October 6, 2000
An unusually intense battle is being fought over three of the five Security Council seats open for election this year, with three European nations vying for two places and an American-backed African candidate trying to derail a bid by Sudan for the third. The two other seats are not being contested.
The voting by the General Assembly takes place Tuesday, and campaigning is going on down to the wire, diplomats say. On Wednesday, King Harald of Norway came to New York to hold a huge reception to press his country's case in a three-way fight with Ireland and Italy.
The Italians — latecomers to the race and, to some Europeans, spoilers for trying to hold the seat twice in a decade at the expense of smaller nations — have been entertaining lavishly in capitals around the world.
Ireland, which has not been represented on the Council for 20 years, has been quietly lobbying developing nations, which form a majority in the Assembly, with assurances that as a poor, once-colonized country, it understands their needs.
The United States has stood back from the race in the group known as Western Europe and Others, to which Washington loosely belongs. But American diplomats have been actively involved in the race for the African seat. The American campaign has aroused enough resentment, some African diplomats say, that Washington's candidate, Mauritius, could lose votes it might have otherwise garnered.
The candidacy of Sudan, backed by the Organization of African Unity, is an embarrassment to Washington, which has tried to isolate the Sudanese government. The ethnically Arab, Islamic government has conducted a punishing war for decades against southern Sudanese, who are black Africans and Christians or followers of African religions.
Today, at a news conference in New York organized by Freedom House, a group of human rights organizations denounced the Sudanese government as "genocidal." Among the speakers was a 21-year-old black man, Francis Bol Bok, who was a slave of a northern Sudanese family and told of the life that thousands of southerners lead in bondage. Alan Hevesi, the New York City comptroller, also denounced the Sudanese government at the news conference. "The election of Sudan to the Security Council would be a sick joke," he said, addingthat his own family's persecution as Jews during the Nazi era led him to champion the Africans of southern Sudan.
Some European diplomats said they had hoped that the battle over the African seat could have been avoided by diplomacy. In June, the Security Council was on the verge of ending sanctions imposed on Sudan after a 1995 assassination attempt against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Mr. Mubarak's motorcade was shot at in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the assassins were thought to have fled to Sudan.
By this year, the Sudanese had satisfied the Egyptians and Ethiopians that they had made an effort to find the would-be assassins and that they were not in Sudan, thus meeting the requirements to have the largely symbolic sanctions lifted. The United States blocked this move, saying it would be reconsidered in the fall.
Now, European and other diplomats say, the opportunity to trade a lifting of sanctions for Sudan's withdrawal has been lost.
