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Africa News
China says US sanctions complicate Sudan situationMay 30, 2007, 22:11 GMT
New York - Fresh economic sanctions against the Sudanese government ordered by the United States would complicate efforts to end the conflict in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, China's UN ambassador Wang Guangya said Wednesday.
Wang said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council were making progress in solving the ethnic conflict. Those efforts included political dialogue, deployment of a UN-African Union peacekeeping force and humanitarian aid, in a three-pronged campaign to end the three-year-old conflict.
'Under such circumstances, the sanctions announced by the United States and the talk of having a Security Council resolution on the sanctions, would make this fragile situation more complicated,' Wang told reporters one day after Bush announced the sanctions in Washington. The US sanctions aimed at 30 companies, including five in Sudan's booming oil industry, and froze the assets of two senior Sudanese government officials and a rebel leader whose group refused to sign last year's Darfur peace agreement.
The sanctions bar the companies and individuals from all business transactions through the US financial system.
In imposing the sanctions, Bush said he was fighting to end genocide in the Darfur region.
The conflict in Darfur since 2003 pitted government-backed Arab militias, known as janjaweed, against African rebel groups and has left more than 300,000 people dead and more than 2 million displaced.
China, which has strong economic ties to Sudan in developing the country's oil resources, has opposed sanctions against Khartoum. In the US, a group, Save Darfur, has launched a massive advertising campaign saying it is contradictory for China to host the 2008 summer Olympics while it remains on the sidelines of the 'Sudanese government's genocide.'
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http://news.monstersandcritics.com/africa/news/article_1311387.php/China_says_US_sanctions_complicate_Sudan_situation<snip>
RE: "Save Darfur" today in NY Times
Darfur Advocacy Group Undergoes a Shake-Up By STEPHANIE STROM and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: June 2, 2007
Even as advocacy groups attained the seeming triumph of President Bush’s new sanctions against Sudan, the organization that helped bring the conflict in Darfur to the world’s attention is in upheaval, firing its executive director, reorganizing its board and rethinking its strategies.
At the heart of the shake-up are questions of whether the former executive director of the organization, the Save Darfur Coalition, wisely used a sudden influx of money from a few anonymous donors in an advertising blitz to push for action.
The advertisements strained relationships with aid groups working on the ground in Darfur, the western region of Sudan, where at least 200,000 people have been killed and millions have fled their homes. Many of the groups opposed some of the tone and content of Save Darfur’s high-decibel advocacy campaign.
Coalition board members sought to minimize the dispute, saying that tensions had existed between advocates and aid workers in previous crises, like Kosovo, and that the organization’s rapid growth and changing membership had motivated the board’s decision to remove the director, David Rubenstein.
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Mr. Bacon said similar tension had flared publicly during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, when relief groups had staff members in the Balkans at the same time advocacy groups were calling for bombing and more aggressive military action.
“Not only were there concerns among relief agencies that their workers would be hit if there were bombing, but they were also fearful that more aggressive action could provoke a counterattack against aid workers, who might be seen as representative of the Western powers doing the bombing,” Mr. Bacon said.
John Prendergast, a member of the board of
Save Darfur and a leading activist on Darfur, said the changes that the board decided to make were part of an effort to reorganize and re-energize the movement along the lines of its earliest conception: to be a broad, permanent alliance of many different types of organizations working together to prevent atrocities and genocide.
“The growth was so fast in the coalition, as was interest in the issue of Darfur and in the budget, that it was hard to kind of manage the difference between an organization and a coalition,” Mr. Prendergast said. “People felt that the time had some to go back to the roots of the coalition of groups that is so rich and so diverse.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/world/africa/02darfur.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&oref=slogin