Efforts to help Darfur again reach dead end
Dec 04, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Efforts to ease Darfur’s crisis have once again stalled, after Sudan’s government all but buried a U.N. compromise deal to have its peacekeepers deploy jointly with the African Union.
Many predict Khartoum won’t budge unless the West can somehow muster strong sanctions against it.
The U.N. compromise deal was announced in late November by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as a major diplomatic breakthrough to bring peace to the wartorn region.
Annan said Sudan had agreed in principle to a “hybrid mission” of some 20,000 peacekeepers — mostly from Africa — to deploy in Darfur under U.N. command to replace an overwhelmed AU force.
Yet within 24 hours, Sudan’s foreign minister said there was a misunderstanding and that a “mixed operation” in Darfur did not mean a “mixed force.”
That put Sudan back to its original stance: that no U.N. peacekeeper could deploy in Darfur, but that the U.N. was welcome to provide logistical and financial support.
“International troops are a colonization of Sudan,” Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir later told reporters.
An African Union summit in Nigeria last week — which had been due to fine-tune the joint mission — instead was forced to yield to Sudanese pressure. It voted to prolong by another six months the stay of the underfunded and ill-equipped 7,000 AU peacekeepers.
Annan has repeatedly pledged to solve the Darfur crisis before he steps down as U.N. chief later this year. But the renewed blows to peace efforts come as no surprise to many.
“Its entirely coherent with (Sudan’s) pattern of behavior over the last 17 years,” since al-Bashir came to power in a 1989 Islamist and military coup, said Colin Thomas-Jensen of the International Crisis Group, a U.S. think tank.
Several Sudanese government hard-liners are believed to be on a list of suspects that the International Criminal Court has said it would prosecute for crimes against humanity.
That could explain why Sudan adamantly refuses to let the U.N. into Darfur, even though 10,000 peacekeepers are already in the country’s south on a separate mission, said Tom Cargyll of Chatham House, a British think tank.
“Khartoum has much more to lose at Darfur being internationalized than any other country has to win,” he said on the telephone. “It is willing to put much more in the balance.”
In addition, Al-Bashir and other Khartoum hard-liners have grown increasingly savvy at playing the rifts in international diplomacy, he said.
Sudan gained sympathy in the Arab world, for example, by comparing its confrontation with the West to the plight of Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinians — which many Arabs see as victims of U.S. foreign policy.
More importantly, Sudan knows that Russia and China, two veto-yielding powers at the U.N. Security Council, oppose international sanctions against it.
Previous U.N. sanctions against Sudan were lifted after it cooperated with U.S. counterterrorism efforts after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. U.S. sanctions were re-imposed in 1997 and recently strengthened, but such one-country measures have little effect in a globalized economy, analysts say.
More than 5 percent of China’s oil imports come from Sudan, and Khartoum knows that its key Asian ally is unlikely to let it down if the Security Council considers an embargo, Cargyll said.
“Over the past four years, there has been no real cost imposed on the Sudanese government for what is happening in Darfur,” Thomas-Jensen said.
Thursday’s AU summit in Abuja came as a bitter reminder of dashed hopes.
In the same city last May, the Sudanese government and a leading rebel group signed a deal meant to end three years of violence that have killed at least 200,000 people and displaced 2.5 million. The deal has since largely collapsed.
The U.N. Security Council voted in August to replace the AU force with 20,000 peacekeepers, but Khartoum rejected that.
Al-Bashir again said last week that the Darfur crisis is a western media hype fueled by America’s imperialist “hidden agenda” — namely, he contends, getting at Sudan’s oil.
The United States has given some indications it may take a more robust stance soon.
Andrew Natsios, the special envoy named by the White House, recently warned that if Khartoum did not accept an international solution by January, the U.S. and it allies would resort to a “Plan B.”
He did not specify what that might be, but Thomas-Jensen said there were “strong measures on the table” in Washington.
“If there’s a bipartisan way to move forward on Sudan, they’ll certainly move forward,” he said.
Analysts say the new strategy could be to push for targeted sanctions against Sudan’s main oil companies, suspected to be owned by regime hardliners.
But Khartoum appears confident the West won’t slam it with harsh measures, because too many countries now rely on its resources.
“Just when some countries gave us sanctions, God gave us oil,” al-Bashir said last week.
(AP)