U.N. Sees Meager Progress in Darfur

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-sudan2sep02.story
THE WORLD
U.N. Sees Meager Progress in Darfur
A report says Sudan has not done enough to stop the militias or help refugees and calls for a larger monitoring force.
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

September 2, 2004

UNITED NATIONS — A U.N. report Wednesday said that Sudan had failed to stop attacks on civilians or disarm militias in the Darfur region, and that a large international monitoring force was necessary to provide the security the government had not.

Despite the failures, a divided Security Council is unlikely to impose sanctions, as threatened in a July 30 resolution that gave Khartoum 30 days to end the violence. Instead, diplomats say, the council probably will give Sudan more time to complete specific tasks and push it to accept an expanded force of as many as 3,000 African troops. The threat of sanctions will remain if Sudan does not cooperate.

"The disaster of Darfur continues," U.S. Ambassador John C. Danforth said Wednesday evening. "People continue to be abused, the security problem has not been solved, the number of displaced people has increased. The information that we have is that the government has been directly involved in military action against civilian villages, so the situation has not been fixed."

The Security Council will hear details today from the U.N. envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, about what the government has — and has not — done to solve what the U.N. calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis." <snip>

The report, drawn from joint assessments by the U.N. and Sudan and presented in the name of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, acknowledged that not all commitments could be implemented within 30 days across Darfur, a region the size of Texas. But it noted that few militias had been disarmed and they continued to attack civilians with impunity. <snip>