With the strongly worded resolution, the Security Council also sought to wear down Khartoum's resistance to the UN taking command of peacekeeping in Darfur from the African Union. The African Union, which has deployed underfunded and poorly armed multinational forces, has been unable to stop the suffering in Darfur, where almost 200,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the fighting between government-backed militias known as Janjaweed and rebels since 2003.

On Monday, the African Union expressed its readiness to transfer authority for its 7,300-strong peacekeeping force in Darfur to the UN as soon as the world body was ready to take the command.

Only two hurdles remain between full implementation of the peace accord signed in the Nigerian capital of Abuja and the beginning of an end to the extreme human misery in Darfur. These are the refusal by two other Sudanese rebel groups to sign the agreement and by the Arab/Islamist government in Khartoum so far to give its consent to a full-fledged UN peacekeeping mission.

Credit must go to several African nations, the United States and Britain, who brokered the peace agreement. The rest of the international community must now act to provide whatever support it can to help more than a million refugees displaced not only by the fighting, but also systematic harassment by the Arab Janjaweed militias.

These militias storm into villages on horses and camels, killing and pillaging as they go. Entire villages have been razed, women raped and branded, and crops systematically destroyed in a campaign that has all the hallmarks of a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing.

This opportunity for the international community to make amends for its past neglect must not be squandered. The UN must not fail this time.

Let us not forget that this positive development comes almost two years after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan first pronounced the situation in Darfur the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe. The region had attracted scant international attention until now, because the atrocities were happening in a remote part of Africa that offers little economic incentives, and they were overshadowed by a seemingly bigger emergency: the North-South war in the same country.

The Security Council also demanded that an assessment team be dispatched to Sudan within a week, in order to lay the groundwork for the UN to take control of the African Union-led peacekeeping mission. It also asked Annan to make recommendations based on the assessment team's report on the possible make-up of the new UN force, as well as projected costs.

The Sudanese government, now under tremendous pressure, is expected to relent and allow the UN assessment team to visit and verify implementation of the peace agreement and humanitarian situation involving displaced civilian populations on the ground. And the Security Council's threat to impose trade sanctions against anyone trying to delay or undermine the peace agreement is apparently not being taken lightly by Khartoum.

But even now, some key international players - no less than China and Russia, both veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council with a strategic interest in protecting Khartoum - continue to play cynical games. They express reservations about the make-up of the upcoming UN peacekeeping mission, which will include large contingents of Nato forces. These countries, which along with the Arab League have been the main appeasers of the Sudanese government, should try to atone for their sins by at least refraining from hamstringing the UN mission before it even gets under way.