Sudan Rejects U.N.'s Darfur Proposal

Sudan's ruling party rejected a proposal to transfer peacekeeping in the troubled Darfur region from a weak African force to a larger and stronger U.N. mission, saying that would put the nation under the control of foreign powers, official media reported Thursday.

The Bush administration said it will send a senior envoy to Sudan in hopes of winning the government's consent for the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.

"We cannot let the violence and atrocities continue. We cannot let humanitarian workers and peacekeepers continue to come under attack," Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer said in announcing plans to fly to Sudan on Friday.

The United Nations and aid organizations, meanwhile, warned of a deepening humanitarian crisis from violence that has mounted since a peace agreement was signed in May by the government and one of the region's major rebel groups.

To stop the bloodshed, the United States and Britain have introduced a U.N. Security Council resolution to transfer peacekeeping from 7,000 financially strapped African Union troops to a better-equipped U.N. peacekeeping mission of about 22,600.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party lashed out at the latest Western efforts and rejected the proposed U.N. force at a meeting Wednesday night, Radio Omdurman and the SUNA news agency reported.

"The draft resolution is worse than the previous ones because it constitutes an attempt to impose complete guardianship on the Sudan," lawmaker Ghazi Salah Eldin Atabani told journalists after the meeting. "It did not pay any consideration to the bodies set up for implementation of the Darfur peace agreement and was not presented to the Sudanese authorities."

He said any council member who supported the draft would be considered an enemy of Sudan.

Placing the mission under United Nations auspices "can make a difference, bringing quickly to bear the U.N.'s long history of peacekeeping experience and an infusion of addition resources," Frazer told reporters Thursday.

Frazer said there are no plans to carry out a U.N. deployment in defiance of Sudanese wishes.

In a letter circulated Wednesday, al-Bashir asked the U.N. Security Council to give him time to bring peace to Darfur and urged it to delay action on transferring peacekeeping duties to the U.N. force.

He has warned that Sudan's army would fight any U.N. forces sent to Darfur, blaming "Jewish organizations" for the drive to dispatch international troops to the war-torn area of Western Sudan.

Meanwhile, the Security Council held a closed-door council meeting to discuss al-Bashir's letter, announcing later that it would meet again Monday to discuss the transfer of peacekeeping duties.

"We think that the situation in Darfur is so grave that it merits attention," said Ghana's U.N. Ambassador Nana Effah-Apenteng, the council president for August.

The poorly equipped and funded African Union troops, whose mandate expires Sept. 30, have failed to bring security to the area, which has seen more than 200,000 people killed since February 2003.

International aid workers and U.N. humanitarian officials say the violence has actually increased since May, when the government and a single rebel group, Minni Minnawi's faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement, signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, prompting the United States to urge that international troops be in place by Oct. 1.

More than 200 women have been raped in Kalma refugee camp, one of Darfur's largest, during the past five weeks alone, the International Rescue Committee aid organization said Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday that there were thousands of documented cases of women and children abducted for forced labor and rape.

The International Rescue Committee contends that more than 50,000 people have been made refugees in recent weeks, joining some two million people previously displaced.

The conflict that has killed more than 200,000 in Sudan's remote western region since 2003, when ethnic African tribes revolted against the Arab-led Khartoum government, which responded by unleashing militias known as the janjaweed that have been blamed for many of the atrocities.