Obama's Sudan Policy Imperative

Ret.General Scott Gration, President Obama’s new special envoy on Sudan, faces baptism by fire. He visits Sudan this week in the hope of resolving an aid crisis in which over a million Darfur refugees are being brought to the brink of death by the expulsion in March of a dozen international relief agencies. Sudan’s President Omar Bashir is holding these western Sudanese hostage in retaliation for an International Criminal Court indictment against him for war crimes against those very same tribes.

But while Gration tackles how to get food and medicine back into Darfur, he confronts an even larger imperative. Sudan’s crucial Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 (CPA) is now also endangered.