WASHINGTON, September 9 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The United States has presented a draft UN resolution calling for sanctions mainly against Sudan’s oil sector – dominated by Chinese companies – allegedly for lack of progress by the Khartoum government to end the crisis in Darfur.
The resolution, to be discussed by the UN Security Council Thursday, September 9, declares that Sudan has failed to comply with a previous resolution in July to rein in the pro-government Arab militias behind the Darfur crisis.
The council passed a resolution on July 30 that gave the Sudanese government 30 days to disarm the Janjaweed and held out the possibility of sanctions.
But UN special representative to Sudan Jan Pronk admitted there is progress on the ground, as a number of member states, including veto-wielding Russia and China , opposed the option of sanctions.
The new American draft sets out another 30-day period for Sudan to comply with the previous resolution and cooperate with African Union monitors watching for violations of the April ceasefire between the government and the rebels.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan would report back to the council at the end of the period and if Sudan has not complied, the council "will take further actions" on sanctions, according to the draft, carried by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Oil Reserves
If Khartoum has still not complied by the deadline, sanctions may be introduced "including with regard to the petroleum sector". Sudan currently produces about 320,000 barrels of oil per day.
The oil concession in southern Darfur is currently in the hands of the China National Petroleum Company.
As oil pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq , the west "not only has a clear motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely this," the Guardian reported Monday, August 2.
International Over-flights
The new draft calls for international overflights to monitor the situation, as was the case in northern Iraq during more than 13 years of sanctions on the Arab country – which has the world’s second largest oil reserves.
It calls for Annan to set up an international enquiry commission to look into rights violations in Darfur, something that US envoy Stuart Holliday called important in "holding people accountable for the actions of the past."
Although the draft acknowledges "some limited improvement" in increasing access in Darfur for aid workers, it says Sudan "has failed fully to comply" with the July resolution and a separate agreement with Annan to calm the situation.
The draft has drawn an initial reservation among member states of the council.
"We never thought that after 30 days, everything should have changed in a dramatic way -- that the militias would have been disarmed, and that security would have been fully restored," said Algeria 's UN ambassador Abdallah Baali.
"We have seen some important progress made and so our view is to work closely with the government of Sudan ," said Baali, whose nation is the only Arab member of the council.
The Sudanese government is accused of arming the militias, which are blamed for a brutal campaign in Darfur, a vast area the size of France in the west of Sudan , Africa 's largest nation. The government denies the accusations.
Genocide
Washington will also press for an approval of its Security Council draft, with Powell reportedly leaning toward a determination that the violence in Darfur constitutes genocide, in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday.
Powell will reveal whether the United States now concludes the violence there as genocide, which would carry a legal obligation for the government to act, the BBC News Online said.
The US House of Representatives has already declared the violence genocide, but the state department has until now argued that the word is a legal definition and that the data was not available, it added.
The European Union said in August no evidence was found on genocide taking place in Darfur
"We are not in the situation of genocide there, " Pieter Feith, who visited Sudan on behalf of the EU foreign affairs chief Javier Solana, leading an EU fact-finding mission in the region.
"Reports submitted by the WHO employees have not mentioned any acts of ethnic cleansing, genocide or mass rapes as claimed by western human rights organizations," Dr Hussein Gezairy, Regional Director of WHO's Eastern Mediterranean Region, has also agreed.