An alliance of United Kingdom MPs, human rights groups and survivors of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan on Thursday launched a campaign for bolder international intervention to stop the bloodshed.
More than 100 MPs and peers have signed a parliamentary statement calling for the United Nations to authorise peace-enforcement operations to be led by African Union troops, supported by wealthy countries.
The Protect Darfur campaign, which is being coordinated by the Aegis Trust, a charity that campaigns to prevent genocide, was launched at the British House of Commons.
Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, and Clare Short, a former international development secretary, are among politicians from across all parties who are backing the campaign.
Kennedy said political or economic interests cannot be allowed to cause ”further delay” to intervention in the region.
Short said: ”It would not be difficult to stop the killing — a much larger AU force with peace-enforcement powers could do it.
”Instead, the great powers squabble and posture in New York while another genocide is allowed to develop.”
The launch of the campaign comes after the release of a report on Wednesday by the cross-party international development committee that the death toll in the region has been substantially underestimated and is likely to be about 300 000.
This figure is more than four times higher than the fatalities estimated by the World Health Organisation.
A member of the international development committee, Conservative MP John Bercow, said on Thursday: ”Too many people in Darfur have suffered too much for too long with too little done about it.
”The international community must now act through the UN by imposing sanctions on the Sudanese government, extending the arms embargo and providing the AU force with the troops and mandate necessary to enforce peace in the region.”
Later on Thursday in New York, the UN Security Council was expected to vote on a resolution put forward by France that would authorise the prosecution of Sudanese war crimes suspects by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
After weeks of vexed negotiations, approval now seems virtually certain after US officials said Washington has dropped its objections. France had delayed the vote in hopes of averting a US veto.
The Bush administration had preferred that an African court try alleged perpetrators of war crimes, but the US proposal garnered little support among the 14 other Security Council nations. The US opposes the ICC on the grounds that Americans could face politically motivated or frivolous prosecutions.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than two million people uprooted by the fighting in Darfur, which began in February 2003.
The violence stems from a campaign led by government-supported Arab militias against African rebels. Last September, former US secretary of state Colin Powell said the perpetrators had engaged in genocide.
Tens of thousands of displaced people are confined to refugee camps, refusing to return to their villages for fear they would only be forced to flee once again.
Earlier this week, the UN Security Council passed a resolution strengthening the arms embargo in Darfur to include the Sudanese government and imposing an asset freeze and travel ban on people who defy peace efforts.
Last week, the council voted to deploy 10 000 UN peacekeepers to monitor a peace deal between the government and southern rebels that ended a 21-year civil war. The council hopes the resolution will help Darfur move toward peace as well.
Commentators have drawn parallels between what is happening now in Darfur and the killings of about 800 000 people in Rwanda in the early 1990s, when the international community failed to intervene to stop the genocide. — Guardian Unlimited Â