Sudan Blasts Bush's Sanctions

Sudan's U.N. ambassador accused President Bush on Thursday of imposing new sanctions against his country for domestic political reasons and said Americans should feel "ashamed" because Sudan is making progress on ending the bloodshed in Darfur.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad said U.S. sanctions "will cripple the humanitarian situation in Darfur" and elsewhere in the country, because they target railways, airplanes and other transportation links.

But he noted that when the U.S. first imposed sanctions against Sudan nearly 10 years ago, the government achieved "miracles" and "emerged as an oil-exporting country."

"Now maybe it is a blessing in disguise," Mohamad said. "We will prove to them that we are resilient and we will grow stronger than what they think. We will transform the challenges into opportunities."

In November 1997, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Sudan for supporting international terrorism, destabilizing neighboring governments and human rights violations. It cut off about 130 Sudanese companies from the U.S. banking system, forcing them to find other ways to do business.

Bush ordered the new sanctions Tuesday to pressure Sudan's government to halt the bloodshed in Darfur that the administration has condemned as genocide.

He accused the government of being "complicit in the bombing, murder and rape of innocent civilians" and said "the world has a responsibility to put an end to it."

More than 200,000 have died and 2.5 million have been displaced in the four-year conflict between ethnic African rebels and pro-government janjaweed militia. A beleaguered, 7,000-strong African Union force and a peace agreement signed between the government and one rebel group have been unable to stop the fighting.

Responding to Mohamad's allegations, Richard Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said Thursday that Sudan's government "has blocked, obstructed, and slowed the pace of Security Council action to end this tragedy. The American sanctions are designed to change the behavior of the government of Sudan."

The new sanctions bar 31 companies from the U.S. banking system. Thirty of the companies are controlled by the government and are mainly involved in the oil industry, while the other one is suspected of shipping arms to Darfur. The measures also target three individuals, including a rebel leader, suspected of being involved in the violence in Darfur.

"Unfortunately, the United States is politicizing the oil industry because of its very silly objectives in Darfur and elsewhere," Mohamad said.

He added that the U.S. sanctions "came not because of our inaction, it came because of our action, because we are active, because we are cooperating, because we are progressing on various fronts — the humanitarian, the political and the peacekeeping."

The new sanctions come at a delicate time in negotiations on a 23,000-strong U.N.-African Union "hybrid" force for Darfur, and efforts by the two organizations to get all the combatants to the negotiating table.

In November, Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir agreed to a three-phase U.N. plan to strengthen the AU force in Darfur, but he has since delayed its implementation and backtracked on the hybrid force. The AU and U.N. agreed last Thursday on details of the hybrid force, which were then put in a proposal Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave to Mohamad on Friday.

"I think they have to feel ashamed of themselves because Friday they passed a presidential statement in the Security Council welcoming that they received the report about the hybrid operation ... and then they come only after three or four days to sanction Sudan," Mohamad said.

"I think it's now very clear for members of the Security Council to know that the issue (U.S. sanctions against Sudan) has nothing to do with Darfur. It has only to do with settling domestic (issues) in the United States with Democrats, NGOs," he said.

Despite the new U.S. sanctions and the threat of U.N. sanctions, Mohamad said Sudan will attend a meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, next week on the hybrid force proposal.

"We want it to go ahead," Mohamad said. "We will continue with our commitments with the international community. The American sanctions will have no bearing at all with our cooperation with the U.N. ... and the United States at the end will be isolated, as it is now isolated."