How to negotiate lasting peace in Darfur?
By Savo Heleta
February 9, 2008 — The Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), signed in 2006, has been a failure from the outset. It was backed by the Sudanese government and only one rebel faction in Darfur. Instead of bringing peace, the agreement had caused more fighting among the rebels and between the Sudanese government forces and rebel groups. What’s more, the rebel faction that signed the DPA immediately initiated combined military action with the government’s forces against the non-signatory rebel groups.
For a negotiation process to be successful, all parties need to have an intention to achieve a settlement and believe that resolving conflict through negotiations is the best option available. The Darfur Peace Agreement failed because the majority of rebels and Darfur society ignored it.
According to the International Crisis Group (2007), a number of the core issues that drive the conflict in Darfur, such as land tenure, grazing rights and use, and local government’s role, were not resolved in the DPA. Another main disadvantage of the DPA was the fact that the agreement relied far too much on the Sudanese government to carry out many of the accord’s provisions. They were supposed to disarm Janjaweed militia, which they never did.
As maintained by the International Crisis Group (2006), the international community, “in its eagerness to get a peace deal, brokered one that was structurally weak.” Without the major parties and the good faith of those who signed the agreement, the DPA was destined to fail.”
This is not the first time that the international community had tried to get an agreement by any means.
In 1993, the international community brokered the Arusha Accord that promised to end the protracted conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Even though the experts had called the Arusha Accord a “virtual textbook case of modern conflict management,” the international community’s obsession with getting a peace agreement at all costs led to a lack of analysis and a failure to consider whether or not the Accord could be implemented on the ground. Alan Kuperman (1996) argues that,
There is little doubt that the proximate cause of the genocide in Rwanda was that the [Rwandan] President Habyarimana signed and began to implement an agreement that threatened the privileged position of powerful extremists in his country. It was not until the Arusha Accord of August 1993 that extremists took the final steps necessary to implement the genocide… It was continuing international pressure that ultimately drove Habyarimana to agree to implement the Accord.
Many members of the Rwandan government team viewed the entire peace process as a highly disadvantageous, ‘win-lose’ situation. The Hutu extremists claimed that “the extermination of the Tutsis would be the inevitable consequence of the implementation of the Arusha Accord” (Scorgie, 2004). To prevent their own losses, the extremists set off to organize the fastest genocide in human history, where over 800,000 people were slaughtered in only 100 days.
Back in Sudan, the Sudanese ruling National Congress Party and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, thus formally ending the north-south conflict. However, the negotiations and the agreement did not include the conflict in Darfur, even though some of the worst fighting and violence there took place just before the signing of the CPA. Some analysts claim that the peace agreement between the south and the government has enabled Sudan to switch its military resources to Darfur.
A report by the International Crisis Group (2007) presents mistakes made by the international community relating to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Darfur crisis:
[Recent] International efforts have become so concentrated on Darfur, albeit without much success, that the CPA implementation – the bedrock for peaceful transformation in Sudan – is being ignored, in effect a reversal of the situation in 2003-2004, when the focus on ending the north-south war led to diplomatic reluctance to address the unfolding catastrophe in Darfur.
Last year, the United Nations and the African Union organized Darfur peace talks in Libya without securing the presence of the major rebel groups. The talks failed even before they began. Such a complex conflict needs better structured and more serious approach.
The next peace talks to end the crisis and human suffering in Darfur should be planned and carried out by proven experts from the conflict management field, not politicians and diplomats obsessed only with quick fix solutions and geopolitical interests. The negotiators need to broaden participation to all the parties involved plus the civil society from Darfur and address the root causes of the conflict if they want a long-term solution. Their goal must be an agreement that can be implemented on the ground without angering any of the sides. They should keep in mind the “virtual textbook case of modern conflict management” that triggered the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
A peace agreement will last only if it accommodates and is signed by all parties. Everything else will be a short-term masquerade and a further protraction of conflict and violence.
* The author a postgraduate student in Conflict Transformation and Management at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He is the author of Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia. The book will be published in the United States by AMACOM, New York, in March ’08. More about the book on www.savoheleta.com