Sudan Fears Us Military Intervention Over Darfur

Sudan's government is increasingly fearful that the incoming US administration will resort to military intervention to end the six-year-old crisis in Darfur that has killed up to 200,000 people and left 2.7 million homeless, diplomatic sources in Khartoum say.

"There is a great need for us to sound the alarm again about Darfur," Hillary Clinton, who was endorsed as secretary of state yesterday, told the US Senate this week. "It is a terrible humanitarian crisis compounded by a corrupt and very cruel regime in Khartoum."

Clinton said the Obama administration, which takes office on Tuesday, was examining a wide range of options, including direct intervention in support of a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force, known as Unamid, which has struggled to make an impact after beginning operations last year.

"We have spoken about other options, no-fly zones, other sanctions and sanctuaries, looking to deploy the Unamid force to try to protect the refugees but also to repel the militias," Clinton said. "There is a lot under consideration." Clinton has previously asserted that the US has a "moral duty" to help Darfurian civilians.

The US accuses Khartoum's leadership of committing genocide in Darfur. Washington has eschewed direct military involvement since the crisis erupted in 2003, despite growing pressure to act from Sudanese insurgents, exiles, and evangelical Christian groups.

But in a surprise move last week, President George Bush ordered the Pentagon to begin an immediate airlift of vehicles and equipment for the peacekeeping force.

Alain LeRoy, head of UN peacekeeping operations, told the Security Council last month that violence in Darfur was intensifying and stepped-up international involvement was urgently required to avoid a descent into "mayhem".

Influential US-based pressure groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition and Enough are meanwhile demanding that US president-elect Barack Obama act swiftly to fulfil campaign pledges to take more robust action.

"I will make ending the genocide in Darfur a priority from day one," Obama said in April. He has also previously backed a toughening of sanctions and said the US might help enforce a no-fly zone.

"Obama is the [ruling] National Congress party's worst nightmare," said a diplomat in Khartoum. "They wanted [John] McCain and the Republicans to win. They thought they were pragmatists. They think the Democrats are ideologues. They haven't forgotten it was the Democrats who bombed them."

That was a reference to a retaliatory US cruise missile attack on a suspect pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998, ordered by President Bill Clinton after al-Qaida attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Sudan provided a base for the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, from 1991 until he moved to Afghanistan in 1996.

A source in Khartoum said Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, was especially alarmed by Obama's selection of Susan Rice, a former Clinton national security council adviser on Africa, as a cabinet member and US ambassador to the UN.

Rice has spoken passionately in the past of the need for US or Nato air strikes, or a naval blockade of Sudan's oil exports, to halt the violence in Darfur.

Referring to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, she said: "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required."

Bashir felt only "fear and loathing" for Rice and had told aides: "I don't want to see her face here," the source said.

Khartoum's concerns about American intervention extend to southern Sudan, fueled by reports, denied by the US, that Washington is arming the separatist Sudan People's Liberation Army.

The SPLA is the military wing of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement with which the north fought a 30-year civil war. Salva Kiir, the SPLM leader and Bashir's likely rival in elections due later this year, received red carpet treatment by Bush at the White House last week.

"The government knows the US does not arm the SPLA. They're already heavily armed," a Khartoum-based diplomat said. "But the US does train them. It helps with logistics, planning, and so on. And they (the SPLA) do need air defence. Whether to provide air defence to the south will be a key question for the Obama administration."

Fears of direct confrontation with Washington are being fueled by expectations that the International Criminal Court, backed in this instance by the US, will issue an arrest warrant for Bashir within the coming weeks. The ICC chief prosecutor charged Bashir last year with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to Darfur.

A call this week by a leading Sudanese opposition figure, Hassan al-Turabi, for Bashir to surrender himself to the ICC to avoid further confrontation with the US and the west has added to tensions in Khartoum. According to family members, Turabi was subsequently arrested.