Page 136 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ASK THE TOUGH QUESTIONS

Andrew Natsios, met with him, and later had the opportunity to work
with him.”
A few days after the meeting with the president, the United States
announced that it had demanded that Sudan allow a team of United
Nations personnel into Darfur and formally accept an international force
by the year’s end or face immediate unspecified consequences imposed
by the United States, such as travel bans on Sudanese officials, freezing
35
of their assets, and a no-flight zone over Darfur. Although Vlasic said
it was just a coincidence, his Fellows classmates teased him about it
anyway.
During Vlasic’s first meeting with Special Envoy Natsios, he told
Natsios about how he had served on the Slobodan Milosevic prosecution
team and later, while in private practice, had donated his time to help
train the Iraqi judges who tried Saddam Hussein. Natsios explained that
he was trying to persuade Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to sign
on to a United Nations–African Union peacekeeping agreement to help
stop the bloodshed in Darfur, and he invited Vlasic to join him on his
next trip to see Bashir in Sudan. “He told me that Bashir was worried
about two things: getting bombed and being prosecuted in The Hague,”
Vlasic said. “Since I had worked on the Milosevic case and helped with
the Saddam case and was now working for Defense Secretary Gates, he
thought just having me in the room—if I could get into Sudan—might
send a strong signal and possibly help motivate Bashir to sign the peace-
keeping agreement.”
Sudan is the largest country in Africa, with a population of 39 mil-
lion, and the Darfur region in the western part of that country has a pop-
ulation of about 6 million people, mostly living in small villages. Sudan’s
people consist of nomadic Arabs and ethnic African farmers, with most
power in the hands of those of Arab descent. The killings began when
the ethnic Africans in Darfur demanded a greater role in the government.
The Sudanese government then armed and paid northern Arab tribes
known as Janjaweed as their proxies to take up arms against the ethnic

35 “U.S. Tells Sudan to Accept U.N. Force by Year’s End,” New York Times, December 21,
2006.

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