MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Ken Bacon, the President of Refugees International, speaks with Jerry Fowler from Khartoum after having spent eleven days in North and South Darfur. He explains what must be done to salvage the fragile Darfur Peace Agreement and emphasizes the need for security. President Bush met with SLA leader, Minni Minawi this past Tuesday, and Ken sent Bush a letter asking him to address these issues in his meeting with the only rebel leader to sign the peace agreement.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: This is Voices on Genocide Prevention. I am Jerry Fowler. My guest today is Ken Bacon, President of the advocacy group Refugees International. He has just been in Darfur and joins me now from Khartoum. Ken, thanks for being on the program.
KEN BACON: My pleasure Jerry.
JERRY FOWLER: Ken, just give us the basics first. What parts of Darfur did you visit, and how long were you there?
KEN BACON: We spent eleven days in Darfur. We started in Nyala which is the capital of South Darfur and visited some major refugee camps in that area, the major one being Kalma Camp which has about 80 to 100 thousand people in it. Then we went south to an area called Garada. Garada is a town that has been swamped by internal refugees or internally displaced people. It had 30,000 last year; it has about 128,000 today. From there we went up to North Darfur, Al Fasher, and we visited about five refugee camps in that area, including a fast growing camp around Tawilla, outside of Al Fasher, Zam Zam Camp, and camps right in Al Fasher itself.
JERRY FOWLER: You visited the three states of Darfur, North and South and West Darfur. You were not able to go to West Darfur?
KEN BACON: We did not go to West Darfur. We had to make some choices. We did not have unlimited time, so we did not get to West Darfur. I have been there in the past, but I did not make it up this trip.
JERRY FOWLER: How does the situation on this trip compare to your previous visits? You have been there twice.
KEN BACON: I would say there are a couple of fundamental changes. As you know, there was a peace agreement signed in May, on May 5th, and it was signed between the government of Sudan and one of three rebel groups; that is the Sudan Liberation Army faction, headed by a person named Minni Minawi. After that peace agreement was signed, there has been a fairly marked increase in violence and displacement. I will talk a little more about that later, but that is the first deleterious impact of the peace agreement. The second is that it has made some of the large refugee camps very edgy, and at times, violent. This is pretty new. The camps have generally been calm, but since the peace agreement was signed, there have been some killings; an African Union interpreter was killed in Kalma Camp in Nyala shortly after the agreement was signed, some African Union vehicles have been burned in the camps, and there have been other killings and massive demonstrations against the Darfur Peace Agreement. Basically, the peace agreement has not brought peace; it has brought increased violence.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you this about the violence inside the camps; as you mention, Minni Minawi, the one who signed the agreement, is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, and the leader of the faction that did not sign, Abdul Wahid, is from the Fur tribe. Did you see any evidence that the split between Minawi and Abdul Wahid is being replicated among the IDP population between Zaghawa and Fur?
KEN BACON: We saw some evidence. We were told of much more evidence, but I would have to tell you that our trips to the camps, mercifully, were calm, although some of the people we went with expressed concerns that if we asked questions about the Darfur Peace Agreement we could stir up a bitterness and anger, but that in fact did not happen. We found people willing to sit down and talk with us about anything, including the Darfur Peace Agreement, and they were generally pretty calm about it. I will say this, that the Fur tribe is the dominant tribe in Darfur, which of course means land of the Fur. It represents about thirty percent of the population, and it represents about eighty percent of the population in the major camps. The Zaghawa tribe, by contrast, is quite a small tribe; about eight percent of the population of Darfur. There is a lot of bitterness in the Fur tribe because they did not sign the agreement, and their leader, Wahid, said it was a bad agreement. There is a lot of bitterness about the agreement by the Fur tribe, and that has been taken out against the Zaghawa.
JERRY FOWLER: To explore a little bit the nature of their dissatisfaction, is it a matter of following the lead of Abdul Wahid, or was there much substantive familiarity with the details of the agreement and unhappiness with substantive details?
KEN BACON: In almost every camp we encountered a local leader or sheik who had either read the agreement, been briefed on it, or heard accounts on the BBC or Voice of America. In general, the people had not read the agreement and did not know much about it, but this is what they do know: They know that security has gotten worse rather than better. In the life of the internally displaced in Darfur, security is everything. Security is what they want more than anything else. When security gets worse, they turn against what they think caused it to get worse, and they think that there is a relationship between the growing insecurity on the one hand, and the Darfur Peace Agreement on the other. They tend to be against the agreement on those grounds.
JERRY FOWLER: Is it possible at this point for the agreement to be salvaged and support to be generated?
KEN BACON: That is the question, of course, everybody is trying to answer, including President Bush who is meeting with Minni Minawi this week, but I think the agreement on paper is a pretty good agreement, and I think it is a good starting point and we ought to try to make it work. How to make it work is going to be incredibly difficult. The first step will be to show some tangible benefits to the people in Darfur, and the first way to do that is to move from the insecurity to greater security. If that can happen, people will begin to take the agreement more seriously.
JERRY FOWLER: How would it be possible to move to greater security? Who is going to provide that security?
KEN BACON: There are two things. First, despite the greater fighting stirred by Minawi’s troops—and I should tell you that this is a different type of fighting than we have seen from the SLA and Minawi in the past. In the past, the fighting between the two factions of the Sudan Liberation Army has been force on force. It has been groups of soldiers versus other groups of rebel soldiers. The most recent fighting has been soldiers versus civilians, and this way it imitates what the Janjaweed has done, and it indicates what we have called, and what you have called, genocide. The Zaghawa are now coming into camps and they are concentrating on killing young men and boys. They are saying, “If you are not for the peace agreement, if you are not for us, you are against us, and we are going to punish you; we are going to kill you.” It has taken a very disturbing turn against civilians that did not exist in the past from the Minawi group. This is very, very bad news. Now, what is going to change this? I am hoping that during his visit to Washington, the Bush Administration and members of Congress who meet with Minawi will make it absolutely clear that we cannot deal with anybody, even one who signed the peace agreement, if he is killing civilians in Darfur, and therefore, he will put out the orders to his commanders. Second, the good thing that has happened is that the Janjaweed has basically been more under control—this is the Arab-backed militia groups that cooperates with the government—it has not been launching its signature attacks on civilians recently. It has continued banditry, but it has not been attacking and killing large groups of civilians in villages, at least not over the last two months. I hope that continues. One, Minawi will order his troops to stop this fighting, stop the killing. Two, as you know, we are all working very hard to get a United Nations peacekeeping force into Darfur to replace the very undermanned, overwhelmed African Union force that has been there for the last two years. A United Nations force will not be a miracle, it will not bring instant peace and stability, but it should have a better chance of stabilizing the situation than the African Union force has.
JERRY FOWLER: By most estimates, though, once Khartoum agrees to the deployment of United Nations force—which it has not done so far—the deployment is still several months down the pike. Can things last that long? In other words, can the situation hold that long?
KEN BACON: Can the situation get worse? I hope it does not. A lot of that will depend on what the government of Sudan wants, how it wants this to turn out. The good news is that they signed the peace agreement which suggests that they might actually want peace. The bad news is that they have signed peace agreements and cease fires in the past and violated them willy-nilly. In this case, they seem to be holding to the terms of the peace agreement, generally, not a hundred percent, but generally they seem to be honoring it. That is a good sign. Whether they will continue to do that remains to be seen.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you this; there was a piece in the New York Times’ Week in Review this past Sunday where Lydia Polgreen made the observation that many people have claimed that Darfur is becoming the next Rwanda, but she suggested that it could be worse, that it could easily become the next Congo. Are you seeing that reflected on the ground?
KEN BACON: The Congo is terrible, but one of the reasons it is terrible is that it has had very little humanitarian response. Darfur is quite the opposite. There has been a huge, and generally, very successful humanitarian response that saved literally hundreds of thousands of lives. Nutritional levels are now higher in Darfur than they are in other parts of rural Sudan because so much food is being put in; so many clinics have been opened. Health levels are higher than many other parts of Sudan, despite the fact that this is a war zone. In that regard, I do not see—as long as the international community stays engaged—I do not see a Darfur becoming another Congo. It is certainly vicious and violent and as I said, we have not seen an end to that; quite the opposite, but I do think there are fundamental differences between the Congo and Darfur and they primarily relate to the humanitarian response.
JERRY FOWLER: I guess part of what she was suggesting is that humanitarian response would be difficult to sustain and the international political response such as it has been would be difficult to sustain if violence continues by the rebels against civilians, if the situation becomes less morally clear as it seemed to be when most of the attacks were being conducted the Sudanese government or the Janjaweed.
KEN BACON: That is why Minawi’s visit to Washington is so important. It is very important that he get the right messages from the Administration and from Congress, and that he return home with a different set of tactics and a different approach to peace than he has shown over the last few months. If he does not, this whole peace agreement is going to collapse very quickly. I do not think there is much hope right now of getting the other leaders to sign; there could be if there is some security and people begin to see tangible benefits from peace, but so far it has been just the opposite.
JERRY FOWLER: What about the humanitarian workers? I know you spent a lot of time dealing with the aid workers, and as you say this is a massive operation that has had some very positive affects in terms of stabilizing the health status of the IDPs, but there are also increasing reports that the humanitarian workers themselves are coming under attack.
KEN BACON: They are coming under more and more attack. As we move from the more organized war with the government and the Janjaweed on the one, versus rebel groups on the other to a more fractious split, chaotic fighting, and danger is increased for a lot of humanitarian workers as well as for normal civilians. As I said earlier, I am not just in villages, but also people traveling roads are much more subject to banditry, but so far the humanitarian community is continuing to do a fabulous job. There are 13,000 humanitarian workers in Darfur now. They are working very difficult conditions, but they are doing it and they are doing it well. What has happened is that the response has become somewhat less predictable because it will be cut off for a week or two, or maybe a month sometimes in some place because of the decline in security, but as the security returns, the workers also return and that has been happening, so the response has continued.
JERRY FOWLER: You are in Khartoum now; you are hoping, I think, to meet with some government officials. Have you been in Khartoum long enough to get a sense of what the attitude is? What are we seeing on the international level is firm statements by Omar al Bashir, the Sudanese President, that under no circumstances will he allow United Nations to come in, even though there seems to be a growing consensus internationally that the United Nations does need to go in. Do you have any sense about whether that attitude is softening?
KEN BACON: There were—I think someone is trying to call me on this line unfortunately—there were demonstrations today against a United Nations force, but there were also stories in the paper saying that maybe they would accept a force made out of troops from Muslim countries; that could range from Turkey to Bangladesh to Indonesia, there is a wide range of Muslim countries. The idea that they will not allow United Nations or international troops in Sudan is just crazy. They have 10,000 international United Nations troops that are peacekeeping right now in South Sudan, so they have already done that. At one point, the President al Bashir said that he would not accept African Union forces. There are 7,000 African Union forces in Darfur, and they have been there for two years. He has changed his mind in the past; we have to hope he will change it in the future. Frankly, what I think is going on here is that he wants to make sure that a United Nations force does not come in with a mandate to arrest him or other people in this government if there is an indictment by the International Criminal Court. There have not been any indictments of Sudanese officials, but the International Criminal Court is investigating events in Darfur; they have found evidence of crimes according to the prosecutor, but they have not indicted anybody yet. I cannot predict whether they will or they will not, but I think that al Bashir, the President, is very keen to avoid any sort of force in Darfur that might arrest him or other people in his Administration.
JERRY FOWLER: I would like to, as we conclude, to step back a little bit. You were in the United States government for a good part of the nineties as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, so you saw first hand United States government response to, I believe, to Rwanda, to Bosnia, to Kosovo, East Timor, challenges like that. Where do you think we stand today in terms of United States government response and international response to these episodes of mass violence?
KEN BACON: The language of a response is better; at least we are admitting that genocide is taking place. We did not do that back in the nineties, during Rwanda or during the Balkans, but the substance of a response is no better. We are not taking a strong against genocide, so we have a curious situation where President Bush, I think, has been correct, and honest and forthright in calling what is happening in Darfur, genocide, but he is not carrying out the action that I believe anybody who is concerned about Darfur would carry out. We have depended on diplomacy, not military action to stop this. Diplomacy, obviously, is the first choice, but if it does not work, I think we should look at something else.
JERRY FOWLER: What do you think are the obstacles to looking at something else?
KEN BACON: I think having a lot of troops in Iraq right now is one obstacle. That is probably the major obstacle. I think the fact that we apparently have established helpful relationships with Khartoum in the war against terror is another obstacle. Frankly, I think that President Bush probably thought that he would be able to resolve this diplomatically just as intervention helped resolve the 21 year civil war between North and South, but this has turned out to be a somewhat tougher case than the North-South war, at least over the last couple of years.
JERRY FOWLER: Ken Bacon is President of Refugees International and he joins us from Khartoum. Ken, thanks for being with us.
KEN BACON: Thank you Jerry.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
