Sudan: A catastrophe too far
Leader, The Guardian
Jun 01, 2004 — An ominous blue bubble on an aid agency map, for a remote conflict in an even remoter part of Africa, could mean mass starvation before June is out. The map, published on the web by the Famine Early Warning System Network, shows the “rain timeline” for the seasonal monsoon now moving northwards into eastern Chad and the Darfur region of western Sudan. Day by day more territory now suffering from hot winds and blowing dust will bear the even heavier burden of rainstorms which turn roads into swamps and wadis into torrents. The greatest anxiety expressed last week by the UN high commissioner for refugees is for the 125,000 refugees from Darfur who have crossed into Chad and may be cut off by the monsoon from the little aid they are getting now. Yet within Darfur, one-sixth of the population are also internally displaced, living in primitive camps and harassed by hostile militia. A description by the International Rescue Committee makes grim reading: “More than 1 million people in Darfur have been uprooted . . . Civilians continue to be the targets of extreme brutality, including killings and rapes. Villages are being destroyed and crops and livestock looted. The displaced have depleted their meagre food stocks . . .” And there is much more.
On any rational index of human suffering, the conflict in Darfur should now be attracting as much international attention as military conflict and terrorist attacks in the Middle East. Since early this year UN officials have been calling it “the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe” and complaining of a sluggish response from donors: the emergency programme for the refugees in Chad alone is costed at $30m.
Yesterday’s major news wires carried exactly five brief references to Darfur – though one was an encouraging commitment from the British international development secretary, Hilary Benn, to do more. Darfur’s misfortune is that it is a crisis too far, a relatively minor subplot of the long-running Sudanese civil war which ironically seemed last week to have moved a significant step closer to peace with the signing in Nairobi of three protocols between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Although the latest Darfur violence was sparked last year by a local SPLA assault on government forces, the civilian population had long been discriminated against and quickly became the target of vicious persecution by the Jangaweed and other irregulars. Yet Darfur is excluded from the new deal.
Sudan’s greater misfortune is to have been a minor player in the cold war, wooed by the US and the Soviet Union who both backed rival clients – and both switched sides. Oil played its inevitable role too after being discovered in the south: an early peace agreement was scrapped when the then President Nimeiry sought to monopolise its production. (Last week’s agreement includes a precise formula for divvying up the oil revenue.) Awash with arms and rent by misrule, Africa’s largest country was left to flounder in the 1990s and become Africa’s most fractured state. Although Khartoum has a worse record in human rights violations than the southern opposition, it is a contest without heroes. The latest deal may have a better chance, partly because both sides are exhausted after two decades of fighting and, more significantly, because of US diplomatic and economic pressure. Washington wants to neutralise a potential “rogue state” while Khartoum is keen to escape from sanctions.
SPLA leader John Garang said on Sunday that the new deal would “transform Sudan”, but it will not have a chance of doing so as long as the Darfur crisis is unsolved. Sudan’s western backers should put their money where they want to see a proper peace.