Between Sudan and Libya, Critics See U.S. Inconsistency

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor says that the current situation in Libya is more akin to the situation in Darfur before the UNAMID forces were deployed in 2007. By that reasoning, the administration continues to support peacekeeping forces in Sudan. But some, like analyst Reeves, say that the United States refuses to provide the forces with the kind of equipment and supplies they would need to be effective.

That’s not to say that Washington has done nothing. The administration was active in critical negotiations to ensure that a referendum allowing the South to vote on independence would take place on time. Against a number of odds, it did, and the people in the South voted overwhelmingly to secede from the North.

Mark Schneider, a senior vice president at the International Crisis Group, which does conflict-prevention analysis and resolution, said that those negotiations may have prevented the country from falling back into the civil war from which it had barely emerged in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which the Bush administration helped negotiate.

“The referendum itself was a major achievement. That was a surprise. The outcome was not a surprise,” Schneider said. “But the acceptance of it was also a very positive step.”

South Sudanese living in Kenya lined up to vote at a polling station in Nairobi on January 9, 2011, on the first day of a week-long independence referendum. The U.S. was instrumental in facilitating negotiations that allowed the referendum to take place. (Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images)

That’s also how the administration sees its efforts. “Regional governments, including the government of South Sudan, asked that the United States assist in the last stages of negotiating the referendum by demonstrating to the Sudanese government that there was a path toward normalization if they lived up to their international commitments outlined in the CPA,” Vietor said. By the administration's estimation, getting Khartoum to agree to a separation – not an easy task – was just one step on the way to normalization. To get all the way there, violence in Darfur must end, and the administration says it will continue to press the issue.

It was the road to referendum, however, that has left many activists angry at the administration. In order to get the North to come to the negotiating table, the U.S. had to decouple the issue of peace in Darfur, where an estimated 450,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced. Obama also sent Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to tell Sudanese authorities that if they allowed the referendum to occur, the State Department’s could remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, a major step toward normalization of relations between the two countries.

Reeves, the scholar, argued, “That’s absolutely shocking that you would decouple an issue that you have described as genocide.”

But Vietor said that the president is by no means reversing the policy he proposed as a candidate. “Since the very beginning, he has been clear that we will engage even with those with whom we disagree if doing so allows us to get results. We have provided the Sudanese with a road map for normalization of relations, but only upon the satisfactory completion of the CPA, and, specifically, resolution of the Abyei issue, as well as peace in Darfur.”

It’s true the president pledged to engage with dictators such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran and Kim Jong Il in North Korea; Obama believes that direct, aggressive diplomacy is better than no diplomacy. But as a candidate, he spoke of using sticks in his Sudan policy. As a president, he’s been using carrots. Libya is all about sticks.

The next big test is whether the secession of the South from the North will occur peacefully in Sudan. It is scheduled for July 9, but a host of issues must first be resolved. Chief among them is what to do about Abyei, a city in central Sudan that bridges the North and the South and sits atop a number of the country’s oil fields. It is still unclear whether Abyei will join the North or the South or how oil revenues from the region will be split.

Violence has broken out in the city in recent weeks as the two sides' forces clash. According to reports, at least 100 people have been killed and thousands displaced. Photos from the Satellite Sentinel Project - a group conceived by George Clooney that works with the Enough Project to document violence in Sudan with satellite imagery – confirmed that three villages in the region were burned in a targeted attack.

On Wednesday, the White House called for peace. “This dangerous standoff is unacceptable for the Sudanese people, and we condemn the deployment of forces by both sides,” said a statement that was issued not by the president – who would issue a statement decrying violence in Cote D’Ivoire later that day – but by White House press secretary Jay Carney.

“The type of statement issued by President Obama’s White House today confirms to the South that we’re not being robust against those in the North who are the sponsors of this violence,” said Richard Williamson, who was a special envoy to Sudan during the Bush administration.

John Prendergast of the anti-genocide Enough Project, said that his group is not advocating for the use of U.S. force to deliver humanitarian assistance in Sudan. But the group is monitoring the situation closely.  “If the Khartoum regime undermines peace between the North and South, and continues to escalate in Darfur, the [U.S.] administration will have no choice but to alter its present policy,” he said. In Libya, “the swift consequences the U.S. was able to cobble together in the U.N. Security Council was indeed an important precedent, one which we will draw on if the situation deteriorates further in Sudan.”

For now, the administration is safe. As long as military intervention in Libya remains a hypothetical rather than an actuality, human-rights advocates have less to demand. But they’ll be keeping watch.

“I would ask," Reeves said, "why it is that Libyan civilians are more valuable, command more attention, more military commitment than the civilians of Darfur?”

He’s waiting for the Obama administration to prove that such is not the case.

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