THE United States invoked the term “genocide” for the first time yesterday to describe the campaign by the Sudanese Government and the Janjawid Arab militias that has driven more than a million black villagers from their homes in Darfur.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, made the declaration in testimony to Congress — which had already called the violence “genocide” — as US diplomats introduced a new United Nations resolution threatening sanctions on Sudan’s oil industry.

A State Department report released yesterday, based on 1,136 interviews with Darfur refugees, described a “consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities committed against non-Arab villagers”.

The 1948 Genocide Convention commits all contracting parties to “prevent and punish” genocide, defined as trying to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

General Powell, for the first time, invoked article 8 of the convention, which says any contracting party may call on the UN to take “appropriate”, action to suppress genocide.

The UN, which was criticised by the Clinton Administration for declaring the 1994 massacres in Rwanda to be genocide, has so far shied away from applying the label to Darfur as it tries to work with the Sudanese Government to rein in the violence.

The UN and the United States are now focused on getting a ten-fold increase in the African Union (AU) monitoring mission in Darfur.

Washington sought UN security council backing for a resolution threatening sanctions on the country’s oil sector if the Sudanese Government blocked the “extension” of the AU’s monitoring force.

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