Sudan rebels wary over talks
Despite decades of bloodshed, hopes for peace are slim
By Thomas Crampton, International Herald Tribune
RUMBEK, Sudan, Dec 07, 2003 — The thunder of a thousand-horse charge by a cavalry wielding AK-47’s still seems more real to Elias Waya, a rebel commander, than the prospect of peace in Sudan. The battle took place in July last year. “We saw the Arab horsemen just before the dust and noise came,” said Waya, acting commander of Sudan People’s Liberation Army troops in Rumbek, the rebels’ de facto capital.
Waya said he lost the battle to defend the sand-swept outpost of Gogrial mainly due to a perpetual problem: lack of supplies. The outpost lies about 260 kilometers, or 160 miles, northwest of Rumbek, in the far southern reaches of Sudan.
“We held strong when the artillery shelled us for three solid hours and even when we were bombed from an Antonov,” he said, referring to a government air attack. “But the soldiers had only 30 rounds each when the horsemen charged.”
For all the death and destruction Sudan’s civil war has wrought, the combatants are now locked in a stalemate.
Prompted by pressure from the United States, the government in Khartoum and the leaders of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army have entered peace talks aimed at ending Africa’s longest-running civil war within weeks. The talks were getting under way over the weekend in the Kenyan town of Naivasha.
In contrast to optimism expressed at high levels on both sides, however, ground-level rebel military commanders remain dubious, while their civil counterparts warn of looming dangers should peace arrive. “We will not stop recruiting or training troops,” said Magwek Gai, deputy commander of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army for the Upper Nile region.
“The government wants to kill everyone in the south, so even with peace we must prepare for war.” Broadly pitting the predominantly Muslim north against Christians in the south, the war has ethnic, tribal, religious and even economic roots. Disputes over dividing revenues from oil, a huge reserve of which is thought to lie beneath arid stretches of southern Sudan, have long held up peace negotiations.
Impoverishing to the government in Khartoum and devastating to the people of southern Sudan, the decades-old conflict has been blamed for some of Africa’s worst famines. The war and its consequences have been held responsible for an estimated two million deaths since 1983 and for the creation of the world’s largest population of refugees. The United Nations estimates that more than four million people have been displaced by the conflict.
Inspired by recent pressure from the United States, however, the Khartoum government and southern rebels have made more progress toward peace in the last year than at any time in decades. After placing Sudan on a list of states sponsoring terror, the U.S. government has made a peace settlement with southern rebels by the end of this year a condition for a change of status. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army sent a delegation to Khartoum for negotiations on Saturday. Among the bargaining chips will be prisoners of war held by the rebels. For all the progress, however, many in the south remain extremely wary of any promises from Khartoum. “There have never been honest negotiations,” said Daniel Deng Monydit, a senior administrator of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and acting governor of Bahr el-Ghazal Province, of which Rumbek is the capital. “The government’s position never changed until the Americans placed pressure.”
Among the toughest sticking points for the rebels, he said, are Khartoum’s insistence in pressing for all of Sudan to be under Islamic law, reluctance to share oil wealth and refusal to share power with all parties in the south. “Any negotiation must draw in all marginalized areas and groups in Sudan, not just the biggest groups,” Monydit said. “It is now a north-south war, but unless peace is settled with everyone, it will become a war of west and east as well.”
While he is dubious about the prospects for peace, Monydit said almost any settlement would be better than war. “Only a few of my 56 years have been without war,” he said. “I lived war as a child, a boy, a man, a father and now a grandfather.”
The devastation wrought by war is evident all around Rumbek. The roads – all unpaved – consist of interlinked potholes that turn to impassable mud in the rain. Bombed-out and roofless buildings litter the landscape, including the city’s main school, the police headquarters and a hospital. The city has no electricity, no public water supply and no sewage disposal system. Patients in the makeshift hospital sleep beneath a crumbling straw ceiling. The city’s one qualified doctor is also the rebel group’s minister of health.
The few signs of a looming peace include the doubling in size of the city market over the last two years and the opening of new schools.
Construction of housing has begun along the battle-scarred roads leading into the city. On sites formerly avoided for fear of destruction by invading forces, low mud huts have been built, within sight of the hulks of army trucks burned out during a failed government offensive several years ago.
For all the hopes of peace, however, administrators warn that a massive homeward return of refugees will bring its own dangers. “We do not have enough drinking water, food or even hospitals to care for everyone waiting to return,” Monydit said. The prevalence of AIDS in southern Sudan, thought to be low due to isolation imposed by war, could take off should residents of the AIDS-ridden refugee camps along Sudan’s borders return home. In addition to such basic threats to life and health, all government services are virtually nonexistent. “We do not have judges to apply laws, police to enforce or prisons to punish,” Monydit said. “Peace is so much more difficult than war.”