The generals have got it right

Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition

 

Fewer people are dying in Darfur. But the need for a regional settlement is as urgent as ever

FESTERING conflicts in faraway places tend to follow a familiar trajectory. At first there is worldwide moral outrage; next, earnest promises that “something must be done”; then, when rapid solutions fail to work, bafflement and finally a sense of hapless resignation. That sequence is common in Africa: think of Somalia and Congo. Now there is a danger that the benighted region of Darfur, in western Sudan, may join the list of seemingly insoluble problems.

Few of the continent’s conflicts have provoked as much moral expostulation as when, in 2004 and 2005, the truth emerged about the Sudanese government’s brutal suppression of an uprising there. The fighting has lasted longer than the second world war. Some 300,000 people have been killed and nearly 3m displaced. A durable settlement looks unlikely any time soon. In international forums a sense of Darfur-fatigue has spread. The world’s desire to be shot of the problem may help explain the widespread reporting of a story that Martin Agwai, a Nigerian general who is stepping down as commander of the UN’s peacekeeping force in Darfur, said that the war was “over”.

General Agwai said no such thing. He rightly pointed to the end of the full-blown confrontation between well-marshalled rebel forces and a Sudanese army that had mastery of the skies and could bomb the recalcitrant rebel villages at will. But he also explained that, in the past three years, the nature of the fighting has dramatically changed.

Gone is the neat division between attacker and defender. Instead there is a messy and poisonous plurality of rival groups, tribes and bandits; some co-operate with the government, others with the assorted rebels. Allegiances are fickle, loyalties easily bought. The two original rebel groups have fragmented into at least 20 factions. The International Criminal Court at The Hague has indicted Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes in Darfur. But it has also accused three rebel leaders of similar crimes. Even the notorious janjaweed, an Arab militia that served as proxies for the Sudanese army, are now as likely to fight each other or even to turn on the government if they have not been paid on time. It is wrongheaded nowadays simply to tag the rebels as “good” and the Sudanese government forces as “evil”.

Obama’s man flies in

Although the death rate is sharply down, chaos on the ground still prevails—and could easily become much bloodier again. More parts of the region are unsafe for aid workers. It is harder to negotiate safe passage with increasingly unpredictable armed groups. General Agwai was promised 26,000 troops. He still has only 17,000. They cannot ensure humanitarian workers secure access to the region, so the food and medical handouts on which some 2.7m Darfuris survive often fail to get through. A political solution is as sorely needed as ever.

Fortunately, another general, this one formerly of the American air force, is providing fresh political momentum. Scott Gration, Barack Obama’s energetic new special envoy to Sudan, believes that the best chance of peace for this divided country remains the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in 2005 between the Islamist government in Khartoum, in the north of the country, and the former rebels of south Sudan, who are quite separate from the Darfuris, and had been fighting their northern masters for most of the past half-century. The CPA offers a new deal for the whole of Sudan, including national elections to be held next year and the possibility of secession for the south following a referendum promised for 2011. But it has been under severe strain partly because of intertribal fighting in the south.

Mr Gration is using his political clout to force both sides to stick to their agreements under the CPA, thus offering hope that the peace will stick and that the south will be allowed to split off peacefully, if it chooses to. He has also enjoyed some success in softening the Sudanese government’s stance on Darfur, for instance by persuading the regime to allow in other aid agencies to replace those expelled in retaliation for the issuing of the ICC’s arrest warrant for Mr Bashir in March. Some of Mr Obama’s people think Mr Bashir’s indubitably nasty regime should be further isolated and squeezed by economic sanctions. Mr Gration, by contrast, favours a wary but active engagement with Sudan’s government in the hope that it will be more co-operative and less brutal in Darfur and the south. At the moment Mr Gration’s approach seems to be yielding results and should be supported.

 

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