WASHINGTON – Facing resistance by Sudan’s government, the Bush administration has turned to Libya to help mount a $100 million relief operation for the starving people of battle-torn Darfur in western Sudan, a White House official said Sunday.
President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said “there is probably more to come” than the initial $100 million already dedicated to the region where the U.S. Agency for International Development estimates 350,000 might starve by next spring.
Darfur has emerged as a major humanitarian crisis because of a 16-month struggle between regional black tribesmen from the region and government-backed ethnically Arab militias. U.S. officials have called it “ethnic cleansing,” an effort to force out the desolate region’s African majority. The United Nations says more than 30,000 have been killed and 1 million displaced.
The United States has been using costly airlifts for aid to the sprawling region. Land routes from Khartoum, the Sudan capital, and through Chad are difficult and dangerous. U.S. officials have said that an aid route through Libya would be easier, cheaper and more efficient.
“We’re working with others, with the Libyans, to try to get a third route for supplies to get in to Darfur,” Rice said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And we’ve been putting a lot of pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the Janjaweed militia from doing the horrible things that they’re doing in that region.”
The government in Khartoum denies it is sponsoring the activities of the Janjaweed militia.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, now with Bush in Turkey for a NATO meeting, is to fly to Sudan this week and go to Darfur to talk with relief workers and displaced people.
Meanwhile, refugees and aid workers told The Washington Post that the Sudanese government dispatched 500 men last week to the sweltering camp of 40,000 near El Fashir, warning the refugees to keep quiet about their experiences when Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan visit the region.
The men told the villagers that they would impersonate victims when the U.S. and U.N. delegations arrived and tell them the government had done nothing wrong and rebels operating against the government in the region were to blame, the villagers and aid workers said.
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