INTERVIEW – Comprehensive approach to Sudan

Jan 26, 2006 — NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.

JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Eric Reeves. He is a professor of English language and literature at Smith College who now devotes himself full time to Sudan research and analysis. His comments are widely read and are available on the web at www.sudanreeves.org. Eric, welcome to the program.

ERIC REEVES: Good to be with you Jerry.

JERRY FOWLER: Eric, you are a professor of English language and literature, but now you are spending really all of your time on Sudan. How did that come about?

ERIC REEVES: In 1998, Doctors Without Borders described Southern Sudan as the most underreported humanitarian crisis in the world. I was speaking with the executive director of the organization and she lamented Sudan’s invisibility and lack of anyone championing the cause of these people who had suffered for so long. The war in Southern Sudan began in 1983 and this was the second phase of enormously destructive civil war, and in the case of our speaking, I said something to the affect of, “I will see what I can do,” and though I had no idea what that sentence meant at the time, it turned out to mean a life changing commitment to work for peace in Sudan.

JERRY FOWLER: You say, “You will see what you can do,” and for a lot of people that would mean writing a generous check to Doctors Without Borders or some other relief organization. How is it that you took upon yourself to provide analysis, to provide commentary?

ERIC REEVES: I had been a long time donor to Doctors Without Borders. It is one of the reasons I was speaking with the executive director. My initial efforts were pretty mundane. I wrote to a lot of congressmen, a lot of senators, I did what I could to elevate the issue with personal writings. I think the turning point came when I received a reply came from Daniel Patrick Moynihan as I was lamenting what was happening in Southern Sudan, and he thanked me for my concern for the tourists who had been killed in Egypt, and I said, “I think there is a problem here if my response to Sudan generates a reply that speaks to what is going on in Egypt, so I tried my hand at op-ed writing, published my first op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in March 1999, a couple months after I began my efforts. I enjoy the genre of the op-ed; I have now published over one hundred of them. Those led to more critical writings, and those critical writings led to what are now very lengthy analyses, but it has been a genre that has evolved in the course of my seven years of work on Sudan.

JERRY FOWLER: How did you go about becoming an authority on Sudan? I take it you did not have any background in the region and had not been there, had you?

ERIC REEVES: No, I had really no background. I read a lot; I talked to a lot of people. I early on made contact with the Sudan desk officer at the State Department, Matt Herrington, a wonderful man, now a first political officer in Harare in Zimbabwe. This is the last time the State Department actually chose to speak with me, but it was very useful at the time to have somebody who took me seriously and would help me understand the complexities of the conflict in Southern Sudan. The more I wrote, the more compelled I became by the case of Southern Sudan, the more information I found coming to me. After a few years, I was getting very good intelligence from the ground in Southern Sudan, sometimes thoroughly compelling and quite important nature, especially in the oil regions of Western and Upper Nile, where fighting was especially concentrated, beginning in 1998.

JERRY FOWLER: At this point, where are you getting your information? Your analyses, which come out on a regular basis are extensively documented, and they obviously refer to information that is available publicly, but then there is a lot of non-public information. How do you get your intelligence?

ERIC REEVES: I like to brag that having written about Sudan for seven years now, I have never blown a confidence. I have never been told anything confidentially, and then subsequently had my source come back to me and say, “But I told you not to say that.” I think I am understood to be somebody who can write and disseminate widely information that comes to me. At this point I get information from humanitarian organizations on the ground, particularly in Darfur; I get information from people in government; I get information from people in the United Nations; I get information from a lot of people who would not be able to make public what they know, but nonetheless want what they know to be made public. I become an ideal conduit since I am writing about issues that most news outlets would find too peripheral, even as they can sometimes be quite central to the genocide in Darfur.

JERRY FOWLER: Let me pick up on that-the issue of media coverage. In some ways, Darfur now has gotten more media coverage than a lot of crises in Africa get, but it is still pretty episodic; yet it does not seem as though it is a problem of actually getting information?

ERIC REEVES: In some ways it is a problem of getting information. Khartoum has really tightened the screws on news access. I get calls from journalists all the time asking, “How can I get into Darfur? I have run into problems with the Sudanese Embassy. I cannot get a visa; I cannot get travel papers.” That has been a real problem. Certainly human rights groups have also been systematically excluded from Darfur. There is access. Ophera McDoom, the Reuters correspondent, manages to get to places that astonish me. It is possible, but I think the coverage we saw in summer 2004 for example, when humanitarian operations really began to ratchet up in a significant way, that kind of coverage is dissipating. I think, in some sense, Khartoum has won the battle over news access to Darfur. I still would fault the news media though; there are many ways in which we could get a lot more really significant information to wider audiences. In the absence of the larger world community knowing more about the nature of genocidal destruction, that destruction will continue.

JERRY FOWLER: Let us turn to what is happening on the ground in Darfur. You were one of the first to begin to call attention to it which, sad to say, was almost two years ago. In recent months, the situation seems to have deteriorated once again after a period of relative, if negative, stability over the summer. What is causing the current deterioration?

ERIC REEVES: There are a number of factors. Probably the chief is that the combatants on the ground in Darfur have tested the African Union, the monitoring force that is the sole international response to human insecurity, the insecurity of humanitarian operations on the ground in Darfur. The African Union force has been tested, found wanting, and that only encourages the combatants, the Janjaweed, Khartoum’s Arab militia proxy, Khartoum’s own forces; and the rebel movements, which are increasingly fragmenting, and there is great danger in that fragmentation, and that is a very large part of the violence we are seeing. There is also increasing opportunistic banditry. We are about to enter a fourth failed planting and harvest season, beginning this spring. There is very little in the way of food reserves, cattle reserves, means of sustaining life in the face of now famine-like conditions in many places, so people are stealing food; people are stealing vehicles; people are stealing not for military purposes, but for survival purposes, for narrowly, self-interested, economic purposes. I think in the absence of a robust, international, humanitarian intervention, what we will see is a continuing attenuation of African Union ability to provide security, and in fact, their mandate is not to provide security; it is to monitor the non-existent ceasefires. Until there is an appropriate mandate, with appropriate personnel and resources, I am afraid what we will see is a continuation of what has become genocide by attrition. It is not so much the violent human destruction that we saw for so much of 2003, 2004-in fact, we can go back to 2002-but people are now dying from the consequences of this antecedent violence. They have no food, they have no water in many rural areas, camp conditions are in many ways appalling, humanitarian access is diminishing, humanitarian evacuations are a terrifying development of the last couple months.

JERRY FOWLER: By humanitarian evacuations you mean, humanitarian personnel who are pulling back from helping the population?

ERIC REEVES: That is right. The humanitarian organizations on the ground in Darfur are all operating in the red zone; at the far end of the acceptable security conditions, and in fact, in many places, those security conditions have deteriorated to the point where roads cannot be used, even helicopters cannot be used for fear of being shot down, and recently for example, the United Nations withdrew all non-essential personnel from West Darfur, the most insecure of the three Darfur states. Whenever humanitarian personnel withdraw, that leaves the people they were serving without humanitarian services.

JERRY FOWLER: Let us just be clear about the population that we are talking about. At this point, how many people has been displaced by the violence, and, I think this is a slightly different number, how many people are dependent upon this international, humanitarian operation?

ERIC REEVES: You are right; those are quite different questions. In fact, by the United Nations estimate, approximately 3.5 million people are conflict affected and in need of some humanitarian assistance. At the same time, the United Nations estimates on the basis of World Food Program registrations that there are about 1.8 million internally displaced people inside Darfur, and another 200,000 plus refugees in Eastern Chad, just across the border from Darfur. On the other hand, we know that World Food Program registrations do not reflect the full number of those that have been displaced, those who are in need of food; they certainly do not reflect acute human distress in inaccessible rural areas. The areas that are inaccessible only grow in size, but 3.5 million people defined as conflict affected is more than half the pre-war population of Darfur. We do not know precisely what that population was, between six and six and a half million, but I would argue that the data strongly argues for a total mortality in the range of 400,000 human beings, with a monthly mortality rate that could accelerate very rapidly. Indeed, just over a year ago, Jan Egeland, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator predicted that if there were a full-scaled humanitarian withdrawal, as many as 100,000 human beings could die every month. We are far too close to that perilous moment.

JERRY FOWLER: As you mentioned before, the main line of defense against this full-scale humanitarian withdrawal is an African Union force that is very small, under equipped, and stretched very thin. Just very recently there has been increasing talk of creating a United Nations force to either augment or substitute for the African Union force. What are the prospects for that?

ERIC REEVES: I think the prospects are good that it will happen eventually, but we need to worry about that word eventually. The African Union declares itself that it will be out of money in March of this year. There is no possible way that a United Nations force could deploy by March as Kofi Annan admitted when he described a robust force that would be needed if security were to be provided on the ground in Darfur. We have to ask, “What will happen in the United Nation Security Council?? Will China allow an appropriate peace making mission to be deployed? A peace-making mission will require Chapter 7 authority under the United Nations charter. I think it is very doubtful that China will acquiesce in a Chapter 7 deployment, and yet only a deployment of the sort Kofi Annan described-with tactical aircraft, robust force on the ground, involving European and United States troops, with excellent logistical transport, communications, capacity-only such a force can really bring an end to the fighting, protect humanitarians, protect the many, hundreds of thousands of people displaced and at an acute risk everyday. How are we going to get to that force? What will be the timeline? I am afraid that if the United Nations is our conduit for a peace-making force into Darfur, we are talking about many months. In those months, we could see wholesale catastrophe.

JERRY FOWLER: How do we close that gap? If it is going to take many months for the United Nations to be the conduit, what are the alternatives?

ERIC REEVES: The alternatives are very few. In fact, the International Crisis Group has argued as of July 2005 that NATO needed to provide a bridging force for the African Union. I would argue that NATO needs to provide a bridging force for an eventual United Nations deployment. The security crisis in Darfur has, for over a year and a half now, been defined in terms of African Union capacity rather than in terms of the actual needs on the ground. As soon as we look at the needs on the ground and define the humanitarian intervention on those terms then it becomes clear that NATO really is the only force available that could respond in a timely way. We need to be very careful about ratcheting up slowly to a robust intervening force because that would give Khartoum and its Janjaweed militia proxies a chance to engage in anticipatory retribution against the targeted non-Arab or African populations of Darfur that have been the victims of this genocide. We cannot wield a big stick and threaten very slowly without expecting that there will be very serious consequences on the ground in Darfur. That is why I would argue a rapid, robust, NATO intervention is all that can begin to turn the tide of clearly declining security on the ground.

JERRY FOWLER: When you talk about a NATO led intervention, is your idea that this would be under the authorization of the United Nations?

ERIC REEVES: We would hope that that would be the course of action, but all the countries of Europe and the United States are signatories to the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. This is a convention that demands the prevention as well as the punishment of the crime of genocide. I would argue that this Convention allows for and demands-certainly morally demands-that genocide be prevented. We should make no mistake; genocide is ongoing, the human destruction in Darfur is genocidal. Recent reports from any number of organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights, make unambiguously clear that the ethnically targeted human destruction matches several of the key terms of Article II of the Genocide Convention. Are we serious about preventing genocide or not? If the United Nations will not authorize a force to prevent further genocide, then it becomes the obligation of those signatories of the Convention to do so on their own.

JERRY FOWLER: Let us shift gears for a moment. You started out by saying that your involvement with Sudan began with dealing with the crisis in Southern Sudan which ostensibly was ended with what is known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that was signed a year ago this month, in January of 2005, and supposedly it is being implemented with the creation of new government of National Unity, the creation of a government of South Sudan. Where do you see the status of things being in Southern Sudan today as a result of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement?

ERIC REEVES: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement is in deep trouble. The key benchmarks in the agreement-the security arrangements protocol, the wealth sharing protocol, even the power sharing protocol-these key benchmarks have not been met by Khartoum, which is not sharing oil wealth with the South in terms dictated by the wealth sharing protocol; it is not withdrawing its troops from Southern Sudan as the security protocol required; the Khartoum government, which is called a government of National Unity is still dominated by the same men-the National Islamic Front-who came to power by military coup in 1989, deposing an elected government, and deposing it not simply to seize power, but also to abort the most promising chance for peace in Southern Sudan since Independence in 1956. The National Islamic Front, which has renamed itself the National Congress Party, is still the overwhelmingly powerful force in government, controls all military force, all security forces. The failure to draw down troops in Southern Sudan is a clear sign that the government is not really serious about implementing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. If the Comprehensive Peace Agreement fails and we see resumed fighting in the South, one of the consequences will be a sense by Khartoum that it has nothing to lose in Darfur, or in the East, or in the Nuba Mountains, or in Southern Blue Nile, the various marginalized areas that have been excluded from national power, that have been denied their share of national wealth. If war breaks out in the South it will be so clearly a sign of contempt for the international community that Khartoum’s genocidaire will calculate that they may do what they wish and they will have continued support from the Arab League, the African Union which is holding its summit in Khartoum next week. I am afraid they will simply thumb their noses at the various agreements they have made in some sense with Western countries that supported the Comprehensive Peace Agreement-primarily Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States, but many other European countries as well. This is the achievement of the EGAD, an East African Consortium, but also an achievement to Western diplomacy augmenting African diplomacy. The failure of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement would be a major failure of diplomacy in Africa.

JERRY FOWLER: We are coming to the end of the time that we have. Let me see if I can bring these together-the crisis in Darfur, the problems with implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and you referred to the brewing trouble in the East which we have also addressed on this program and in previous episodes. What would a comprehensive approach to Sudan look like? What would be the main elements of it and what are the obstacles to implementing that kind of comprehensive approach?

ERIC REEVES: The primary obstacle remains the National Islamic Front. So long as they have essentially a monopoly on political power and national wealth, there will be no peace in Sudan. This security cabal is guilty of genocide in the Nuba Mountains, in the oil regions of Southern Sudan, in Darfur, and we should make no mistake that if fighting breaks out in the East, it will be directed against the Beja people and it will be another genocide. The Beja people have the misfortune, in some sense, of existing very close to the export oil pipe line that runs from South Sudan to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. This is far too strategic a source of national wealth for Khartoum to allow the East to threaten in any way this oil pipeline. Some way or another, the international community must figure out those diplomatic, economic, and other measures that will democratize political power and end the National Islamic Front monopoly. Right now the National Islamic Front controls the presidency through Omar al-Bashir, the President himself, Ali Osman Taha, formerly first Vice President, and now second Vice President. The National Islamic Front controls the army; it controls the security apparatus; through Salih Gosh. One of the architects of the Darfur genocide, recently flown to Washington, D.C. by the CIA, in a topic to be addressed later, but the United States interest in terrorist intelligence that Khartoum might provide tells us way too much about why there is no more pressure on the National Islamic Front; why the National Islamic Front does not feel sufficient pressures to include other political elements, both from the North, but also from the South, the West, and the East. Until there is a true opening up of political possibilities in Khartoum, we will not see peace. This regime, the National Islamic Front regime which still dominates what is nominally a government of National Unity, will not make a just peace for the people of Sudan. It is inconvenient for the international community to recognize this fact and act on it, but it is a fact nonetheless.

JERRY FOWLER: We are going to have to leave it right there for now Eric. Thank you so much for being with us.

ERIC REEVES: My pleasure.

NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org