Sudan peace process on the road to nowhere
Arab marauders have killed thousands in Sudan’s Darfur region and forced a million from their homes. What will the world do this time
By Tom Masland, Newsweek
May 3 issue — Mornay is what passes for a safe haven in western Sudan. For 14 months, the government has fought a merciless war against rebels in the remote Darfur region. Sudanese warplanes and the feared Arab militiamen known as the janjaweed, who attack on horseback, have depopulated much of an area larger than California, driving roughly 1 million villagers into a few spots like Mornay. In January the town had some 2,000 inhabitants; by March there were 80,000. Every village within 30 miles has been leveled, says Coralie Lechelle, a nurse with the relief group Medecins sans Frontieres. Refugees are stuck there, she says: “In fact, it is a prison.”
It’s about to get worse: the rainy season is coming. Most of the displaced villagers sleep in the open, having lost nearly everything else along with their homes. They can’t reach their fields to plant this year’s crops, and in May, when the rains start, it will be too late. Diseases, especially waterborne ones, are sure to spread. Meningitis has already broken out at a camp on the Chad border. Flooding will likely make some camps inaccessible. Many are largely cut off even now. Khartoum is barring aid shipments from Chad or anywhere else outside its control. And relief groups say militia raids against rebel areas continue despite the regime’s recent signing of a 45-day truce. “African countries and the entire world must decide if we will act to try to stop the genocide in Darfur or if we will respond with silence and inaction as we did in Rwanda 10 years ago,” wrote Richard Williamson, the U.S. envoy to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, in the Chicago Sun-Times recently. “To fail to act is morally indefensible.”
Last week the White House had a chance to take action. Instead, President George W. Bush certified, as required every six months under the 2002 Sudan Peace Act, that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is negotiating in good faith for an end to Sudan’s other civil war: the decades-old rebellion in southern Sudan. If the president had withheld his signature, he could have unleashed severe economic sanctions against Khartoum. But a southern peace framework seems tantalizingly close, so policymakers faced a tough choice. “It’s frustrating,” says a senior State Department official, “but given all the progress, we couldn’t say they weren’t cooperating.”
The administration badly wants peace between Khartoum and the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. Since 1983, the war between northern Muslims and southern animists and Christians has killed some 2 million Sudanese and driven 5 million from their homes. (In the recent conflict over Darfur, where both sides are predominantly Muslim, an estimated 30,000 have died.) Ending the north-south war would be a huge step toward stabilizing the Horn of Africa and would open the way to Sudan’s newly proven oil reserves. Administration officials say Africa will eventually supply as much as 30 percent of America’s oil. But before Sudan can fully exploit its oil, Khartoum and the SPLM have to work out the last few details of how power and revenues are to be divided during the six-year run-up to a referendum on southern autonomy.
The regime shows no hurry. “Khartoum has a vested interest in the status quo-no war and no peace,” says John Prendergast, a Clinton-era National Security Council staffer now advising the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. “It can continue to milk 100 percent of the profits from oil. And with no fighting in the south it can concentrate its military hardware and assets on Darfur.” On Friday the United States took a hard line against Khartoum, casting the lone vote against a U.N. Commission on Human Rights resolution expressing concern about Darfur. The language was too mild, Williamson said; it should have talked about “ethnic cleansing.” There will likely be other chances before the killing stops.
* With Richard Wolffe in Washington