Nairobi — Many East Africa-focused activists in the United States are expressing dismay over the Obama administration's emerging policy toward Sudan. They say the US is taking too soft a line with the government in Khartoum on two fronts: the Darfur region and Southern Sudan.

Revising their positive views of the president's intentions, the campaigners warn that President Barack Obama is breaking his promises of strong US action to halt what he had described as genocide in Darfur.

Advocates of a tougher US policy also fault the Obama administration for talking with the Sudan government about possible modifications to a 2005 accord that ended a ruinous 20-year civil war in the south of the country.

"We believe that your conciliatory stance and reluctance to criticise the government of Sudan both excuses and emboldens the government of Sudan, thereby facilitating its ongoing reign of terror and well-known strategy of 'divide and rule'," a coalition of US groups wrote in an open letter to Scott Gration, Obama's special envoy to Sudan.

The activists charge that Gration is enabling the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) to stall on implementation of the 2005 peace agreement and to promote violent tribal rivalries in southern Sudan.

"Left unchecked, the NCP's behaviour will trigger a war in the south and make it all the more difficult to resolve the still-simmering crisis in Darfur," the letter declared.

Leaders of Africa-related NGOs had welcomed Obama's election but are now worried that he will prove no more effectual in regard to the Darfur conflict than did his predecessor, George W Bush.

There is also concern that President Obama may fail to match Bush's successful handling of the long-running crisis in Southern Sudan, where the US helped broker the deal that calls for elections next year and a referendum on independence in 2011.

John Prendergast, a Sudan ex-pert who served in the Clinton White House, noted in a recent CNN commentary that opposition in the US Senate to government-instigated atrocities in Darfur had been led by Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and President Obama.

With those three figures now occupying the highest seats of power in Washington, "we felt there finally would be a consequence for the perpetrators of genocide: the regime officials in Khartoum, Sudan," Prendergast wrote in an analysis co-signed by Dave Eggers, an American novelist who has written about Sudanese refugees in the US.

"But rather than the kind of tough actions the these top officials had all advocated in their previous jobs and on the campaign trail, President Obama's Sudan envoy instead began to articulate a friendly, incentives-first message that even Sudan's president, an indicted war criminal, publicly welcomed," Prendergast and Eggers continued. "Our chins hit the floor in disbelief, because our chins had nowhere else to go."

Some activists had been refraining from public criticisms of President Obama because his administration has been engaged in a months-long Sudan policy review that is expected to be published soon.

But the direction of Obama administration policy is already clear, Prendergast and Eggers wrote, "and it is of urgent concern. There is no clear decision for the US to take the lead in revitalising a peace process for Darfur, or to create real costs for non-implementation of the existing North-South peace deal."

Special envoy Gration told the US Congress two months ago that there is no longer justification for keeping Sudan on a list of countries that Washington regards as sponsors of terrorism. Gration further suggested that US sanctions against Sudan should be eased.

Those comments reflect Sudan's co-operative response to US efforts to destroy Al-Qa'ida, the Islamist network that had been based in Sudan during its formative stages in the 1990s. The NCP, itself an Islamist party, has quietly facilitated Washington's counter-terrorism strategy in East Africa in recent years.

The context for the Obama administration's Sudan policy has been further altered as a result of a new set of dynamics in Darfur. The six-year conflict there is essentially over, the former head of the United Nations' Darfur peacekeeping force said recently.

"We can no longer talk of a big conflict, of a war in Darfur," Rodolphe Adada told the Associated Press just prior to stepping down from his peacekeeping post.

Adada's assessment echoed that of Gration, who in June characterised conditions in Darfur as "the remnants of genocide" - as opposed to an ongoing genocide.

By the UN's count, there were 16 killings in Darfur in June, compared to a rate of 130 a month in 2008. But nearly three million Darfuris have been displaced from their homes, mainly due to a terror campaign carried out against black African tribes by Arab militias allied with the Sudan government.

The uprooting of a substantial proportion of Darfur's population explains why the violence has decreased, says Abdelwahid Elnur, leader of one of the main rebel groups in the region. "There are no more people on their land to kill," Elnur told the Associated Press.

Sudan's leader, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on war crime charges. And relief workers in Darfur continue to be attacked, a Human Rights Watch official recently noted in The New York Times.

Those factors lead many activists to argue that the Obama administration must continue to exert pressure on Khartoum to bring about a settlement in Darfur.

Other analysts maintain, however, that the black African rebel groups who rose up against Khartoum's rule in 2003 have become as much a part of the problem in Darfur as the Sudan government and its local allies.

The rebels have splintered into more than 30 factions, which sometimes fight one another and which have carried out atrocities of their own. Three rebel leaders have also been indicted by the ICC for war crimes.

Marc Gustafson, a Sudan expert at Oxford University, criticises Darfur-focused activists for having misrepresented the conflict in order to advance their own agendas.

"In Darfur, the use of the term 'genocide' has allowed the rebel groups to slip under the radar and commit crimes against humanity without the rest of the world taking notice," Gustafson wrote recently in the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor. "Had 'genocide' not been the focus, activist campaigns might have challenged the rebel groups and checked their criminal acts."

Gustafson continued: "For example, Eritrea, Chad and the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement were the principal funders of the rebel groups in Darfur. They were and are also allies and aid recipients of the US government, which means they could have easily been pressured to cut their lifelines to the rebel groups."

(Eritrea cannot accurately be considered an ally of the US government. Washington has warned repeatedly that it will move to punish Eritrea unless it ends its reported support for Islamist fighters in Somalia.)

The Obama administration's conciliatory approach to Khartoum is meanwhile being defended by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, an NGO that issues research reports sometimes critical of US policies. Fabienne Hara, a leader of the organisation, said some Darfur activists are "out of touch with reality" and that President Obama's stance marked a much-needed change in US relations with Sudan.