OneWorld.net (U.S.)

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jun 30 (OneWorld) - Africans and Americans support United Nations-authorized military intervention to quell serious human rights abuses and violence in Sudan's Darfur and other conflict-wracked regions, said a pair of new polls.

Pollsters GlobeScan, in a survey begun late last year and released Wednesday, said about two-thirds of 10,809 African respondents said the United Nations should be able to intervene to stop abuses. Slightly more than half said that intervention could be justified even without authorization from the U.N. Security Council.

Participants in the survey came from Angola, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed earlier this month voiced support for U.N. military intervention in Darfur, Sudan, where fighting between government-backed and rebel militias, now in its third year, has claimed between 180,000 and 400,000 lives and forced some 2.5 million people to flee their villages and livelihoods.

According to the U.S. poll, released Wednesday by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), 61 percent of U.S. respondents said that U.N. members should use military force to stop the violence in Darfur. The level of support stood at 67 percent among Republicans, 62 percent among Democrats, and 52 percent among Independents.

Fifty-four percent of the 812 Americans surveyed said the United States should be willing to contribute troops to such an operation.

Nearly three-fourths of U.S. survey participants said they thought the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which includes the United States, should contribute equipment and logistical support to African Union (AU) peacekeepers deployed in Darfur, a region roughly the size of Texas.

The administration of President George W. Bush has termed counterinsurgency operations in Darfur as ''genocide'' and is providing transport and logistical support to the African mission through NATO but has resisted calls from advocacy groups to weigh in with U.S. troops and to mobilize a larger international peacekeeping force.

''What is quite striking here is that even as the U.S. is tied down in Iraq and suffering daily casualties, a majority of Americans would support contributing troops to a multilateral operation in Darfur,'' said PIPA director Steven Kull.

''This suggests that what is occurring there goes against strongly held values in the American public. Indeed, multiple polls have found that many Americans believe that if severe human rights abuses are occurring, especially genocide, the U.N. should have the right to intervene and the U.S. should be willing to contribute troops,'' he added.

Among Africans, support for international intervention was not uniform.

Thirty percent of respondents in GlobeScan's poll said they would prefer to see U.N. peacekeepers take charge in situations like Darfur's, compared to 22 percent who favored AU intervention. Only five percent said they would support intervention by a wealthy non-African country acting alone.

Support for U.N. military intervention was strongest in Ghana (80 percent), Kenya (75 percent), Nigeria and Tanzania (66 percent), Zimbabwe (65 percent), and Cameroon (64 percent). It was weakest in Angola (55 percent), and South Africa (47 percent).

The greatest number of people rejecting any foreign military intervention was in Cameroon (20 percent) and the smallest number was in Ghana (6 percent), GlobeScan said.

The polls were released as the prosecutor of the fledgling International Criminal Court said Wednesday he would proceed with an investigation into murder and rape in Darfur even though Sudan planned to conduct its own trials.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, in his first appearance before the U.N. Security Council, said he would press on in probing atrocities in Darfur, including those possibly perpetrated by senior Sudanese government and military officials.

Darfur is the first case the U.N. Security Council has referred to the court. Sudan had said it would not extradite any of its citizens and instead announced it would hold its own trials. On Wednesday, news reports said Sudan's U.N. ambassador, Elfatih Erwa, told reporters that the question of extradition remained hypothetical as the government in Khartoum had not yet been asked to hand over any suspects.

Separately, the U.N.'s top humanitarian official in Khartoum said Tuesday that international aid had helped to bring the death rate in Darfur below crisis levels but warned that if fighting were to resume or aid supplies were to dry up, the situation would deteriorate rapidly.

U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan Manuel Aranda Da Silva, said a U.N. survey showed that the death rate in Darfur between November and May had fallen to 0.8 deaths per day per 10,000 people, three times lower than at the height of the crisis a year ago, according to news reports from the Sudanese capital. The U.N. uses an international crisis threshold of one death per 10,000.