Posted on 08/02/2004 5:01:59 AM PDT by Clive
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) - Sudan's foreign minister called the United Nations Security Council's 30-day deadline for action on Darfur "illogical," saying Sunday the country instead would implement a 90-day program agreed to earlier with Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Friday's Security Council resolution gave Sudan 30 days to disarm Arab militias blamed for the deaths of thousands of black Africans in the vast western Darfur region or face diplomatic and economic penalties.
Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said after a cabinet meeting that the resolution was illogical but had some positive aspects, such as calling for international aid to the region.
Ismail instead renewed his country's earlier commitment to carry out a 90-day agreement signed July 3 with Annan. The agreement called for disarming the militias, deploying 6,000 Sudanese soldiers and policemen to improve security, facilitating humanitarian aid and allowing African Union troops and human rights monitors into Darfur.
Ismail suggested that Friday's UN vote passed because of "elections taking place in some western countries" and said Sudan might be "a scapegoat for the guilty conscience that the international family and the UN (have) for slacking in Rwanda" - a reference to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which more than 500,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed.
However, he welcomed the resolution's call on the international community to offer humanitarian assistance to Darfur.
The UN and international aid organizations have accused the pro-government Janjaweed militias of waging a brutal campaign of killings and rapes to drive Sudanese citizens of African origin out of Darfur.
An estimated 30,000 people have been killed in the 17-month conflict and one million have been forced to flee their homes. An estimated 2.2 million people are in urgent need of food, medicine and other basics.
A lot of Christians will die over the next 90 days.
And at the end of that time, when Sudan will have done nothing to stop it, there will be another UN resolution.
And another, ad infinitum.
But there is hope. Some day a head of state will stop momentarily at the airport at Khartoum or N'Djamena on his way to somewhere else and make a speach apologizing for the world not having acted with sufficient due dispatch, As Clinton did at Kigali respecting the Rwanda genocide.
But by then it won't matter because the genocide will have been accomplished and there will no longer be any issue there to trouble the world.
That is why genocide has not been acknowledged since the end of WWII while it was still ongoing.
Acknowledging it meams having to do something about it, so best look the other way.
Halt or we'll say halt again. The UN is disgusting.
"Acknowledging it meams having to do something about it"
Yep.
OK 29 days then. You want to try for 28?
Oh year, they'll always take the money.
Someday, we'll look back on these times, and realize that the Crusaders had a point.
Who says Intervention is evil?
Kofi go home - but leave your ill-gotten gains behind. Try living like the majority of those Africans you have done NOTHING to help.
But then....who will be the next "token" recipient of the post?
After the deadline the UN will give them another 30 days
My guess this Sudan thing is just the start of a new era in African bloodletting. This is over natural resources, and its serious never mind the liberal boo hoo stories. Maybe this time the King's men won't be marching to and fro whipping the natives into shape, but this time it might be fought by proxy. Tom Clancy ought to jump in front of the curve and put out a book dealing with the 21st centuries' battle for oil and other natural resources.
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