US can help building the rule of law in Sudan

By Mark Massoud, the San Francisco Chronicle

Dec 26, 2005 — Next month marks two important anniversaries for Sudan, Africa’s largest country: It has been 50 years since colonial independence (Jan. 1) and one year since the signing of Sudan’s comprehensive peace agreement (Jan. 9), which formally ended one of the world’s longest and deadliest civil wars. The international community heralded this peace accord as the first major step Sudan had taken in more than two decades toward building the rule of law.

But the rule of law cannot be constructed by putting down guns. The rule of law means that government officials and judges make and apply laws fairly. In Southern Sudan — a region half the size of Western Europe — there exist only 22 trained judges to help people resolve their disputes nonviolently. Without independent, educated judges and citizens’ confidence in government, the regime rules against the will of the people. Trust is crucial to establishing democracy.

But trust has been a rare commodity in Sudan. In the last 50 years, Sudan has had two civil wars, three military governments, three currencies, four transitional governments, five constitutions, decades-long experiments with socialist rule and Shariah law, and a period during the 1990s of accommodating the world’s notorious terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. These periods of violence and arbitrary laws have eroded citizens’ trust in government and government’s ability to construct the rule of law.

What can Americans do to help build trust in the Sudanese government that has participated in so much of this complex history?

First, the U.S. State Department must step up its diplomatic pressure the new Sudanese Government of National Unity to focus more on how to build the rule of law by providing basic services to its people, such as schools and independent courthouses. Trust in government generally will translate into trust in its legal institutions — indirectly bolstering the rule of law.

Second, Congress must reconsider its recent decision not to renew a $50 million-aid package for African Union troops in Sudan. These peacekeepers work tirelessly to curtail lawlessness and what Congress itself has called genocide in Darfur. Without these troops, aid agencies could not provide the humanitarian assistance that is necessary to building Darfur’s rule of law.

Third, Congress should earmark an additional $15 million to the United Nations for disbursing long-term grants to Sudanese legal-aid organizations. Despite adversity, lawyers in these organizations are training poor people across Sudan to assert their human rights under both international and new Sudanese laws. War-displaced persons living in desert camps in Sudan told me that they never knew about human rights before these trainings.

But lawyers in Sudan face major constraints from their government in their work — constraints Congress can pressure Khartoum to abandon. Public-interest lawyers in Sudan face harassment by Sudan’s national security police and work under the threat of being arbitrarily detained or having their organizations shut down.

The financial base of these public-interest legal groups is at best tenuous and insecure — they spend on average more than half their time applying for short-term grants from the international community. Long-term grants from the United States, disbursed by a trusted international organization such as the United Nations, will alleviate this tension and enable Sudanese organizations to work within their communities to build the rule of law from the ground up.

The evening before I left Sudan in 2005, a local bank celebrated the arrival of its first ATM. A few months earlier, a Sudanese company unveiled the first escalator in Sudan. The country is slowly rebuilding after the war. The challenge now for the international community is to modernize Sudan’s government by developing the capacities of Sudanese grassroots legal organizations. By pressuring the Sudanese government and by increasing aid to peacekeepers in Darfur and organizations that strive to build the rule of law in Sudan, America can help curtail violence in Darfur while also strengthening human rights throughout the country — helping to make Sudan one day a global model for transitional justice.

* Mark Massoud, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley