Global Policy Forum

By Tom Atkins

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned on Wednesday that outside military action may be needed in western Sudan to halt "ethnic cleansing" in the strife-torn Darfur region. Annan said humanitarian workers and human rights experts needed to be given full access to Darfur to administer aid to hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes, many into neighbouring Chad. "They need to get to the victims," he said. "If that is denied, the international community must be prepared to take swift and appropriate action. By action in such situations, I mean a continuum of steps which may include military action."

U.N. and independent aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian crisis in Darfur, where the United Nations estimates the conflict has affected one million people. Arab militias are conducting an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing to drive black Africans from Sudan's Darfur region and the government is doing little to stop it, U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said last Friday.

Talks between two Darfur rebel groups, who accuse the Sudanese authorities of involvement in the violence, and the government began in the Chad capital N'Djamana on Tuesday on getting international humanitarian aid to the area. Sudan had objected to the presence of European Union and United States observers at the talks, saying Darfur was a local and tribal conflict, not an international matter.

"The international community cannot stand idle," Annan said in his speech, delivered to the annual meeting of the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission and marking the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in which some 800,000 people died. Annan also criticised U.N. member states for lacking the political will to act in potential genocidal situations. "The risk of genocide remains frighteningly real," he said.

"This speech was a wake up call to the international community," Reed Brody, special counsel to U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch, told Reuters. "The best way to honour the dead in Rwanda and to show that we have learned from our failures is to stop the massacres from being carried out in the Sudan."