Obama Shifts Sudan Plan With Incentives

Updated 10:16 a.m. Eastern time

President Obama said Monday that the U.S. will shift its policy toward Sudan to one based on working with the Khartoum government instead of isolating it.

Still, Mr. Obama said he later this week will renew tough sanctions against the Sudanese government.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was announcing details of the new approach at a news conference Monday, joined by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Scott Gration, the administration's envoy to Sudan.

"We have a menu of incentives and disincentives," Clinton said.

In a statement Monday, Mr. Obama said the U.S. and international community must act "with a sense of urgency and purpose" to seek and end to conflict, human rights abuses and genocide in Darfur. He said an agreement between the North and South in Sudan must be implemented for there to be any chance for long-term peace.

"These two goals must both be pursued simultaneously with urgency," Mr. Obama said.

Rice and Gration have clashed over how far to engage the Sudanese government of President Omar al-Bashir, charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity and war crimes for allegedly masterminding deadly attacks throughout the Darfur region of Sudan.

Gration has argued in public for a less strict line toward Bashir, who he has told officials is the key to resolving the situation in Darfur as well as in southern Sudan, which in 2005 signed a provisional peace deal with the government in Khartoum, ending Africa's longest-running civil war.

Rice favors taking a harder line approach.

However, the new policy will not make major concessions to Bashir, whose government is designated a "state sponsor of terrorism" by the State Department, U.S. officials said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity because Congress had yet to be briefed on the planned policy shift.

Instead, the new policy is designed to bring Khartoum into the fold by offering incentives for improved relations for improvements in the situation in Darfur as well as in southern Sudan, which will hold a referendum on succession scheduled to take place in 2011, they said.

"If the government of Sudan acts to improve the situation on the ground and to advance peace, there will be incentives; if it does not, then there will be increased pressure imposed by the United States and the international community," Mr. Obama said. "As the United States and our international partners meet our responsibility to act, the government of Sudan must meet its responsibilities to take concrete steps in a new direction."

The Darfur conflict began in February 2003 when ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in Khartoum, claiming discrimination and neglect.

U.N. officials say the war has claimed at least 300,000 lives from violence, disease and displacement. They say some 2.7 million people were driven from their homes and at its height, in 2003-2005, it was called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.