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| Africa Horn |
| Darfur peace deal analysis |
| 2006-05-06 |
| The Darfur peace deal the Sudanese government and a major rebel group signed on Friday may be doomed from the start, since two other rebel groups balked at signing the accord to end what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis. "Unless the right spirit, unless the right attitude and right disposition is there, this document isn't worth the paper it is signed on," warned Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, host of the drawn-out Darfur talks in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. The international community "should be celebrating that there is an agreement, but not by any means treating this as the end of the story," said Colin Thomas-Jensen, an expert on the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group in Washington. "It's the question of doing now the diplomatic heavy lifting and the implementation of it. ... The government of Sudan and the rebels have signed numerous agreements," including an April 2004 cease-fire, "all of them systematically violated." Hours after this week's third deadline passed at midnight Thursday and the talks teetered on the brink of collapse, observers broke into applause as government officials and members of the Sudan Liberation Army -- the main rebel group fighting the Sudanese army and its proxy militia, the infamous Janjaweed -- signed the last page and initialed each of the 85 pages of the revised peace agreement. Under the accord, the Khartoum government would yield to rebels' demands for power-sharing, disarming its militia, accepting more rebels into the national security force and compensating war victims. Western diplomats hope the deal will end three years of war in Darfur, in which at least 180,000 civilians have been killed and more than 2 million displaced in western Sudan -- a crisis that the Bush administration has called genocide and that has galvanized protest movements in the United States and elsewhere. Brokered by U.S. and British officials and African Union mediators in 11th-hour negotiations, the accord would allow a U.N. peacekeeping force into Darfur to protect the 8 million civilians who live there. "One shouldn't get overly optimistic that (the end of genocide) is the result," said Roberta Cohen, an expert on Sudan and humanitarian issues at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "It doesn't necessarily mean (the two sides) would adhere to their word." Khartoum touted the signing of the accord as a major success. "The deal is peace," said government spokesman Abdulrahman Zuma. "I think that the victory today is for Sudan." But two of the factions walked out of the negotiations early Friday. One of the rebel leaders who did not sign the peace deal, Abdel Wahid Nur, said the proposed accord was "a big disaster" and did not guarantee the disarmament of the Janjaweed. Another group that also balked at signing the deal is the smaller Justice and Equality Movement. The chasm between the rebels deepened further when Abdulrahman Moussa, one of the top negotiators for Nur, announced Friday that he was forming his own Front for Liberation and Renaissance. Although the international community will probably eventually bring these groups into the peace process, these last-minute splits showed that "the chronic distrust between the rebel groups and the government and the rebel groups themselves simply will not go away," said Thomas-Jensen. He pointed out that two other, smaller rebel groups broke away from the peace process several months ago and did not even participate in the last leg of the drawn-out negotiations. Divisions also exist within the Sudanese government, he said, and "there are elements of the Sudanese government that are going to pursue a military solution to this conflict no matter what." Friday's draft accord provides for the carefully choreographed disarmament of Darfur rebels and government proxy militias, integration of a minimum 5,000 rebels into Sudan's security forces, re-education of 3,000 rebels to prepare them for civilian life, help for the more than 2 million displaced Darfur residents, and a prominent representation for the western Sudanese in the national government. Humanitarian agencies hope the agreement will pave the way for relief groups to bring aid to the region, which has been too dangerous for many aid groups to operate, before the rainy season in June makes dirt roads in Darfur impassable for relief vehicles. The European Union's executive commission, which has been closely following the talks in the Nigerian capital, said Thursday it would contribute $125 million for a humanitarian and initial recovery package in Darfur. The agreement calls for a protection force for civilians, but does not specify who would be its members. The United States hopes Khartoum would allow United Nations peacekeepers, backed by NATO logistics and training, to monitor the peace process, augmenting the 7,000 thinly spread out and poorly equipped African Union troops, who have been unable to stem the bloodshed. The African Union says it is running out of money to keep even these peacekeepers in Darfur for much longer, but Khartoum has been reluctant to accept U.N. troops, and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden last month urged his followers to go to Sudan to fight against them. On Friday, however, Sudanese officials signaled they were willing to accept U.N. peacekeepers. "The government has no reservation whatsoever about any U.N. involvement or participation after the signing of the peace agreement," Zuma said. "The United Nations is the only party that could help us, really, in implementing this peace agreement." But some Africa experts caution against accepting at face value Khartoum's stated willingness to make concessions. "I worry that the government's quick acceptance of this ... proposal means they aren't really serious about implementing anything," said John Prendergast, a Sudan expert and a former senior Africa specialist for the Clinton administration. The war erupted in 2003 when rebels in Darfur, an ethnically mixed wasteland the size of France, began attacking government targets, claiming that the Arab-led government in Khartoum was neglecting the region and oppressing black Africans in favor of Arabs. Human rights activists accuse Sudan's Arab-dominated central government of unleashing the Janjaweed -- "devils on horseback" -- to murder and rape civilians and burn villages, but Khartoum denies the charge. Although most of Darfur's residents are Muslims, the Janjaweed consider them apostates and say Islam permits enslaving, raping and slaughtering them. The humanitarian crisis and violence have spilled into neighboring Chad, which has sheltered hundreds of thousands of Darfur refugees, and into the Central African Republic. Starvation accompanies the violence. Aid workers say their food stocks for the region's 2.8 million people who rely on food aid are nearly depleted. Last week, the U.N. World Food Programme, the main agency providing aid in Sudan, slashed its food rations for refugees in Darfur to about half of what is considered the minimum daily nutritional requirement. Although the peace agreement should ease access to the people in need of relief, it will not immediately alleviate the suffering of the starving millions, said Trevor Rowe, a WFP spokesman. "War or peace, there's still no money. People are still hungry. We don't have food, we can't (deliver it to) the regions that are affected," Rowe said. "If there's a sudden outbreak of peace, I don't know how the politics of humanitarianism change." "It's an important step toward peace but this is definitely not the end of the genocide," said Ivan Boothe, a spokesman for the Washington-based Genocide Intervention Network, which has raised $250,000 to support African Union peacekeepers protecting civilians in Darfur. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 I hope the rebels said "No thanks" to the offer of a helicopter. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-05-06 18:24 |