South Sudan peace eases Darfur pressure on Khartoum
By Jonathan Wright
CAIRO, Jan 7 (Reuters) – The peace agreement for southern Sudan, to be signed in Kenya on Sunday, helps take the heat off the Khartoum government, which for most of the past year has faced a barrage of international criticism for its handling of the separate conflict in the western region of Darfur.
The United States and European governments will portray the peace deal in the south as a model for Darfur and press the government to make similar arrangements to end a crisis which has displaced more than 1.6 million Darfuris, analysts said.
But their margin for manoeuvre will be limited because Khartoum expects some reward for coming to terms with the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and Western states will be reluctant to do anything to endanger the smooth implementation of the complicated arrangements.
“Just as it (the international community) has pulled its punches on Darfur partly in order not to jeopardise the peace process in the south, it may well end up doing the same supposedly in order not to jeopardise the implementation,” said John Ryle, a Sudan specialist at the Rift Valley Institute.
Analysts say the international campaign to solve the Darfur crisis peaked several months ago because the United States and Britain, the major players on Sudan policy in the U.N. Security Council, have no appetite for the kind of direct intervention which Khartoum most fears.
Khartoum appears to have survived the genocide label Washington has used to describe aspects of the Darfur conflict and any conceivable new sanctions could hardly be worse than those imposed on Sudan at various times over the past 10 years.
Peace in the south also takes some of the wind out of the sails of the U.S. Sudan lobby, a loose alliance of Christians and African Americans which has helped to drive U.S. policy against a Sudanese government dominated by Arabs and Muslims.
Kent Dagerfeld, head of the European Union delegation in Khartoum, said that peace in the south could trigger the release of up to 400 million euros ($540 million) in European aid to Sudan, even if the Darfur conflict continues.
“The peace agreement will earn them (the Sudanese government) credit and good will. It is obvious that we cannot forget about Darfur but when they sign we will start opening the faucet and play it by ear,” he told Reuters.
Marina Ottaway, senior associate at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the southern peace deal put Western governments in a difficult position over Darfur.
“The United States and Britain will have to give some credit to the government or else it (the move towards peace) may be reversed, so the government is going to have some breathing space. But there will be tremendous reluctance to do this in the middle of Darfur,” she told Reuters.
COMMON ROOTS OF CONFLICT
Diplomats said their governments would take the opportunity to push Khartoum towards a comprehensive resolution of all the country’s conflicts, which have expanded over the years to include unrest in the east of Africa’s largest country.
Analysts say the conflicts share common roots in the chronic domination of post-independence politics in Sudan by a small Arab elite with its home base in the Nile valley north of Khartoum, to the detriment of fringe provinces.
All the rebel groups, in the south, west and east, complain of marginalisation — political code for the exclusion of their ethnic groups from the top jobs in government, the army and the civil service.
Ryle from the Rift Valley Institute said Western governments were mistaken to bank on expectations that the southern rebels would press for a settlement in Darfur once they joined the national government.
The Western governments argue that the SPLM will not want to be associated with the violence there.
“SPLM members of the new national government will be understandably reluctant to take responsibility for the government’s actions in Darfur, even as they take up their new posts in Khartoum. And the international community is likely to give them the benefit of the doubt,” he said.
Ottaway said the circumstances of the deal to end the southern conflict, which started in 1983 and has devastated the region, were very different from those prevailing in Darfur, where the rebels have been fighting for less than two years.
“Think how long it took to negotiate the agreement in the south (more than two years) and the two sides were completely exhausted. The agreement was still being negotiated after the Darfur crisis erupted, but the government did not become more flexible. So I’m not so optimistic,” she added.
Ryle said that, in its relations with Western governments, the Khartoum government is already benefiting from ambiguity about who is to blame for the Darfur crisis.
“An increasing number of atrocities are ascribed to the rebels, and access is progressively restricted … A creeping moral equivalence will set in — in fact it already has done, at least at the diplomatic level. The world may forget exactly who has done what to whom,” he said.