UN vote backs Brown's call for action to end Darfur conflict

Gordon Brown's honeymoon really is going a treat.

Gordon Brown scored a dramatic first foreign policy victory last night when the UN security council voted to deploy a 26,000-strong international force to Darfur, with a mandate to stop the massacres of civilians which have driven 2 million people from their homes.

Mr Brown has made Darfur a foreign policy priority, and the UN resolution was an initiative he promoted 10 days earlier with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, aiming to end a year of international drift on the issue. This week he secured George Bush's support for the draft.

The vote was passed unanimously after China, the Sudanese government's main defender at the UN, dropped its objections. British officials said that China's oil interests in Sudan were eventually outweighed by anxiety about a possible international human rights backlash over Darfur aimed at next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.

The UN vote will dispatch a hybrid force of 19,555 UN and African Union (AU) soldiers and more than 6,000 police from around the world. They are due to take over from a largely ineffectual 7,000-strong AU force in the western Sudan by the end of the year, and will have a much more muscular mandate. They are being deployed under chapter 7 of the UN charter which will give them the right to use force to protect civilians and assist the delivery of relief supplies.

The world's inaction over Darfur has been a bloody disgrace and the fact that we are eventually employing forces there is to be welcomed.

Blair sat on his arse and ignored this issue because of the obstructionist tactics of Khartoum, and it is a very large plus to Gordon Brown that he has managed to secure movement on this issue so soon after becoming Prime Minister.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called the decision a "historic and unprecedented resolution" which will send "a clear and powerful signal" of the UN's commitment to "close this tragic chapter in Sudan's history". Britain's ambassador to the UN, Emyr Jones Parry, called it "an unprecedented undertaking in scale, complexity and importance".

Hours before the vote, Mr Brown went to the UN headquarters to endorse the resolution, describing Darfur as "the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today". Since a rebellion broke out in the province in 2003, the fighting has cost the lives of more than 200,000 people, most at the hands of Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, sponsored by Khartoum.

Brown is forcing the agenda that many of us regard as important. For too long this issue has been ignored whilst Washington obsessed itself with Iraq and potential action against Iran. Blair, who always followed Washington's agenda, paid lip service to this issue whilst doing bugger all about it.

Brown has really hit the ground running. He has been aided in this by the fact that pressure has been put on China - ahead of the Olympic games - to finally give up on it's objections to anything being done over this matter. But, the important thing is that he has recognised the right time to seek action and that the action that he sought has been accepted by the UN.

Although there is much still to be done:

"It is not time ... to pop open the champagne bottles. The true test of this measure is not what happens today in New York, but what happens over the coming weeks in Darfur," Allyn Brooks-LaSure of the Save Darfur Coalition said last night.

Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, pledged the political momentum would be maintained, calling for a rapid deployment of the force "in conditions that allow it to make a difference".

Brown's maiden voyage to the US has turned out to be a complete success.

The security council voted while Mr Brown was flying back from his maiden US trip as prime minister, which his aides claim has been an outstanding success. At Camp David, the prime minister reaffirmed his support for the transatlantic alliance but stopped short of the warm personal endorsements of President Bush for which Tony Blair had been known. A Washington Post headline on the meeting described the British prime minister as "more bulldog than poodle".

Brown set out to show that he was different from Blair... and he has done so. Both in substance and in style.

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Tags: Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, George Bush, Iraq war, Darfur