c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Religious leaders around the world are continuing to press international policy makers to move from talk to action over the spiraling violence in Sudan’s Darfur region.

But Sudan’s resistance to non-African peacekeepers and differences between the United States and the United Nations have hampered any unified approach by the international community to what the Bush administration and Congress have labeled genocide.

On Sunday (Feb. 26), Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, arrived in Khartoum for a week-long visit. With the Sudanese conflict in Darfur as well as the ongoing protests over the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and the sectarian violence in Iraq forming a backdrop for his comments, Williams appealed for tolerance and interreligious understanding.

“So many of these conflicts are about who is to be king,” he said. “Together as groups, as tribes … as religions, we know that God alone is king and we can therefore be at peace with each other.”

During his visit, Williams will travel to southern Sudan, where a peace agreement last year ended nearly two decades of civil war between the largely Christian south and the Muslim-dominated government in the north. That war, which claimed an estimated 2 million lives, was sparked in part by the Sudanese government’s imposition of Shariah law in 1983.

But while peace has come to Sudan’s south, the conflict in the Darfur region between rebel groups and government-backed militias shows no sign of easing. The Darfur conflict pits black African Muslim rebels seeking more autonomy from Khartoum against the government and the government-backed Arab Muslim Janjaweed militias.

Under increased pressure from religious and human rights groups, the Bush administration has moved Darfur up on its priority list.

On Feb. 22, the Save Darfur Coalition of 150 religious and faith-based aid groups launched a 22-city campaign aimed at generating 1 million postcards to Bush asking him to make a stronger commitment to ending the Darfur war. It will culminate with an April 30 demonstration in Washington.

At the same time, at the United Nations, the U.S. pushed unsuccessfully for a hurry-up Security Council resolution calling for the world body to take over peacekeeping operations in Darfur from the 7,000 African Union monitors and soldiers currently there. Those forces have been unable to stem the bloodshed. An estimated 180,000 to 200,000 people have been killed and 2 million people displaced since fighting broke out in 2003.

“We think that the AU mission has done a very good job, but I think everybody believes that there now needs to be a more robust force,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a news conference in Cairo on Feb. 21.

But how that “robust force” will be created and what role the United States might play remain uncertain.

Ambassador John Bolton, the U.S. envoy to the U.N., strongly prodded the Security Council to adopt the peacekeeping resolution. But Bolton, president of the Security Council during February, was rebuffed by the rest of the 15-member council which said U.N. action should wait until after the African Union foreign ministers meet March 3.

“Our view is that the deteriorating security situation in Darfur requires us to move forward,” Bolton said last week, even as he acknowledged there was no support for his resolution.

Bolton has been sharply critical of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan for what he says is the U.N.’s snail pace on the issue.

But others see the Bush administration’s criticism as hypocritical.

“The U.S. has not been forward-leaning on this issue,” John Prendergast, a Sudan expert with the International Crisis Group, told Reuters. “It’s disingenuous to claim that the United Nations is not doing all it should.”

In mid-February, Annan, in a Washington meeting with President Bush, reportedly told the president the United States would have to play a significant role in deploying any expanded peacekeeping force in Sudan.

But the administration, with its military already stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so far continues to insist that no American forces will be sent to Sudan, so it remains unclear what it might do.

Bush has, however, suggested that NATO might play an expanded role in shoring up the African Union force. Currently NATO provides some airlift and logistics aid to the African Union forces.

Sudanese officials have been divided in their comments on the recent diplomatic initiatives. While some Sudanese officials have spoken of a U.N. takeover of the peacekeepers as “inevitable,” others have rejected it.

“The government of Sudan strongly rejects the proposal of international forces to be deployed to Darfur and rejects the transition of operations in Darfur from the AU to the U.N.,” Foreign Minister Lam Akol told a session of parliament on Feb. 22. “The U.N. has no mandate in Darfur, it is the AU that has the mandate there.”

DEA/RB END RNS