Norm Dixon
In the early hours of May 5, the most militarily significant Darfur rebel group — a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) led by Minni Minnawi — reluctantly accepted a flawed "peace" agreement with Sudan's authoritarian regime. Contrary to the optimistic claim by US President George Bush on May 7 that the agreement allows the people of ravaged Darfur "a chance to begin anew", the deal imposed by Washington again leaves the fate of millions of Darfuris dependent on the "good faith" of Khartoum's rulers, whose vicious scorched-earth tactics are responsible for the deaths of up to 450,000 people in western Sudan.
Since 2003, Khartoum has repeatedly broken all promises to disarm and disband the state-sponsored janjaweed militia responsible for the massive pogroms against Darfur's non-Arabic-speaking villagers. Nor, despite pledges to do so, has it put on trial any perpetrators of atrocities in Darfur, which include mass rape and mass murder. Sudan's army and air force have regularly participated in the attacks, and actively hindered the inadequate African Union (AU) ceasefire monitoring force. The Khartoum regime and its bandit allies are systematically blocking aid supplies reaching millions of people displaced by their attacks, contributing to tens of thousands of deaths through disease and hunger.
In the month before the latest round of negotiations, which began in Abuja, Nigeria, on April 25, Khartoum's armed forces and proxies brazenly launched an offensive against the rebel-controlled Gereida area in South Darfur. Around 90 villages were attacked and 200,000 people displaced, bringing the total estimate of "conflict-affected" people in Darfur to 3.6 million. As late as April 24, government bombers and helicopter gunships attacked the area.
Rebels pressured
For all Washington's tough talk against Khartoum over the years, at the Abuja talks senior diplomats from the US, Europe and the AU applied immense pressure on the main Darfur rebel groups — the Minnawi faction of the SLM, the SLM faction led by Abdel Wahid Mohamed Nur and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — to agree to a "peace" settlement before a UN Security Council-endorsed April 30 deadline. Well before then, the Sudan government's chief negotiator Majzoubal Khalifa announced that Khartoum was willing and ready to sign on the dotted line.
However, the draft ignored the liberation movements' key demands — a single, autonomous Darfur provincial government (currently there are three Darfur states), and an additional national vice-president from Darfur (provisions similar to those in the peace agreement that ended the north-south civil war in 2005). The rebels were also concerned that there was no specific timetable for the disarming and disbanding of the janjaweed, that the number of rebel fighters to be integrated into the Sudanese armed forces was not specified and that the reconstruction aid would be inadequate.
Despite being the massively outgunned victims in the conflict, pressure was heaped on the Darfur groups to "compromise" with the mass murderers in Khartoum. "Now is the time for you to show leadership and make the compromises necessary for peace, for the sake of the people of Darfur", AU mediator Ahmed Salim lectured the rebels on May 1.
For several years now, US, UN and AU officials have increasingly attributed blame for the continuation of the Darfur crisis in equal measure to the rebels and the government. The corporate media has dutifully followed suit. For example, the "liberal" British Guardian on May 2 began its report on the talks' deadlock: "Darfur rebels have bickered among themselves, violated a ceasefire and even been accused of attacking peacekeepers. Now they risk being seen as standing in the way of a peace agreement..." Similar assertions appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and other leading Western capitalist media.
The Bush administration ordered US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick to travel to Abuja, arriving May 1, and take charge of the negotiations to break the stalemate. The French newsagency AFP on May 3 quoted US State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack on Zoellick's mission: "It is time for the international community to make it clear to all these groups they need to make the hard decisions ... for peace so that the killing can be stopped."
It soon became clear that Zoellick's central task was to bully the Darfur representatives into agreeing to the "take-it-or-leave-it", Khartoum-friendly deal. The May 9 Washington Post revealed that at one point in the drawn-out, sleepless negotiations Zoellick bailed up Minnawi, who was still wavering over signing, and threatened: "I can be a very good friend, but I am a fearsome enemy."
Minnawi succumbed to the pressure. However the Nur-led wing of the SLM and the JEM refused to sign. "Our people sent us here to bring back their rights", explained Abdel Wahid Mohamed Nur to the May 5 New York Times. "We cannot accept anything less than their minimum rights." According to the May 4 New York Times, "a senior State Department official travelling with Mr Zoellick said the United States and other nations intended to simply ignore the other two [rebel] groups ..."
On June 1, the Nur-led SLM and the JEM allowed a final deadline to pass. "We are calling on the United Nations and international mediators to be patient, not to hurry up, not to force an unacceptable peace on people of Darfur", JEM leader Ibrahim Mohamad Khalil told Reuters. The AU is threatening to impose sanctions on the dissenting rebels.
The rebels' key political demand for the creation of an autonomous Darfur province was refused, the only concession being a referendum to be held sometime after the fighting has ended to decide whether such an administrative region will be created. There were some improvements on the initial draft: the number of rebels to be integrated into the Sudanese armed forces was set at 4000, with another 1000 to join the police force and 3000 others to be provided education to enable them to return to the civilian population; and a timetable for the disarmament of the janjaweed was established.
The fundamental weakness is that the deal's implementation relies entirely on Khartoum keeping its promises. There will now be a month-long "assessment" period, followed by a 45-day "disengagement" period. Only then is Khartoum required to begin to redeploy its armed forces from parts of Darfur and start to disarm the janjaweed, to be completed five months later. While Khartoum officials have said the Sudanese government will now consider the stationing of an expanded "international" force in Darfur to oversee the implementation of the agreement, this will not be in place until after September at the very earliest and probably many months after that, if at all.
Until then, the under-staffed and under-resourced AU force will be the only guarantee that Khartoum will end its attacks and rein in the janjaweed — a task the AU troops have been incapable of enforcing to date. For all their "humanitarian" rhetoric, US and European governments have refused to provide adequate funds, equipment and logistics to the AU soldiers in Darfur, the only force in a position to prevent or discourage attacks on civilians. Only 6000 of the projected force of 7000 troops are in place, and they are mostly holed up in their barracks due to a lack of vehicles and fuel.
Washington opts for Khartoum
Minnawi signed the flawed agreement because he felt that his rebel force and the Darfuri people as a whole had few other options. As the old saying goes, "actions speak louder than words", and the performance of Robert Zoellick at the talks — and the record of Washington over the past three and a half years — clearly shows that no matter how belligerent its public utterances, in private Washington has concluded that at this stage its strategic interests are best served by the reactionary National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum.
Significant sections of the anti-imperialist left, the liberal centre and the pro-imperialist right have all been fooled into believing that the Bush administration is prepared to launch an Iraq-style military intervention with the goal of "regime change" in Sudan on the basis of its rhetoric on Darfur. Washington's actions reveal that this is not the case.
The fact that Washington used its diplomatic muscle to force the SLM to sign a deal approved by Khartoum even as Sudanese government forces and janjaweed had launched an offensive against Darfuris in Gereida, sent a signal that Minnawi could not ignore. "If they don't sign, the horrors of the last years will be redoubled. Few doubt that Khartoum's 'Plan B' is anything other than a large-scale military offensive", Alex de Waal, adviser to the AU mediation team, explained according to a May 5 IRIN news agency report.
Adding to the blackmail has been the West's appalling response to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and eastern Chad. On May 22, Medecins Sans Frontieres International noted that on April 28 the World Food Program had been forced, due to the failure of Western governments to honour financial pledges, to halve the daily rations for the millions receiving emergency food aid in Darfur — from 2100 calories per person to a below sustenance level of 1050 calories. As of March 30, just US$131 million of the $600 million required in 2006 had arrived.
"Flagging donor mobilisation is particularly difficult to understand, given that the status of the displaced has worsened since last year", said MSF's Darfur mission head Fabrice Weissman. "The international community is behaving as if it had decided that providing vital aid to the Darfur populations would depend on the signing of the peace agreement among the warring parties."
This is the latest episode in the cynical double game that Washington has played since the crisis in Darfur began in 2003. While it has loudly lambasted Khartoum in public, most recently with vague threats of UN sanctions and hints of NATO intervention, and postured as a defender of the human rights of the people of Darfur, behind the scenes it has sought to reach a political accommodation with Sudan's rulers. The lives of millions of Darfuris come a far distant second to Washington's central political and economic goals in the region: continued close cooperation of Khartoum's rulers in the US "war on terror" and eventual access to southern Sudan's rich oil resources.
From Green Left Weekly, June 7, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.