Earlier this month, The Baltimore Sun published a great Darfur Op-Ed by Raj Purohit (an international law expert and professor at American University’s Washington College of Law) and Howard Salter (a former senior public affairs officer at USAID in the Clinton administration).
I wanted to call out this paragraph from their piece:
“Taking advantage of ICC action on Darfur to address the crisis would provide Mr. Obama’s foreign policy team with an opportunity to make a fast start to address these crimes in a cooperative, multilateral manner. Will the new president seize the moment and show a willingness to engage key allies, such as France and the United Kingdom, along with strategically important countries such as China, South Africa and Egypt, to bring an end to crimes that have shamed the global community?”
These sentences made us wonder: What is the Obama administration doing right now to build a “Sudan policy consensus” within the United Nations and the European Union, and across the larger international community?
As activists, we can’t just assume that a lot of behind-the-scenes work is getting done right now on behalf of Darfuris and other marginalized Sudanese. Our comfort and confidence lean on public action. Unfortunately, lately we haven’t heard of many meaningful Sudan-related commitments from Nicolas Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner; Hu Jintao and China’s UN Ambassador; Gordon Brown and most British MPs…and that’s just to name a few folks.
By all accounts, now’s the time for the full-court press. Multilateral sanctions against Khartoum; making sure that humanitarian access throughout Western Sudan is improved significantly; forcing the Sudanese government to disarm its proxy militias — these are a few priority action items (among many) on which the Obama team needs to engage some key international players.
