Darfur needs peace more than aid
By ALSIR SIDAHMED, The Globe and Mail
July 28, 2004 — To focus attention only on the disastrous human crisis engulfing Sudan’s Darfur region is futile. Western countries must seek a more effective, political solution.
As it stands, the Darfur rebels have no interest in negotiating with the Sudanese government; in the absence of a credible ceasefire, Khartoum has no interest in reining in the militia. The two parties mistrust one another too deeply to get to the roots of the problem — the unbalanced relationship between Sudan’s centre and its periphery, and the underdevelopment of a region whose population is growing despite the drought that has raged in this part of western Sudan for more than three decades.
Neither the United Nations nor the African Union has the necessary clout to get the two together (as demonstrated by last week’s failure in Addis Ababa to bring the rebels to the negotiating table). The current paralysis not only adds to the suffering of the people of Darfur, it endangers the recent hard-won efforts to bring peace to southern Sudan, ravaged by two decades of civil strife.
The way to break the Darfur stalemate is to learn from the lesson of southern Sudan. Billions of dollars in humanitarian aid from Western countries had been flowing to the south over a 13-year period. For eight of those years, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD, a regional organization of central and eastern African countries) had supervised Sudan’s north-south peace talks to end its civil war — to no avail. Media stories, meanwhile, mounted about the murahilin militia’s use of abduction and slavery to aid the government’s war against the rebels.
But only last May, when the United States, Britain, Norway and Canada threw their weight behind the IGAD talks, was there a breakthrough. Peace talks in Naivasha, Kenya, dealing with power, wealth-sharing and security arrangements, opened the way for real change. The U.S., Britain and Canada appointed special envoys for Sudan and, after the cessation of hostilities between Khartoum and the southern rebels, monitoring and verification teams were set up. The de facto ceasefire has been holding ever since; in March, Charles Snyder, U.S. acting assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told the House international relations committee that, in the past year, there were few, if any, slave raids.
But slavery and rape are the fallout of a bigger problem: war itself. Stopping the war is a political issue, and requires well-positioned mediators. More important, warring parties must be able to see that they have a stake in the peace.
When John Danforth, the former U.S. senator and current ambassador to the UN, was appointed peace envoy to Sudan in 2001, he began by choosing the contested Nuba Mountains region as a place to try out a ceasefire, in order to test the willingness of the parties to negotiate. The rebels didn’t welcome the proposal. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement took the position that a ceasefire should follow a political settlement, not precede it. They saw the proposal as giving in to a government resisting reform. Still, the proposal went ahead, opening the way for the peace process.
Some leaders of American organizations sympathetic to the rebel SPLM cause raised their concerns with President George W. Bush. A former U.S. diplomat told me that Mr. Bush responded by asking what they wanted to accomplish: to save the Nuba people or topple the Sudan government?
The same question might be applied to Darfur today. A U.S.-led political intervention in Darfur could help redress the negative message conveyed by the Naivasha accords that partial peace can be achieved and confined to combatants only. The peace process must be expanded to include other political powers and regions.
Alsir Sidahmed, a Sudanese journalist living in Mississauga, Ont., is a former editor of Sudanow magazine.