Please read this

The Australian — News
Hill to advise on Diggers for SudanDavid Nason
April 26, 2006
OSAMA bin Laden's call for jihad against a proposed UN peacekeeping force in Sudan has dramatically raised the stakes for Robert Hill, who will advise the Howard Government on whether Australian troops should be involved in trying to quell the world's ugliest civil war.
The former defence minister arrives in New York on the weekend to take up his post as ambassador to the UN. The Sudan crisis is at the top of his agenda.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and twomillion displaced in ethnic violence in the country's western Darfur region since 2003, sparking moves for a beefed-up UN force to replace failed African Union peacekeepers by early next year. UN sources say Australia has been informally approached about committing combat troops and a Blackhawk helicopter squadron to the force.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wants the force to be a highly mobile and well-equipped outfit of 20,000 soldiers, double the size of the AU deployment.
Mr Hill's task will be to assess whether Australia's armed forces can make a useful contribution in Sudan; advise on how a military commitment would sit with Australia's national security priorities; and advise on the extent of the dangers troops might face.
Bin Laden called for jihad against the "infidel" UN force in an audiotape broadcast this week by the al-Jazeera media network.
The tape supports last month's observation by Jan Pronk, Mr Annan's special representative on Sudan, that al-Qa'ida operatives had become increasingly visible in the capital, Khartoum.
The al-Qa'ida presence has coincided with a sudden change of heart from Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's Government about a UN takeover of the peacekeeping effort in Darfur.
Last month, the tensions resulted in Jan Egeland, the UN's under-secretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator, being denied access to Darfur. In 1998, the Khartoum government paid for the sanctuary it gave bin Laden and al-Qa'ida when the US ordered air strikes against a suspected Sudanese chemical weapons factory, a retaliation against terrorist attacks on US embassies in Africa.
But combined with Khartoum's new hostility towards the UN, bin Laden's jihad call raises the spectre of Sudan becoming another Afghanistan, something that could make the political justification for an Australian involvement in the proposed UN force much easier.
Under Operation Slipper - the guiding philosophy behind Australia's involvement in Iraq - Australia is firmly committed to contributing militarily to the international coalition against terrorism anywhere in the world.
Mr Hill has had a longstanding concern about Sudan and referred to it in his recent farewell speech to the Senate. He also paid a surprise visit to 15 Australian military observers attached to the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) last November.
The observers have been monitoring a fragile peace agreement between the Khartoum Government and rebel forces in the country's south, on a six-month rotation since April last year.
Australian Federal Police personnel are also attached to UNMIS but, like the military observers, have not been involved in the Darfur region where violence has been so bad the US has described it as genocide.
Darfur erupted in early 2003 when ethnic African tribes accused the Arab-dominated Khartoum Government of neglect.
The Government retaliated by arming Arab Janjaweed militias who embarked on a Rwanda-like program of ethnic cleansing.