Darfur, the first test for AU
By Somini Sengupta, The International Herald Tribune
TAWILAH, Western Sudan, Nov 29, 2004 — Sudan Representatives of the African Union came here over the weekend to investigate an incident that it had hoped would not happen during its watch.
Just after the dawn prayers were finished last Monday, rebels attacked this strategic town in North Darfur, killing nearly 30 police officers and pocking the government garrison with bullet holes. The government retaliated with air strikes. People ran whatever way they could. Like so many others in Darfur, the town virtually emptied out.
That familiar pattern – a rebel attack, a government air strike, the flight of civilians, a busy market town turning into a ghost town overnight – was supposed to be a thing of the past in Darfur, the vast region of western Sudan ravaged by nearly 22 months of war.
Both the government and the rebels have agreed to a cease-fire and then, to the foundations of a peace deal.
Under heavy pressure, the government allowed more than 3,000 African Union troops into the area. They have not been authorized to fight; they are supposed to prevent further violence just by being here.
On Sunday, a team of nine African Union military observers, trailed by the first journalists to visit this town since last week’s attack, stared at the shallow crater that a government bomb had left in this now-charred collection of huts.
One of those huts was no more than a circle of black ash, with an earthen water jug lying on its edge. A woman had lived here with her five children.
The unarmed monitors snapped pictures. They interviewed local people who had stayed and many more who had come back because they had heard the African Union had come to the town.
The monitors took the risk of staying through the frigid night on the edge of town, mainly, they said, to show people that they were there. They handed their uneaten military rations to women who straggled up the sand streets.
Then, by mid-afternoon, they left in a long white ribbon of 4x4s and armored personnel carriers, returning to the safety of their base in the state’s capital.
Just before they pulled out of town, a group of men rushed up and said the police would start harassing them for talking to the monitors.
The team’s head, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Fouad of Egypt, listened and nodded. Later, when asked what he would do about the men’s pleas, he said he would note them in his report and pass it along to headquarters.
Until there are enough troops to patrol towns like this one, he said, there was nothing more he could do.
The weekend mission perfectly summed up the challenge faced by the African Union.
On the one hand, they are the vanguard of peacekeeping in Sudan; no one but African heads of state have bothered to send their soldiers into the dangerous mess that now is Darfur.
On the other, they are hamstrung in terms of numbers, in terms of expertise and most of all, by their rules of engagement. It will be at least February before the full deployment of 3,400 troops arrives. This weekend there were not enough tents to house the nine observers who went to Tawilah; they slept in their vehicles or curled up on folding cots.
For the African Union itself, a nascent organization representing African governments and struggling to shake off the legacy of its ineffectual predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, Darfur represents the ultimate test.
If the union succeeds in Darfur, it will achieve a lot of credibility.
If it fails, the price will be dear. “We will take a long time to recover our credibility towards our people and our partners,” Jean-Baptiste Natama, an African Union senior political officer, said in an interview last week.
Privately, Sudanese diplomats have worried that sending in the union troops would be a recipe for failure. In the days following the violence in Tawilah, the United Nations top envoy, Jan Pronk, suggested that the force should be more than twice the 3,400 initially planned.
Natama, meanwhile, floated the idea of strengthening the union’s mandate to peace enforcement, a politically risky idea that the Sudanese government may be unlikely to accept.
“If the situation is getting worse we are not going to pack our luggage and leave Darfur,” Natama said in the interview. “We are going to have to have a robust mandate to make sure we are not here for nothing. We should be able to bring peace, or impose peace.”
The organization’s success or failure will be measured, in part, by how the union responds to the Tawilah incident and whether it can prevent future Tawilahs.
Few people were surprised by the incident. Tensions between the townspeople, largely members of African tribes, and Arabs from nearby villages had been building for some time.
The pivotal event, according to townspeople, was a brawl that erupted on Nov. 16, market day.
A group of Arabs, men and women, had come to the market, as they normally do. But this time, some of the Arabs picked up some women’s clothing, stuffed the items into their sacks and, refusing to pay, brandished guns at the merchants.
Frustration already was running high. The Saturday before, some Arabs – perhaps the same people, perhaps not – had looted food from some stalls.
Earlier this year, the town came under attack by government forces and their allied Arab militias. Homes had been looted. People fled, seeking refuge in camps in El-Fashir.
For months, Tawilah itself had been filled with thousands of people displaced from other nearby villages.
And so, when the Arabs refused to pay on this market day, the Africans decided to lash out. First the merchants – and then their customers – grabbed sticks and stones and began pummeling the Arabs, killing four of them on the spot and injuring as many as seven.
By the time the police came to disperse the crowds, the Arab corpses lay on the ground, beaten and disfigured.
Revenge begot revenge. That night, Arabs returned to Tawilah, firing randomly and looting the market. The following Monday, the Sudan Liberation Army, a rebel outfit led by ethnic Africans, attacked Tawilah.
Atima Dahab, who lived in Tawilah, said that before the attack she had dreamt of a camel standing in front of her house. In the dream, she told her husband that something bad would happen.
She woke up to the sound of gunfire. The bad dream that Darfur has come to be was unfolding once again