UN Emergency Session Agrees Immediate Action for Peace in Sudan

At a closed-door emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council ambassadors on Monday, UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan requested for immediate action to breakthrough the peace deadlock in war-torn Darfur, Sudan. He stressed his proposals to send 10,000 UN peacekeepers to monitor the security of the region and oversee that the peace agreement, which has already been signed between the government and southern rebels, is fully enforced.

Annan renewed his call following the report from the UN Humanitarian Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland. Egeland said that women and girls in the conflict-plagued Darfur region are suffering from an increasing wave of rapings, which are believed to be carried out by government soldiers, militia-men and other armed men.

The situation has been deteriorating and the Sudanese government has appealed for help from NGOs. According to Egeland, the government conceded that "this is now a reality and that they want to work with the African union and us to clamp down and have those responsible punished and also to prevent future acts by protecting women."

The Sudanese government at the Capital Khartoum and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement signed a landmark agreement in January that ended a two-decade-long civil war. The war displaced more than 2 million people and more than 70,000 lives were claimed through disease and hunger.

Following the peace agreement, the government and the southern rebels are expected to form a coalition government, decentralise power, share oil revenues and integrate the military.

In addition, as suggested by the UN, peacekeeping troops may soon be sent to safeguard the security of Darfur in the midst of the volatile transition stage. The UN is also considering travel sanctions and an asset freeze on perpetrators of atrocities in Darfur, and it will be decided whether an international court should hear the cases of human rights offenders.

However, the 15-nation UN Security council has been debating on all these actions for over three weeks without a final decision being made, leaving the peace process in Darfur in deadlock.

"I think all would agree that not enough is being done to bring the security situation in Sudan under control," UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

"We all know the kinds of difficult issues that the council is grappling with as they debate approving the secretary-general's proposal for a peacekeeping mission," he said. "And I think he(Annan) wants to discuss with them what practical options are available to them to act more decisively to deal with the continuing killing and rape that's going on."

After the meeting yesterday, a statement was released saying that it was possible that UN peacekeepers could complement African Union troops now in Darfur, but the 53-nation African bloc is expected to play the leading role. The African Union is expected to deploy approximately 4,000 more troops to join the 10,000-strong peacekeepers there.

Moreover, most of the UN Security Council ambassadors agreed to set a mechanism for holding people accountable for crimes in Darfur, even though several of them said no such mechanism has been agreed on.

Despite continued disagreements among the ambassadors, they said they have recognised the need for quick action and expect a resolution soon.

"We all understand that we have to move faster," Russia's UN Ambassador Andrey Denisov said. "So the main reason for that meeting was to try to speed up."