Carrots but no stick

2nd April 2007
By Gillian Lusk

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‘I am committed to do everything I can on this,’ wrote Tony Blair to fellow European Union leaders in December 2006. ‘This’ was the ‘tragic situation in Darfur’, which the prime minister declared was ‘unacceptable’. His letter made it clear that most of the blame lay with the Sudanese government.

It is now three months after the letter and four years after 2003’s rebel attacks, widely regarded as the start of the crisis. The ‘tragic situation’ has grown even more tragic. Darfur may have fallen out of the headlines, thanks to international journalism’s lack of interest in Africa and the efficient efforts of Sudan’s Islamist regime to block media access, but death and destruction still reign in Sudan’s vast western region.

‘Access to people in need in December 2006 was the worst since April 2004,’ wrote United Nations agencies in an unprecedented joint statement on 18 January 2007. ‘Villages have been burned, looted and arbitrarily bombed, and crops and livestock destroyed. Sexual violence against women is occurring at alarming rates.’

‘This situation is unacceptable,’ declared aid bodies ranging from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to the World Food Programme. They could no longer hold the line, they warned. UN reports show that suffering has only increased since.

Sudan’s ruling National Congress, as the National Islamic Front re-branded itself, still refuses to allow UN troops into Darfur, despite UN security council resolution 1706, passed in August 2006, which called for the deployment of 20,000 troops. By December, Khartoum had again brandished the sovereignty card to negotiate this into a ‘hybrid’ operation.

African Union and interested governments said Sudan had agreed to a hybrid force of UN and AU troops, but the regime is angrily refusing ‘foreign’ forces and accepting only a dribble of UN military advisers. The small, under-resourced AU force in Darfur is in no position to insist on anything, which is why Khartoum wishes it to stay.

Where does Britain come in on this? There has been widespread wringing of hands, and very little action. When this point was put to a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office official he expressed surprise, pointing out that Britain had pushed hard for resolution 1706 in the face of opposition from the Russian, Chinese and Arab governments, and that the UK was foremost in providing humanitarian aid to Darfur. This is all true. However, it does not alter the fact that between 200,000 and 450,000 civilians have been slaughtered in Darfur, the vast majority by their own government, and that Britain has failed to try to stop it.

One reason is that Whitehall insists that Darfur is first and foremost a ‘humanitarian crisis’, caused by tribal and resource conflict. These are part of the context, not the cause. A string of UK officials have downplayed the political dimension of the crisis. Sudan is now largely the responsibility of the Department for International Development, which reinforces this misinterpretation. Although the head of the Sudan Unit is from the FCO, and the UK special representative to Sudan is Christopher Prentice (previously ambassador to Jordan), they are heavily outnumbered by development-oriented staff.

This makes Hilary Benn the minister responsible. In press conferences and meetings on Darfur, Benn responds to questions about British action by talking about aid flow. In response to questions about Khartoum’s role, he stresses the atrocities committed by the Darfur rebels, and also that most refused to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) of May 2006. In a BBC interview on 12 March, after the UN Human Rights Council had roundly blamed Khartoum for most of the atrocities, Benn responded by stressing rebel responsibility. Both Benn and his predecessor, Clare Short, have told me that the Khartoum government ‘wants peace’. It is hard to find a Sudanese who would agree.

 This is the root of the problem: a failure to understand the political nature of the war in Darfur.

The ‘moral equivalence’ argument dominates British views. Darfur rebels do commit atrocities, and human rights organisations, who work tirelessly to document the disaster, rightly draw attention to them. But it is difficult to compare the scale of rebel abuses  with the crimes of a regime which sets out to eliminate as many civilians as possible.  

As reported in Parliamentary Brief’s June 2006 edition, Scandinavian researchers found that 97 per cent of attacks on civilians were perpetrated by government forces and the proxy militias known as Janjaweed. Furthermore, many of the current ‘rebel abuses’ are committed by the only group which did sign the DPA, Minni Arkou Minnawi’s faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, and who are no longer officially rebels.

Benn attended the talks in Abuja and pressed for a quick agreement in tandem with Robert Zoellick, the US special envoy at the time. This delighted Khartoum: once a country is involved in peace talks it has a stake in not rocking the boat. For Khartoum, this policy was well established during the three years of negotiation for the 2005 accord over the South with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

Britain was deeply involved in the CPA, for which the Sudan Unit was established under Alan Goulty, former UK ambassador to Sudan and who was at that time the UK special representative to Sudan, and later to Darfur. He is now ambassador in Tunis.

The CPA had the commendable aim of attempting to bring peace to Southern Sudan, where war had raged since independence in January 1956 apart from an eleven-year truce following a peace agreement in 1972. The downside of the CPA was that the process entrenched a ruling party that had seized power from an elected government in June 1989 and held power by killing or torturing democratic opponents, attacking those who, unsurprisingly, rebelled, and ethnically cleansing civilians in the Nuba Mountains and the South. All are tactics now employed in Darfur.

It is now widely accepted that the CPA is in danger of collapse, a fact accepted by some UK officials, and again the main culprit is the Islamist Sudanese regime. Khartoum has failed to share vital oil information and revenue with the SPLM, to accept the colonial north-south boundary, or to dismantle the security apparatus, all stipulated in the CPA. Similarly, Khartoum repeatedly fails its Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) commitments, most notably by continuing to attack villages from the ground and from the air.

Why has Britain, partly responsible for both agreements, failed to speak out? It has shied away from treating either war as essentially political. If it did, it would be hard to evade the conclusion that the common factor is Sudan’s fundamentalist regime, which would imply a need for action.

 However, the problem with action is Iraq. The Iraq war has sapped the West’s capacity to even mention the UN World Summit’s 2005 vote on ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians, let alone enforce it. A trend within the FCO desiring ‘engagement’ with Islamists also plays a role, allowing Sudan’s security supremo, General Salah Abdullah ‘Gosh’, to visit London with impunity in the name of a nebulous ‘intelligence co-operation’.   

Yet faint hope glimmers. US campaigners are having some success with divestment, the threat of sanctions is hardening, and Britain was preparing a new UNSC resolution as this edition went to press.

The new UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, talks tougher than his predecessor. Kofi Annan highlighted the problem in December, as he had never done publicly as UN secretary general. Observing that the promise of ‘never again’ was ringing hollow, he said the blame should be shared among ‘those who value abstract notions of sovereignty more than the lives of real families, those whose reflex of solidarity puts them on the side of governments and not of peoples’. This should have resonated in Whitehall.

Blair said something similar in his December letter to the EU: ‘I know we are all determined to ensure that the international community does not fail to protect our fellow human beings facing slaughter.’ Blair is tougher than his officials on Darfur. ‘If [the Sudanese government] fail to move, we should agree to further measures to isolate it and pressure it,’ he wrote to the EU.

He has talked of sending troops, rapidly denied by officials, and of a no-fly zone, which would require enforcement. The question now is whether, like Annan, he will try to redeem his legacy only after leaving his post, or if he will do something while he still can.

Gill Lusk is a journalist specialising in the Sudan. Until 2006 she was deputy editor of Africa Confidential.

Filed Under: Sudan, UN, Africa, Foreign Policy
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