Be tough on Al-Bashir, activists tell Obama

Many East Africa-focused ac-tivists in the United States are expressing dismay over the Obama administration’s emerging policy toward Sudan. They say the US is taking too soft a line with the government in Khartoum on two fronts: the Darfur region and Southern Sudan.

Revising their positive views of the president’s intentions, the campaigners warn that President Barack Obama is breaking his promises of strong US action to halt what he had described as genocide in Darfur.

Advocates of a tougher US policy also fault the Obama administration for talking with the Sudan government about possible modifications to a 2005 accord that ended a ruinous 20-year civil war in the south of the country.

“We believe that your conciliatory stance and reluctance to criticise the government of Sudan both excuses and emboldens the government of Sudan, thereby facilitating its ongoing reign of terror and well-known strategy of ‘divide and rule’,” a coalition of US groups wrote in an open letter to Scott Gration, Obama’s special envoy to Sudan.

The activists charge that Gration is enabling the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) to stall on implementation of the 2005 peace agreement and to promote violent tribal rivalries in southern Sudan.

“Left unchecked, the NCP’s behaviour will trigger a war in the south and make it all the more difficult to resolve the still-simmering crisis in Darfur,” the letter declared.

Leaders of Africa-related NGOs had welcomed Obama’s election but are now worried that he will prove no more effectual in regard to the Darfur conflict than did his predecessor, George W Bush.

There is also concern that President Obama may fail to match Bush’s successful handling of the long-running crisis in Southern Sudan, where the US helped broker the deal that calls for elections next year and a referendum on independence in 2011.

John Prendergast, a Sudan ex-pert who served in the Clinton White House, noted in a recent CNN commentary that opposition in the US Senate to government-instigated atrocities in Darfur had been led by Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and President Obama.

With those three figures now occupying the highest seats of power in Washington, “we felt there finally would be a consequence for the perpetrators of genocide: the regime officials in Khartoum, Sudan,” Prendergast wrote in an analysis co-signed by Dave Eggers, an American novelist who has written about Sudanese refugees in the US.

“But rather than the kind of tough actions the these top officials had all advocated in their previous jobs and on the campaign trail, President Obama’s Sudan envoy instead began to articulate a friendly, incentives-first message that even Sudan’s president, an indicted war criminal, publicly welcomed,” Prendergast and Eggers continued. “Our chins hit the floor in disbelief, because our chins had nowhere else to go.”

Some activists had been refraining from public criticisms of President Obama because his administration has been engaged in a months-long Sudan policy review that is expected to be published soon.

But the direction of Obama administration policy is already clear, Prendergast and Eggers wrote, “and it is of urgent concern. There is no clear decision for the US to take the lead in revitalising a peace process for Darfur, or to create real costs for non-implementation of the existing North-South peace deal.”

Special envoy Gration told the US Congress two months ago that there is no longer justification for keeping Sudan on a list of countries that Washington regards as sponsors of terrorism. Gration further suggested that US sanctions against Sudan should be eased.

Those comments reflect Sudan’s co-operative response to US efforts to destroy Al-Qa’ida, the Islamist network that had been based in Sudan during its formative stages in the 1990s. The NCP, itself an Islamist party, has quietly facilitated Washington’s counter-terrorism strategy in East Africa in recent years.