Sudan Rejects Request To Allow U.N. Troops

Bush Calls for Assistance From NATO

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 19 -- Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on Tuesday dismissed pleas from President Bush, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and other Western leaders to allow a force of 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers into the violence-wracked Darfur region.

But Sudan will allow a smaller African Union peacekeeping force of 7,000 troops to remain in Darfur until peace returns to the troubled province, Bashir said.

"Our position is that the force of the African Union should continue in Darfur," Bashir told reporters. "We categorically . . . reject the transformation of the African force in Darfur into a U.N. force."

Bashir's remarks make it likely that African Union leaders, who will meet Wednesday in New York to discuss Darfur, will renew the peacekeepers' mandate before it expires Sept. 30.

But the Sudanese leader dimmed hopes that Khartoum would yield to international pressure to allow the United Nations' larger and better-equipped force into the region.

Bashir blamed unnamed Zionist Jewish organizations for stoking public opposition in the United States against his government, through the organizing of nationwide protests against the violence in Darfur.

"I'm not talking about Jews," he said. "I'm talking about Zionist organizations that have motives in Sudan. They have objectives in Sudan. They want to weaken Sudan. They want to dismember Sudan."

Darfur is witnessing the greatest resurgence of violence since the Sudanese government, with the support of local Arab militias, launched a bloody counterinsurgency operation in early 2003 against two of the region's rebel groups.

Violence and disease have left as many as 450,000 people dead and 2 million homeless in a campaign Bush characterized again Tuesday as genocide.

Bush announced Tuesday the appointment of a new special envoy for Sudan, Andrew S. Natsios, to help recharge diplomatic efforts aimed at restoring peace in Darfur. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, is planning to host a high-level diplomatic meeting of Security Council members and other key governments on Friday to coordinate the international response to the crisis.

In his speech to the General Assembly, Bush urged U.N. members to increase humanitarian assistance to Darfur and to provide additional support to an African Union peacekeeping force "that has done good work, but is not strong enough to protect you." He also called on NATO to provide "logistics and other support" to a "larger and more robust" U.N. force.

"To the people of Darfur, you have suffered unspeakable violence, and my nation has called these atrocities what they are: genocide," Bush told the gathering of world leaders and foreign ministers. "If the Sudanese government does not approve this peacekeeping force quickly, the United Nations must act."

It remains unlikely that the United States and other Western powers are prepared to back an invasion force that would fight its way into Darfur.

U.N. ambassador John R. Bolton said that Rice is "likely" to meet Bashir this week to "tell him in the strongest possible terms that we want him to cooperate so we can take steps to deploy this U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur and end the ongoing genocide."

But another senior State Department official said such a meeting appears increasingly unlikely.

U.N. officials have privately expressed frustration with the United States for failing to use its diplomatic muscle to help assemble an international force for Sudan and to pressure the Sudanese government to accept it. They have voiced skepticism that this latest U.S. diplomatic push will lead to the deployment of U.N. troops in the coming months.

Annan said the continuing horror, in which men, women and children are being raped and killed and in which thousands of villages have been destroyed, "makes a mockery of our claim, as an international community, to shield people from the worst abuses."