In a major policy reversal, Washington's special envoy for Sudan has confirmed the United States is backing away from demands for deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to halt what it has called genocide in the the war-torn region of Darfur.
Andrew Natsios, President George W. Bush's personal envoy to Sudan, said Washington and other Western governments were looking for an "alternate way" to deal with the violence in Darfur which has left at least 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million homeless in the past three-and-a-half years.
It was the first public admission that the United States was reconsidering its backing for an August 31 UN Security Council resolution, which Washington sponsored, demanding the immediate deployment of some 20,000 UN troops to replace an ineffective African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur.
Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir rejected the UN demand and refused to meet with Natsios during a visit to Khartoum last week, the US envoy said in an interview with the US National Holocaust Memorial Museum which was posted on the memorial's website on Friday.
Natsios said Beshir was furious over Bush's renewal this week of US financial sanctions imposed on Sudan for its handling of regional conflicts, including Darfur, and alleged support for international terrorists.
"They were quite upset about (it), so much so that they cancelled my meeting with President Beshir," he said.
At a White House meeting with Natsios on Wednesday, Bush said he was reviewing the US approach to the Darfur crisis, described as the first genocide of the 21st century, but he and other US officials refused to provide details.
The crisis in Darfur, a region roughly the size of France in western Sudan, erupted in early 2003 when rebel's representing the region's mostly black African population launched a revolt to obtain autonomy from the Arab-led government in Khartoum.
Beshir's regime responded by armed Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, who have carried out a scorched earth policy of rape and pillaging across the region.
A UN-brokered peace agreement signed in May with one of the rebel groups brought hope for an end to the carnage, but ultimately failed when the other groups refused to sign on.
Since then government-allied forces have renewed offensives in the region, with the UN reporting Friday that scores of civilians had been massacred in refugee camps in the region over the past few days.
Under pressure from European allies and human rights groups, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made Darfur a major US foreign policy priority in the middle of this year, insisting that only a UN "blue-helmeted" force would have the financial and political clout to stop the killing.
But Besher has refused to budge.
At a summit of African leaders in Beijing Friday, the Sudanese leader said accepting UN troops in Darfur would lead to a debacle similar to the American involvement in Iraq.
Natsios now says the UN role is no longer essential.
"Our real interest here is not what it is called or what it looks like in terms of its helmet, but how robust and how efficient it is," he said.
"If it does not have a United Nations helmet, but it is very competent and very aggressive, then we have fulfilled our intention," he said.
Washington could accept either a strengthened African Union force or one led by Arab or Muslim nations, possibly backed by UN financial or logistical support, he said.
Another element of the new US approach is to use African mediation -- Natsios mentioned Eritrea as a potential go between -- to renegotiate the May peace agreement in a bid to draw in other rebel groups.
The prospect of a policy turnaround amid the ongoing violence in Darfur was assailed as "shameful" by one former US official involved in the issue.
"If where we're headed now is some sort of appeasement or accommodation with the government of Sudan so they can yet again cherry pick and constrain a new peacekeeping force, we really are complicit in failing to stop this second wave of genocide," said Susan Rice, the State Department's top Africa official in the previous administration of president Bill Clinton.
"The only reason the Sudanese don't want the United Nations is because they think it will be more effective in protecting civilians, and that's precisely why we should want it," she said.