November 30th, 2007 - Nikki Serapio  Permalink  View & Add Comments

Where are the sanctions?

The Darfur movement has been remarkably clear and coordinated on its position about imposing targeted multilateral and bilateral sanctions against the Government of Sudan’s senior leaders. The Save Darfur Coalition, ENOUGH, STAND, GI-NET, and many others, including my own organization, have made it clear that targeted sanctions (i.e., asset freezes and travel bans, among other things) need to be imposed by the UN Security Council, the European Union, and individual European countries, if and whenever the Government of Sudan obstructs the urgently needed deployment of UN peacekeepers to Darfur—a deployment that the Security Council authorized this summer.

Well, this trigger for targeted sanctions—the obstruction of UN deployment—has been pulled. And Khartoum has pulled the trigger again and again these past few months. Indeed, this week the UN’s top peacekeeping official confirmed what Darfur activists have seen for a while now. Here’s the relevant description of what the Government of Sudan is doing, as mentioned in a New York Times article from this Wednesday:

“The official, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, told the Security Council that Sudan was resisting accepting specialized troops from non-African militaries that were critical to the mission, blocking support staff and materials from the area through bureaucratic maneuvers, and withholding needed land and permissions for the assignment of helicopters.”

“In addition, he said, the government in Khartoum was asserting the right to close down the force’s communications when its own army was operating in the area and was refusing to give United Nations planes clearance to fly at night. “The mission has the mandate to protect civilians,” Mr. Guéhenno said, “and that responsibility does not end at sunset.”

It’s time for the Darfur movement to be loud on this issue. While there have been a number of important action alerts issued lately—calling on China to stop its support of Khartoum, calling on Congress to fund Darfur peacekeeping—the sanctions issue, in AADG’s view, should take top priority. Imposing multilateral sanctions against Khartoum’s senior leaders and the companies they own will impose heavy costs, and as most Darfur analysts believe, these costs (or else Khartoum’s perception that these costs are likely imminent) will make the perpetrators of genocide back down.

In short, if effective targeted sanctions are imposed, the Government of Sudan will most likely stop obstructing the deployment of UN peacekeepers, which are urgently needed to end the dying and rape in Western Sudan.

One last note: the U.S. has an important part to play in pushing through targeted sanctions. The White House imposed unilateral economic sanctions against the Government of Sudan this May, but these were too weak to have any effect, in part because the Sudanese government is rapidly moving away from the U.S. dollar as its primary transactional currency. Right now, though, the U.S. needs to ramp up the international and bilateral diplomacy significantly, particularly on its European allies, who have been noticeably silent on targeted sanctions these past few months. The people of Darfur will continue to suffer until President Bush and others finally make stopping genocide a top-tier foreign policy priority.