British Prime Minister Tony Blair is pushing the United Nations to declare a no-fly zone over Darfur, enforced if necessary by the bombing of Sudanese military airfields used for raids on the province. The controversial initiative comes as a classified new report by a UN panel of experts alleges Sudan has violated UN resolutions by moving arms into Darfur, conducting overflights and disguising its military planes as UN humanitarian aircraft. Over 200,000 have been killed in the course of a counter-insurgency by government forces and allied Janjaweed militia, and more than 10 times that number forced to flee their homes. Humanitarian supplies to the millions of refugees in the area are tenuous and threatened by continuing violence on the Sudan-Chad border. Speaking in Berlin on Sunday, Blair described the situation in Darfur as "intolerable" and said, "We need to consider a no-fly zone to prevent the use of Sudanese air power against refugees and displaced people." The imposition of a no-fly zone, of the kind employed over Iraq before the invasion, has been widely dismissed by military experts as impractical over an area as large as Darfur, which is the size of France. Yet US and British officials are pushing punitive air strikes against Sudanese air force bases as an alternative if Khartoum violated the no-fly zone.

Julian Borger, Guardian

Do you agree with British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal to declare a no-fly zone over Drafur, punishable by air strikes on Sudanese airfields, in order to halt the humanitarian conflict in the region?