SUDAN - Pax Americana Is Changing - Part 16B - Part 2.

US President George W. Bush is seeking re-election to a second term on Nov. 2 and his main bet is on support from the tens of millions of Christian evangelical fundamentalists whose leaders want him to apply maximum pressure on the Khartoum government. Apart from his preoccupation with Iraq, the war on terror and domestic issues, he focused on Sudan since he came to power in early 2001.

In New York, US and other Western diplomats are considering economic and diplomatic sanctions that could be implemented against Khartoum if it fails to make progress on an "action plan" agreed with the UN to quell violence in the Darfur region. In London on Aug. 20, a senior Foreign Office official said the options under discussion included travel bans against the country's leadership, asset freezes, extending a European Union-wide arms embargo or the imposition of an oil embargo.

On Aug. 21, a UK Foreign Office official was quoted by the Financial Times as saying: "People are making mental checklists, seeing how it might work. We don't want to go down that route, but the [UN] Security Council said what it said and was serious about what it said".

The Sudanese government agreed to act after a July 30 UN Security Council resolution gave it 30 days to take measures to prevent military attacks against civilians and prove its commitment to disarming the notorious Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, or face economic and diplomatic action. Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, flies to Khartoum on Aug. 23 for talks with the country's leaders.

His visit comes days before the UN Security Council is due to discuss whether further action is needed. One option is to extend the period for compliance, but tougher measures could follow if Khartoum is judged to have made little progress. Britain supports calls to increase the number of African military observers deployed in the Darfur region to monitor whether the Sudanese government fulfills its pledges to the UN.

There are currently about 120 African Union (AU) observers in Darfur. But the AU is wary of widening the mandate of its monitoring remit to allowing it to use force to protect civilians. It is hoping persistent diplomatic pressure will help end the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

Violence in the region has made more than 1m people homeless and killed tens of thousands. Human rights groups still accuse the Janjaweed of conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the region's African tribes (see background in Part 1 in the July issue of FAP).

Under the UN action plan, the Sudanese government promised to identify militias it had control over and instruct them to lay down their weapons. Both the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office say Khartoum is not yet doing enough.

Khartoum still suspects that behind the Western pressures is a plan for a US-led multinational force to intervene in Darfour, on the one hand, and for the peace deal in the south between the government and SPLA to be undermined by the latter as US Secretary of State Colin Powell has warned indirectly (see Part 1). Khartoum suspects that the plan's ultimate objective is to partition Sudan, as part of a wider strategy to split the Arab world into a number of small and weak states around a "greater Israel".

The US is frustrated by such suspicions, which now are widespread in the Arab world. Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, on Aug. 19 said in unusually candid terms that Bush administration efforts to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world had fallen well short of their targets. Speaking at a time when the US fight against terror is associated more often with military intervention than diplomacy and image-building, Rice said: "Our strategy must be comprehensive, because the challenge we face is greater and more complex than the threat".

Rice told an audience at the US Institute for Peace she accepted that more money needed to be spent on Arabic-language broadcasts and other means of reaching Muslim opinion. Nor did she defend US public diplomacy in the Islamic world, which has been harshly criticised by many in Congress and recently by the national commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She said: "We are obviously not very well organized for the side of public diplomacy. Yes, there is more that the government should do".