Washington - The US administration plans to engage more directly with the Sudanese government as President Barack Obama advocated during his election campaign, US newspaper reports said Saturday. The new policy is to be officially unveiled on Monday by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice.
Obama's special envoy to Sudan, retired Major General J Scott Gration, described the changes in an interview with the New York Times.
He said the White House would use a mixture of "incentives and pressure" to help end the conflict in Darfur that has left more than 300,000 people dead and millions displaced over the past five years.
But the White House would continue to maintain, as did former president George W Bush's administration, that the killings represent "ongoing genocide" in western Sudan's Darfur, officials told The Washington Post on condition of anonymity.
Gration and Rice have apparently differed greatly on the Sudan strategy, with Gration wanting to downplay the mass murder in the region in order to engage with the government in Khartoum, which has backed the militia carrying out the killings.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has been indicted as a war crimes suspect by the International Criminal Court, and he has avoided international travel out of fear of being arrested.
Al-Bashir has also worked to handicap peacekeeping troops deployed by the African Union and the United Nations from their efforts to protect civilians in Darfur.
Gration told the Times that the White House would also set strict time lines for al-Bashir to implement the 2005 peace agreement his government signed with rebels in southern Sudan.
