Darfur: Abdul Wahid is right
Editorial, The Citizen Newspaper
April 19, 2007 — Nearly one year after the signing of the Abuja accord between the National Congress Party regime and one of the two major armed groups in Darfur, that of Mini Minawi, representing primarily the Zaghawa ethnic community, the Janjaweed, the regime’s proxy genocide militia, are still terrorizing the civilian population with impunity; therefore, when the leader of Darfur’s principal holdout faction, Sudan Liberation Movement’s Abdul Wahid Muhammed Nur, says that he will not resume negotiations with the NCP until the Janjaweed are disarmed and the people in the IDP camps return to their villages, he is making a reasonable point, which the international community should appreciate and prevail upon the NCP to do likewise.
Taking Abdul Wahid’s point in this regard seriously would first of all increase the success chances of the proposed hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force that was been agreed on by the two multilateral organizations and Sudan earlier this week. Greater political pressure must be brought to bear on the NCP to disarm and disband the Janjaweed; no one should entertain illusions of the UN-AU forces going into Darfur to clean out NCP’s dirty house. It is not the job of the UN-AU peacekeepers to go Janjaweed hunting in Darfur. The less the UN-AU forces have to engage in exchanges of fire the more successful their mission will be.
American Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was smart to place the burden of disarming the Janjaweed on the Sudanese government; what the UN-AU forces should be doing in Darfur is protecting civilians in the villages and IDP camps, which would mean that as long as the Janjaweed don’t venture into areas where the peacekeepers are doing their job there should be no contact between the two. If the Janjaweed dare attack the new alignment of forces, the NCP regime should be held responsible. Moreover, we would expect the UN-AU forces to have sufficient firepower to make any such Janjaweed venture suicidal. Unlike the Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, who imagine themselves martyrs, the Janjaweed are from a marauder background and are simply interested in looting, raping and the thrills of arson and cold blooded murder; they are not patrolling the arid expanses in Land Cruisers with ferocious artillery looking for bullets in their heads.
NCP might try to keep the Janjaweed on ice until the day when the Peacekeepers would have left Darfur, with a view to simply putting the genocide agenda in abeyance; but no doubt the only way to avoid this is to reach a peace deal wherein Darfur is given the right to retain its own military command, as South Sudan now does; though this would require a commitment from either the United States or North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to train the Darfur troops and give them a professional military orientation.
The violations of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement’s security protocols by the NCP and its armed forces, despite the South’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army being well armed, clearly indicates that the regime can never be trusted; as die hard militarists what it needs is a military deterrent, otherwise neither Darfur, Southern Sudan nor any of the other marginalized areas shall be in peace, irrespective of what the ink on the paper reads.
As we move ahead on the Darfur issue and endeavor to strengthen the position of Southern Sudan to get justice out of the CPA, the international community should not deal with the NCP regime like a legitimate government of a sovereign republic, but as a pack of unrepentant war criminals and genocidal maniacs, keeping in mind that this regime is the product of a coup d’état against a democratically elected government 18 years ago. The UN personnel in Sudan, whether in Southern Sudan, Darfur or Nuba Mountains, should survey public opinion among the marginalized communities and become honest brokers for the people as well as an objective institutionalized voice for their aspirations and demands. As much as one would like to avoid generalizations, we can safely say that African communities, with their institutionalized leadership structures, are traditionally and typically sober minded, but oppression and outrageous abuse may radicalize them. Thus the radicalization of our people came about as an instinctive defence and survival mechanism; that was the case during the colonial onslaught from Europe and is very much the case today in situations of domestic colonialism and tyranny. This is to say that we have to move from initial solutions that recognize the legitimacy of radical positions on the part of the oppressed peoples, as was the case of the CPA, to gradual cooperative institution building that would establish the new order we are demanding in Sudan.
In this age of supranationalism even if Southern Sudanese vote for separation in the 2011 referendum, improvement of the power profile of the marginalized communities in the national set up and the inevitable end of domestic colonialism and oligarchy will bring about a new situation in which Sudan would one day reunite on a cooperative federal or confederacy basis. The worse thing the international community could do at this point is play into the hands of the self-centered, antinationalist NCP regime, because this would only lead to unpopular deals that immediately start breaking at the seams, as was the case with the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) and Eastern Peace Agreement (EPA).