Global Policy Forum

The U.N. Security Council delayed on Thursday a meeting to lift symbolic sanctions against Sudan because of attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon, diplomats reported.

U.S. officials told council members the time was not ripe, and sponsors of the resolution to end the bans agreed to put it off, the envoys said. "In the circumstances, no one was inclined to press this issue," a British official said. France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-David Levitte, the current council president, said the 15-member body had been scheduled to discuss the embargoes on Thursday and then vote to lift them on Sept. 17. But this has now been postponed.

It is unclear how the United States would have voted had the meeting gone ahead. U.S. officials in Washington told Reuters last week -- before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday -- a decision had not been made although others said the Bush administration might have voted in favor or abstained.

The council also postponed a discussion of Burundi, scheduled for next week, because Nelson Mandela, the mediator of peace talks in the central African nation, could not come to New York for medical reasons, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said. The former South African president is being treated for prostate cancer.

Sanctions against Sudan were imposed in 1996 to force the Khartoum government to hand over suspects in an assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. They require all states to reduce the number of Sudanese diplomatic personnel on their territory and to restrict the entry or transit of Sudanese government officials. But the United States is one of the few countries to honor them.

A ban on Sudanese aircraft was approved by the council but never went into effect because the 15-member body did not adopt a follow-up resolution setting a date for its entry into force. Since then, even Egypt, on whose behalf the embargoes were imposed, and Ethiopia, where the attack against Mubarak took place, have supported ending the sanctions.

Washington wants proof from Sudan

The United States has insisted Sudan show it is no longer providing sanctuary to alleged terrorist groups, and U.S. counterterrorism experts said last month the government was not supporting the gunmen involved in the attack on Mubarak. Separately, the United States has its own sanctions imposed by former President Bill Clinton, who closed the U.S. embassy in Khartoum in 1996 and put trade embargoes in place. Sudan also remains one of seven countries listed by the U.S. State Department as a sponsor of terrorism. In August 1998, Clinton ordered air strikes on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory on grounds, much disputed, that it was preparing to produce ingredients for chemical weapons.

Washington said then that Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, now suspected in the latest attacks against the United States, had a stake in the plant. The White House, particularly U.S. President George W. Bush, had hesitated to lift any sanctions, mainly because of Khartoum's record in condoning the use of slaves throughout the country's brutal 18-year-old civil war. More recently, however, the Bush administration decided to launch a peace initiative to mediate between Sudan's Islamic government and Christian and animist militias fighting for autonomy.

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