By Julie Flint, The Daily Star
LONDON, Feb 19, 2004 — For the last 12 months, peace talks to end 21 years of civil war between the government of Sudan and the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) have ground on with little or no care for a new war in Darfur on Sudan’s western border. But now, with thousands of civilians killed in Darfur, over a million displaced and hundreds of villages destroyed, the Sudan government has reportedly been told: Call off your troops and militias in the west, or expect no peace dividend for an agreement with the south.
US State Department sources say this was the message carried to Khartoum last week by a high-level American delegation headed by Charles Snyder, acting assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Snyder reportedly warned Khartoum that the US would not lift sanctions against Sudan, and the “troika” mediating the north-south talks the US, Britain and Norway would not fund a new era of peace with the SPLA as long as the war in Darfur rages unabated.
If confirmed, and if translated into meaningful pressure at the north-south talks that resumed in the Kenyan town of Naivasha on Tuesday, the new tough line with Khartoum may mark the end of a year in which the US administration turned a blind eye to the war in Darfur in its eagerness to score a foreign policy success in the south.
As Washington persisted in ignoring the conflict in Darfur, a region that is overwhelmingly Muslim, UN Undersecretary-General Jan Egeland warned last month that the crisis there probably comprises “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world” today. The UN estimates that half the population of Darfur is now “war-affected.” A million people are internally displaced, deprived of any humanitarian relief thanks to a one-two punch of deepening insecurity and government restrictions on relief. Another 110,000 have crossed the 1,350-kilometer border into Chad and are camped in precarious conditions in dangerous proximity to the border.
Relief workers say the vast majority of the refugees are farmers of African origin who have seen their villages and crops burned and their animals looted and killed by Arab militias, or Janjawiid, supported by the regular Sudanese Army.
UN relief agencies this week began an emergency airlift of 256 tons of aid to the border area, warning that the refugees stranded there are facing a “catastrophe.” The UN estimates 40 percent of the refugees are children under five and about 75 percent of the adults are women. Many are suffering from diarrhea and respiratory infections made worse by huge swings in temperature from scorching by day to near-freezing by night. Some of the refugees have been attacked, and their few belongings looted, by militias crossing the border with apparent impunity. Others have been bombed by Sudanese planes violating Chad’s airspace.
The Sudan government has consistently sought to downplay the conflict in Darfur, blaming it on “tribal clashes” and “banditry” despite abundant evidence of its own increasing involvement both through the regular army and air force and through the Janjawiid. Last week, for example, President Omar al-Bashir claimed the conflict in Darfur was over; this week, Amnesty International said it continues to receive “details of horrifying attacks against civilians in villages by government warplanes, soldiers and government-aligned militia.”
“The notion that restraint in speaking about the massive crisis in Darfur helps diplomacy in Naivasha is remarkably foolish,” says Sudan analyst Eric Reeves. “Khartoum sees only an incentive to prolong the ‘climactic moment’ at Naivasha as long as possible, thereby expanding the window of opportunity in which it can attempt to crush militarily the Darfur insurgency.”
An independent sultanate until 1917, when it was the last region to be incorporated into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Darfur is one of Sudan’s most neglected regions with a long history of resource conflict between Arab nomads and settled African farmers. This conflict was controlled and kept within limits by indigenous peace-making mechanisms until the 1980s, when a regional government was established in Darfur, the traditional “native administration” system based on village sheikhs was dismantled, and competition for political influence took on an ethnic color aggravated by the decision of the then prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, to arm Arab militias.
At the same time, drought and desertification encouraged a more systematic drive by Arab nomads to occupy land in the central Jebel Marra massif, Darfur’s most fertile land. Hundreds of villages belonging to the Fur tribe, the largest African tribe in the region, were destroyed and thousands of lives were lost on both sides.
In February 2003, a new element was injected into the Darfur equation when the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) took up arms to protest the marginalization of Darfur in general and its African tribes in particular. The rebellion by the Fur-dominated SLA placed Darfur’s national agenda in the hands of leaders from Darfur for the first time and, despite espousing a secular agenda, surprised observers by winning widespread support. A string of military victories soon encouraged the formation of a second, overtly Islamic rebel movement the Justice and Equality Movement.
Although the relationship between the two rebel groups is not yet clear, there are indications that they are, for the moment at least, cooperating in many parts of Darfur. Unable to defeat the rebels on their own ground, relief workers and human rights groups say Khartoum adopted a strategy of attacking civilian targets through the Janjawiid, backed by the regular army and air force helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers. “The Janjawiid militia is reportedly the single major source of destruction and abuse,” says Alex de Waal of Justice Africa. “The government of Sudan’s armed forces were unable to cope with the Chadian-style highly mobile landcruiser-based raids of the SLA. In this context, its only hope for effective counter-insurgency is to try to clear the population itself. There is plentiful evidence of government of Sudan involvement in the planning and implementation of the Janjawiid attacks. Any denials by the government carry no credibility at all. It cannot claim ignorance.”
The deepening crisis in Darfur has been paralleled by major but as yet inconclusive advances in the north-south talks in Kenya: in 2002, a breakthrough agreement granting the south the right to self-determination after a six-year transition period; in September 2003, a deal on transitional security under which the government would withdraw its troops from the south; most recently, agreement on a 50-50 split of the nation’s wealth most importantly, its oil wealth.
Still to be resolved are the status of three disputed front-line areas Abyei, the Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile and the division of political and administrative power. This round of talks should make clear whether the government is negotiating in good faith or, as many fear, simply playing for time in hope of winning the war in the west.
Julie Flint is a veteran Middle East reporter based in Beirut and London
SOURCE:
Foreign ministers of Dakar contact group charged with improving relations between Sudan and Chad wrapped a two-day meeting in the Chadian capital, N’djamena today. The member of ce group are: Chad, Sudan, Libya, Gabon, Congo Republic, Senegal and Eritrea.
