By NIKKI SERAPIO

The day after President Bush imposed sanctions against the government of Sudan, Khartoum’s Ambassador to the U.S. John Ukec Lueth Ukec went on the diplomatic offensive. Speaking at the National Press Club, he denied that genocide is occurring in Darfur. He said no one is dying in Darfur. And he underlined his government’s frustration with a very unique threat: If the U.S. presses on Sudan that much more, then no more Coca-Cola for you: Omar al-Bashir and company will stop exporting Sudan’s gum arabic, and the world will be without its favorite source of caffeine.

Mr. Ukec’s claims are clearly stupid. There was so much showmanship in his display, you might think the government of Sudan deserves to be historically cast into the quirky dictators’ club. Idi Amin, Kim Jong-Il, Turkmenbashi and those loud crazies ruling Sudan. But then you remember, and the reminder expresses the tragedy: Mr. Ukec works for a regime that has killed more than 500,000 men, women and children in Darfur over the last four years. And the dying and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis continue today.

Foreign policy analysts point out that Khartoum is clearly the opposite of stupid. As one example, the regime knows how to destroy a UN resolution, as it did last year: in August 2006, the UN Security Council authorized 20,000+ troops to deploy to Darfur, but Sudan jumped on the fact that this resolution “invited” its consent. (“Invited” is arguably a diplomatic code word for required.) Khartoum asserted its sovereignty; it used the long shadow of the Iraq War to suggest that the U.S. was planning an oil-driven, imperial march into Africa and, as an “alternative” to the abovementioned force deployment, it got the UN to agree to a three-part plan about multinational peacekeepers. When this compromise was announced, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said part three of the plan specified the deployment of UN troops. According to Khartoum right now, however, part three means nothing of the sort.

There are too many examples of the UN dithering in the face of mass atrocity, and the genocide in Darfur is no exception. When President Bush spoke about Darfur at the Holocaust Memorial Museum last month, he took what sounded like a potshot at the UN: “The brutal treatment of innocent civilians in Darfur is...unacceptable to the United Nations — at least, that’s what they’ve said.”

President Bush, though, cannot claim the high ground. This Tuesday, in a move criticized by Amnesty International, the ENOUGH Project, Human Rights Watch, American Jewish World Service and many others, the President announced that the U.S. has begun implementing his weak “Plan B” for Darfur. This plan is made up of new unilateral sanctions that Khartoum is very ready for (given that it has grown tremendously wealthy despite the U.S. sanctions that have been in place against it since 1997), a promise that Condoleezza Rice is seeking a new UN resolution about Darfur and a promise that the U.S. will try to impose multilateral sanctions on Khartoum via the Security Council — but against Sudan’s mid-level officials, not against the senior leadership that actually controls and executes the current divide-and-destroy campaign in Darfur.

What’s wrong with this picture? In his sanctions pitch, President Bush made it seem that his sanctions will ultimately and actually affect the pocketbooks and economic freedom of Sudan’s murderers. But the President’s Special Envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios assured everyone that, indeed, these unilateral measures are toothless: “The purpose of these sanctions is not sanctions. [Their] purpose is to send a message to the Sudanese government to start behaving differently when they deal with their own people.”

Well, President Bush and his team have been sending “messages” to Khartoum for three years now.

What needs to be done? On the sanctions issue, there is basically a consensus among advocates, human rights groups and foreign policy think-tanks that Sudan sanctions 1) need to be multilateral to be effective, and 2) need to target Sudan’s high-level leaders to be effective. Right now, President Bush has pledged to fulfill the first criterion. But his administration is far away from pushing for the second.

Besides this, there is the issue of using actual military force in Darfur. The reasoning behind strong sanctions is that they will disable Sudan on the international marketplace. And thus Bashir will ultimately need to say “yes” to UN peacekeepers.

But of course there are no guarantees about sanctions, and at the end, Americans who care about the people of Darfur need to confront some hard questions about the use of military force. There is a 99 percent chance that we will have to use violence to end the most extreme kind of violence known to humanity. If we support UN peacekeepers, we ought to expect them to use force against the Janjaweed militias, against people who have had no qualms in gang-raping young Darfuri girls.

Stanford STAND supports effective military action to stop this genocide. UN peacekeepers should deploy to Darfur, but no one is under the illusion that they can deploy quickly. For this reason, and because of the many, many reports from humanitarian organizations saying that they are close to pulling out of Western Sudan because of the insecurity, there are some people, like General Wesley Clark and former Clinton administration officials Anthony Lake and Susan Rice, who believe that our country should not depend on Sudan’s consent in order to act. Speaking at Stanford last week, Clark expressed strong support for the non-consensual deployment of NATO troops to Darfur. And for over a year, Lake and Rice have asked the question, if Kosovo and ethnic cleansing, why not Darfur and genocide? If the U.S. was willing to use its air power to stop Milosevic, why shouldn’t it use surgical strikes (combined with the deployment of a light quick reaction force to Eastern Chad) to destroy Sudan’s air fields, military planes and other military assets-the exact things Khartoum needs to bomb the people of Darfur? On its part, STAND fully supports Clark, Lake and Rice’s proposals.

Right now, however, the Darfur policy climate in DC isn’t all about the big issue of military intervention. Right now, the decision to be supported or rejected has to do with targeted, multilateral sanctions against Sudan’s high-level leaders. No shot has to be fired, no plane has to be launched, no military resource needs to be exhausted to impose these sanctions. President Bush just has to invest in the full court-press diplomacy necessary to push these sanctions through — perhaps an involved task given other countries’ ties to Sudan, but far from impossible. So what’s our country waiting for?

And another question: What are we waiting for? Today, STAND will be out in White Plaza from 11:00am to 3:00pm, hosting Camp Darfur, an exhibit that can help Stanford keep in mind the hunger, death and displacement that continues today in Western Sudan. We’ll have petitions to Congress you can sign, scripts you can use to call your elected officials and suggestions for how you can continue advocacy over this summer.

At the end, the people of Darfur are unfortunate to have been born in Africa. In my three years coordinating Darfur activism at Stanford and off campus, I’ve always believed that people would respond to this crisis if it were closer to home. Of course we can’t imagine such a scenario for more than a few moments, but at least we can imagine the scenario in order to examine our consciences. What if this happened in Canada? In our own country? What would our response be? Do we hear the people of Darfur, who themselves are calling for concrete justice and concrete multinational protection? Do we really value their lives in any way?

Nikki Serapio ‘07, a political science major, is the coordinator of Stanford’s chapter of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur. He can be reached at nserapio@stanford.edu.