Darfur Help Again Risks Being Too Little, Too Late 
By Reuters
January 26, 2006
The New York Times
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-sudan-darfur-threat.html

GENEVA (Reuters) - Worsening violence in Sudan's Darfur needs an urgent international response, but the fear is that help will again arrive late, a top United Nations human rights envoy said on Thursday.
``The situation is unraveling ... and if it comes apart, the danger to civilians will be very great,'' said Juan Mendez, U.N. special adviser on the prevention of genocide.
Mendez, who presented a report to the U.N. Security Council last October warning of growing bloodshed in the troubled western Sudan region, told Reuters that differences within the 15-member body acted as a brake on action.
``We are always moving slowing and in cumbersome ways, and doing as little as possible,'' he said. ``The main problem is that we have a bottleneck in the Security Council because of the difficulty of getting consensus,'' he added in an interview.
He said local Arab and Black African communities must be brought into the peace process.
``We need to start quickly engaging the local community in talks. The level of animosity is very great and so is their ability to arm themselves and engage in violence.''
A ceasefire between rebel and government forces, the arrival of African Union monitors and massive humanitarian aid in mid-2004 brought relative calm after more than a year of mayhem.
But since late last year, the violence has resumed, making it increasingly difficult for aid agencies to operate.
About 2 million people have been made homeless in the fighting, which was started in February 2003 by rebels complaining the government was neglecting their region. The conflict is now about to enter its fourth year.
The Argentine lawyer, who worked for 15 years with New York-based Human Rights Watch, said that the some 7,000 African Union troops had been doing a good job, but they were not enough and they were under-supplied and under-financed.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for western countries to help strengthen the force.
But Security Council permanent members Russia and China have traditionally opposed any intervention by non-African countries, while Khartoum is against it.
Even if the Security Council did eventually back the call for more troops, it would take several months for them be operational.
``It is urgent that ... we establish a force that has both the troop strength, the equipment and an unambiguous mandate to protect civilians from harm,'' Mendez said.
With peace talks in the Nigerian capital of Abuja going nowhere, he said the priority should be getting all sides to agree a new ceasefire.