Global Policy Forum

By Adrian Blomfield

Britain has said it will not support calls for military intervention in Sudan despite warnings that a government campaign of ethnic cleansing against black Muslims in Darfur could cause 350,000 deaths in the next few months. Alan Goulty, Tony Blair's special envoy to Sudan, said he also opposed sanctions against Khartoum.

The comments are likely to widen a foreign policy rift between Britain and America, the two most important western players in Sudan. United States officials are convinced that sanctions are the only way of exerting meaningful pressure on Khartoum to avert a catastrophe that is already being compared with the genocide in Rwanda 10 years ago. But Mr Goulty does not agree. "In the long term, threats of sanctions don't seem likely to produce immediate action and immediate action is what we need," he said.

"The more time we spend dithering, the more people will die." The West has tried to ignore Darfur's war, described by the United Nations as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, since it began a year ago. It is now too late to stop the ethnic cleansing. Darfur, an area the size of France, is largely empty. Arab militiamen on horses and camels, armed and funded by kinsmen in Khartoum, have ridden across Darfur, burning villages, raping women and executing men of fighting age.

About 30,000 people have been killed. More than a million black Muslim civilians accused by Khartoum of supporting rebels fighting its political and economic marginalisation of Darfur have fled. Most of them languish in camps in Darfur's desert and Khartoum has done its best to ensure aid organisations cannot get there to feed them. With seasonal rains expected any day, their plight can only worsen.

The only roads in Darfur and neighbouring Chad, to where at least 200,000 refugees have fled, cross dry river beds which fill up with water when the rain begins. Aid convoys will not be able to reach the overcrowded camps, where festering disease will be worsened by the rain, for at least two months.

Last week, the International Crisis Group, a respected think tank, called on the UN Security Council to consider authorising the use of force to disarm the militias as the only way to ensure the delivery of emergency food and medicine.

Mr Goulty insists that military intervention would be a drastic and ineffective response to the crisis. "It would be very expensive, fraught with difficulties and hard to set up in a hurry," he said. Britain has long preferred a policy of "quiet diplomacy" with Khartoum. British diplomats say their patience, as much as American bullying, led to a peace deal signed last week that could end a separate war, waged intermittently for half a century, between the government and non-Muslim rebels in the south.