The independent commentary on British political affairs.
The independent commentary on British political affairs.
May 2008
Vol. 11, No. 11
A People's War: Brenda Boardman | The shadow over Brown's plan's to change the way we are governed: … More…
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It would have been the first significant initiative for peace in Darfur since negotiations in Abuja were rushed to a premature conclusion and produced an imperfect and unenforceable agreement in May last year — a meeting of field commanders who have opposed the Darfur Peace Agreement with a view to forging a unified position in advance of fresh talks to end the conflict.
The commanders’ conference, sponsored by the African Union, was to have opened in North Darfur on 19 February, attended by international observers including representatives of the British government. At time of going to press, the conference was delayed indefinitely because of a build-up of government troops and Janjaweed in the area surrounding the conference site, suggesting an intention to attack.
On the day the conference was scheduled to open, rebel commanders said government forces were massing in the garrison towns of Sayyah and Mellit, while regular troops and Janjaweed were building up in Kutum. They said the Sudan government had given a guarantee it would not attack the conference — but had given no guarantee ‘for the minute after the meeting ends’.
‘The government is moving all its forces to North Darfur,’ said one of the key commanders in G-19, a new rebel group fighting the government in North Darfur. ‘They know our routes and can attack us as we leave. They know our areas and can ambush us. We need stronger guarantees.’
Acceptance of the commanders’ conference by the AU and other international observers from Abuja marks the first acknowledgment that the Darfur Peace Agreement, which was rejected by a majority of rebel groups, is unworkable as it is.
It also acknowledges the central role of field commanders who were bit players in Abuja but who now form the main military opposition to the Sudan government and its Janjaweed proxies — among them, those belonging to G-19. (See following box.)
G-19 and a number of other commanders critical of the Abuja agreement are loosely grouped in a coalition known both as SLA-Unity and SLA-Non Signatory Faction (SLA-NSF). They are committed to a negotiated settlement to the conflict — as the UN special envoy for Darfur, Jan Eliasson, and Salim Ahmed Salim, the AU’s special envoy, confirmed after meeting some of them in North Darfur in early February — but want improvements on the text negotiated in Abuja.
The purpose of the commanders’ conference is to thrash out a common position, among the commanders who now control the field, before new talks open under AU-UN sponsorship.
Key demands are strong international guarantees for the implementation of any agreement reached, improved security arrangements for displaced civilians returning to their homes, stronger power-sharing in Darfur itself, and an increase in the $30 million the government has put up as an initial payment into a compensation fund.
The conference will bring together only commanders who originally belonged to the Sudan Liberation Army, the largest rebel group that has splintered into half a dozen factions since it took up arms in 2003. It does not concern the Justice and Equality Movement, the smaller and more Islamist of the original rebel movements, as well as political figures from both the SLA and JEM.
Libya is currently atttempting to host a separate conference designed to organise the ranks of a second loose coalition. The NRF groups JEM and political veterans from an older generation as well as a number of commanders who span the political-military divide and have been excluded from the commanders’ conference in Darfur. Tensions between the two coalitions are running high. There is concern in some quarters that the manner in which the commanders’ conference has been organised has already created another divide — between those in Darfur and those in the diaspora, between soldiers and strategists.
It seems unlikely the commanders can reach a detailed consensus in the three or four days the conference is expected to last — if, indeed, it ever begins. More seriously, there is no evidence of any serious AU or UN plan to integrate the commanders’ conference into a wider strategy for a revived peace process.
A first attempt to hold the commanders’ conference in November last year failed after government planes bombed the village of Bir Maza as final preparations were being made to hold it there. A second attempt failed after commanders travelling from the north to South Darfur were attacked on their way to a new site.
The massing of government troops in February around the conference site suggests that regime hardliners are still committed to a military solution to the rebellion. Government moderates who favour a negotiated settlement, admitting the impossibility of defeating the rebels militarily, acknowledge that this cannot be achieved without a measure of unity in the fragmented SLA.
A who's who of the rebel movement in Darfur:
Darfur is becoming one of the most dangerous areas in the world for aid workers, says the UN’s Acting Emergency Relief Coordinator, Margareta Wahlström. The reasons for this are many: fighting between government-backed and rebel forces, attacks on aid workers by government forces, rebels and bandits, and, last but not least, the neutralisation by the government of the rebels’ humanitarian co-ordinator, Suleiman Jamous — a man who for three years not only facilitated the delivery of relief behind rebel lines, but who also expanded the humanitarian space that is now so dangerously shrinking.
Jamous has been detained without charge or trial six times in the last five years — three times by the government, and three times by the former rebel leader Minni Minawi, now Khartoum’s partner in its pitiless war in Darfur. In June last year, the UN negotiated Jamous’s release from Minawi and moved him, for his own safety, out of Darfur — to a UN hospital in neighbouring Kordofan. There he has remained for the last eight months, confined to one room and with an armed guard at his door.
Doctors at the hospital have certified that he needs urgent medical treatment, including a stomach biopsy, that they are not equipped to carry out. UN officials say Jamous is free to leave whenever he wishes. Jamous says this is not the case and even if it were he would walk straight into re-arrest at a government checkpoint outside the hospital. Senior African Union officials are attempting to negotiate his release through talks with no lesser a figure than Majzoub al Khalifa, President Omar Bashir’s advisor on Darfur. Under the UN smokescreen, Jamous appears to be a prisoner of the Sudan government — a prisoner of war, in contravention of the Darfur Peace Agreement.
Jamous is 62 years old and never carries a weapon. His only ‘crime’ has been to work tirelessly for the safe delivery of relief to civilians in rebel-controlled areas, and to fight for the unity and reform of the rebel movement. When Jamous was in charge of relief operations, relief workers were not beaten, raped and subjected to mock executions. Relief supplies were not looted as they are now. Humanitarian convoys were attacked less frequently. His release would not stop all the abuses, but it would stop some.
Oxfam International reported recently that more than a third of Darfur’s war-affected population — almost one million people — is ‘effectively out of bounds to aid agencies’. The number of those affected by the conflict is growing relentlessly: the month of January saw 25,000 people join the more than two million who are already displaced. Against this backdrop, a man as valuable to the humanitarian effort as Suleiman Jamous is allowed to be sidelined.
The AU is doing what it can for Jamous. But others, including the humanitarians with whom he worked, have all turned their backs on him. In so doing, they are not only failing him, they are failing every civilian who has not yet been driven into the embrace of the government.
Julie Flint is author with Alex de Waal of ‘Darfur: A Short History of a Long War’.