FEATURE: Key decisions ahead for US policy on Sudan

By Daniel Van Oudenaren

September 28, 2008 (WASHINGTON) — More than four years now after the current US administration declared that “genocide has been committed in Darfur,” diplomats are seeking to increase the number of peacekeepers in Darfur and salvage key provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, while expert observers emphasize that almost any course is wrought with complexity and uncertainty for the people of Sudan.

The United States is supporting the efforts of the new UN-African Union joint mediator for Darfur, Djibril Bassolé, reports Tim Shortley, the new senior representative for Sudan at the Department of State. “I have also been meeting with UN Department of Peacekeeping officials to discuss possible US assistance to increase the number of peacekeepers to be deployed to Darfur in support of the UN-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID).

“We would like to increase the number of peacekeepers in Darfur by 4,000 troops before the end of the year. Countries such as Ethiopia, Egypt, Rwanda and Thailand are ready to come to Darfur to play an important role in stabilizing the region,” writes Shortley at the official State Department blog.

But there are dangers ahead, say administration officials, and a need to rethink core concepts of strategy and diplomatic practice, say policy analysts.

“The peace process is moribund,” says US Special Envoy to Sudan Richard Williamson about the political situation in Darfur. “The mayhem, murder and misery continues. The Darfur Peace Agreement has failed.”

What is more, implementation delays have left preparations for Sudan’s 2009 elections at a “crisis point” beyond which the effective support required for credible elections will be impossible to achieve, says Earl Gast, a senior official of the Africa program at the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO

Describing a potential worst-case scenario for the Sudanese elections, Jennifer Cooke, codirector of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explains that there could be a “breakdown of the election process, you could see fracturing within northern Sudan, major fracturing within southern Sudan, resumption of violence and conflict. You may see a hunkering down of the regime in Khartoum, looking for allies elsewhere.”

“I think the next administration, whether McCain or Obama, has a real responsibility to forestall this crisis in Sudan. Because it could dwarf what’s happening in Darfur and really subsume all our energies towards Africa in a very negative way,” warns Cooke.

FUNDAMENTALS OF THE PEACE IN DOUBT

Yet even if the CPA – widely considered a landmark achievement of the Bush administration, which helped broker the deal – is preserved, and the southern part of Sudan is put on a clear heading toward its treaty-mandated 2011 referendum for independence, the situation still might not necessarily meet constituents’ expectations for humanitarian and security goals. “Let’s not pat ourselves on the back too much for bringing about the CPA,” explains Douglas Johnson, a foremost historian of Sudan.

“Southern Secession provides no solution for the peoples of the Nuba mountains and the Blue Nile along the south border. So separation by itself will not bring a lasting peace,” says Johnson, referring to areas not strictly considered part of the south that revolted during the 22-year civil war, much as Darfur did in 2003, but which were not included in the 2005 peace deal brokered between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement of the south and the National Congress Party government of the north.

“The faction within the [ruling] National Congress Party who feel that too much was conceded in the CPA is now in the ascendant and is preparing to hold on to as much as possible in the future, which is why the border regions of Abyei, the Nuba mountains and Blue Nile are in such turmoil now.” At least 69 children died from malnutrition and disease in recent weeks in the Blue Nile region, the UN reported on Thursday, the day following Johnson’s remarks.

PUSHING FOR LEADERSHIP, CHANGE OF OUTLOOK

Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist at Congressional Research Service, urges policy-makers to consider regime change, covert action, unilateral military action and providing air defense systems to the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army. While few US officials are likely to publicly accommodate such hawkish suggestions, they could enjoy some congressional support and are backed by a policy tradition – Wilsonian moralism, a broad and periodically dominant strain in American foreign policy – that is largely comfortable with unilateral interventions.

Such aggressive involvement or the use of other forms of serious leverage, however, are still forestalled by US counterterrorism cooperation with Khartoum, as well as a more basic lack of diplomatic resources and misunderstanding of the political situation in Sudan, experts continue to say.

Johnson, referring to his 1984 testimony before congress, in which he claimed the US had misread the political situation in Sudan, explains that ironically he was disregarded as naïve at a time when the US was backing Khartoum and was soon to embark on a course of supporting the subsequent Khartoum regimes, including the current one that would come to harbor al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin-Laden. Johnson argues that the US government “still misreads the political situation in the Sudan, and [has] a Sudan policy still subordinated to a dominant security policy.”

“I will have to say that I was not convinced by Ambassador Williamson’s answer to these points just now,” said Johnson in reference to questions put to Williamson on Sept. 24 about whether US counterterrorism policy has taken precedence over policies to promote human security in Sudan.

There has been serious misdirection in US diplomatic involvement, says John Prendergast, formerly the director of African affairs at the National Security Council and now co-chair of the advocacy group Enough Project, who critiques “the conventional wisdom” about the Darfur peace process, which is that “the splintering of rebel factions has resulted in a vacuum of political authority and the absence of a viable Darfurian interlocutor for peace negotiations.” Prendergast urges that more Darfuri be included in the peace process, through civil society and diaspora groups.

That peace process, he says, is in urgent need of US leadership. “The US must refocus the international community on the opportunities present today in Sudan, instead of dwelling on the flat-lined DPA and making incremental improvements to the fundamentally flawed UNAMID,” says Prendergast, referring to the Darfur Peace Agreement of 2006, which only one rebel group signed and which is widely recognized to have failed to improve the situation on the ground. “Just like in southern Sudan, a peace deal is what will bring an end to the violence. Absent that, even tripling the number of peacekeepers will have little impact.”

‘MAJOR INTERNAL BATTLES’

Prendergast claims, furthermore, that there have been “major internal battles within the administration.”

According to a Sept. 21 Washington Post report, the appointment of a controversial Rwandan general to the peacekeeping mission in Darfur “opened a deep rift within the administration” – but it is not clear that Prendergast was referring to this instance.

“Ambassador Williamson has personally pushed to do something, but he, I believe, is doomed to be the Bush administration’s Sisyphus, pushing rocks up the hill, only to have them thrown back down the hill by senior State Department officials who are to remain nameless,” says Prendergast, likening the State Department’s internal battles to the ancient myth of Sisyphus, a man condemned to perpetually roll a stone up a hill.

The role of Sudan’s First Vice President Taha as interlocutor for Robert Zoellik, formerly the US Deputy Secretary of State and now President of the World Bank, tends to influence other levels of US government, Prendergast implied on Friday, referencing reportedly cordial relations between the two officials. This relationship should not remain static, but should be leveraged, says Prendergast.

Zoellik, like former US Special Envoy Andrew Natsios, did not back congress and the administration’s 2004 contention that genocide was being committed in Darfur, and was criticized in Nov. 2005 by the activist group Genocide Intervention Network for calling the Darfur situation a “tribal war.” While almost any observer will acknowledge a tribal component of the conflict, few experts characterize the conflict entirely as Zoellick did, since both rebel and Janjaweed forces consist also of widely recruited professional military cadres, many of whose leaders come from or were educated in Khartoum itself.

At even a functional level, “resources within the State Department, particularly devoted towards Africa, were sapped by the Iraq war and 9/11 and so forth. There’s a chronic deficit of senior high-level officials within the Africa department because of funding and so forth,” says Cooke.

POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES

While some imply that the two American political parties will handle Sudan policy significantly differently – many Sudanese themselves, for instance, regard Democrats as more hawkish – the point may be moot if a critical course of action has to be determined in the coming months, especially if a crisis is prompted by the potential impending International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is accused on ten counts of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

Moreover, there are some trends that transcend overt political distinctions. Sudan policy is shaping conservatives’ perspective on the ICC perhaps more than their opposition to the ICC is shaping Sudan policy. The US has acquiesced to letting the ICC process run its course, despite having previously vehemently opposed the court for ideological reasons and fears that it would unfairly prosecute US soldiers.

Although the US probably still will not sign the Rome Statute, the treaty governing the ICC, the Darfur situation is prompting “the beginning of a breakthrough on policy,” says Vienna Colucci, director of international justice at Amnesty International.

“I think the more you raise public awareness … and the less it becomes an abstract entity that people don’t know what it does, and the more that you have real pieces, it also creates a bigger pressure from constituents – not just a ‘base’ who might be interested in a particular religious freedom, but also beyond that,” says Colucci, referring to evangelical supporters of Bush’s 2005 Sudan peace initiative. “Just because it becomes politically harder to continue to attack an entity that’s really doing something that people think is important and valuable.”

The US is the largest donor of both food and non-food humanitarian assistance to people in Darfur and eastern Chad. Since the fiscal year 2005, the US has contributed more than $4 billion in humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and reconstruction programs to the people of Sudan and eastern Chad.

The US officially considers Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism, although cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Sudanese intelligence is widely acknowledged, particularly after Sudanese intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh made a 2004 visit to CIA’s Langley Headquarters on board an agency jet, and later in 2006 received medical treatment and met with officials in the United Kingdom.

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