4 months after DPA, Darfur heads toward military confrontation

By Lydia Polgreen

Aug 30, 2006 (ALFASHER) — At the airstrip here in the heart of Darfur, the Ilyushin cargo planes fly in day after day, their holds packed with the stuff of war: troops, trucks, bombs and guns.

So far, negotiations over a proposed United Nations force to shore up the shaky peace in Darfur have limped along with no sign of compromise. The opposing sides in the conflict now seem headed toward a large-scale military confrontation, bringing Darfur to the edge of a new abyss — perhaps the deepest it has faced.

“Unfortunately, things seem to be headed in that direction,” said Gen. Collins Ihekire, commander of the beleaguered 7,000-member African Union force that is enforcing a fragile peace agreement between the government and one rebel group.

Nearly four months after signing the agreement, the government is preparing a fresh assault against the rebel groups that refused to sign. Years of conflict have already killed hundreds of thousands of people here and sent 2.5 million fleeing their homes. But that may be a prelude of the death likely to come from further fighting, hunger and disease. In the past few months, killings of aid workers and hijackings of their vehicles, mostly by rebel groups, have forced aid groups to curtail programs to feed, clothe and shelter hundreds of thousands of people.

“We have less access now than we did in 2004 when things were really bad,” said one senior aid official in El Fasher, speaking on the condition of anonymity because outspoken aid workers have been penalized and expelled by the government. “If there were a major military offensive you could be looking at a complete evacuation of humanitarian workers in Northern Darfur, which would leave millions without a lifeline.”

Diplomatically, Sudan has taken a hard line, refusing to allow any international peacekeepers other than the small and relatively powerless African Union force already in place.

The United Nations Security Council plans to vote Thursday on a resolution that would replace the 7,000 African Union troops with some 21,000 United Nations troops and police officers, but the resolution specifies that the troops will not deploy without the consent of the Sudanese government.

A visit to Khartoum this week by Jendayi E. Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, failed to produce an agreement, potentially leaving the people of Darfur without any international peacekeepers to protect them. The African Union force has only enough money to keep going until Sept. 30, when its mandate officially ends. As it is now, its troops have not been paid, in some cases for months. It is perpetually running short of fuel, food and equipment, and its suppliers, who also have waited months for payment, are reluctant to make new deliveries. Helicopter flights that deliver all but the most essential goods — food and medicine for the troops — have been canceled.

Beyond that, the force is finding itself increasingly drawn into the battle between the government and the rebels. An attack on a fuel convoy earlier this month was suspected to be the work of rebels. Two Rwandan soldiers were killed in an intense firefight that lasted hours. Rebel leaders deny that they were involved in the ambush, but nevertheless say that the African Union is biased because it brokered a peace agreement that they reject.

Most ominous is the looming confrontation between government troops and rebel holdouts, which is set to take place on a battlefield that is home to a quarter of a million people, and could easily set off a chain of battles across Darfur. “It would be catastrophic,” said another senior aid official with a different agency, asking not to be identified for fear of retribution from the Sudanese government. “In terms of loss of life it could dwarf the killings in 2003 and 2004.”

In that period alone, at least 180,000 people died from attacks on villages by government forces and their allied Arab militias, known as the janjaweed, and in battles with non-Arab rebel groups seeking greater power in the region. The violence brought on widespread hunger and disease, often the most lethal killers here.

El Fasher was once a sleepy state capital in an impoverished, backward part of Sudan. Now it is a garrison town swarming with government troops in crisp new uniforms, driving shiny trucks mounted with 50-millimeter guns. The trucks are so new that their spare tires still bear the white and blue marks from the factory along the grooves of their deep treads.

The government has made no secret of its intentions — it submitted a plan to the Security Council earlier this month stating its plan to use 10,500 of its own troops to crush the rebellion, a move that would violate the peace agreement it just signed, according to General Ihekire.

In an interview in Khartoum last week, Lam Akol, the foreign minister, said the government was simply trying to secure peace.

“We have the duty to secure our territory,” he said. “We have signed a peace agreement, and if the holdouts don’t want to join it then what can we do? How else can we return the region to normal life?”

The rebel movements that refused to sign the Darfur peace agreement have massed in a vast swath of territory north of here, gaining strength and flexing their muscle in attacks on government troops and its allies, as well as on the African Union force.

In an interview deep in the territory they hold, commanders of the new rebel alliance, the National Redemption Front, said they were ready for a fight.

“Our capabilities are unlimited, on the air and on the ground, to repel them,” said Jarnabi Abdul Kareem, a top rebel commander.

In Umm Sidir, more than 100 rebel soldiers preened with their Kalashnikov rifles for visiting journalists. Many seemed barely in their teens, with amulets encasing Koranic verses slung across their narrow, boyish chests. Their battered pickup trucks were mounted with heavy weaponry — gleaming anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles. The splintering and reforming of the rebel groups since the peace agreement was evident in their makeshift logos. On one truck, the initials had been changed so many times that the jumble of abbreviations — SLA, JEM, NFR, G-19 — had become a collection of illegible smears.

Seated in a circle under a thorny tree, leaders of the front, joined in collective hatred for the signers of the peace agreement, said they came back to the battlefield reluctantly.

“We are holding arms in our left hand but an olive branch in our right,” said Abubakar Hamid Nour, a commander of the Justice and Equality Movement, an Islamist group that has joined with a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army to fight against the government and the rebel faction that signed the agreement.

“But the government selected the way of force, the way of arms,” he continued. “The government has dispersed our people, burned 4,000 villages, raped the women of Darfur. This peace agreement will never answer to the people of Darfur who carried arms to win their rights.”

The battles over this patch of earth have already exacted a terrible toll.

On the outskirts of Hashaba, people displaced by the fighting as far back as 2003 have settled, their camps becoming semipermanent villages. There are few men here — just a handful among dozens of drawn-faced women and wiry children with ochre-tinted hair, a telltale sign of malnourishment.

“We used to get food here, but no one comes anymore,” said Aisha Adbul Rahman. In her hut were the ingredients for that night’s dinner — a calabash of brown, silted water and half a bowl of millet.

In Hashaba, at a clinic run by the International Rescue Committee, an aid organization, Dr. Hassan Ibrahim Isaac said he wrote prescriptions for the banal sicknesses that killed here — malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia. But these bits of paper are like scrip at a bankrupt company’s store. The clinic’s pharmacy ran out of antibiotics and antimalarial drugs long ago.

“I still come because I don’t want people to give up hope,” Dr. Isaac said. “But now fewer people come. They know I have nothing to give them.”

This is the planting season, when rains coax skeins of green from the dun-colored earth. Once-bleak hills bristle with grassy stubble. Wadis, seasonal rivers, snake across the landscape like aortas, veins and capillaries. But they bleed into empty fields across much of Northern Darfur — violence has kept many villagers from their fields. And so the earth foretells more hunger when harvest time comes.

Military officials for the African Union said the government troops could build up along an axis between El Fasher and the towns of Mellit and Kutum, using Antonov bombers and attack helicopters to wipe out as many rebels as they can, then force the rest to flee north. Another possibility is that the government will attack from the south, and airlift troops to swoop down from the north as well.

Already, bombing attacks on Kulkul have pushed rebels north to Umm Sidir and beyond, African Union military commanders said.

Open armed conflict on a vast scale seems so likely, and the hope of a United Nations peacekeeping force arriving to ease the tensions so distant, that a joke has been making the rounds of military and aid officials here: The most important peacekeeper in Darfur right now is the rain.

It turns the rough, dusty tracks that crisscross the arid plains and mountains into impassable bogs, and swells once-dry riverbeds into rivers easily capable of carrying off a Toyota Land Cruiser, the military vehicle of choice.

But the rains end in the next couple of weeks.

(The New York Times)