In Sudan’s Drafur, ceasefire monitors find task daunting

By Raymond Thibodeaux

KABKABIYAH, Sudan, Dec 3, 2004 (The Boston Globe) — Hidden among scrub brush not far from this remote, sandy outpost, Ibrahim Ali Hassan, a rebel fighter in Sudan’s western Darfur region, spots the slow-moving caravan of 18 camels and their riders. They look like specks on the horizon.

African Union cease-fire monitor Colonel Georges Niouky of Senegal leaves a meeting with Sudan Liberation Army rebels at the village of Gellab, west of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, November 8, 2004. A small AU force of about 700 troops is tasked with restoring order after more than 20 months of fighting in the troubled western region of Africa’s largest country has driven 1.5 million people from their homes. Another 2,200 AU troops are due to reach Darfur the coming months. Picture taken November 8, 2004. (Reuters).

“Stop them. We need to see who they are,” Hassan says to a team of African Union monitors. It was Arab militiamen on camels who ransacked his village and others nearby, killing some of his relatives and friends, and driving the rest into refugee camps. And so when it comes to spotting men on camels, he has the eyes of a sharpshooter.

Hassan, 25, belongs to a rebel movement that sought to topple Sudan’s Arab-dominated government for what it says were decades of brazen neglect that impoverished Darfur, even while Khartoum, the country’s booming capital, thrived on billions of dollars in oil revenue.

The rebels’ February 2003 uprising sparked a wave of reprisals from the government and its allied Arab militias, who have carried out a campaign of terror against Darfur’s black African population. The conflict has claimed up to 70,000 lives and driven about 1.7 million people from their villages and farms.

Bowing to international pressure, Sudan and the rebels reached a cease-fire agreement and Sudan agreed to the deployment on its territory of a 3,500-strong African Union force to monitor the accord.

With nearly 1,000 AU troops already on the ground, and the rest of the force expected in the next few weeks, violations of the cease-fire appear to be increasing. The attacks highlight what critics say are shortcomings of the AU’s mission in Sudan: a too-limited mandate — to investigate and report on cease-fire violations — and a force too small to do it.

Jan Pronk, the United Nations envoy to Sudan, speaking in Geneva on Tuesday, recommended stretching the AU mandate and its troop strength to deter future attacks. To adequately do that, some military analysts say, the AU mission in Sudan would require 10 times the current allotment of soldiers. The monitors receive funding and logistical support from the United States and Europe.

The monitors and the troops who protect them spend much of their time driving to remote villages and farms in their bleached-white sport utility vehicles, trying to keep a high profile with the hope that their presence will minimize attacks.

Each AU team consists of several monitors from various African nations, a Western liaison, and a representative from each of three parties in Darfur’s conflict: the Sudanese military and two rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Army, or SLA, and the Justice and Equality Movement. The teams are protected by at least eight well-armed soldiers, usually Rwandans.

On their daily two-hour drives across this vast expanse of desert — roughly the size of Texas — rarely does Hassan’s monitoring group come across such a large group of men and camels on the move.

The monitors step from their vehicles to question the men, and the Rwandan protection force fans out around the scene, each with his automatic rifle at his chest, ready.

Whips hang from the saddles of the men on camels, and their saddlebags look heavy. They are ethnic Arabs and, it turns out, some of them are police officers, recruited last year for Sudan’s Popular Defense Forces, or PDF. The rest are headed to Kutum, a nearby town, to be recruited.

Darfur’s rebels and many international human rights observers have accused Sudan’s government of recruiting former Arab janjaweed fighters into the police and civil defense forces to both hide and control them.

“See if they have weapons,” says Abdullah Musa Mursal, the SLA representative.

The men say they are unarmed, but Mursal wants the monitors to check their bags anyway.

“That’s not in our mandate,” says Major Jose Manhoco from Mozambique, leader of the team of monitors.

Even if the monitors find weapons on them, there’s nothing they can do about it. The Sudanese government is supposed to disarm its militias. Under their mandate, AU troops can intervene militarily only if the civilians and aid workers they encounter are “under imminent threat and in immediate vicinity” of attacks. So the men on camels are allowed to continue their trek.

But the encounter reveals to the AU monitors that Sudan has reneged on its vow to the United Nations to stop recruiting for its civil defense forces.

“They admitted they were existing and new recruits for the police version of the Popular Defense Force,” said US Army Major Patrick Christian, an American liaison to the AU mission. “So the agreement signed in the Abuja accord that they would downsize and disarm the defense force, you’re seeing evidence that they’re still upsizing and still training it.”

Protecting unarmed monitors is one of the most important, and sometimes most difficult, tasks of the AU mission. Last month, SLA rebels ambushed an AU monitoring team convoy, but no one was hurt. In October, uniformed Arab fighters ambushed and killed an SLA commander and his four bodyguards soon after being escorted by AU monitors to the town of Zalingei. The commander was supposed to negotiate the release of 18 Arabs kidnapped by SLA soldiers days earlier.

The team of monitors has been at the AU base in Kabkabiyah for more than four months, more than enough time to meld as a group. For some, the divisions among them have become more pronounced, especially between the Sudanese military representative and the rebel envoys, Hassan and Mursal.

They often disagree on the daily details of their mission: what villages to visit, what reports warrant investigation, what level of engagement is acceptable to the letter of their mandate.

On a recent morning, Mursal, the SLA representative, pushed to have the team investigate recent news from the village of Shoba, where Sudanese authorities reportedly removed more than 60 bodies from a mass grave of mostly civilians allegedly killed during an Arab militia attack there two months ago.

But the Sudanese military envoy, Lieutenant Colonel Majzoub Abu Asala, balked at having a Western journalist present for that trip. Instead, he insisted on going to a tiny, nearby Arab village that seemingly was untouched by the conflict, the underlying message presumably being that the problems in Darfur are grossly exaggerated.

Some of the team’s observers see Asala as a liaison for Sudan’s government to the AU mission. After a recent AU security briefing about troop movements and areas of recent conflict, he was caught phoning in rebel positions to his commanders, an incident that earned him a serious reprimand from Brigadier General Festus Okonkwo of Nigeria, head of the AU’s mission in Sudan.

Several AU monitors admit it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay within the limits of their mandate, especially with the recent upsurge in attacks by rebels and Arab militias. The ongoing violence has forced the UN and other aid agencies to evacuate their workers even as thousands more of Darfur’s civilian population move into already overcrowded refugee camps.

For most of the people who live in the camps, the aid workers are the eyes of the international community, and their absence leaves them more vulnerable to janjaweed attacks and harassment by Sudanese police. Relief workers in the field often alert AU monitors to possible cease-fire violations.

Aside from their unfettered access to the region and a direct line of communication to the AU’s leadership, the monitoring teams are considered to be as ineffectual as aid workers in quelling the violence in Darfur. Like the aid workers, AU monitors frequently witness human rights abuses they are powerless to stop.

“It’s not an easy job,” Okonkwo says. “This is not a peacekeeping mission where you can exert some kind of force. Nobody ever agreed to that.”