Thorny issues underlying carnage in Darfur complicate World’s response

By SOMINI SENGUPTA, The New York Times

NDJAMENA, Chad, Aug 15, 2004 — There is no disagreement about the consequences of the war under way in Sudan, Africa’s largest country: tens of thousands killed, cholera outbreaks, severe malnutrition, more than a million people forced to flee their homes, many into neighboring countries like Chad.

Yet there is deep disagreement among world leaders over how to respond. The stalemate comes from issues underlying the conflict in Darfur, a region in western Sudan: questions of racial identity, competition for natural resources and the imperatives of a powerful sovereign state.

Unfortunately for the victims of the war, the international response is also complicated by issues that reach beyond this conflict. First, in pitting Arab herders against black African farmers, the civil war in western Sudan underscores a larger struggle for power, land and water that cuts across borders in this arid part of Africa. Second, efforts to address the Darfur crisis have become entangled in the larger grievances of the Arab world – not least, the United States-dominated war in Iraq.

The result? The Arab Islamist government of Sudan, joined by its allies in the Arab League, has angrily accused Western countries of ganging up against an Arab-led government to exploit its oil and gold reserves. The Bush administration has dismissed that contention, and the United States Congress has accused the Arab militias, backed by Sudan and known as the Janjaweed, of genocide against Darfur’s black Africans. Nearly 150,000 black Africans have fled to seek refuge on the barren eastern frontiers of Chad.

The United Nations, meanwhile, has threatened unspecified penalties if Sudan cannot prove by Aug. 31 that it can restore stability. Sudan and its allies have resolutely opposed outside intervention, like the deployment of foreign peacekeeping forces. And Europe and the United States have left it to the fledgling African Union, which represents the continent’s governments, to handle matters on the ground.

The Darfur crisis has presented a stark challenge to African leaders: How is Africa to live with its diversity, specifically its Arab and black African mix, and how are the continent’s leaders, in fashioning a response in Darfur, to balance the claims of a sovereign state and an emergency facing ordinary Africans? Fortunately, for African leaders, this conflict has no religious divide: both sides are Muslims.

The African Union has dispatched monitors to Darfur to oversee the cease-fire declared in April and has invited the Sudanese government and the two Darfur rebel groups to peace talks, starting Aug. 23, in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. It is also sending a few hundred peacekeepers to Darfur, but only to protect its monitors, not Sudanese civilians.

On Sunday, about 150 Rwandan troops were en route. Nigerians are scheduled to arrive in 10 days.

“The Sudan government sees the A.U. as their best option,” said one Western diplomat here. “Wider international intervention is a bigger problem for Sudan than the A.U.”

Clearly, the biggest potential threat for Sudan is the United Nations Security Council’s deadline and the prospect of penalties.

With little more than two weeks left, the United Nations secretary general’s special representative for Darfur, Jan Pronk, described conditions as bleak and dangerous.

“There is no improvement in terms of safety, there is more fighting, the humanitarian situation is as bad as it was,” Mr. Pronk said Friday in a telephone interview from his office in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital.

Since February 2003, the war in Darfur, sparked by a rebel insurgency demanding political and economic rights for the people of western Sudan, has killed 50,000 civilians and displaced more than a million Sudanese, the United Nations estimates.

Mr. Pronk said he met with Sudanese authorities on Thursday and laid out a timetable: Instruct local authorities in Darfur to disarm the Janjaweed in the next 10 days and demonstrate “a substantial improvement in security” in the 10 days after that.

“Local authorities should be forced to do what the national government has decided,” Mr. Pronk added. “It cannot be done in Khartoum only. It has to be done in Darfur. No attacks by the army. Exercise restraint. Even if the army is attacked by rebels, no retaliation.”

Also on Friday, the government ordered tribal leaders in Darfur’s three provinces to start disarming the Janjaweed, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Pronk credited President Omar el-Bashir of Sudan with having ordered the military to refrain from air raids and other attacks, but blamed the government-allied militias for violating the April cease-fire.

“There are Janjaweed militia under the influence of the government,” he said. “We do not know how many. However, they are under influence of government, and they are continuing attacks.”

Sudan has rejected foreign military intervention, saying it alone is responsible for security within its borders. Nigeria, the West African nation leading the peace talks, has already voiced frustration. “What has to be made clear is that if Sudan will not yield to gentle and African pressure it will have to succumb to extra-African pressure that might not be so gentle,” Remi Oyo, the spokeswoman for President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, was quoted as saying in an Agence France-Presse report.

It is unclear whether the African Union will decide to send peacekeepers to protect civilians in Darfur – or whether Sudan, one of the union’s member states, will allow it to do so.

Meanwhile, the most powerful Arab voice in the African Union, neighboring Libya, summoned both sides to informal talks late last week. One of those attending, Adam Shogar, of the Sudan Liberation Army, a Darfur rebel group, said in an interview here in Chad’s capital that Libyan officials expressed to him their discomfort with the prospect of Western intervention in the region.

“They don’t want the Americans and the others to come in,” Mr. Shogar said. “I told them, ‘Not America alone, if the devil himself comes in to protect us, we accept him.’ ”

The Sudan Liberation Army and the other rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, have agreed to take part in the Abuja talks. But already, some have voiced cynicism about their prospects.

“We don’t have full trust that the African Union has the capability of solving this problem because the Sudanese government is not going to listen to them,” Ahmed Tugod Lissan, coordinator of Justice and Equality Movement, said in an interview here. “The Sudan government is building up for a war.”

Depending on the role of the African Union on the ground and in negotiations, the crisis in Darfur will undoubtedly test its mettle as little else has. It will force the union to face the racial divide that has long bedeviled the continent in complicated ways, from a long tradition of slavery in Mauritania to recurrent clashes over land and water between Arab nomads against black African farmers here in Chad and in nearby Niger and Mali. Not least, the African Union itself must contend with Arab and African leaders within its ranks.

That delicate balance is being closely watched by those who are counting on the African Union to take charge of solving the Darfur crisis. After all, with widespread discontent in the Arab world over Iraq, neither Americans nor Europeans are keen to put troops on the ground in another Arab-led country.”If the African Union splits over this issue, then its capacity to deal with this will diminish,” said a senior European Union official in a recent telephone interview from Brussels. The Darfur crisis will also test how the African Union will balance the rights of a sovereign African nation with the rights of ordinary Africans.