Sudan vagueness on Darfur deliberate – experts
Jan 18, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — Khartoum is employing a deliberate policy of vagueness on the deployment of U.N. troops to its Darfur region to mitigate internal divisions and avoid confrontation with the international community, analysts say.
Sudan rejected U.N. Security Council Resolution 1706 authorising some 22,500 U.N. peacekeepers and police to take over a struggling African Union mission in Darfur. It also rejected a compromise on a hybrid U.N.-AU force.
In December, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir softened his position agreeing to a “hybrid operation” in a letter to outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, adding Sudan was in “full agreement” with the world body.
But Bashir has declined to elaborate publicly on the details of the hybrid operation while still denying any agreement on U.N. deployment to a domestic audience.
“We do not want to get into a media discussion over this,” Presidential Advisor Mustafa Osman Ismail said in January, declining to specify whether Bashir’s letter meant Sudan would allow U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur.
Analysts call this tactic survival and subversion — it allows Bashir to avoid critics at home, who equate foreign intervention in Darfur with invasion, and dodge criticism internationally that he is obstructing efforts to bring peace to war-torn western Sudan.
“It allows the international community to point to the positive statements emanating out of Khartoum as evidence of progress, conveniently ignoring the contrary statements by (Khartoum) officials, the ongoing government offensive and bombing campaigns in Darfur,” said Sudan expert Dave Mozersky of the International Crisis Group think tank.
U.S. academic Eric Reeves said the debate over whether Sudan had accepted a “hybrid force” detracted from the fact that Khartoum had managed to shelve Resolution 1706 in defiance of the world body.
“The regime well understands the value of creating whatever ambiguity the international community needs as a fig-leaf for inaction,” he said, describing Resolution 1706 as “dead in the water.”
DOMESTIC PRESSURES
Discussions over a peacekeeping force have been ongoing since early 2004, about a year after mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government charging neglect.
Since then experts estimate some 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes in a campaign of rape, pillage and murder in Darfur which Washington calls genocide.
Khartoum denies genocide. The International Criminal Court is investigating alleged war crimes in the region, where the world’s largest humanitarian operation is operating.
Some said the Khartoum government’s ambiguous position was aimed at buying time to resolve internal divisions between those who wanted to work with the international community and hard-liners in Khartoum who viewed the United Nations as a colonial force.
“There are different islands within the government. You could say the government has two faces,” said Sudanese human rights activist Faysal el-Bagir.
“They don’t want people to see them accepting what they refused to accept previously,” he added.
Bashir is under domestic pressure to take a more hardline stance in the face of international pressure. Stonewalling the United Nations has appeased those elements in his government.
Khartoum led an intense media campaign against a U.N. presence in Darfur last year, calling it a Western plot to recolonise Sudan. The propaganda turned some parts of Sudanese society against the world body with thousands of angry young Sudanese chanting “down, down, U.N.” in regular marches last year in the streets of the capital.
Any compromise to allow U.N. troops into Darfur has become even more difficult for Khartoum in the wake of recent allegations of sexual abuse of children by U.N. soldiers monitoring a separate peace accord in Sudan’s south.
LACK OF LEADERSHIP
Some analysts say the international community has allowed the government in Khartoum to defy U.N. resolutions.
“The lack of strong and determined international leadership on Darfur that is willing to hold (Khartoum) accountable for its actions and to its past commitments has created a space for … Sudan to play diplomatic and bureaucratic games with the U.N. and the international community,” Mozersky said.
Retired U.S. ambassador Lawrence Rossin, senior international coordinator of the advocacy group Save Darfur Coalition, said the time had come to stop debating the details and ensure Khartoum implemented what it appeared had been agreed.
“What there needs to be is commitment and determination to devote unrelenting and concentrated diplomatic effort from the international community on the government of Sudan to spur action and implementation on the terms in Annan’s letter,” he said.
(Reeuters)