NATO Role in Darfur On Table

"My hunch is, we're watching a bureaucratic slow-roll take place, but the danger is it's happening as the situation on the ground is getting worse," said Susan Rice, who served as an assistant secretary of state for Africa during the Clinton administration and now is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The administration has been in this knot of having called the situation genocide but then failing to do anything."

The latest conflict dates from early 2003, when Darfur rebel groups took up arms against the Arab-led Islamic government in Khartoum, citing discrimination against the region's black tribes. The Sudanese government bombed villages to force the rebels out and unleashed Arab militias that mounted a campaign of burning and pillaging. An estimated 100,000 to 400,000 people may have died from violence or disease, according to U.N. officials and human rights advocates, and more than 2 million people have been displaced to camps.

Juan Mendez, the U.N. special adviser for the prevention of genocide, last week expressed disappointment that the world's great powers had failed to take adequate action to halt the violence. "In effect, for the last two years we have engaged in half measures, and those half measures, one, have not been sufficient to protect and, two, they're showing signs of unraveling," Mendez told reporters Friday.

The African Union contingent, sent to Darfur in 2004, represents the first major test of the African peacekeeping force. It has grown to about 6,000 troops but, by all accounts, the force remains inadequate to secure a region that is the size of Texas. At least three international assessments of the force have found major weaknesses in its ability to manage its resources and organize operations.

By mid-March, Pentagon authorities had reviewed various options and were ready to back a large team of NATO advisers. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was briefed on the proposal March 17 and approved it for discussion with the White House and State Department, the administration official said. There is now "a general agreement in principle to this broad concept," the official added.

One of the factors limiting what can be done, U.S. officials said, is reluctance in NATO to undertake another major commitment on top of the alliance's growing role in securing Afghanistan.

"Afghanistan is a big mission for NATO, which wants to make sure it devotes appropriate priority to it," the administration official said. "Some NATO allies think Darfur could potentially become a distraction in a way that could jeopardize Afghanistan."

Nonetheless, U.N. officials have put the Bush administration and NATO on notice that they expect help in establishing the follow-on force to the African Union contingent.

"We've made it very clear that in order for a U.N. force to come," it "would need the kind of mobility and command and control and communications capacity that are reflected in the capacity of Western countries, which includes NATO and the United States," said Jane Holl Lute, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping.

But U.N. officials have yet to spell out requirements. They are devising several options, depending on whether a full-fledged peace agreement can be reached or little more than a shaky ceasefire is achieved.

The U.N.'s military planning has been complicated by Khartoum's hardening opposition to a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur. In a sign of stepped-up harassment of U.N. officials, Sudan last week barred a senior U.N. humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, from visiting Darfur. To avoid another confrontation, U.N. officials have postponed plans to send a military assessment team to the region.

John Prendergast, who heads the Africa division of the International Crisis Group, said Sudan's opposition to U.N. peacekeepers reflects fear that the troops could be used to arrest government officials currently under investigation by the International Criminal Court for ordering the commission of atrocities in Darfur.

"They don't want an effective force in Darfur," he said. "And they don't want the U.N. peacekeeping mission to become a Trojan horse that could execute the eventual ICC warrant for involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity by some of the leadership."

The envisioned transition to a U.N. force also been complicated by mounting resistance from the African Union to yielding power. The union chairman, former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konare, has been "backpedaling" on his commitment to support a handover to U.N. troops, a U.N. official said. Konare told Annan on March 31 that his organization was considering a series of options, including a proposal to have the African Union and the United Nations run a joint peacekeeping operation.

Lynch reported from the United Nations.