The international community pampers Sudan on Darfur crisis

By Eric Reeves, the Guardian online

October 10, 2007 — Lakhdar Brahimi, a former UN envoy to Iraq and one of several
international eminences know as “the Elders,” briefly toured Sudan last
week and declared that the Darfur rebels were being “pampered” by the
“international community.” This sentiment represents a growing
exasperation on the part of western and African diplomats with the
Darfuri rebels for being unable to coordinate a common position from
which to negotiate a peace accord. And for this failure, rebel leaders
and Darfuri political leaders in the disapora bear a great deal of
blame, even as Khartoum has been exceedingly resourceful in its
divide-and-rule policies.

But the notion that the rebels are being pampered by the international
community is simply nonsense. Diplomatic criticism of the rebel leaders
has grown steadily in past weeks and months. Moreover, one has only to
look at the anemic Western contributions to the UN/AU hybrid peace
support operation to Darfur authorized by UN Security Council Resolution
1769 to see how little pampering has occurred. All evidence suggests
that the people of Darfur – civilians and rebels alike – will be left
without meaningful improvement in human security for many months to
come.

Indeed, the international community’s willingness to commit to a policy
of moral equivalence, in which Khartoum is no more responsible for
violence and civilian destruction in Darfur than the rebels, shows that
it is the Khartoum regime that is pampered, not the rebels. This
perverse balancing of moral equities prior to peace talks scheduled to
take place in Sirte, Libya has played directly into the broader strategy
of the regime. These ruthless survivalists envision, with terrifying
plausibility, a peace process owned by no one, poorly prepared for by AU
and UN envoys, and presenting unfettered opportunities for the regime to
cleave insistently to the ill-conceived Darfur peace agreement (DPA) as
the only basis for negotiations.

The rebels, as well as Darfuris in camps for the displaced,
overwhelmingly reject the DPA. Thus, with diplomatic pressure largely
removed because of Khartoum’s nominal commitment to a peace process, and
with the disastrous consequences of the rebel attack on Haskanita, the
regime intends to move toward a final military solution of its Darfur
problem. Hundreds of thousands of civilian Darfuris are poised to die.

This renewed military solution has already begun in earnest, and Darfur
appears on the brink of a resumption of full-scale war. Khartoum has in
recent days attacked a number of targets, including humanitarians and
civilians, and is gathering its forces across this deeply threatened
region. The town of Haskanita, which came under Khartoum’s control
following the rebel attack on the nearby AU outpost, has been completely
burned to the ground by Khartoum’s regular forces, together with the
Janjaweed militia. All the surrounding ethnically African villages have
been abandoned, according to Suleiman Jamous, the most respected and
credible of the rebel leaders, who also reports that during a rampage of
several days more than 100 civilians were killed. The Associated Press
has reported that 15,000 civilians were forced to flee the area. Some
130km to the west, according to numerous reliable reports, the town of
Muhajeria was bombed on Monday by one of Khartoum’s Antonov aircraft.
Amnesty International reports that the plane was painted white, the
colour of UN aircraft. At least 40 civilians were killed in this town of
5,000, which also hosts some 45,000 displaced civilians. We should bear
in mind that all offensive aerial military flights are prohibited by the
March 2005 UN Security Council Resolution 1591, a prohibition that
Khartoum regularly ignores because of tepiinternational community Brahimi invokes as pampering the rebels.

There are threats far to the northwest, as well. Amnesty International
and others warned on Tuesday that Khartoum is massing its forces near at
least six towns in North Darfur, including Tine, Kornoy, Baru and Kutum.
Tine is approximately 500km from Haskanita. The Group of 19, comprising
many of the most honourable of the rebel commanders, dominates
militarily in North Darfur and had nothing to do with the attack on the
AU peacekeepers near Haskanita; indeed, at least one leader tried
desperately to halt the attack beforehand. And yet a major military
offensive by Khartoum is clearly in the offing, targeting this most
potent source of rebel resistance.

Perhaps most ominously, Nyala – capital of South Darfur, the largest
town in the region and previously thought one of the safest – is on the
brink of a security collapse. Khartoum’s forces in this area are
attacking elements of the rebel faction of Minni Minawi. Reports from
the ground in and near Nyala indicate that UN humanitarian organizations
have begun withdrawing their non-essential personnel. If international
nongovernmental aid workers also withdraw, some of the very largest
camps for displaced persons in Darfur will be without assistance and –
in the absence of international witnesses – vulnerable to violent
assault. A number of expatriate humanitarian workers have also recently
been expelled from the Nyala region by Khartoum.

And yet those who have been most critical of the rebel attack on the AU
are evidently willing to countenance these attacks by Khartoum. The
demonizing of the rebels has gone far beyond what can possibly be
justified, even as a willingness to condemn Khartoum for its years of
massive atrocity crimes has in many quarters atrophied to the point of
merely perfunctory criticism.

Here it is important to recall something of the history of the Darfur
conflict, as this history is increasingly distorted or simply ignored.
The rebellion commonly dated to February 2003 grew out of years of
severe economic and political marginalization by Khartoum, as well as
antecedent ethnically targeted violence, much of it orchestrated by the
National Islamic Front regime through Arab militias. The late 1990s saw
especially intense attacks on the Massalit, an African tribal group that
has had over 95% of its villages in Darfur destroyed over the last
decade.

Since Khartoum began its genocidal counter-insurgency war after rebel
military successes of early 2003, the ensuing destruction has been
savagely comprehensive. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Africans have
been killed; tens of thousands of African women and girls have been
raped; the vast majority of African villages have been burned, along
with food and seed stocks. Precious water wells have been poisoned with
human or animal corpses. Agricultural implements have been destroyed;
mature fruit trees cut down. The notorious Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal
articulated the regime’s intention in an August 2004 memorandum: “Change
the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.”

When we assess current rebel violence, intransigence and fractiousness,
we risk hopelessly distorting the nature of the rebellion and continuing
resistance if we ignore the clear evidence of Khartoum’s strategy of
genocidal destruction. Similarly, if we ignore the regime’s record of
genocide – in Darfur, but also in the Nuba Mountains and the oil regions
of southern Sudan – then the baseline for any peace process will also be
badly distorted.

Confident that such distortions and ignorance will prevail, Khartoum has
moved decisively onto the military offensive. This in turn will make it
even harder to persuade rebel leaders to attend the peace talks.
Historical myopia, excessive criticism of the rebel groups and growing
international unwillingness to acknowledge the realities of genocidal
destruction have brought Khartoum steadily closer to a final solution of
its Darfur problem.

* Eric Reeves is author of A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide. He can be reached at [email protected]. www.sudanreeves.org