U.S. Push for Sudan Sanctions Opposed

President Bush, left, and Lawrence Swiader, Chief Information Officer for the U.S. Holocaust Museum, stand in front of a online display of the Google's satellite imagery web site: Google Earth, to promote awareness of the crisis in Darfur region, Wednesday, April 16, 2007, during a tour of the exhibit at the museum in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) (Pablo Martinez Monsivais - AP)

UNITED NATIONS -- Britain and the United States said Wednesday they will propose new U.N. sanctions to pressure the Sudanese government and rebels to stop the fighting in Darfur, but Russia, China and South Africa opposed any new measures.

The push for new sanctions was announced after a confidential U.N. report charged that Sudan's government has been flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and is impeding peace efforts by using aircraft with U.N. markings.

President Bush warned that the U.S. will tighten economic sanctions on Sudan and impose new ones on its own if Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir doesn't move quickly to stop bloodshed in Darfur, where African peacekeepers reported 62 more people killed in new fighting.

Diplomats from Russia, China and South Africa, which are all on the U.N. Security Council, said it was the wrong time to raise the threat of new sanctions because Sudan just agreed to the first significant deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.

They also noted the U.N. and the African Union are intensifying efforts to get Sudan's government and all rebel groups to the peace table.

"It would be very strange," Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters. "After a long while, we have this positive development in the dialogue between the U.N. and Khartoum, and all of a sudden to come back with some sanctions would not be good."

Since Russia and China are veto-wielding permanent members of the council, their opposition signals a major hurdle for the U.S., Britain and France in trying to pass a new sanctions resolution. Other non-permanent council members who generally object to sanctions, like Qatar and Indonesia, are also likely to oppose new measures against Sudan.

On April 2, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the United States and Britain to refrain from pushing for tougher sanctions, saying the U.N. needed time to promote political negotiations and to persuade Sudan to accept the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.

After five months of stalling, Sudan sent a letter to Ban on Monday giving a green light for a U.N. force of 2,250 soldiers, 750 police and six helicopter gunships to reinforce the beleaguered 7,000-strong African Union peacekeeping mission already in Darfur.

Poorly armed and funded, the AU force has not been able to calm the vast Sudanese region, where 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been chased from their homes by four years of fighting between rebels based in Darfur's ethnic African communities and nomadic Arab tribes.

China's deputy U.N. ambassador, Liu Zhenmin, told reporters Wednesday that U.N. peacekeeping officials said it would take "until the end of the year" to get all of the new U.N. force to Darfur.

The 3,000-strong mission is the second phase of a U.N. plan that Sudan's president agreed to in November, but then backed off. Ban and African Union chief executive Alpha Oumar Konare said Wednesday that they wanted that force to be quickly followed by deployment of the accord's final phase _ a 20,000-strong "hybrid" U.N.-AU force.