More violence in the Sudan: Whither Darfur?

The Coalition for Darfur has all the latest on the helicopter accident (?) that killed Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) leader John Garang, the appointment of Salva Kiir as his successor, and the U.S. response (a 135-word statement from the White House), as well as some (rather depressing) discussion of what it all means for Darfur . There's a lot of stuff there, but check it all out. It's worth your while.

In addition, there's a link to the latest piece by Sudan expert Eric Reeves at TNR:

The chances for an end to Darfur's genocide were dealt a potentially severe blow this weekend by the helicopter crash that killed the country's new vice president, John Garang de Mabior. But this is not because Garang was, as U.S. State Department officials have disingenuously implied, a powerful force within Sudan's new national unity government, able to exert real pressure on Khartoum's National Islamic Front (NIF) to negotiate a just peace with Darfur's insurgency movements. (In an example of this excessively optimistic reasoning, Condoleezza Rice said two weeks ago that Garang "has been saying the right things" about the genocide and that "we want him to be very involved in Darfur.") Rather, Garang's death imperils the January 2005 north-south peace agreement--and thereby increases the odds that the genocide in Darfur will accelerate. The relationship between Darfur and southern Sudan is complex, but it takes on a terrible urgency in the wake of Garang's death.

Not good.

(For my last post on Darfur (which criticized Congress for scuttling the Darfur Accountability Act), see here.)