US seeks halt to atrocities in Sudan

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States tightened pressure yesterday on Sudan to halt atrocities by progovernment militias against civilians in the Darfur region, saying it wants United Nations sanctions imposed on militia leaders unless the attacks end within days.

But human rights and Africa-focused groups say US and other governments are moving too slowly to save hundreds of thousands of endangered people.

The UN Security Council is considering a US draft resolution on the 16-month-old civil war in Darfur, which has left an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 dead and a million people huddled in refugee camps, short of food, water, medicine, and shelter.

Even in a world distracted by the war in Iraq, the violence of Darfur has in recent days forced itself onto the agendas of the Bush administration and the United Nations. US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan crossed paths in visits to Sudan last week, each providing his institution's first top-level focus on the crisis, which UN officials have called the world's worst current humanitarian crisis.

The new US ambassador at the United Nations, John Danforth, told reporters yesterday that Sudan's government, which is dominated by ethnic Arabs, must halt atrocities by the Arab militias called Janjaweed against non-Arab tribes of Darfur's deserts and grasslands. ''We are talking about days. We are talking about this week," Danforth told reporters after a Security Council session on the crisis.

Washington's draft resolution would ban arms purchases or international travel by leaders of the Janjaweed if they do not halt attacks within 30 days. But Danforth, who is a former Bush administration special envoy to Sudan, declared yesterday that ''30 days is too long for the government to act."

Meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the African Union demanded that Sudan arrest and prosecute militiamen accused of committing atrocities, but it said the violence in the Darfur region did not constitute genocide.

The council said in its statement that ''even though the crisis in Darfur is grave, with unacceptable levels of death, human suffering, and destruction of homes and infrastructure, the situation cannot be defined as a genocide." No major Western or UN officials have publicly called the situation in Darfur genocide, but Annan has said the crisis is ''bordering on ethnic cleansing."

New York-based Human Rights Watch and other groups have insisted that any sanctions must target the Sudanese government of President Omar el-Bashir, whose military, by all available evidence, has been backing the Janjaweed. Diplomats yesterday told reporters at the United Nations that such a broadening of the proposed sanctions was under discussion.

But some Security Council members were resisting stepped-up pressure on Sudan. Pakistan's ambassador was one of several critics yesterday who noted that UN member states seem in some ways more willing to talk about Darfur than to act on it, noting that countries have so far donated only about a third of the $350 million that UN humanitarian agencies are pleading for to save the lives of Darfur's uprooted and impoverished subsistence farmers and herders.

The chief UN coordinator for humanitarian aid, Jan Egeland, said the relief effort in Darfur will need food rations for a million displaced people by the end of this month. Relief agencies will have to provide primary health care for three-quarters of these people and materials to build shelters for 90 percent of them, Egeland told the Security Council yesterday.

The whole aid effort will be complicated because, until Annan's visit last week, Bashir's government was barring relief agencies from most of Darfur. Under pressure, he has promised to provide access, but now ''the rainy season has very much started," Egeland said, so more aircraft and specialized, mud-capable trucks will be needed to deliver supplies across much of a region that is as large as Texas.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.