The five keys Gordon needs to open the door in Darfur

9th May 2008
By Alex de Waal

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Sudanese continue to fight and die because the country’s problems are fiendishly difficult to resolve. Extra international effort is not guaranteed to bring progress let alone solutions. But there are many useful things that Gordon Brown can do to help resolve Darfur’s complex and still-bloody conflict.

Sudan’s first civil war — seventeen years’ of killing and hunger — ended in February 1972 after just twelve days of face-to-face negotiations between government and Southern rebels. The host for the peace talks, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, intervened just once in the negotiations to persuade the Anyanya rebels to accept a unified national army. There were no sanctions, no indictments for war crimes and no peacekeepers.

By contrast it took almost three years of continuous negotiation to bring Sudan’s second north-south war to an end, despite the involvement of large teams of facilitators and resource persons from an array of international organizations and foreign governments. The world’s largest and most complex peace-keeping mission was set up—the UN Mission in Sudan—to oversee the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

Settling Darfur’s shorter conflict has proved still more difficult. Face-to-face talks between Khartoum and the Darfur rebels began within six months of the outbreak of full-scale war in April 2003.

Representatives of eleven foreign governments and four inter-state organizations witnessed and guaranteed the May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement, a document mostly fashioned in large part by international experts and foreign diplomats.

That agreement didn’t work and today the war continues despite an even larger UN peacekeeping mission and a European force across the border in Chad.

Bitter experience shows that there’s not always a good correlation between external effort and national results. The involvement of well-meaning outsiders can create as many problems as they solve. Agendas can contradict each other and priorities can become blurred and energies diffused.

We can see a proliferation of parallel negotiating fora which cancel each other out and multiple instruments deployed by different actors, each wanting to be relevant. Is the main objective to hammer out a workable political compromise for Darfur? To deliver humanitarian assistance? To seek justice for the victims of human rights violations? Or to punish Sudan for being a bad global citizen? Multiple initiatives allow spoilers to heighten their demands or play for time.

Today the politics of ‘Darfur’ are as much about the confused politics of international response as the conflict itself. As many news stories about ‘Darfur’ are prompted by the activities of celebrities and activists, notably the campaign to rebrand the Beijing Olympics, as by the continuing suffering of Darfurians and the hundred or so violent fatalities that the war costs every month.

And in turn, the challenge facing Gordon Brown following his 8 April announcement that he plans a summit on Darfur, is as much to navigate the turbulent currents of international engagement with Darfur as to get to grips with the conflict itself.

What could a Darfur summit achieve? There are a number of possibilities — let’s examine five of them.

1. A peace agreement

The likelihood of the current mediation effort led by the UN and AU reaching an agreement is very slender, and the two Special Envoys, Jan Eliasson and Salim Ahmed Salim, have switched their efforts to pressing for a ceasefire. They have concluded that while the rebels remain so disunited, there cannot be any serious talks.

Some of the rebels are also hanging on in the hope that a Democratic president in the U.S. next year would adopt an aggressively anti-Khartoum stand.

The Sudan government also does not have much interest in making any concessions to the rebels beyond what it yielded in the Darfur Peace Agreement without any guarantees that the deal would stick. Khartoum’s real interest is in normalising relations with the US. In pursuit of this, Sudanese leaders have met with the American Special Envoy for Sudan, Richard Williamson, and agreed on a set of reciprocal steps towards normalising relations.

Full details have not been disclosed (though the Save Darfur Coalition has speculatively condemned the plan) but they are understood to cover both Darfur and the north-south Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The Sudan government and the Republican administration share a common interest in sealing an agreement before the November elections.

Any British initiative for peace in Darfur — or indeed for putting the CPA on a firmer footing — would only have traction insofar as it supported the Washington-Khartoum talks. There may well be a role for Britain there. Darfur and the CPA cannot be definitively fixed in any short time frame and it’s essential to bring in Europe and China as guarantors of any deal for resolving Sudan’s crisis.

One British role could be bringing in other members of the UN Security Council as partners in the initiative so as to anchor any progress made in the next six months within a multilateral framework.

2. Responsibility to Protect

The Foreign Secretary has elevated the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (known in the trade as R2P and adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005) to the centre of Britain’s foreign policy principles. Darfur is a test case of the R2P with the UN-African Union Hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) and the European Force in eastern Chad and Central African Republic (EUFOR) as the practical embodiments of the principle.

At the moment, the prospects for either are not good. UNAMID has barely 300 additional troops in comparison to its predecessor the much maligned African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), and is less mobile because AMIS’s helicopters and vehicles are either worn out or don’t meet UN standards.

The Sudan government is widely blamed for putting bureaucratic obstacles in the way of UNAMID’s deployment and objecting to non-African troops (especially those from NATO countries or, like the Nepalese, with a history of working with them). Yet, as the UN Special Representative for Darfur, Rodolphe Adada, explained to the UN Security Council on 22 April, an equally great responsibility falls on the international community for failing to provide the necessary logistics and infrastructure.

The EU Force in Chad and CAR does not face the same constraints as the European troop contributors have stepped up to the plate with the needed equipment, and France has allowed its attack aircraft stationed in Chad under its defence cooperation agreement with the government of President Idriss Deby to be called upon.

However, EUFOR is just a twelve-month stopgap until a still-hypothetical UN force can take over. And, more problematically, it is seen by Chadians as a non-neutral force sent to protect the embattled and unpopular Deby regime.

The UN Mission in Sudan, dispatched in 2005 in support of the north-south CPA, will also be over its head if that peace agreement crumbles. If there is no longer a peace to keep, the world will certainly demand that its peacekeepers at least take on a civilian protection role.

A grand summit on R2P in Sudan, Chad and CAR would not bring peace. It would not resolve the fundamental dilemmas facing the three force commanders of how they can use force to protect civilians without embroiling themselves in other people’s wars. But it could galvanise the international community to stump up the resources to make sure that these three vast peacekeeping and civilian protection operations are at least logistically capable.

3. A Sudan-Chad Agreement

Darfur’s war is now one and the same with Chad’s war. Both governments are sponsoring insurgents against the other. It is a power struggle, pure and simple. In the last three years there have been agreements mediated by Libya and Senegal, neither of which have come to anything.

But the single biggest step towards a ceasefire and political resolution in either country would be to end the mutual destabilisation, seal the border and put the respective rebels in well-guarded camps. Such things have been done before and can be done again with some hard-headed diplomacy and pressure and the use of the international troops in both countries plus the 1,200 African troops to guard the border promised under last year’s never-implemented Tripoli Agreement.

A summit on the regional war would need a partnership with Sarkozy as France is the guarantor of Chadian stability and the country with the most impressive military forces in that country.

4. A People’s Democracy

War inevitably brings military men to the fore of politics. Peace processes do the same: peace agreements carve up power between the military leaders on both sides. Sudan’s CPA promised free national elections in 2009 but with little mutual confidence between the ruling National Congress Party and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement which controls the South, the road to elections is rocky.

This is the centre of gravity of Sudanese politics: if there can be free and fair elections and a truly legitimate government in power then the prospects of peace, stability and a southern vote for unity in the 2011 referendum on self-determination are much improved.

When the CPA was signed in January 2005 one British diplomat commented that getting the deal was only ten per cent of the task, and implementing it would be the remaining 90 per cent. With international attention focused on Darfur, pressure to fairly implement the CPA has been low and provision of resources to ensure that Sudanese of all walks of life enjoyed a peace dividend have been lacking. Fortunately the latter imbalance is now being rectified and Sudan’s international donors are meeting in Oslo to unlock more funds for reconstruction.

The abortive 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement planned to bring Darfurians into this national democratic process as well as consulting civil society and community leaders through the Darfur-Darfur Dialogue and Consultation. One of the encouraging signs of recent months is the renewed determination of Darfurians to resolve their differences at community level and restore good relations between the tribes.

It is important to give greater muscle to Sudan’s democrats and greater confidence to civil society and community leaders. Many small scale efforts are underway to support this. A sensitively-handled high-level initiative can certainly give these greater impetus.

5. Finance

The post-war reconstruction efforts in South Sudan have made modest progress in the last three years. In the areas of the North ravaged by that long war, such as the Nuba Mountains, people complain that living standards have actually deteriorated in the years of peace and speak not of if the war will resume, but when.

For millions of ordinary Sudanese in the North, neither peace nor oil revenues have brought any improvement in services or reduction in poverty. The UN Mission in Sudan, at first heralded as the vanguard of the world’s commitment to improving the lot of ordinary Sudanese, is increasingly seen as remote and uncaring.

Senior UN staff lament that they have lost the public relations contest. The reason is that it is very obvious that billions are being spent on UNMIS while ordinary people languish. Funds for rehabilitation and development could also be well spent in the many parts of Darfur which remain relatively stable — such as the towns where fully a third of Darfurians live. A summit to pledge sufficient resources to make the peace dividend a reality would be a huge step forward.

But there is more to finance than aid. Over thirty years, Sudan’s rulers have turned to plundering the assets of their poorer citizens and diverting foreign aid because the domestic tax base is so low and unreliable. Twenty-five years of suspending Sudan from international financial institutions, imposing sanctions and divesting private sector companies have intensified the spiral.

National finances need to be put on a sustainable footing. In turn this needs international co-operation for debt relief, oil revenue management and development assistance, all linked to domestic fiscal and financial sector reforms. Some of Sudan’s neighbours, including Chad and CAR, need this even more desperately.

Over the last eleven years, Gordon Brown has pioneered some of the most innovative ideas for financing development. Perhaps financing peace could be a focus for his planned summit?

It is a brave leader who puts his political capital on the line to try to straighten out the crises in Sudan. George Clooney may have galvanised this courage in Gordon Brown — but that is just the beginning.

Alex de Waal is author, with Julie Flint, of ‘Darfur: A New History of a

Long War’, new edition to be published Zed Books, May 2008.

Filed Under: Darfur, Gordon Brown
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