1:10 P.M. EDT
Real Audio of Briefing
MR. DENIG: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. One area of the world that has been in the news a great deal lately is Sudan, and particularly the Darfur region, and this, of course, has caused increasing attention both in the international media as well as among governments worldwide.
So we're very pleased today to be able to present to you a briefing on the topic, "Keeping Up Pressure on Sudan," and to have two experts who can bring us up to date on developments with regard to the Sudan. First we have Dr. Kim Holmes, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, and secondly we have Charles Snyder, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Each gentleman will have some opening remarks to make and then we'll be very glad to take your questions.
Dr. Holmes.
DR. HOLMES: Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Like everyone, I'm sure, here and around the world, the United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council recognize that the situation in Darfur is very dire. We are all appalled at the reports of loss of human life and the violations of human rights that are going on there.
Nothing less than immediate action by the Government of Sudan is needed. It needs to protect the people of Darfur and also the humanitarian workers that are trying to help the people of this region. The Government of Sudan also needs to disarm the rebels.
As Secretary Powell said last week after his meeting with the Secretary General of the United Nations, even with some recent improvements in humanitarian access, we remain completely dissatisfied with the security situation.
Now, our consultations in the Council on our revised draft resolution on Sudan are aimed at finding the best way to pressure the Government of Sudan to act quickly. In various experts meetings we have gone over the text, paragraph by paragraph, to make it as strong and as effective as it can be. The draft incorporates benchmarks from the United Nations-Government of Sudan joint communiqué and it calls upon Sudan to fulfill its commitments to the Secretary General. It broadens and it strengthens the arms embargo to cover the Jingaweit and the rebels in Darfur. It calls on rebel groups to end the violence immediately and to respect the April 8th ceasefire. It demands that Sudan arrest and prosecute the Jingaweit. It states clearly that if Khartoum does not comply with the resolution's demands, the Council will consider more stringent action, such as imposing sanctions on the Government of Sudan.
The United States believes that an explicit threat of sanctions would show the resolve of the international community on this very grave matter. The draft resolution also requires the Secretary General to report to the Council on progress on compliance by the Sudanese Government every 30 days. We hope to have a vote on this resolution this week, but we'll have to wait and see how it goes.
Let me also say that we are working closely with the Secretary General of the United Nations and also with other United Nations agencies, like the World Food Program. All of these organizations are in Sudan and in Chad now, and we're hoping to work with them to help alleviate the suffering there.
Overall, we, the United States, have given $141 million in aid to date for Darfur. This is out of the $299 million planned for fiscal year 2005. But it's not enough for the United States and the international community to provide aid to help the starving and displaced people of Darfur. The Government of Sudan is responsible for protecting its people and for providing a secure environment and safe access for the international relief workers so the aid that we are giving, that the rest of the international community is giving, can work.
Also, the international community needs to fund the relief work in Darfur and in Chad. Amounts contributed so far have not been enough to allow the United Nations, other international organizations and nongovernmental organizations to adequately respond to the emergency needs of refugees and internally displaced persons.
It is imperative that other donors do all that they can do to address what the United Nations has described as its most pressing humanitarian crisis. Immediate and generous donor contributions are critical at this time before the rains further shut down operations and to arrest the decline in nutrition and health that could lead to hundreds of thousands of more deaths.
We are urging the Government of Sudan and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to agree to the travel of independent human rights monitors so that all of us can gain a more accurate picture of the human rights situation in Darfur.
We are pleased the Secretary General has named a special advisor on the prevention of genocide. We welcome the appointment of Juan Mendez of Argentina and we look forward to his beginning work early next month. We hope he will focus intently on the situation in Sudan with an eye to mitigating the immense human suffering that is occurring there.
Thank you very much.
MR. DENIG: Thank you, Secretary Holmes. Secretary Snyder.
MR. SNYDER: Good afternoon. I think Kim has adequately covered the general situation. Let me add a bit of an Africa twist to the blend.
The African Union has been seized with this issue from the beginning, and even though it's a fledgling organization, it's making a serious attempt to fulfill its mandate to be the conscience and the voice of Africa. They've set up an African Union ceasefire monitoring mechanism. They have 80 monitors on the ground right now and they intend to have a 300-man protection force to join those 80 monitors in order to begin to enforce the April 8th ceasefire and to begin to identify the guilty and the incidents that are violating this ceasefire, particularly with regard to the kind of depravations and rapes and other things that are going on around some of these IDP camps inside Sudan.
The truth of the matter is that the government of Khartoum has not yet restored security in the area and that is really the key to the crisis. There is enough humanitarian assistance moving now in the general direction that if the access, if the security could be improved, we could begin to reverse this tragedy. That's what Africa wants. That's what the United States wants. That's what the European Union wants. And we're all working together to make that happen.
We've already provided $2 million dollars in immediate assistance to this African ceasefire force. We've got another $4.8 million en route. We've lent them planes from our early ceasefire monitoring force for the north-south dimension of the crisis in Sudan to get them off to a running start, and American contractors on the ground are providing the basic facilities they need for the outposts that they've set up in order to monitor the ceasefire.
The European Union is providing €14.1 million for this same purpose. The British, in particular, have provided over ₤1 million in fuel to fuel the helicopters and the planes that these monitors are using.
Unfortunately, despite this effort, what we're finding on the ground is that the security situation has not moved in the right direction. There have been seven reports so far by the ceasefire monitoring mechanism. In most cases, they've found that the Jingaweit are still able to act and the Jingaweit are responsible for atrocities of various kinds, forcing more people off their land, raping women, killing people. Some reports lead us to believe there are already 10,000 dead as a result of what's gone on. As you know, USAID has said that if we don't reverse the situation, there's a worst-case of 350,000 casualties staring us in the face.
And to top it all off, it's begun to rain, which makes this a factor of five times worse than it would be if we had a dry season to work with. There were no roads to begin with and they're now turning into muddy wallows. So this is not an emergency made up in our minds. It's an emergency on the ground and, in fact, and the key to changing it is security. And so far, Khartoum just has not stepped up to the problem.
I think we and Africa remain optimistic that they will take our point and step up to the problem, but they need to do it soon. As the Secretary has said previously, we're not talking months here. We're talking weeks and maybe a month. Things have to change. Now, with that said, I think we'll take questions.
MR. DENIG: Thank you very much. Let me remind you, please, to use the microphone, identify yourself and your news organization. Let's start with the Washington File in the middle back there.
QUESTION: Yeah, Jim Fisher Thompson, Washington File. A question for both of you, I guess for Mr. Snyder first.
You say Khartoum has not stepped up to the problem. Today, I guess just within hours ago at the AU, you know, meeting in Addis, I believe the Sudanese representative, according to the AP, really launched on the United States and accused us of using the Darfur crisis as a pretext to topple the Sudanese Government. And then I believe a number of days ago, top Sudanese officials traveling in Europe more or less told the United States Government it should butt out and not get involved in Sudanese internal affairs.
But we keep coming to these readouts and hearing about, you know, how we're trying to make the Sudanese government, you know, give access to these humanitarian flights and they seem to get more and more belligerent. I mean, is there any light at the end of the tunnel? Where's the stick and the carrot here? Is there going to be any movement before 300,000 people die or --
MR. SNYDER: The short answer to the question is there will be movement before that happens. The international community, the United States, Europe will insist on it. What we're hoping is that the Sudanese Government, of its own volition, begins to act more effectively on the ground. The test is not what Khartoum says. They have issued many decrees, many effective decrees at the national level. We've seen some changes even at the governor level, the walis. The trouble is, in too many cases on the ground, the people that can allow or deny access to an individual camp seem either to have not gotten the word or are ignoring the word. And so we're still putting this pressure on Khartoum, saying the proof is action, not words. We want to see the difference.
With regard to an attempt on our part to topple the government in Khartoum, we have worked for over three years to bring to closure the long civil war between the north and south in which over 2.2. million people have been killed over a 17-year period. Now, this is not the action of a government that seeks to topple another government. We've reached out to them. We've worked with them. To some degree, I think the stridency you may be hearing from Khartoum is a bit of a disappointment that we don't consider the north-south so important that we would be willing to overlook this.
And the truth of the matter, as we have said to Khartoum several times, is the north-south peace can't exist without peace in Darfur. Sudan is one country. There's either a just peace throughout the country or there is no peace that's effective and we cannot continue to proceed on the basis of strictly a north-south compromise if these kinds of actions are going to take place in the west or the east or anywhere else.
DR. HOLMES: If I could just add one thing. The members of the Security Council have been looking at this issue for a number of weeks, and have already spent days on our draft resolution so we've already had an opportunity to exchange views on this issue. And certainly everyone, although they may have some differences of opinion about the exact language of the resolution, everyone believes the Security Council should be engaged on this issue.
So, hopefully, as we move forward and we do get a resolution at some point in the very near future, that will make very clear to the government of Khartoum that the international community has followed on this point and that the best thing for them to do, in order to help their own people, is to improve access for humanitarian aid workers and to also provide greater security for their own people in the region of Darfur.
MR. DENIG: Let's go to Egypt in the front row here, please.
QUESTION: Thank you. Hoda Tawfiq, Al Ahram newspaper, Egypt. Can I follow on my colleague's question about what the Sudanese Government thinks? They're protesting interference in the affairs of Sudan, and what do you think of this? Is this, like a draft resolution, going to force interference, like sending troops or anything, like what the British stated?
And if this resolution passes, you think it will help the Sudanese Government to do something or the vice versa? Maybe it will have a different position from the Sudanese Government since they are asking for time, they need time to do the job they're asked to do and they said they don't have the means.
Thank you.
DR. HOLMES: Well, it's already been a number of weeks since the Secretary General of the United Nations and also the Secretary of State were in the region and had meetings and made very clear what was expected of the government of Khartoum in order to show progress. So they've already had some time.
But clearly, what this resolution says -- I went through the specific aspects of it in my opening statement about the needs for the government of Khartoum to provide security, to arrest the Jingaweit, who are primarily responsible for the violence in this region; but it also makes very clear that there would be a 30-day period after the resolution is passed by which the Secretary General of the United Nations would report on whether or not the government of Khartoum is complying with the recommendations in this resolution. So there is time.
At that point, if the government does not comply, if the government of Khartoum does not comply, then the Council would have to consider whether or not sanctions at that point would be the appropriate response.
But there is time. It's built in there. But what really needs to be done, instead of complaining about needing more time, I think the government of Khartoum needs to get very busy in making sure that the people who are under their stewardship are protected. That's what really matters here. That's what this is all about.
QUESTION: On interference of the affairs of Sudan, that they are protesting?
DR. HOLMES: Well, as I said a minute ago, the Security Council is engaged on this issue and it is speaking on behalf of the United Nations Security Council. If a resolution is passed, then it would seem to me to be incumbent upon the government of Khartoum to respond to what the international community has asked it to do.
MR. SNYDER: And this is not a standard that we're setting for Sudan that's different. Reactions in Bosnia and elsewhere were the same. This is about human rights violations of a massive scale, a complex humanitarian emergency that's gone beyond the right of sovereignty to defend it. We're united on this with Europe. Many Arab states have actually spoken out on the same ground.
And what we're saying to Khartoum is, "Do the right thing. Exert your sovereignty in the right fashion. Restate control if you can get it. And if you can't, ask for help." We're not saying that Khartoum shouldn't be asking for help. They can ask for help from their friends. We're not going to willy-nilly impose it if they can do the right thing. And they haven't looked into that, I think, in a way that they might. There are plenty of people willing to help. Khartoum just has to ask. But if they don't want to ask, then they need to use their own sovereign assets and they need to change the situation on the ground now.
MR. DENIG: The lady on the right here, please.
QUESTION: Cindy Shiner, Voice of America. I wanted to ask you sort of a three-part question. If you could explain a little bit more what you mean by "gone beyond the right of sovereignty." In terms of the Australians and the U.K. talking of a humanitarian military operation in Darfur, to what degree would the U.S. support this or be part of a military operation and at what point do you say: "Enough is enough. We're going to go in and take action"?
MR. SNYDER: I think let's start at the basic premise. There are also cross-border activities here. They were bombing on the other side of the border in Chad. There were Jingaweit raids into Chad. Even in the more traditional sense of this going beyond borders and becoming an international problem, this problem has already risen to that. As you know, there was action against the Chadian Government directly traceable to some of the ethnic problems along the border as a result of Jingaweit raiding and the reactions of the Zagawa in particular and Chad to that and whether the Chadian Government was doing enough.
So it's already slopped over the borders, if you will, in that sense so we've got the international justification on that ground if it ever came to it. But the truth of the matter, even if it was confined strictly to inside Sudan, this is a case where these people are out of control. It's like a bandit group had taken over a large place in the United States. It would be incumbent on the Government of the United States to do something about it and to do something about it in a way that didn't do damage to the human population in the area, et cetera. That's what we're asking Khartoum to do and that's what they don't seem to be able to do. In fact, there's some evidence that they've, in fact, backed the Jingaweit for a number of reasons, political and otherwise. And we're saying to them, "Bring them back under the control or, if you can't, ask for help."
In terms of the question of humanitarian intervention by outside forces, that's not where we are yet. The quickest way to turn this around is for Sudan to exert its own sovereignty. It would take time. It will take effort. It will take money. It will take a while to do something from the outside. That's not a good answer. People are dying now. We need the Government of Sudan to do what it can or to ask for help to do what it can.
Only in the last resort, when we're all convinced that the Government of Sudan cannot and will not do anything about this, then we would have to consult with our allies and look at something more serious. We are not there yet. And, in fact, we're still calling on Khartoum to do the right thing, which means we believe they can and they have that capacity. If they don't have that capacity in the end, then they should ask for help.
MR. DENIG: Let's go to the gentleman in the middle, next row.
QUESTION: Mohamed Menshawy from Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.
Secretary Powell will be in Egypt tomorrow, the country that has a lot of influence in Sudanese affairs and the country that's expressed cautious about imposing any sanctions on Sudanese Government. Is he going to discuss the Darfur question with the Egyptian Government? And what do you say about the French statement today and their Foreign Minister spokesman referring to the preferred regional solution to the crisis in Darfur?
MR. SNYDER: What kind of solution?
QUESTION: Regional solution.
MR. SNYDER: I can't imagine the Secretary of State would go to Cairo and not speak about one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world when it was going on next door, so the short answer to your question is clearly the Secretary will consult with the Government of Egypt. We value Egypt's opinion on this and the neighbors, many times, have much better insight to these problems than those of us that are looking at little more distantly at the problem. So close consultation with Egypt on this is a given, I would think, and we're looking forward to getting advice and assistance from the Egyptians in dealing with this matter and in re-emphasizing the point that it's not just the West and Europe that thinks this is a problem, it's the Arab world as well, and Egypt as a neighbor is concerned. And so I'm sure there will be a frank exchange on this with the Government of Egypt.
In terms of a regional solution, that's exactly what we're backing. The assistance we're giving to the African Union ceasefire force and their monitoring mechanism indicates the preferred solution from all of us: step number one, the government to do the right thing; step number two, to the degree it can't, ask for the regional entity to help, ask for the African Union's help and, if it can't help, then find somebody else that can.
There is some assistance now coming in from the African Union (AU). If that turns out to be enough, if the ceasefire monitoring is enough and the situation changes on the ground, then we'll agree 100 percent with the Government of France that the regional solution is the right one. We're prepared to see a more robust regional solution if that's what the African Union and Sudan agree upon. So we don't disagree with France on this at all; in fact, we're hoping that the steps that have been taken by the AU and the Government of Sudan will change things.
We haven't seen that effect yet, and given the situation in humanitarian terms we can't wait a long time. As I made a point earlier, this is not a diplomatic situation in which I can make my position known and then I can debate it with you for 60 or 90 days over a word or two words or three words. This is something where people are dying from one day to the next. We can't argue about whether the word "should" or "could" makes the most sense. We need to act and we need to act effectively.
MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go to the gentleman in the back here, please.
QUESTION: Hisham Bourar, Al Hurra TV. Do you expect any difficulties in getting this resolution through the United Nations Security Council, especially when China, who has a veto right, has strong ties with Khartoum and huge investment in Sudan?
Secondly, the Congress with both houses has spoken clearly in saying that what's happening in Darfur is clear genocide. Do you think is United States in need of United Nations to act in front of this sense of urgency?
DR. HOLMES: You know, whether or not it is called genocide, atrocities, whatever label that you put on it, it's clear to everybody who knows the facts on what's happening in this region that there's a terrible human tragedy going on. And it is that problem that is causing the urgency of this government and many other members of the Security Council to try to take up this issue and to figure how we can push not only the government of Khartoum but also to try to encourage the international community to help Khartoum help its own people.
As far as members of the Council are concerned, we have been greatly encouraged by the support that our resolution, our draft resolution, has received from other members of the Security Council. There have been very insightful and serious questions raised by other members of the Council. You mentioned China. Yes, they have raised some questions. We are listening to them. But I think everyone on the Council agrees about the urgency of the matter. We have not seen anyone on the Council raise a fundamental objection to the need to do something about this problem. There's only the question of exactly how you move forward. So we are hoping in the next few days, as we move into what we hope will be the final stages of negotiations, to bring the Council members onboard and we are hopeful that we can do that.
QUESTION: Is it the State Department's position that what's happening is genocide? Do you share the description of Congress?
DR. HOLMES: Well, I thought I just answered that. As I said, you know, what is really going on there is a human tragedy. Whether or not it's genocide or not is something that is a legal definition that perhaps must be looked at, looked at very closely. But as we talk about whether or not it is genocide or not, what we really must do is try to move very quickly in the Security Council, on the humanitarian aid front, in the diplomatic front, to try to get access to this region, to try to get aid in there as quickly as we can.
MR. DENIG: Let's go to Japan over here, please.
QUESTION: Masakatsu Ota, Japanese Kyodo News. I have two questions and just one question is about the situation on the ground.
Secretary Snyder, you say there are 80 monitoring people are going to the region and with some security, you know, troops, 200-300. Is that enough? I mean, are these numbers adequate for secure the region and, I mean, to achieve the fair monitoring? Is that the good number to do that? That's my first questions.
And also, why are you so confident, you know, the military operation or urgency and any involvement, military involvement or operation, you say that we have not reached that point yet? Are you -- why are you so still confident and that this government is violating their commitment before and that this country is a state sponsor terrorist country? Why are you so confident of this regime?
MR. SNYDER: Let me answer the technical question first in terms of the ceasefire group. It's 80-plus people on the ground with a 300-person protection force. If we hadn't had the experience we already had in the north-south negotiation with a successful ceasefire monitoring regime in the Nuba Mountains, I would agree with you; as an outside observer, I would say this force is not big enough for the territory it must cover.
We had such good success in the Nuba Mountains with a small ceasefire force that it's changed our mind, I think, on what can be done. We can try this solution. The African solution is not at all dissimilar in size when you scale it up from the Nuba Mountains from what went on there. That was quite effective and it was quite effective in an initially hostile situation. In fact, they found almost a 50/50 split in terms of violations early on in their work. They were facing hostility both from the rebels and the government when they started their work. That ceasefire has held for the better part of two years quite successfully with a very small force that, in fact, didn't have any protection force of its own. It was strictly a ceasefire force.
So, from a technical point of view, until we see a reason that this 80- to 120-man monitor force doesn't work, we have no reason to second-guess it yet. Technically, given helicopters and airlift and a reasonable modicum of protection, they can cover this area. The truth is, just like the Nuba ceasefire, people on the ground will tell them what's happening. NGOs on the ground, Sudanese as well as European and other kinds of NGOs, will report incidents and give them facts and multiply their effectiveness in a large way.
Why am I confident that we're not at the point where we need an intervention force of some kind yet? Despite our great difficulties with the government of Khartoum -- and as you pointed out they are on the state sponsors of terrorism list -- we asked them to do hard things on terrorism when we engaged them initially. They made some serious changes in places that many people thought they wouldn't change. They did things for us when we asked them that were hard for them to do. This is hard to do. We're asking them to restrain people that are basically political supporters of theirs. But they've acted that way before under pressure in a less intense humanitarian situation, but nonetheless they did the right thing. And until we're convinced that Khartoum will not do the right thing -- you know, we can't wait much longer -- to go to more extreme measures just isn't warranted yet. We do respect sovereignty where we can, but the sovereign power has to act responsibly, and we're still waiting for that to happen.
MR. DENIG: Let's go to Radio Sawa there and then we'll take the gentleman on the far right.
QUESTION: Samir Nader with Radio Sawa. Why, in your opinion, the Sudanese Government is not -- is allowing this to happen in Darfur? Does the situation have anything to do with the negotiations with the south? Are they like a tactic to -- so they won't give some of what they are asking to do?
Also, on the draft resolution, why you don't -- you didn't mention if it's going to be characterized as a genocide.
DR. HOLMES: Well, the resolution, draft resolution at this point, has a preamble that asks the question of whether or not at some point the United Nations special advisor on genocide should look into this question. But that's in the draft resolution that we have at this point. But to repeat what I said a minute ago, the main thrust of this resolution is to try to get the focus on the obligations and responsibilities of the government of Khartoum to solve the problem as quickly as possible and to give them a period of time by which the United Nations can examine whether or not they are complying. And at some point at the end of the 30-day period, the Secretary General would provide a report on whether they're complying, and at that point the Council would engage and decide what to do next, including the options of sanction. That's the main thrust of what the resolution is all about, and we'll see how it goes over the next couple of days.
MR. SNYDER: You should never ask an Africanist why something happens in Africa. The truth of the matter is the crisis we see here is a result of a series of missteps along the way. Darfur, being a Muslim section and clearly identified historically with no questioning by anyone as part of the north, represented a threat to Khartoum very different than the rebellion in the south, which was among a Christian population and others who sought a fair share.
The people in Darfur ultimately have the right to claim power in Khartoum, so the nature of the threat from the beginning was different than the southern threat. The fact that one of the smaller movements, the JEM movement, has ties to Hassan Turabi also made it much more threatening in the sense of fundamental regime change to Khartoum.
Their response to it initially was what we would expect. They used the army. Unfortunately, 40 percent of the Sudanese army draws itself from the Darfur region, so many people in the army sympathize with the rebels. There were instances in which you can make the case that the army even left a little ammunition behind.
Faced with this kind of threat and the disastrous defeat when the rebels actually briefly took a major airfield in El-Fashir, one of the biggest cities, and destroyed five or six aircraft on the ground, the government of Khartoum realized this was a major threat to them and they began to fall back, as any threatened regime does, on the ultimate weapons and security; they went back to the old pattern of Popular Defense Forces, which were the strike forces, if you will, of the old Islamic regime.
They went back to the security apparatus rather than the military. The military became a screening device, not the action arm. The result was, they turned to these Arab militias which were, by and large, now part of the Jingaweit processes -- we've lumped them together -- and released them with modern weapons, modern ammunition supply, and took an underlying ethnic problem between nomadic peoples and settled peoples and put modern weapons and modern technology into it and the result was the humanitarian tragedy that you see today.
So a very different question. Why did this happen? Is it related to the north-south piece of the problem? You can make the case, and some people have, that the Darfurians thought they were being left out of a north-south settlement, and hence you take up arms to get your share of the pie. The truth is that's an excuse. It's not the truth of the matter.
The north-south agreement is meant to transform Sudan. It's meant, ultimately, to address those questions, whether they're west, east, north or south. It proposes, essentially, a federalized state in which there's real power-sharing, real wealth-sharing. Not only do you get control of a particular governorship, but there's a very careful agreement that X percentage of wealth goes to that particular province that the north and south have agreed on. There's room for other parties to join this agreement. That was the idea all along. There were disaffected peoples in the Nubian hills. There were disaffected peoples in the east in the Beja region. There were disaffected peoples in the west.
The problem is, this particular group chose to go for the gun first, rather than consult with their own allies. They all belonged to the NDA. John Garang is part of that. There are seats in this arrangement for all of them. They need to be brought back to the table in a sensible way as well. So it's not an easy question. They got there the hard way, but nonetheless they're there.
MR. DENIG: Okay. Let's take the gentleman in the way back, please.
QUESTION: Gary Wood, Voice of America. I wonder, continuing on that same line, who are these rebels and do you think the rebels have an interest in wanting to bring in foreign troops?
A PARTICIPANT: The rebels are a conglomeration, again, of this old Hassan Turabi JEM movement. He originally rose up out of the west -- ethnic kinsman, but also extremist practitioners of various kinds that were related to him. That movement existed for quite a while. Turabi, as you know, is in jail. Their power is broken in Khartoum. This is an attempt to put themselves back on the stage.
The SLM piece of this movement is something much more based in the ethnic deprivations, with the settled African tribes, in particular, feeling left out, disappointed and abused even under the preexisting conditions. They were slowly being encroached on or their land was being taken -- wells, grazing area -- in an Arab region.
That was the cause of rebellion. They saw a deal going down which they didn’t understand. These are not particularly politically sophisticated people, but they felt abused and they rose up on that basis. Would they love to see the outside intervention? I think any rebel who is not winning the war probably would like someone to come in and bail them out and I don't doubt some of them would like that to happen.
The truth is that's not why this would happen. This would happen because Khartoum failed to act to relieve the humanitarian situation. We hold no brief with the rebels. We'd like them brought into the north-south pact as part of a national settlement. Their political positions are not particularly attractive to us and so a compromise is strictly a political matter between Khartoum and the rebels.
We do call on the rebels to cease and desist, to stop this rebellion and honor the ceasefire which they agreed to April 8th, and we've worked with them to make them understand that that's in their best interest. We're hopeful the next time, when they come back to talk, they'll talk seriously. This last time, they sent low-level people and they postured, basically demanding preconditions. They have to do better.
But as I said, this is a relatively new group, less politically evolved at this point than some other rebellions around the world. Again, never ask an African why.
MR. DENIG: Okay, let's take the lady here and then, as a final question, we'll go back to the middle.
QUESTION: Joyce Karam from Al Hayat newspaper. The 9/11 report -- it hints to some connection between Turabi and al-Qaida, at least on the ideological level. Do you see this connection today with the Jingaweit militia and maybe al-Qaida through arms smuggling or other measures that are taking place there? And will the resolution address this?
MR. SNYDER: To my knowledge, there's no connection between al-Qaida and any of these rebellions in this part of Sudan. The sad truth is, chaos anywhere is a fertile breeding ground for the kind of activities that al-Qaida and extremists like to practice, and to the degree there's now chaos in Darfur, you can make the case that if al-Qaida chose to operate in there, they could. There's no evidence of that yet so, to the best of my knowledge, that connection isn't there except that broadest one. Chaos favors movement of these people who have to hide in the shadows and there's now chaos in Darfur.
MR. DENIG: Last question. We'll go back to the Washington File there.
QUESTION: Yeah, I'm going to kind of be more mundane again about this, less intellectual. Again, a question for Mr. Holmes.
You said the situation in Darfur is very dire. Mr. Snyder said the rainy season had started already. It's very dire there. The Government of Sudan -- nothing less than immediate action by the Government of Sudan is needed. And then, at the same time, you describe a process in the United Nations where you're pushing through a resolution that involves a 30-day waiting period. Now, what could happen -- how many people could die in 30 days?
And my next question after that is, does the UN really have all that great a track record of kind of helping us take care of immediate crises? It seems that in our intervention in Iraq, the UN Security Council wasn't all that sympathetic to our interpretation of the dire threat, you know, that Iraq involved. And even going to Africa, it seems to me that in Sierra Leone we had to end up training some Nigerian battalions for kind of direct intervention there to stop the bloodshed until the UN could finally get on its feet.
Prime Minister Blair has finally said that -- as he sent 800 commandos to Sierra Leone before the UN got involved and he declared, apparently, that he would also be willing to send troops unilaterally to, you know, to Darfur, to this crisis. What makes us believe that the UN is going to act so expeditiously here in this matter when it's got a track record like that?
DR. HOLMES: Well, in the opening statement, I said that are the expectations of the international community and what we have made clear is that we expect the government of Khartoum to act immediately. The question of a 30-day wait is not about waiting for the government to act. It's waiting on whether or not the international community, if this resolution passes, will take additional measures, perhaps sanctions against them, in case they don't. So I think it's a distinction that we have to keep straight in our minds.
As for your general point about the United Nations, I think that the Secretary General and his staff and the secretariat have made it very clear over the last few weeks that this catastrophe in Darfur is the main humanitarian crisis that they are now grappling with. It is true that the United States AID is involved there. NGOs are very much involved there. But the United Nations is a very important facilitator for all of these NGOs and these aid groups. It's also a very important way, working through the Security Council, of trying to bring pressure to bear on the government of Khartoum.
The United Nations has operated quite well on various peacekeeping operations throughout Africa. There is an expectation that at some point there would be a peacekeeping operation if we can get past this crisis. That was envisioned as a result of the north-south agreement for Sudan, and there are plenty of other places in Africa where the United Nations is engaged.
So I see the United Nations as a force multiplier, as a facilitator, as a way of bringing legitimacy and urgency on the part of the international community to act as quickly as possible on this crisis.
MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Secretaries Holmes and Snyder. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
