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US Military Personnel Advise African Union Monitors in Darfur

United States Department of State (Washington, DC)
NEWS
September 14, 2004
Posted to the web September 15, 2004

By Susan Ellis
Washington, DC
American military personnel are working with African Union monitors in the
Sudanese region of Darfur to help bring the attacking militias under control
and restore security to the area, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a
student audience at Georgetown University September 10.
On September 9, Powell testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
pressing the cause of a United Nations resolution on Darfur that would declare
the violent actions of the Arab Sudanese Jingaweit militias against the black
African residents of the region to be genocide, and establish specific
sanctions against the Sudanese government and the militias.
Responding to a student's question on whether the United States is willing to
use sanctions or even force to prevent the genocide in Sudan, Powell stated
there are no plans to use any U.S. or European troops in enforcing a United
Nations resolution, but, he added, the issue of sanctions is the subject of
intense debate within the Security Council.
"Sanctions and the possibility of sanctions," he said, "are in the resolution
that was passed a month or so ago, [Resolution] 1556, and it is in the draft
resolution that we have put forward before the Security Council this week. ...
But there is another point of view in the international community that
sanctions would be premature and might not be the best thing to do right now.
"We believe that the best solution is to continue to press the Sudanese to
bring the Jingaweit and the other militias under control and to meet their
responsibilities, and we'll help them. We'll help them with the African Union
peacekeepers. There are some American military personnel in there working with
the monitors," he said.
While the Sudanese government has done quite a bit to improve access to the
camps, Powell said, and humanitarian aid is flowing, there is still a great
need for more aid. At the same time, he said, "We do have political dialogue
going on in Abuja [Nigeria] and the monitors are now going in in greater
strength than they were a little while ago. What we need now is greater effort
on the part of the Sudanese government to meet its responsibility to the people
and the international community by bringing the Jingaweit militias under
control."
Powell praised the African Union for its willingness to increase the number of
peacekeepers it is sending into the war-ravaged area to monitor the situation
and bring some stability to the country through their monitoring presence.
"They are willing to scale up, and we are committed to helping them to do that.
Darfur is a very large place; it is 80 percent the size of Texas, roughly the
size of France, and it is a very remote area," he said.
Powell also touched on the broader question of fighting terrorism: "We have to
find out what it is that gives them sustenance in the places that they're
operating in. We learned in Afghanistan that when the world wasn't paying
enough attention, al-Qaeda essentially took over a country.
"So we have to dry up these potential havens for these terrorist organizations
and then, more importantly, we've got to invest in these countries in ways that
they will not find a pool of recruits or an accepting political system.
That comes in the form of the Millennium Challenge Account [MCA] assistance
reform, through which regions that have supported individual terrorist groups
are targeted to help create stability and "a political system that says, 'Look
-- we're going the road of democracy and freedom and human rights and living in
peace with our neighbors. We're going to invest the treasure in our nation and
help our people.'"
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information
Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

   

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