Khartoum

Andrew Natsios, former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, is familiar with huge, difficult tasks. He presided for a time over both the postwar reconstruction of Iraq and Boston's ill-fated Big Dig tunnel project. Yet his new job as President Bush's special envoy to lead America's efforts at reversing escalating violence and bloodshed in Darfur - which must finally include the imposition of genuine sanctions - will likely make the other assignments pale in comparison.

"On a knife edge." That's an image used to the point of cliché by headline writers in British newspapers whenever a situation hangs precariously in the balance. Cliché or not, it perfectly describes the situation in Sudan. While millions around the world have focused on displacement and death in Sudan's Darfur region, southern Sudan has been moving along the path toward peace. This is remarkable because before violence was visited on Darfur, four decades of war left an even greater humanitarian tragedy in the south, with millions dead and displaced in a conflict that seemed endless and intractable.

WHEN YOU ARE VISITING a city like Khartoum, the hot, dry, capital of Sudan, run by some pretty uncompromising Islamic fundamentalists, life's pleasures are rare, but treasured. Khartoum is not a place for tourists. Not that it's a dangerous place, unless you happen to get on the wrong side of the government. The only reason to be there is if you're trying to cash in on the developing oil industry, you're a builder, an aid worker, an academic, a journalist, a diplomat, or a terrorist in good odor with the regime.

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Hundreds of demonstrators in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, poured into the streets yesterday demanding the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her class of 7-year-olds named a teddy bear Muhammad. The protesters, some carrying swords, screamed, "Shame, shame on the U.K.!" and "Kill her, kill her by firing squad." They were calling for the death of Gillian Gibbons, who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in jail. Under Sudanese law, she could have spent six months behind bars and received 40 lashes.

WASHINGTON -- Revising its strategy of treating the Sudan as a complete pariah state, the Clinton administration decided last week to put a handful of diplomats back in Khartoum to press the North African nation to stop harboring Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian and Algerian terrorists.The Sudan's Islamic government welcomed the announcement as a victory in its efforts to soften the U.S. diplomatic line against it. But administration officials said that sending diplomats back to the Sudan would allow the United States to increase pressure on its government.

WASHINGTON -- Rebel advances in Sudan over recent days have shaken the Islamic-led government, increasing the possibility of reform if not defeat of the rogue regime, according to officials and regional analysts.In one dramatic reaction to the increasing pressure it is facing, the beleaguered Khartoum leadership sent an emissary last week to meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, target of a 1995 assassination attempt by terrorists who allegedly fled to Sudan.Sudan is on the U.S. State Department's list of pariah nations because of its support of international terrorism.

As a young staffer on Capitol Hill in the 1970s, Barbara Lee worked on anti-apartheid legislation aimed at pushing U.S. companies to leave South Africa. Now a member of Congress, Lee is helping to craft another divestment campaign, this one designed to end mass killings in Sudan. "Anyone who understands that genocide is morally wrong and reprehensible cannot help but get involved," said Lee, a Northern California Democrat. She has called on the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the largest state pension fund with $180 billion in assets, to rid itself of "blood money" invested in companies that do business in the war-torn African nation.

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- For perhaps the first time in his life, Ghazi Suleiman is defending the same cause as the Sudanese government he detests.A lawyer and human rights activist, Suleiman represents the pharmaceutical company that the United States bombed Thursday in retaliation for terrorist attacks at two U.S. embassies in East Africa.The Clinton administration claims the El Shifa factory was producing a chemical weapons component and was tied to the exiled Saudi businessman it holds responsible for the embassy bombings.

THE CLINTON administration has taken a page out of the Cold War foreign policy handbook and is about to apply it to the Sudan. There is a great temptation to apply the dictum that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to the Sudan. Moreover, in comparison to many of the previous recipients of U.S. aid under this doctrine (e.g. the Contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, UNITA in Angola), the enemies of the regime in Khartoum are most deserving of external support. However, the question is whether the Clinton administration wants to be part of the problem or part of the solution.

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- At Khartoum's outdoor market, Hawa Sabboon leans listlessly against a pole. Her trays of watermelon seeds and dates remain nearly full. As an ocher sun wallows in the dust-filled sky, she assesses the day's trade."No customers. No buying. No selling," says the 18-year-old street vendor, who, at dusk, will board a crowded bus for the 1 1/2 -hour ride home.Sabboon knows little of the United States' military strike that destroyed a Khartoum pharmaceutical plant Aug. 20 and focused the world's attention on her African homeland.

Washington -- Sudan has secretly worked with the CIA to spy on the insurgency in Iraq - an example of how the United States has continued to cooperate with the Sudanese regime even while condemning its role in the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Darfur. President Bush has condemned the killings in Darfur as genocide and has imposed sanctions on Sudan's government. But some critics say the administration has soft-pedaled the sanctions to preserve its extensive intelligence collaboration with Sudan.

Darfur has taken on the shorthand status accorded Biafra and Bangladesh in a previous generation. The very word has come to represent horrible things happening to poor and defenseless people, held up to shame the rich and powerful world for its lack of action in stopping this injustice. For many who decry these atrocities, that is all they know, all they need to know. There is no doubt that Darfur fits that rather simplistic role. But there is also no doubt that no solution to its many problems will be possible without understanding its complexity.

NAIROBI, Kenya -- The Sudanese government ordered the top United Nations envoy out of the country yesterday, the most recent sign of deteriorating relations between Khartoum and the world body over how to stop violence in Darfur. Jan Pronk, a former Dutch government minister who has been serving as U.N. special representative in Sudan since 2004, was given 72 hours to leave the country after Sudanese officials accused him of making inappropriate comments on his personal blog. The expulsion marked another diplomatic nose-thumbing by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and his administration, which has resisted international pressure in recent months to accept U.N. peacekeepers in western Sudan.

Andrew Natsios, former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, is familiar with huge, difficult tasks. He presided for a time over both the postwar reconstruction of Iraq and Boston's ill-fated Big Dig tunnel project. Yet his new job as President Bush's special envoy to lead America's efforts at reversing escalating violence and bloodshed in Darfur - which must finally include the imposition of genuine sanctions - will likely make the other assignments pale in comparison.

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council voted yesterday to send a new peacekeeping force to Sudan's troubled western Darfur region, but the Sudanese government immediately rejected the resolution as "illegal." The rejection heightened diplomats' concerns about a looming humanitarian crisis in the region, where an African Union contingent has been largely unable to protect civilians and monitor a cease-fire. The Sudanese government in the capital, Khartoum, said yesterday that the U.N. force is unwelcome and that its own soldiers will pacify the region in tandem with the African Union troops.

The University of Maryland's endowment foundation has joined 23 other college endowments around the nation in attempting to use its considerable assets as leverage to end the Sudanese government-backed genocide in Darfur. In Maryland's case, the effect is likely to be negligible. The university system has no investments in the companies it has pledged to avoid, and most of its assets are in managed funds over which it has little control. As a symbolic gesture, though, the foundation's decision is encouraging in that it reflects the growing success of the student activism that brought it about.

OMDURMAN ES SALAAM, Sudan - Peter Maeike's house is a patchwork of sugar sacks, plastic sheeting and cardboard stretched over a pole frame, so fragile that a strong breeze might lift it into the air. It would not look out of place in Sudan's western Darfur region, where a government-backed campaign against black African tribes has left up to 50,000 people dead and driven 1.5 million civilians out of their homes and into sprawling relief camps in search...

SINCE SEIZING POWER in 1989, the National Islamic Front of spiritual leader Hassan al-Turabi and President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has put Sudan on the cutting edge of the Islamic revolution.They have served as a conduit for Iran's export of terrorism, harbored subversives of neighboring Arab regimes, genocidally suppressed the black Christians of the south and given sanctuary to cultist Christian insurgents in Uganda. This was the regime that sponsored the revival of black slavery in its own country that was exposed by Sun reporters Gregory Kane and Gilbert Lewthwaite last year.

"Do I hope there will be a significant decline in violence? Yes. Can I be certain? No." That was Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick's pessimistic assessment of the peace agreement he helped broker last month between the Sudanese government and the ragtag rebel groups whose uprising has provided the pretext for the three-year-old genocide in Darfur. Negotiated under intense U.S. and international pressure, the agreement was hailed by President Bush as "the beginnings of hope for the people of Darfur."

Sadly, President Bush was correct when he described the peace deal between the Sudanese government and the main rebel group in Darfur as offering only "the beginnings of hope." Little more than a week later, violence continues in a ravaged region where more than 300,000 innocents have been savagely murdered and from which 2 million tribal villagers have been driven to the hellish half-lives of refugee camps. If anything, pressure has only increased on the United States and its European and African allies in the peace talks to remain on the scene and actively involved.