Seeking Sudan's pressure point

THE SANCTIONS on Sudan that President Bush announced Tuesday are justified as expressions of solidarity with the 2.5 million people of Darfur and eastern Chad who are trapped in refugee camps, prey to government-backed janjaweed militiamen, disease, and malnutrition. But there is no reason to believe the new sanctions are enough to compel Sudan's president, Lieutenant General Omar Bashir, to end the Darfur genocide.

These latest sanctions are limited in scope, adding 30 Sudanese government-controlled companies and one private firm to a list of 130 outfits that are already prohibited from trading with American companies or individuals or from using the US financial system. Sudan has long disdained such limited economic penalties -- as well as diplomatic pressure at the United Nations and an International Criminal Court indictment of two officials accused of furthering the ethnic cleansing, raping, and murdering in Darfur.

Bush also said he will propose fresh UN sanctions. Some of these measures have teeth but are unlikely to survive a Chinese veto in the UN Security Council. One such action is a ban on Sudanese military flights in Darfur; many of the Arab janjaweed raids on African villages there are preceeded by bombing from government planes.

But China, with its large investments in Sudan's oil sector and its profits from arms sales to Khartoum, so far has run interference for Bashir. For his part, Bashir has thwarted a mandatory Security Council resolution from last August that authorized rapid deployment of 22,500 well-armed peacekeeping police to augment the overwhelmed 7,000 African Union observers who have hardly been able to protect themselves, much less the people of Darfur or humanitarian workers.

China has the leverage America lacks. There are signs that officials in Beijing are beginning to get the message about their responsibility -- not from other governments but from a grassroots movement to shame China by characterizing the 2008 summer games in Beijing as the "genocide Olympics." In response, China has appointed a special envoy to Sudan, Lui Guijin, who returned from a recent trip to Darfur disputing reports from the United Nations and international aid groups. "I didn't see a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger there," he claimed. China's investments in Sudan, he said, "will fundamentally help Sudan address the conflicts and wars in Sudan."

This is transparent propaganda. But when Chinese officials nervously complain that talk of a genocide Olympics is an intolerable politicizing of sport, they are acknowledging that their weak spot -- and Bashir's greatest vulnerability -- has been located. Bush's sanctions may not achieve much, but civil society has a chance to shame China into forcing Bashir to stop the genocide in Darfur.