AMY GOODMAN: Let me put a question to Nicholas Detorrente. The issue of the arms embargo, would that make a difference on the ground if the US imposed an arms embargo against the Sudanese government?

NICHOLAS DETORRENTE: It's hard for me to comment on that, but I think that there are sufficient weapons and especially the will to carry out the kinds of policies of repression and scorched earth that have characterized the situation in Darfur at the moment, and so I think that the real issue right now is pressure on whoever is waging violence to stop that, especially directed at – obviously directed at civilians and specific crimes such as sexual assault and rape, and then, of course, is the -- to -- the pressures to allow for aid to continue. I think that's the precondition for anything else. The aid has to be able to continue. But it's not enough, and we are actually frankly concerned that just the trickle of aid that is being allowed to come in and very precarious, very fragile is, you know -- this kind of stalemate seems to be convenient for everyone at the moment. People are stuck in the camps. They cannot go back. But nothing is really done to enable them to return to their villages, to move on and the political solutions that need to be put in place for that to happen are really stalemated at the moment, at least from the perspective of the people in the camps and suffering in Darfur today.

AMY GOODMAN: And final time, Charles Snyder, again why the Bush administration is not pushing for an arms embargo against the Sudanese government, who itself -- who the Bush administration says is engaged in genocide?

CHARLES SNYDER: We did in fact push for such an arms embargo. Frankly, the security council will not go along with us. What we got was the best we could, which is a limited embargo.

AMY GOODMAN: But a US embargo, not UN, but US.

CHARLES SNYDER: There is a US arms embargo. We do not sell weapons to the Sudanese government. We have not. And to the degree we detect anybody, as a third party, selling US weapons, we take action against them. But the truth is the weapons are not coming from the United States. And as the Medecins Sans Frontieres guy already pointed out, there's enough weapons on the ground to fight this war another ten years without any new weapons. It's not us. It’s other parties that are selling these weapons, and as long as at security council chooses not to see this as a viable action, it's a unilateral action on our part that's relatively ineffective.

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, we’ll have to wrap it up, I want to thank you very much, Charles Snyder, US State Department senior representative on Sudan, Nicholas Detorrente, Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders in New York City, and Ben Elberger, Stanford student lobbying for divestment from companies to doing business with the Sudan.

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