Obama ups the pressure on Khartoum
President Obama has dispatched his Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan to Khartoum.
John Brennan, the White House’s top counter-terrorism official visited Khartoum on Wednesday to press home Obama’s message that Sudan will only be removed from the US list of State Sponsors of Terror if Sudanese troops withdraw from the contested region of Abyei.
“Mr. Brennan underscored President Obama's deep concern over the continued presence of Sudanese Armed Forces in Abyei and urged a rapid and peaceful resolution to the crisis,” the White House said in a statement.
“This trip reflects the President's personal commitment to a peaceful resolution of the problems that have beset the region over the last several decades,” the White House said.
As usual with top diplomatic visits Brennan met with “Sudanese government officials” but not President Omar al-Bashir himself who is wanted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court for massacres carried out in the Sudanese region of Darfur. The outstanding indictment means Western diplomats avoid meeting Sudan’s president face-to-face.
The US was one of the so-called ‘troika’, a group of three countries including Britain and Norway, that pushed for a 2005 peace deal that ended 22-years of civil war, and Obama is loath to let that legacy slip away at the last minute only weeks ahead of southern independence.
Brennan’s stop in Khartoum was at the beginning of a diplomatic tour that will include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates where the ongoing unrest and violence in Yemen will be top of the agenda.
Speaking in Washington on Wednesday Johnnie Carson, the top US diplomat for Africa, added to the pressure on Khartoum. “The United States condemns the offensive operations being undertaken by the Sudanese Armed Forces in and around Abyei town and the presidential decree dissolving the Abyei administration,” he said.
Carson said the north’s actions were “blatant violations” of the 2005 US-brokered peace deal.
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