UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — A US human rights activist on Tuesday warned China that it risked rebel attacks against its oil interests in Sudan unless it put pressure on its ally Khartoum to end the violence in Darfur and south Sudan.
John Prendergast told reporters that Beijing, a veto-wielding council member which has close energy ties with Khartoum, has a "disproportionate responsibility" in helping find a settlement to the conflicts in Darfur and south Sudan.
"They (the Chinese) must fulfil that or else we are going to see Sudan burn and one of the first things that is going to burn is China's own economic interests," he added after he and other Darfur activists met with members of the UN Security Council.
Prendergast, a former Africa expert at the National Security Council and the State Department, said he had just returned from a trip to south Sudan where recent fighting in the flashpoint oil-rich region of Abyei had threatened a return to civil war.
He said that in the wake of the burning of the town of Abyei, the former rebels who signed the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) "are becoming increasingly concerned that they are going to have to go back to war to fight for their independence referendum that is promised in 2011."
"If that happens the very first target that the rebels are going to go after are the Chinese oil installations," he warned. "They have learnt a lot about how to penetrate and undertake commando operations during these last 20 years."
He said it was a "very significant concern" that China was "ignoring this possibility."
He added that the Chinese had a responsibility to work with the United States and other Security Council members "to bring pressure to bear on Sudan to end what is genocidal in scope and scale violence in Darfur, to end this sponsorship of a coup attempt across the border in Chad, to
end the undermining of the CPA" in southern Sudan.
Prendergast, who is co-chair of ENOUGH, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity, was referirng to alleged Sudanese support for the anti-government rebel offensive on the Chadian capital Njdamena.
And he said the Security Council "emboldens the Sudanese government to continue to burn Darfur, the south (of Sudan) and the neighboring region" by failing to impose sanctions on Khartoum.
US actress and Darfur activist Mia Farrow, who also attended the closed-door meeting with Security Council members, also accused China of protecting its major oil supplier, Sudan.
"I don't think the government of Sudan could have continued in this way for more than five years without the knowledge that it has the support of a giant," she said. "And that giant is China."
Meanwhile Williamson deplored the fact that the joint African Union-UN peacekeeping force (UNAMID) had yet to be fully deployed in Darfur.
He noted that while 6,900 troops from the previous AU force have been redeployed under UNAMID, "there's only been an addition of 585 new UN peacekeepers."
"One of most urgent things is to get fuller deployment of UNAMID," Williamson said.
UNAMID is ultimately to total 26,000 members, including around 6,000 police, tasked with protecting the civilian population of a region the size of France which has been mired in civil strife between ethnic minority rebels and the Khartoum government since February 2003.
Close to 300,000 may have died from the combined effects of war, famine and disease and 2.2 million fled their homes in Darfur, according to UN humanitarian chief John Holmes.
Khartoum maintains that the death toll does not exceed 10,000.
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