AU overmatched in Darfur but international pressure continues

CNN's Jeff Koinange travelled with the grossly overmatched African Union mission in Darfur, western Sudan.

And that's pretty much the way the genodical regime in Khartoum wants it.

The United Nations Security Council is discussing a possible peacekeeping mission to Darfur to replace the underfunded, understaffed and underequiped AU troops. But the Sudanese regime has angrily rejected any such possibility. They warned that any country contributing troops to such a mission would be committing "a hostile act."

It argues that transferring the mission from the AU to the UN (ie: from one multinational institution to another) would be an attack on its sovereignty. In reality, it knows that a UN mission would be well-equipped and given a significant mandate.

The US is the only major western government to describe Darfur as a genocide, one of the very few things the Bush administration has gotten right.

Anti-genocide activists scored a big victory last week when America's largest state California passed a law limiting business contacts between its companies and the regime and divesting the state's pension fund from foreign businesses who operate in Sudan If California were its own country, it would have the sixth largest economy in the world. A similar international campaign was launched in the 1980s against the apartheid government in South Africa.

The activist task force's director notes that genocide is expensive. "The Sudanese government relies heavily on foreign investment to fund its military and the brutal militias seeking to eliminate the non-Arab population of Darfur."