The Darfur crisis escalates for the worst

By Salah Shuaib

August 10, 2013- While the international community is turning a blind eye to its responsibilities in Darfur, the crisis there has taken now a severe downward direction. In the past six months, violence has quickly escalated to end the shaky peace in Darfur’s towns and villages. In Nyala, the second largest city in Darfur, people now live under consistent fear throughout the day because of fighting between government forces and their militias in the city streets.

The Doha Documentation for Peace in Darfur (DDPD) signed by the government and the Justice and Liberation Movement, JLM, joined later by a wing of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), did not create peace and stability so far. Instead the tribal fighting has become a common reality on the ground. As the displaced and refugees face mortal suffering in the camps there is no glimmer of hope to end their plight.

Those painful facts led the Chairman of the Transitional Darfur Regional Authority (TDRA) Al-Tegani Saisai to say more than once that this new catastrophic tribal fighting in the region stands on the way of implementation of the DDPD and may help break up the entire country. On the issue of the international Criminal Courts (ICC), no any progress is made to bring those who committed war crimes to justice.

The continuation of Darfur problem has repeatedly confirmed that the roots of the cries is not in Darfur but in the nation’s capital, where there political plans regarding the Sudanese states have been adopted since independence. The ongoing conflict also stressed that the policy of partial solutions to Sudan’s crises may lead the Sudanese boundaries to disperse into more than two countries.. South Sudan separated from the country because of ignoring the risk of partial solutions. Now experts are concerned about more fragmentation of remaining Sudan.

Amid these sad facts, the international community continues its silence. And this silence has helped, somehow, in producing these unfortunate events in Darfur, the marginalized areas in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan, and other parts of the country, where the deterioration of living conditions affect all people.

By failing to stop tragedies in the country due to its support of partial solution, the international community has fallen into the trap of the government which declares readiness to reach agreements with its rivals, but with no commitment to achieve the outcome.

Over the last decade, the regime violated the agreements it signed with the Central Opposition, Darfur’s movements, and those with the East Front. This is in line with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which Khartoum procrastinated in implementing its items. More than that, Sudan under pressure from the Security Council signed recently an agreement with the newly independent South Sudan to solve the outstanding issues, but president Albashir in a moment of anger violated it publicly.

Along those lines, the agreement Khartoum reached to with the SPLM, North in Addis Ababa, 2011 June, was again ripped by President Albashir himself. Clearly, the policy of the government to sign these peace agreements was just an attempt to show the international community its desire to achieve peace, but the country’s rulers were mainly intending to benefit from the element of time.

Instead of acknowledging the stage of the comprehensive mess the country entered in, the leading officials in the government still fully engage in denial of their failures. Ironically, they remained “proud of the model presented by Sudan for Africa to challenge colonization traps”, as Nafie Ali Nafie, the vice president of the National Congress Party (NCP), said in a conference for African parties which was held in Khartoum recently. He conveniently forgot that he and his colleagues separated Sudan into two states, and that their policies threaten to separate the rest of the country that is preoccupied with war and ideological conflict.

Worse, the regime does not allow even the reformist trends within the Ruling Party to elaborate on the need to change the policies of the Party concerning Sudan’s political situation. To silence these national sincere voices which call for peace the government has confronted all opposition parties, domesticated some of them, smashed their cohesion, and sought to dry up the sources of thought and opinion in the capital so that the Sudanese people remain divided and unenlightened.

Those who had a dream that the regime will positively respond to end its nasty phase and form a transitional government to deal with the national mess are not enlightened enough by the exact nature of the regime. The Regime is clinging to power through full oppression, and this is, after all, the strategy the Islamists have used since they took power in 1989.

Despite their knowledge of the regime’s political tactics, there are, unfortunately, party leaders and national figures who have been expecting that the regime’s leaders, until this moment, may change their policies, or respond to the call of the dialogue, as an option to stop wars and other problems facing Sudan.

We do not know whether the appeal made by some national figures to stop war, and to ask the regime to dissolve itself for the sake of the country’s peace, is naïve or incapable of understanding the Muslim Brotherhood’s mentality. But we know that the ideological regime comes into being to remain with total oppression, full stop.

It is possible to call for stopping the war, a war of the strong on the weak, and to bet on a coming day in which the criminal leaders of the regime may form a transitional government to deal with the troubled situation. But these hopefully national calls can only show us the weakness of those who are incapable of confronting the governmental aggressiveness, which led to the secession of the South.

Now the senseless leaders in the regime see those who call for stopping the wars, as a way of national reconciliation, as the ones who frustrate the country’s efforts to defeat the armed movements and threaten Sudan’s unity.

In any case, there is no solution to Sudan’s problematic issues unless the regime is overthrown, and this move requires forgetting any positive role the international community may play, at a time it defends similar Arab and African leaders.

*The writer is a Sudanese journalist working for Radio Sawa, in Washington DC. He can be reached at [email protected]