Hope In Darfur

This is indeed good news, and it was orchestrated by the UK, not the US. This is kind of what I was talking about when I discussed Gordon Brown's visit the other day. He appears to be skilled at getting others to agree with him and also think it was their idea all along:

Gordon Brown scored a dramatic first foreign policy victory last night when the UN security council voted to deploy a 26,000-strong international force to Darfur, with a mandate to stop the massacres of civilians which have driven 2 million people from their homes.

Mr Brown has made Darfur a foreign policy priority, and the UN resolution was an initiative he promoted 10 days earlier with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, aiming to end a year of international drift on the issue. This week he secured George Bush's support for the draft.

The vote was passed unanimously after China, the Sudanese government's main defender at the UN, dropped its objections. British officials said that China's oil interests in Sudan were eventually outweighed by anxiety about a possible international human rights backlash over Darfur aimed at next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.

It looks like Sudan will support the force as well. I'm liking Gordon Brown so far. It's also important for the credibility of the UN to achieve some global consensus on the side of human rights. Though there is reason for reservation:

Human rights activists welcomed last night's vote, but warned that a lot more political will would be needed to ensure the security council decision was implemented in the face of potential obstructionist tactics by Khartoum, which had referred to similar versions of the resolution as "ugly" and "awful".

The resolution had been stripped of any threat of sanctions against the Sudanese government if it blocked the force's deployment, though Mr Brown said his government would "redouble" efforts to impose an embargo if that happened.

"It is not time ... to pop open the champagne bottles. The true test of this measure is not what happens today in New York, but what happens over the coming weeks in Darfur," Allyn Brooks-LaSure of the Save Darfur Coalition said last night.

Incidentally, the breakthrough in Darfur may be coming about due to a giant underground lke recently discovered there. If the resource wars can end there, suddenly there would be less of a need to drive people off their land. It's amazing how much the environment can be linked to gloal security.