International response to Sudan’s ‘New Strategy for Darfur’

By Eric Reeves

October 10, 2010 — On September 16, senior ministers in Khartoum’s National Congress Party
(NCP) regime officially ratified their “New Strategy for Darfur,” a document
that will serve as a blueprint for consolidating the results of more than seven
years of genocidal counterinsurgency warfare in Darfur. Although publicly
promulgated in August, the document has barely registered in the news
media, even as its most insidious features require urgent translation. For
there can be little doubt about what the “New Strategy” entails: massive,
forced relocation of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs); denial of the need
for a continuing international humanitarian presence in Darfur; refusal to
participate seriously in an internationally mediated peace process; and the
establishment of a more robust “security” presence that will eventually
compel the withdrawal of the current UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur.
The New Strategy reads like an attempt to clear the ground for the final
solution to the Darfur problem. This harsh translation requires some context,
but its accuracy can scarcely be doubted, given recent and past actions in
Darfur by the regime.

The most significant context for the policies implicit in the “New Strategy”
is a belated rush by the international community to rescue the referenda for
South Sudan and the critical border enclave of Abyei. Scheduled for January
9, 2011, the referenda appear unlikely to be held in a free, fair, or timely
fashion. Although this has been clear for well over a year, the world has
done next to nothing as various deadlines and benchmarks established by the
January 2005 North/South peace agreement (the so-called Comprehensive
Peace Agreement, or CPA) have passed by unmet. Suddenly—with only 100
days until the referenda—attention from the United States, the EU, and the
UN has dramatically intensified. President Obama made a personal
appearance at the September 24 summit on Sudan at the UN in New York;
Secretary of State Clinton has declared Sudan to be a “ticking time bomb”;
additional diplomatic resources have been deployed to the region; the UN
Secretariat and Security Council have expressed serious concern; a
distressed insistence that these elections must occur as scheduled echoes in
various European capitals; even the Arab League and African Union now
offer more than their usual lip service to the importance of the referenda,
which are—in the eyes of the people of the South—the cornerstone of the
CPA. Only now do the guarantors of the CPA (chiefly the United States,
Great Britain, and Norway, but also the UN and the East African consortium
of nations known as IGAD) seem to realize that if Khartoum seeks to abort,
delay, or militarily preempt the referenda, there will be catastrophic war.

The result has been an ungainly lurch in diplomatic attention from Darfur to
the South. This is a grimly ironic reprise of the decision to ignore Darfur
during most of 2004 in the run-up to the January 2005 CPA signing in
Nairobi. At the very height of genocidal destruction in Darfur, the
international community was successfully blackmailed by Khartoum: “push
us too hard on Darfur and you won’t get the North/South peace agreement
you so desperately want.” By the time the agreement was signed, the worst
of the large-scale, ethnically targeted violence was over.

But that violence never ceased, and a meaningful peace agreement was
never reached with the rebel factions. Moreover, Khartoum continues to
flout a raft of UN Security Council resolutions: demanding that the brutal
Janjaweed militia be disarmed, demanding a halt to offensive military air
flights over Darfur, imposing an arms embargo on the region, guaranteeing
freedom of movement for UN/African Union peacekeepers, and
guaranteeing that humanitarian relief organizations have access to distressed
populations. It is simply shocking to look at the sheer physical size of the
stack of UN resolutions that have accumulated—meaninglessly—over the
past six-and-a-half years. The gap between words and action has created a
deep and abiding sense of impunity on the part of Khartoum and its
paramilitary allies in Darfur. They simply do not believe that the world is
serious about halting what amounts to ongoing genocide by attrition.

It hardly helps that the International Criminal Court has watched helplessly
as warrants for crimes against humanity have been issued for a senior
Khartoum official in Darfur (Ahmed Haroun, now governor of a key
North/South border state) and Ali Kushayb, known as the “colonel of
colonels” among the Janjaweed. President Omar al-Bashir has himself been
charged by the ICC with crimes against humanity and genocide. None of
those identified by human rights groups and UN investigators as bearing
responsibility for a wide range of atrocity crimes in Darfur has been brought
to justice—not one.

ALL THIS has bred a perverse confidence in Khartoum, and this—along
with diplomatic focus on the southern referenda—is what explains the
timing and character of the “New Strategy” document. If there is a key
proposal in the “New Strategy for Darfur”—and it appears with refrain-like
regularity—it is the insistence that “a top priority for the government [is] to
re-direct the humanitarian efforts towards rehabilitation and shifting from
depending on the relief to development and self-reliance.” The document not
only repeats this insistence, but demands the cooperation of UNAMID and
humanitarian organizations in Darfur: “The government expects UNAMID
and other partners to play [sic] decisive role in this anticipated shifting from
relief to development.” In one form or another, this emphasis on
“development” appears more than a dozen times in the eight-page document.

What is meant by this language? It is foremost a declaration that the
humanitarian crisis is essentially over, and that humanitarian capacity can be
shifted to development. The problem is that this is just not true.

The humanitarian crisis in Darfur is deepening, not improving. More than
2.7 million people remain internally displaced. Relief capacity has never
recovered from Khartoum’s March 2009 expulsion of thirteen of the world’s
finest humanitarian organizations, which at the time provided roughly half
the humanitarian aid in Darfur. Huge areas are inaccessible to aid workers,
either because of insecurity or because Khartoum restricts access; the
populous eastern Jebel Marra region, for example, has been without any
humanitarian relief since February because the regime denies relief
organizations flight and road clearance. Malnutrition has increased
dramatically during the current “hunger gap” (the period between spring
planting and fall harvest) even as the UN humanitarian coordinator for
Sudan, Georg Charpentier, refuses to release data and reports on food
insecurity (indeed, Charpentier now allows his press releases to be vetted by
the regime). Reports from the ground, especially via Radio Dabanga, give
horrifying glimpses into the suffering and destruction that have been
endured in the IDP camps this rainy season, which is only now ending.

To move from humanitarian assistance to development at this juncture
would also eliminate the raison d’être for a number of key organizations that
see themselves as emergency relief responders, like the remaining national
sections of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
More humanitarian aid, not less, is required; yet humanitarian crises
elsewhere, including South Sudan, have actually reduced the funds and
capacity in Darfur. During this year’s hunger gap, the UN World Food
Program further reduced rations for displaced persons, who now receive
only 50 percent of the UN’s minimum kilocalorie diet. Under the leadership
of Nigeria’s Ibrahim Gambari, UNAMID—which has proved woefully
inadequate in fulfilling its primary mandate to protect civilians and
humanitarians—is being pushed to engage in development projects. Indeed,
the “New Strategy” speaks explicitly of “the central role of UNAMID in
IDPs and refugees return and reconstruction.” But this is not the mandate of
UNAMID, despite Gambari’s ambitions. Indeed, development work by
UNAMID dangerously confuses the roles of peacekeepers and
humanitarians. The central obligation of the mission is to protect civilians
and humanitarians. For despite the “New Strategy’s” declaration that the
regime “affirms the humanitarian needs for Darfur are fully provided and all
gaps are filled,” enormous gaps remain, conditions in many camps have
deteriorated badly, and there are critical shortages of food, clean water, and
primary medical care. Conditions will improve only when security does—
both for civilians and humanitarians.

The “New Strategy” is filled with such patent mendacity in its broad and
facile characterization of the humanitarian situation. Here we should recall
that for two weeks in August the regime blocked all humanitarian access to
Kalma Camp, one of the largest in Darfur, with as many as 100,000 human
beings completely dependent on international relief aid. And yet even as the
UN was pleading for a lifting of the blockade, Khartoum publicly and
adamantly denied it had imposed one. Recent violence and continuing
desperation in this tinderbox of human misery have now driven as much as
half the camp’s population to other camps or nearby villages; many simply
can’t be accounted for.

WHAT OF the other side of the coin, “development”? There is not a shred
of evidence that Khartoum intends to make a significant commitment to the
development or “rehabilitation” of Darfur. Certainly before the rebellion
began in 2002-2003 there was no investment in Darfur by the regime—
except in paramilitary forces. The justice system had decayed into
meaninglessness, infrastructure was left untouched, and the number of
schools and hospitals per capita was shockingly low. And so it has continued
during the twenty-one years of NCP tyranny. Khartoum declares it has
committed $1.9 billion to development projects, but such “commitment” is
nothing more than specious words and a signature on another worthless
piece of paper, of a sort we have seen countless times in the past. The best
measure of the regime’s concern for Darfur is the shameless export of
agricultural products for profit (benefiting almost exclusively the regime and
its cronies), while people in Darfur live on half-rations from the WFP, which
must import at great cost nearly all the food it distributes.

Almost as frequent in the “New Strategy” as the emphasis on “development”
is the insistence on the “return” of displaced persons. To be sure, the
reference is always to “safe and voluntary returns”—but this is nothing more
than a rhetorical gesture. Tellingly, the regime has recently expelled from
Darfur key officials of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR),
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the
intergovernmental International Organization for Migration (IOM). All
would be essential in providing true security to returning displaced persons
and ensuring that their returns were voluntary.

The fact is that since summer of 2004 there has been a relentless insistence
by Khartoum on the return of these most vulnerable of civilians; on this
issue humanitarian organizations and UN agencies have so far drawn a line
and succeeded in forestalling such deadly ambition. But with U.S., AU, and
UN approval, Khartoum is set to compel the return of displaced persons,
even if there is no place for them to return. Many villages—indeed the vast
majority—have been partially or completely destroyed, with no means of
agricultural livelihood remaining. Arab tribal groups—some from Chad,
Niger, and elsewhere in the Sahel—have appropriated the lands of many
who fled. Even for those with homes remaining, insecurity simply does not
permit returns at the present time. And yet the “New Strategy” declares that
“the organization of the return [sic] is one of the government [sic] top
priorities.” UNAMID and humanitarian organizations are being required to
assist in what will be in all too many cases death sentences.

Here U.S. special envoy to Sudan Scott Gration has already signaled in
ominous fashion his agreement with the regime’s thinking. In summer 2009
a UN humanitarian relief coordination team convened an emergency
meeting to make clear that they felt compelled to disassociate themselves
from Gration’s assessment of the political and humanitarian situation in
Darfur, particularly the situation of displaced persons. And they made their
view publicly known:

Given the message sent by Scott Gration to the humanitarian
community and the [Darfuri] beneficiaries, i.e. peace will prevail in
Darfur by the end of the year, and returns have to happen, the [UN
humanitarian coordination team] felt it has to take a common position.

That “common position” was of course deep skepticism about the possibility
of secure and voluntary returns. This truly extraordinary public rebuke of the
U.S. envoy is at once revealing of his ignorance and a signal that the
humanitarian community on the ground remains acutely aware of the
dangers that still confront displaced persons. Peace did not “prevail in
Darfur” by the end of 2009, as Gration foolishly predicted; nor will it
“prevail” by the end of 2010. On the contrary, the peace process has largely
collapsed, and even Khartoum in its “New Strategy” makes explicitly clear
that Doha (Qatar) is now a sideshow, and the real effort will be to
“domesticate” the peace process: “The peace process requires radical re-
direction,” we are told, particularly in “shift[ing] the focus of the peace
weight [sic] to the inside.”

Caught “inside” are the displaced Darfuris, who reacted sharply to Gration’s
remarks about returns in summer 2009, accusing him of taking sides with
Khartoum. They know better than anyone just how inadequate the security
environment in Darfur remains. And even those not displaced are at acute
risk. On September 2, 2010—shortly after Khartoum’s promulgation of the
“New Strategy”—the Janjaweed, long the regime’s primary military proxy,
savagely attacked the market of Tabarat village in North Darfur. Details are
still not fully clear, although the reports from Reuters, the African Center for
Peace and Justice, MSF, and Radio Dabanga comport closely with one
another. More than fifty people were shot and killed at point-blank range;
more than 100 were injured, many with extremely serious gunshot wounds.
MSF treated some fifty people at its clinic in the nearby town of Tawilla, all
of whom were male, as were the victims who were shot while lying face
down in the market. MSF also reports that “hundreds of families fled
Tabarat area in fear, leaving everything behind” and now “urgently need
basic items for survival.” These people are unlikely to see the benefits of the
“New Strategy,” announced just days before. Rather, they join the more than
500,000 Darfuris newly displaced since UNAMID officially took up its
mandate on January 1, 2008.

The UN’s human rights investigator for Sudan, Chande Othman of
Tanzania, has called for an “urgent” investigation by Khartoum into the
attack. But this will never occur. The same regime that blocked UNAMID
forces from witnessing the aftermath of the Tabarat massacre is hardly likely
to conduct the “thorough and transparent investigation” that Othman called
for. The impotence of UNAMID has once again been highlighted, along
with Khartoum’s contemptuous regard for the mission’s mandate. To
complicate matters, India has recently announced that it will go forward with
its previously proposed draw-down of helicopters presently serving a critical
role in UNAMID—and this is likely only the first of many such actions. As
one seasoned UN observer of Darfur recently remarked to me, “The question
is not if but when UNAMID withdraws.” And growing pressure from
Khartoum’s military and security forces may very well accelerate that
withdrawal.

The African Union’s Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, is
recently reported to have said that, “there are many displaced people who
expressed to him their desire to return to their places of origin.” But this is a
dangerous half-truth, as Darfuris were quick to point out. Virtually all
Darfuris want to return to their homes and lands, if possible; but widespread
and deeply threatening insecurity is precisely what makes this impossible.
Moreover, with Khartoum’s recent expulsion of officials from UNHCR, the
ICRC, and IOM, there is much less capacity to oversee such returns,
ensuring that they are safe and voluntary. “Security,” despite being another
“axis” of the “New Strategy,” is nowhere discussed in specific terms: there
is nothing about disarming the Janjaweed, nothing about cease-fire
monitoring, nothing about how opportunistic violence will be brought under
control. Indeed, humanitarians report that the regime has condoned or even
orchestrated much of this violence as a means of controlling the movement
of aid workers. On the issue of security, the “New Strategy” seems intent
mainly on reminding UNAMID that it may not act in ways that infringe
upon “the Government of Sudan [sic] sovereign obligations.”

In short, the “New Strategy” offers not a single concrete proposal for
reducing the insecurity that is the greatest obstacle to a return to normalcy in
Darfur. Instead, this “strategy” ominously threatens unspecified “unilateral
action to improve security”—a phrase that can be used to justify virtually
any military action by the regime. A September overview of the Darfur
peace process from the authoritative Small Arms Survey notes that the rebel
movements in particular believe this language is “a cover for a return to
military offensives to crush the movements while the international
community is focused on Southern Sudan’s January 2011 self-determination
referendum.”

Finally, the “New Strategy” speaks repetitively and redundantly about a
“Darfur Consultative Forum.” But this is merely a gesture to Darfuri civil
society, which has been relentlessly excluded from the peace process. What
goes unmentioned is how fully Khartoum has controlled representation of
Darfuri civil society to date, and how deliberately it has undermined some of
the key efforts to create a truly representative civil society forum. The
regime collapsed an ambitious effort by civil society groups to hold a
meeting in May 2009 in Addis Ababa, refusing to allow key participants to
leave Sudan. Subsequently, Darfuri civil society representatives organized a
series of symposia in Heidelberg, Germany with the assistance of the Max
Planck Institute and funding from the German foreign ministry. In the last of
the Heidelberg symposia (in February and March 2010) the representatives
agreed on a final Outcome Document containing draft proposals to guide a
possible Darfur peace agreement. The Outcome Document, supported by the
only rebel group attending the Doha talks, was peremptorily dismissed by
Khartoum; indeed, the regime’s negotiators refused even to accept the
document and protested the presence of a delegation from the Heidelberg
Committee.

There is no reason to believe that what Khartoum touts as a “Darfur
Consultative Forum” will be anything more than a carefully orchestrated
public relations effort. Dissident voices may be allowed to speak, but their
views will be ignored and it is more than likely that the regime’s ruthlessly
efficient security services will use this forum as a means of arresting,
detaining, or even murdering those who speak critically of Khartoum. There
are already strong suspicions that the regime is behind a series of recent
murders in camps near Zalingei (West Darfur)—murders that appear to be
political assassinations, with camp leaders opposed to Khartoum’s plans as
the targets. Notable among these is the September 3 murder of Adam Ismail
Bush, a humanitarian coordinator for the Zalingei camps.

WHAT IS astonishing is the degree to which international actors of
consequence have not simply acquiesced in but applauded this “strategy.”
While Arab League approval was predictable, given the obdurate refusal of
Arab countries to respond seriously to Darfur’s realities, enthusiastic
approval from the African Union under Mbeki is another matter. Mbeki led
the “AU Panel on Darfur” (AUPD) and spent a great deal of time on the
ground last year; he now heads the “AU High Level Implementation Panel”
(AUHIP), a follow-up effort that works from a putative roadmap for peace
and rehabilitation contained within the document produced by the AUPD.
But the AU report offers no such “roadmap.” It is chiefly an uninspired
rehash of previous human rights and humanitarian reports, though there is
not a single footnote or reference in its 125 pages of text. In turn, Mbeki has
tried to leverage his role as head of AUHIP into a means for displacing and
upstaging the ineffective UN mediator in the Darfur peace process, Djibril
Bassolé of Burkina Faso. Mbeki also seeks to diminish the diplomatic role
of Gambari, a ruthless UN careerist whose tenure in Burma a few years ago
proved both his incompetence and his callousness. Gambari nominally heads
UNAMID, the UN/AU peacekeeping mission in Darfur, but he is pushing to
displace Mbeki and take the diplomatic lead himself, even as his leadership
of UNAMID has been disastrous. An observer close to the Darfur peace
talks nominally underway in Doha recently wrote to me describing the
dispiriting sight of Gambari, Mbeki, and Bassolé fighting among
themselves, working at cross-purposes, and indeed at times actively seeking
to undermine one another.

Only one rebel group, the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM), has
attended the peace talks. Everyone in Doha is well aware that the LJM—a
factitious organization created out of expedient diplomacy by the United
States and Libya—cannot possibly bring peace to Darfur. They are neither
representative of Darfuri civil society nor do they have any military muscle
on the ground. Mbeki sees their weakness—and the “New Strategy”—as
creating his moment of opportunity.

But even more alarming than Mbeki’s support for the “New Strategy” are
the approving remarks of U.S. special envoy to Sudan Scott Gration.
Following a meeting with Ghazi Salah Eddin Attabani, the regime’s point
man on Darfur, Mbeki declared—representing himself, Gambari, and
Gration—that, “We strongly support this strategy to resolve the conflict in
Darfur.” This is at once astonishing and profoundly dismaying. Gration
himself would go on to “hail the transparency of the new strategy” and
“praise the developmental approach adopted by the government [in
Khartoum] to resolve the conflict.” The regime’s “New Strategy for Darfur,”
will “bring development…infrastructure…and security to that region and
then the rest of the region.”

Gration is either appallingly ignorant or chillingly cynical: even after a year-
and-a-half as special envoy, he remains peculiarly opaque. Certainly it’s no
secret that U.S. policy toward Sudan has deemphasized Darfur. But to
embrace “enthusiastically” the plan, the “strategy” of a regime that has
violated every commitment it has ever made, that has reneged on every
agreement it has ever signed with a Sudanese party—every one—is a
decision that deserves serious scrutiny, particularly since Gration’s remarks
were reported only in the Sudan Tribune.

The “New Strategy” has been vehemently rejected by all the rebel groups
(one of the few things that unites them), by Darfuri civil society, and notably
by the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, nominally part of the
“Government of National Unity” in Khartoum (the SPLM was of course
never consulted about the “strategy”). The enthusiastic embrace of this plan
by the AU, the UN, and the United States is a measure of how fully Darfur
has been abandoned, how little the words of outrage from President Obama
really mean, and how attenuated the chances are for any sort of peace
agreement. The world has signaled to Khartoum’s génocidaires that they are
free to go about their business in Darfur; and as the killings in Tabarat
demonstrate, business is brisk.

Eric Reeves has published extensively on Sudan, nationally and
internationally, for more than a decade. He is author of A Long Day’s Dying:
Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide.