Kolbe Says Money Is Needed For Dire Situation In Darfur.

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Author: Cohn, Peter

Appropriations

House Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., said today â€" after a 12-day trip to Africa â€" that increased funding for the African Union peacekeeping effort in the Darfur region of Sudan was "absolutely crucial" and that he expects the Bush administration to request as much as $100 million in an FY06 supplemental. "There are only about 6,000 [African Union] troops policing an area larger than Texas, and that is clearly inadequate," Kolbe said. During year-end spending negotiations, Secretary of State Rice asked appropriators to include $50 million for Darfur, but the White House did not submit a formal budget amendment to adjust spending caps, meaning appropriators would have had to cut other programs or designate the money as "emergency" funds. The request was denied, although appropriators signed off on a $13 million reprogramming request from State Department peacekeeping accounts. Kolbe added that he witnessed a "massing of forces on both sides of the border," making a "major conflict very likely to break out in the near future."

He said the new money ought to be designated as emergency spending, which the White House was likely to seek, although the climate in Congress post-Hurricane Katrina has been to insist on offsets for new spending. The new supplemental request, which could be in the range of $80 billion to $100 billion, also might contain foreign aid items such as roughly $1 billion for Israeli economic development efforts in the Negev desert after last summer's withdrawal of settlements from the Gaza Strip, in addition to funding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kolbe said he has not been contacted by U.S. or Israeli officials about such a request, and neither U.S. nor Israeli officials have publicly confirmed it because of the sensitive nature of the private discussions.

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By Peter Cohn