The Darfur Conference in Qatar: Reflexive issues cross-tabulate deflective passions
By Mahgoub El-Tigani
February 14, 2009: In these past weeks, the Sudanese government busied itself with public campaigns to denounce the ICC indictment of the government’s senior official, Omer al-Bashir. The government threatened the International Community with grave post-indictment acts, and silenced whoever dared to ask government indicted officials to abide-by international law to save the country from further serious effects.
THE AU/AL DEFLECTIVE PASSIONS
To deflect the rising excitement of people, as the ICC verdict is almost done, the government media heated up hysterical deflections to camouflage the national attention from following-up the escalated crisis. Led by the indicted president, the state media disseminated a wave of distractions spreading news about the “illegality, non-relevancy, and non-obligatory jurisdiction of the ICC” over Sudan.
The Qatar-led conference to close the gap between Darfur rebel movement JEM and the Government of Sudan provided an opportunity to rally the Sudanese public opinion around some reconciliation possibilities. And yet, a war-like crude statement by the Minister of Defense against an alleged conspiracy to launch a new civil war in Kordofan, the neighboring region of Darfur, evidenced a long-standing ambivalent zigzag of the NIF/NCP short-sighted tactics to undermine non-partisan participation in national affairs.
Apart from the massive popular protest against the killing of hundreds of children and women, in particular, by the army of Israel in the Israeli-Hamas most recent armed conflict in Gaza, the Sudanese government raised the banners of condemning the ICC Prosecutor Ocampo amongst the protesting crowds. As a result, many demonstrators were loudly asking for severe punishments against the ICC!
Many observers noted with increasing concerns the African Union-Arab League political “passion” to protect governments and/or senior officials from criminal responsibility or legal accountability, rather than protecting the public interest in compliance with internationally-recognized charters and religious teachings.
These passionate attempts to get the Security Council to ease the case of Omer al-Bashir from application of possible ICC decisions have undoubtedly encouraged the Sudanese government to act, free of all national or global obligations, in all media avenues, including the United Nations platforms, to accuse the ICC Prosecutor General and “imperialist sources” of “plotting against the national unity of Sudan” by “the unlawful indictment of Omer al-Bashir”!
Quite expectedly, however, the NIF/NCP 20 years’ of bad governance culminated finally in irreconcilable conflicts in the complex arena of international relations, which definitely lies beyond the authoritative policies of the ruling party and its allies in and outside the country. Judged by all possible legal provisions and political measures, the NIF/NCP self-imposed governance vis-à-vis the ICC/Security Council is the hardest ordeal and is the most critical challenge the ruling junta ever faced:
THE NDA OPPOSITION DEFLECTIONS
True, the Sudanese major opposition parties, the former and/or present-time members of the NDA Leadership Council, especially the Umma, DUP, Communists, SPLM/SPLA, failed to honor the NDA Charter and celebrated resolutions to “bring to international justice the culprits of the June 1989 military or civilian junta” (NDA), as main agenda of the transition period.
Earlier, the Cairo Communiqué of the NDA Leadership Council (Cairo: August 17, 1998) condemned in the strongest terms the “unabated gross human rights violations by the ruling regime” and welcomed “the establishment of an international criminal court to prosecute the transgression, war, and crimes against humanity; the kind of crimes continuously committed by the Khartoum ruling regime.”
Instead of complying with their own commitment to force Omer al-Bashir and his accomplices to comply with the ICC, the NDA parties lingered behind the indicted president. They did silence their NDA voices; even worst of all, they sided apparently with the ruling parties’ official stand against the ICC.
The passionate AU/AL sentiments to save the Sudanese seated president from ICC indictment, rather than objective diplomacy as a presentation of rational terms to resolve the government’s conflict with the ICC, confused the Sudanese public at large. This further allowed the indicted president and his aides to insult the ICC and Prosecutor Ocampo in misleading public campaigns never organized before by Sudanese state managers against an internationally-recognized authority.
The NDA-Government lined behind the “passionate” politics of the African Union and the Arab League to protect the indicted president. Ironically, both the African Charter and the Arab League cherished the ethics of principled governance since they emphasized in clear letters their deep concerns for the United Nations international norms, and they did condemn civil wars and crimes against humanity since they were born
GOVERNMENT POLITICS VS FORUMS in GOOD FAITH
The Qatar-led/Security Council round of negotiations, each in their own right, brought to the fore the crisis in Darfur within a whole set of ambivalent tactics:
Apparently, the Government of Sudan would have to consent to the major requirements of compliance with the Security Council Resolutions of which the ending of hostilities against the people of Darfur; the dignified return of the displaced civilians with sufficient compensations; the complete sharing of power relations with the Darfur rebels and civilian opponents; and the surrender of war criminals to the ICC due process of justice, among other requirements might constitute an acceptable deal for the Security Council to act favorably towards the crisis.
Following the NIF/NCP ambivalent tactics, however, the Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a member of the government’s negotiators at the Qatar Conference with JEM, did not hesitate (when interviewed by the Jazeera on February 11, 2009) to threaten the Darfur rebels with the use of force “since it is the government’s prerogative to preserve order in the country!” Little wonder, the Mutraf insistence in his government’s use of force was nothing but an extended reflection of the same threat by the minister of defense to overshadow the Qatar meetings.
These same war-like announcements were already endorsed by the government’s simultaneous attacks on Darfur rebels along the negotiations! The world is again reminded of the NIF ambivalent tactics throughout the negotiations with the SPLM/SPLA in the 1990s up to the IGAD talks in Naivasha to bring peace to the South. The government never ceased fire as a strategic policy to keep up the warfare efforts, while her delegates were solemnly sworn to place the issues of peace above all other concerns!
In appreciative modesty, the Qatari mediators said they were not aspiring to strike a full agreement between JEM and the government; but they aimed to bring about a “workable framework.” Even here, the Darfur rebels’ lack of trust in the government and the recurring attacks by government forces against Darfuri citizens were hardly reconcilable.
Some of the reconciliation requirements might be easily swallowed by the usurpation capacity of the NIF/NCP to ensure partisan top interests as was well-experienced in two decades. The regime might understandably impose favorable sacrifices on the faithful aides: State minister Haroun and commander Kushaib would certainly top the list for that purpose.
The hardest agenda, nonetheless, pertain to the dire need to establish effective participation by all armed groups, together with the JEM, versus the exclusionary politics of the government. The Sudanese, in general, and the Darfuri, in particular, maintained the gravest concerns to enjoy full participation in national and regional decision making. The failure of reconciliatory “frameworks” to contain this fundamental provision will simply nullify the reconciliation possibilities.
STERLIZING STRATEGIES
In the two decades of the NIF/NCP rule, the regional and international mediators in the peace process were faithfully advised by the Sudanese opposition, as well as human rights and democracy groups, to avoid the partisan politics that sidelined contending groups only to safeguard a few short-lived commitments by power-centered participants. The negotiations, however, often concluded in undesirable governance arrangements, as occurred in the CPA which granted upper-hand powers to the ruling junta at the expense of democratic forces.
Aware of the necessarily equalitarian relations to accomplish the country’s national unity and permanent peace versus the government’s co-opting plans, the Minawi-led Sudan Liberation Movement and the ‘Abd al-Wahid opposition group reechoed similar advisements and claims by the other opposition and civil society groups to persuade the United Nations and the Sudan Friends to recognize the comprehensive role to be played by the Sudanese popular movement in the Darfur peace process.
As is well known, all Darfur rebel groups and opposition parties held the NIF ruling party responsible, in the first place, for the crisis in Darfur. In a strong critique of the Qatar meetings, ‘Abd al-Wahid affirmed the JEM-Government meetings “are talks between two factions of the same ruling” (Jazeera, Feb. 2009). From his part, the JEM spokesperson emphasized his group’s independence from all NIF factions and then reiterated JEM commitment to the ICC.
Despite deep appreciation to the State of Qatar’s attempt to reconcile the warring groups in Darfur, these repulsive announcements and others indicated the hesitant mode of the rebels not to finalize a political agreement with the government in the absence of the other Darfuris. The extent to which the Qatar-made JEM-Government collaborative framework would maintain peace and mutual respect between JEM and the other Darfur rebels remains to be seen.
In the context of Sudanese politics, elective negotiations will never survive national unity, and the crisis in Darfur will not end without indiscriminate representation of the Darfuri rebels, in addition to the full engagement of the Sudanese political rainbow. Including the conference in Qatar, the earlier Abuja Conference and the following NIF/NCP Ahl al-Sudan Initiative piece-meal approaches failed to bring about a full-fledged political settlement of the crisis in Darfur.
THE OPPOSITION’S AMBIVALENCE
In the domestic arena, nonetheless, it seems that the opposition parties, including SPLM, the CPA partner, resorted to the ambivalent tactics of the NIF/NCP: Two contradictory stances were always made available; one reconciliatory stance to nurture the issues in dispute accompanied by a conflicting stance to expose the repressive nature of the regime.
Since June 30, 1989, the NIF politics dragged the Sudanese opposition via national reconciliations under a presumable threat of national unity and a sincere need to maintain the country’s integrity. All in all, these ambivalent tactics ruined the strategies of the opposition, especially the NDA, and helped the NIF/NCP to fall in isolationist policies to the detriment of the country’s needs to normalize relations with the International Community.
Very often than not, the opposition groups compromised their well-thought communiqués and principled plans to come to terms with the deceptive junta in the striving for national unity (including a unique theatrical show at the Republican Palace by all government and opposition parties to support al-Bashir versus the ICC!). In almost every round, however, the ruling party gained undeserved strides by cashing the outcome or manipulating the consequences to consolidate its own interests by some repressive policies.
The relative silence of the opposition groups not to mount up public resistance to stop the government’s gross violations of the Interim Constitution is a current outcome of the ambivalent tactics: The opposition fear for the elections is the most lucrative card blanche’ in the government’s hands to water down the Bill of Rights’ most appealing provisions in the Interim Constitution, especially the freedom of expression and the Press, the unity option, and the elimination of hostilities and warfare over the Nation.
Since approval of the Elections’ Act, the government toughened security measures against all opposition groups. Journalism, above all, was harshly censored. Several journalists have been placed under tight security surveillance since they demonstrated against the government’s legislation. The National Security and Intelligence Department (NSID) played a key role in the suppression of journalism and the civil society groups. These ill-practices are daily exercised despite the government’s and the opposition’s celebration of the Elections’ Act and the Journalists’ Act!
The al-Midan daily of the Communist Party (which concluded a party conference at the Friendship Hall days ago in support of the Sudanese struggles for the permanent and just peace by the CPA democratic transition and pluralist rule) was the most recent victim of the Gosh-led NSID anti-constitutional censorial power – one unlawfully delegated by President Omer al-Bashir to the NSID in gross violation of the Constitutional stipulation of the NSID as “an information data collector,” not any regime’s protector.
The SPLM Secretary General Pagan Amum’s cautioning press conference (February 2009) about the CPA performance and the observable negative reactions among Southerners towards the unity option in the upcoming referendum surfaced serious concerns about the government’s lack of interest and the unabated tensions by the NIF/NCP authoritative rule to suppress public freedoms and conquer the civil society, especially in the ongoing pre-elections period.
To make it worse, the government expanded renewed hostilities against the peace process and the CPA, despite wise appeals from domestic and external sources to the NIF/NCP to abide-by the ICC requirements, the most important element to bridge the widening rupture between the Government of Sudan and the International Community.
THE OPPOSITION POTENTIALITIES
The steeping disintegration of the NDA Leadership Council in the post-CPA transitional period was repeatedly predicted by observers beginning the exclusion of the NDA from the CPA negotiations in Kenya 2004. Many commentators alarmed that the bilateral agreement between the SPLM and the NIF/NCP must be supported by active participation by all parties in the national decision making processes along the transition to democratic rule – a peace strategy strongly adopted by the CPA.
Applying the CPA parliamentary verdict that the regime mechanically enjoyed over all opposition groups, including the SPLM partner, the unabated suppression of the opposition and civil society activists by the Bashir Presidency and government has certainly ensued in a situation of non-equilibrium policies in both domestic and international arenas.
Most likely, the Qatar Conference might end up with “a bilateral framework of understanding between the JEM and the Government of Sudan.” The framework will not include a detailed program of action. Rather, it will touch upon letters of understanding to prepare the ground for shared concerns and perhaps strategies for further negotiations. But the correlations between domestic deals and international obligations must be seriously realized to ascertain equal representation of the other players.
AVOIDING THE CPA BILATERAL DEALS
To guarantee a progressively-oriented agreement, the national democratic agenda on the crisis of Darfur must be carefully adopted. The achievement of this goal, however, should not fail to break the NIF/NCP repressive monopoly; nor should it hesitate to bring to the table of negotiations the Darfur rebel and opposition groups as well as the NDA groups and the Umma opposition parties.
The reciprocated fears between the NIF/NCP and the other contending groups will not rest in peace, however, unless the Government of Sudan commits to workable relations with the ICC and the Office of the ICC Prosecutor. Furthermore, the Government must be lawfully prepared to abide-by the Security Council resolutions.
The GOS must ensure the full enjoyment of human rights and public freedoms for all citizens, indiscriminately. The GOS must seriously apply the CPA national and international orientations together with provisions of the Interim Constitution. The Presidency should commission the National Security and Intelligence Department to play its sole constitutional role as a strictly information agency, short of any authority to censor the Press or to harass civil society activists.
* The author is a sociologist at the Department of Social Work & Sociology in Tennessee State University, Nashville TN, USA. He can be reached at [email protected]