Sudan can disarm Janjaweed, at a cost

By Jonathan Wright

CAIRO, July 27 (Reuters) – Sudan can meet demands it crack down on Janjaweed militias wreaking havoc in Darfur but only by weakening its own security forces and losing some political credibility among its powerbase, analysts and diplomats say.

The United States, the United Nations and many European governments have called on the Khartoum government to cut its links with the Arab militiamen, whose activities have helped drive more than a million people from their homes in Darfur.

So far Sudan has reacted by promising compliance and making what diplomats call token gestures against a limited number of Janjaweed members in the troubled western region.

The demands pose a dilemma for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who for the past year has relied on the militias as auxiliaries against two rebel groups who took up arms in February 2003.

Even before the rebellion, influential people in Khartoum struck alliances with the militias to serve their local purposes in Darfur and in some cases as a counterweight to the army, which has always been a force in Sudanese politics.

Ghazi Suleiman, a Sudanese lawyer and activist, said the word Janjaweed was in essence no more than the collective name for Darfur tribes allied with the Sudanese army against other tribes associated with the two rebel movements.

Since the government is part of the conflict, it is unrealistic to expect it to weaken its own position by disarming its allies, especially in the absence of any reciprocal disarmament by the rebels, he added.

A crackdown on the Janjaweed could even backfire on the weak and fractious government.

“They (the Janjaweed) could ignore the government and the government would collapse and the rebels would take over Darfur and maybe kill the Arabs,” added Suleiman, who himself favours an international peacekeeping force in the region.

Douglas Johnson, a specialist on Sudan in Oxford, England, said Khartoum could take steps to control the Janjaweed but only at a political cost.

EXISTING SPLIT

“It can be done because it was the government who organised and supported them in the first place,” he said.

“But politically, it would only be possible at the cost of a split within the ruling party because those who have put themselves behind the Janjaweed will lose credibility, or will have to be sacrificed and removed from government.”

The Darfur conflict is already an important element in the existing split in the Sudanese Islamist movement – between the president’s ruling National Congress party and the Popular Congress party of his old ally, imprisoned pan-Islamist ideologue Hassan al-Turabi.

The government deployed the Janjaweed against the rebels with special vigour last year partly because it suspected links between Turabi, one of Sudan’s most popular politicians, and the rebel Justice and Equality Movement.

But a diplomat whose government is sympathetic to foreign intervention said it was premature to talk about a crackdown on the Janjaweed when Khartoum had not even shown it was willing to cut off active assistance to them.

“We really have no information to suggest that the government has stopped supporting them,” he said.

When one of the militia leaders, Moussa Hilal, took reporters out to Darfur this month, they flew on a helicopter provided by the Sudanese government, he added.

The diplomat said the Janjaweed played a useful role for Khartoum as auxiliaries. “For the government of Sudan, the most important issue in Darfur is control. The government has relied on these militias and may still need to rely on them,” he said.

One immediate effect of the threat of international intervention in Sudan has been to give the government and its political allies a chance to play the nationalist and Islamist card against foreign interference.

But it may be hard for the government to mobilise popular opposition to intervention because a large number of Sudanese are disillusioned with the government and because Darfur is many hundreds of km (miles) away from the capital, analysts say.

“The situation is very different from Iraq because there is the possibility that foreign forces would establish working relationship with the opposition,” the specialist Johnson said.

The diplomat said the rhetoric against foreign interference was “bluster”. “It’s meant to scare us off,” he added.