Sudan

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.

BEIJING -- China has expressed "grave concerns" to the Sudanese government about the recent violence in western Darfur and is actively working to resolve delays in establishing an international peacekeeping force, China's special envoy to Darfur said yesterday. The envoy, Liu Guijin, who recently returned from his fourth visit to Sudan, offered a detailed defense of China's role in Darfur at a news conference at the Foreign Ministry here and repeated Beijing's stance that activists are wrong to link the strife in Darfur to the Beijing Olympics in August.

WASHINGTON -- Human rights in Sudan are "extremely poor," the State Department said yesterday, charging the Islamic-led government with responsibility for killings, disappearances, forced conscription of children into the army -- and slavery.Citing a series of articles in The Sun, published in June, that detailed the purchase of two young slaves by two of the newspaper's reporters, the State Department said in its human rights report: "Although the law prohibits forced or compulsory labor, slavery persists.

KHARTOUM, Sudan - An international commission led by the United States condemned the Sudanese government yesterday for allowing slavery to flourish in this war-racked country. But the commission said the issue was not as clear-cut as it was often portrayed, and panel members questioned whether international Christian organizations that buy back slaves are helping the situation. Government officials here have long denied any role in what they call tribal abductions. As a show of concern, in 1999 Sudan created the Commission for the Elimination of Abductions of Women and Children to address the problem.

NEW YORK -- A United Nations aid agency yesterday accused Sudan's Islamic fundamentalist government of banning food flights to a beleaguered rebel-held war zone, threatening hundreds of thousands with starvation and death.Holding up a photograph of a child with a bloated abdomen and matchstick legs, Catherine Bertini, executive director of the U.N.'s World Food Program, said:"When people look like this, and more and more children are dying any decision not to allow food to reach them is cruel."

KHARTOUM, Sudan - Facing growing international pressure to stem the violence in Darfur, Sudan's president has called on tribal leaders in the conflict-torn region to form their own security forces to combat Arab militias blamed for thousands of deaths. President Omar Hassan Ahmed el-Bashir, facing a U.N. deadline to disarm the militias, ordered leaders of about 100 tribes in the region to turn in "outlaws" to the government and to rebuild "social bonds" between Arab and black villagers.

UNITED NATIONS - The Security Council passed a resolution yesterday that threatens the Sudanese government with punitive measures if it does not disarm and prosecute Arab militias that have forced black Africans off their land in the Darfur region through a campaign of killing, rape and pillage. The vote on the U.S.-crafted resolution was 13-0 with China and Pakistan abstaining. Passage was achieved after the United States revised the measure Thursday to drop the word "sanctions" and substitute a reference to a part of the U.N. charter that in effect lays out sanctions as the consequence of noncompliance with the demands of the resolution.

WASHINGTON -- The NAACP will become "more activist" in opposing slavery in Sudan and elsewhere, the Baltimore-based organization's executive director Kweisi Mfume said yesterday.Speaking after publication of a three-part series in The Sun describing how two staffers illegally entered Sudan to buy and free two young slaves for $1,000, Mfume said: "I have always brought a sense of activism with me, and I expect the NAACP, which has traditionally been an activist organization, will become more activist."

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Security Council approved a resolution on Sudan yesterday threatening sanctions against the country's leaders and oil industry if the government fails to curb ethnic violence. The measure also sets up an inquiry into whether the violence constitutes genocide. The vote on the 15-member panel was 11-0, with Algeria, China, Pakistan and Russia abstaining. The measure calls on Secretary-General Kofi Annan to create an international commission to determine whether the campaign by marauding Arab militias against the villagers of Darfur, in western Sudan, has reached the level of genocide.

In response to student activists, and in step with a nationwide trend among college endowments, the University System of Maryland Foundation has pledged to avoid investing in four companies it believes help the government of Sudan commit genocide in the country's Darfur region. "We don't want to be associated with the mass murder of innocent civilians," Leonard Raley, president and CEO of the $700 million foundation, said last week. The announcement was greeted with enthusiastic approval by many in the university community, but some divestment activists said the foundation's resolution - formally adopted by its board in June but not publicly announced until last week - did not go far enough and left key questions unanswered.