Sudan pays for ignoring prophet
By STEPHANIE NOLEN, The Globe and Mail
KHARTOUm, Aug 17, 2007 — Plump and good-humoured in a crisp white robe and prayer cap, Ibrahim Suleiman bears little resemblance to the fragile prophetess of ancient Greece, but these days he is cast in the uncomfortable role of Cassandra in strife-torn Sudan.
Mr. Suleiman is one of this country’s most eminent men. He was chief of staff of the army and held a number of cabinet posts, including a long stint as defence minister. Until May, 2003, he was the presidentially appointed governor of the state of North Darfur.
But then, Mr. Suleiman recalls, he bluntly told the government of President Omar Hassan Bashir that its plan to arm militias and send them against rebels rising in the west of Sudan could bring only chaos and disaster.
The next day he was unceremoniously stripped of his job. The government went ahead with its plan. The quick result? Chaos and disaster.
Instead of fighting rebels, the Arab militias assembled by Khartoum went on an extermination campaign against civilians from the black African tribes with whom they had historic conflicts.
Fifteen months later, the state Mr. Suleiman used to govern is in what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. At least 50,000 people in the region are dead and another 1.4 million driven from their homes.
Mr. Suleiman, ousted from Darfur, sits in a house in Khartoum, reading the newspapers, thinking, painfully, “I told you so.” (He was fired after a rebel attack on the state capital, Al-Fashir, but knowledgeable observers agree that the key factor was his unwelcome advice.)
Darfur’s tribal conflicts began in the mid-1980s. The region, which is the size of France, was once able to accommodate both the African farmers and the nomadic Arab herder tribes who lived there. But as the desert expanded, tension grew over access to a shrinking number of water sources.
“It started as a fight between one person and another, and it became a conflict of tribe against tribe,” Mr. Suleiman explains. He says the primary aggressors were the nomadic Arab tribes who wanted access to the increasing area of land the Africans had under cultivation.
There are few police in the three states that make up the vast Darfur region, and no one intervened in those early attacks. Soon the African tribes were preparing to fight back, and angry at the government for not defending them.
The skirmishes intensified, and starting in 2002 Mr. Suleiman held a series of tribal councils to try to resolve the issue. Two things went wrong, he says.
First, socialist academics from the local universities convinced aggrieved young African men to band together in a “rebellion,” citing the historic marginalization of the area. Then the new rebels attracted military support from the well-established Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement in the south of the country. When he heard that, Lieutenant-General Bashir vowed to crush the insurrection.
And that’s where it all went wrong, Mr. Suleiman explains sadly: The government decided it would not use the national army to suppress the rebels.
“They could have withdrawn three or four battalions from the south and they could have finished the problem,” he says. But Sudan’s army was fatigued after fighting 20 years of civil war in the south.
Also, inconveniently, about four-fifths of its soldiers were from the Fur tribe, whose members are numerous in Darfur. Soldiers, in other words, who might not be willing to fight their tribal kin.
The army was already fighting: in the south and against a new insurrection in the east. Gen. Bashir did not want a third. “So they thought, ‘We will use the tribes,’.” Mr. Suleiman says with a heavy sigh. “I told them in Parliament, ‘Don’t try, it will be a big problem.’ Because I knew – they would have no real problems with the rebels, but the problems between the tribes would be terrible and we wouldn’t make it right for 20 or 30 or 50 years.
“They gave the tribes arms to eradicate the rebellion, but those tribes had their own agenda. For them it was about land.”
Sending foreign troops won’t solve the problem, he says, but foreign aid will be needed to address the underlying causes of the conflict. “We don’t need a military force,” he says. “We need international intervention to eradicate the illiteracy of six million people. Sudan can’t do that. We need hundreds of schools. We need to settle the nomads, and [create complex irrigation schemes] so they have water.
“We need help patrolling our borders [around Darfur], which are open. We need well-equipped, well-trained police. We need health projects. If we succeed in all that, we can bring Darfur back into Sudan.”
That development agenda, however, leaves one enormous problem, and it’s one Mr. Suleiman has no idea how to resolve.
“The big problem is how to bring people to live together as they were. It will take years.
“If you talk to little children in the camps now, they will tell you: The Arabs did this to us.”