From Eric Reeves:
On Thursday, August 31, 2006, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1706, ‘inviting’ the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum to allow a large and robust UN to enter Darfur with the primary goal of protecting acutely vulnerable civilians and humanitarians. This force (between 23,000 and 24,000 troops, police, and Formed Police Units) could at the very least begin to halt the accelerating slide toward cataclysmic human destruction, destruction that UN aid chief Jan Egeland warned the Security Council on August 28, 2006 could reach to hundreds of thousands of human deaths.
The same day that Egeland issued his terrifying warning—and while US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer continued her humiliating two-day wait to meet with National Islamic Front President Omar el-Bashir—Khartoum launched its long-anticipated military offensive in North Darfur. Early reports from the ground suggest that the offensive is massive ( see August 30, 2006 dispatch from el-Fasher, North Darfur by New York Times correspondent Lydia Polgreen, at http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article17368 ) and already there is clear evidence that the offensive entails serious violations of international law and war crimes. Amnesty International reports that Khartoum’s military strategy is following the same pattern of destruction that characterized offensives during the most violent phase of the genocide (2003-2004).
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The International Crisis Group (ICG) is similarly right to urge significant punishment of Khartoum’s genocidaires:
“The regime will only change its behaviour in response to realistic threats of punishments,” the ICG’s Nick Grono and John Prendergast wrote recently. “UN member states must change the calculus of self-interest for the Sudanese regime, and one of the most effective ways of doing this is to target its sources of illicit income and unravel the Sudanese leadership’s shadowy web of commercial interests.” (Globe and Mail [Canada], September 1, 2006)
International acquiescence before the violence that has produced this catastrophe has not gone unnoticed in Khartoum. Indeed, it is almost impossible to overstate the current confidence of the National Islamic Front regime in conducting ongoing genocidal counter-insurgency warfare. The self-abasing spectacle of the US attempting to turn a hortatory Security Council resolution into a diplomatic triumph only reveals to Khartoum weakness, not strength or resolve. For again, the only real effect of Resolution 1706 is to confer determination of a time-table for UN deployment upon the very genocidaires who have just begun a ghastly new exercise in targeted human destruction.