Breaking ranks

Sudan | Despite a power-sharing agreement, leaders of Sudan's South are starting to part diplomatic ways with a still-aggressive North | Priya Abraham

Mission head Ezekiel Gartkouth did not mince words, disputing Ukec issue by issue.

Sudan is a nation of civil wars. Two years ago its government signed a U.S.-brokered peace deal with the mostly Christian South after one such 20-year war. Open fighting may have stopped, but the stalled agreement—while conflict in another Sudanese theater, Darfur, rages—means frustrated southerners are seeing few gains.

Now the two sides have settled on a proxy battleground: Washington. When President Bush announced new sanctions against Sudan's government for directing genocide in Darfur, Sudanese Ambassador John Ukec Lueth Ukec perfected his strategy of denying everything at a demonstrative May 30 National Press Club gathering.

"See how many people are dying in Darfur—none," Ukec said. Ignoring evidence to the contrary, he said Khartoum does not back local civilian-terrorizing militias, and insisted the central government was an agent for peace.