[allAfrica.com] [This_Day,_Lagos] Human Rights Official Frustrated By U.N. Inaction On Darfur United States Department of State (Washington, DC) NEWS August 19, 2004 Posted to the web August 20, 2004 By Jim Fisher-Thompson Washington, DC J. Prendergast calls for other measures if Security Council is blocked The frustration was audible in former White House official John Prendergast's voice as he blamed the United Nations for "compromising" efforts to stop the "slow motion ethnic cleansing" taking place in Darfur. Prendergast, who is a special adviser to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), worked as the National Security Council adviser for Africa in the Clinton White House. He spoke August 18 on a panel on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Unfortunately, he told the panel, at the UN "high level officials from all over the world continue to talk very passionately but act very timidly, and the Darfurian people continue to perish. And we're going to see those numbers increase dramatically, principally, as has been predicted for months," with the arrival of the diseases borne on the flood waters from the seasonal rains. In a worst-case scenario, Prendergast declared: "If the Security Council does not act, or action proves impossible" because of the threat of a veto, "we need to test that veto aggressively...in the next draft of a resolution. If we can't get any action . . .through the Security Council, I think the United States, along with partner governments who are willing to do something, need to undertake unilateral action...and do everything possible to prevent genocide" in Darfur. In Darfur, where Sudanese government-supported militias called the Jingaweit have murdered up to 50,000 people and displaced another one million inhabitants over the past 10 months, security was absent and the human rights situation remained desperate, Prendergast said. "The efforts to confront mass atrocities and protect civilians are really still nonexistent," he said. There is a "clear abdication" by the government of its responsibility to protect its citizens resulting in a "legacy of obstructionism" that is proof that it has "no qualms in slaughtering its own people." In July both Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan visited Sudan and the Darfur region where they met with government officials and demanded the Khartoum regime end its support for the Jingaweit and provide immediate access of humanitarian aid workers into Darfur. Prendergast said the reaction of the Khartoum regime has been to drag its feet on both counts, a stand that has been abetted by the UN where "in the last two weeks we've seen UN diplomacy and Arab League solidarity dramatically undermine" efforts by the United States and others in the Security Council to set a deadline for the Khartoum Government to act [in Darfur]. One result, he said, is that "we've seen the [Sudanese] government reject the African Union (AU) offer to have 3,000 forces deployed to Darfur to protect civilians." The regime "has learned very well...that it can do just enough, or even just say enough, to escape serious international responses." His chief criticism of the UN resolution was that "it did not authorize or even threaten specifically targeted sanctions against regime officials. Remarkably the resolution had no operative actionable clauses at all focused on the [Khartoum] Government." And the 30-day waiting period merely gives Khartoum a breather, Prendergast indicated. In general, the resolution is a failure, Prendergast said, because, "It violates the primary imperative of diplomacy: 'First, do no harm.' But then it sailed right through the second diplomatic imperative: 'When you're in a hole, just stop digging.'" Instead, he said Secretary General Annan "got out his best shovel and handed it to his special envoy, Ambassador [Jan] Pronk and sent him to Sudan even before the ink was dry on the Security Council resolution. Ambassador Pronk used his new shovel to dig two new holes. First, to negotiate what is called a plan of action that gave Khartoum a set of easier benchmarks and a different timeline then the one the Security Council had set." Moreover, Prendergast charged, Pronk undermined the resolution by indicating that the Khartoum regime might not be able to meet these new demands, "constituting an escape hatch, or in this type of situation an escape tunnel, to the [Sudanese] government and giving an excuse to the UN Security Council members who don't want to take punitive action against the government for non- compliance." Sadly, Prendergast said, the UN plan of action "really epitomizes and symbolizes what months of unfulfilled warnings and unfulfilled deadlines have lowered international credibility in the eyes of...the Darfurian people who have waited so patiently and for so long" for help. (The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)   =============================================================================   Copyright © 2004 United States Department of State. All rights reserved. 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