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As a consultant to the African Union, Alex de Waal, senior fellow at Harvard’s Global Equity Initiative and author of “Darfur: Short History of a Long War,” helped broker the Darfur Peace Agreement. In an interview with Jerry Fowler, he explains that the agreement is deteriorating because a solution was rushed, not enough parties signed onto the deal, and Darfur is still missing a political solution. Taking a different stance than most, Alex asserts that before protection can be provided to the people of Darfur, a political settlement must be reached.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Alex de Waal, senior fellow at Harvard’s Global Equity Initiative and author of “Darfur: Short History of a Long War.” He is also a consultant to the African Union. Alex, thanks for joining us.
ALEX DE WAAL: It is a pleasure.
JERRY FOWLER: Alex, in Darfur it seems like the situation continues to hit a new low every day.
ALEX DE WAAL: The situation for the humanitarian aid operation, and the situation politically are hitting new lows; that is absolutely correct, but we have to have the perspective that the violence, bad though it is, is nowhere near the scale that Darfur witnessed at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004 when tens of thousands were killed and millions displaced. It was really those two huge military offensives by the Sudan government with the Janjaweed as proxy that created the disaster of Darfur, and what we are really dealing with today is the aftermath of that.
JERRY FOWLER: You mentioned that, obviously, the situation and the humanitarian operation is perilous, and if this current violence causes the humanitarian operation to collapse, which some United Nations officials have been suggesting may happen, the consequences will be even worse than that round of violence in 2003, 2004.
ALEX DE WAAL: Certainly if the humanitarian operation grinds to a halt, then the situation for the population of Darfur will deteriorate. Having said that, the operation over the past couple of years has been remarkably effective at bringing mortality rates down. It is actually, in some interesting respects, a humanitarian success story. In the context of the most appalling violence, and the most appalling intent by the government of Sudan and some of the rebels, the humanitarian community has rescued some sort of solution for very, very many people in Darfur. Should they withdraw, the situation will deteriorate, but it will not deteriorate overnight. Darfurians are remarkably resilient people; they are able to survive very, very considerable adversity, and many of them will do so, where the precipice where on is not an immediate humanitarian precipice; it is a humanitarian incline. It is not a precipice of massacres; the precipice is one of losing sight of a solution. We did have a solution to the crisis in Darfur within our grasp earlier this year; it is very, very rapidly going out of our grasp, and if it does, then what we are faced with is an intractable crisis that could stretch many years into the future, a bit like the war did in Southern Sudan for more than twenty years.
JERRY FOWLER: You said that a solution was within grasp, and I imagine you are talking about the period of time in early May when the Darfur Peace Agreement was signed. The situation has deteriorated since the signing of that agreement. Why has that not worked out?
ALEX DE WAAL: The negotiations in Abuja—and I was part of them; I was particularly working on the security side—those negotiations dragged on over a couple of years, and the last round dragged on almost six months, and they were tremendously frustrating. They were tremendously frustrating because the government has some very able negotiators who scarcely gave an inch, and the rebel movements were divided, they were incoherent, they were maximalist in their demands, and they were really so distrustful of the government, with good reason of course, but they were not prepared to engage in serious negotiation. However, progress was being made; compromises were being reached; the parties were admitting that they need to live with each other, that the power sharing needed to be worked out within certain parameters; a lot of agreement was reached on issues of wealth-sharing, and the security arrangements, which were the most tricky of all, the area where distrust and mutual fear was at its greatest, we were beginning to make serious progress in defining the problem and identifying a route on how to demilitarize displaced camps, how to disarm the Janjaweed, how to integrate the rebels into the Sudan army, and so on. What was needed, I believe, was more time. Darfur is peculiarly horrible, but in many other respects, it is just like any other African civil war in which a negotiated settlement is the answer, and a negotiated settlement takes quite a while to achieve because of these huge obstacles of mutual distrust. But, because of the gravity of the situation on the ground, and because of the frustrations with the slow pace of the negotiation, we were stampeded into a very quick settlement. We were stampeded into, as the African Union, not acting as facilitators or as mediators, but as arbitrators. The document that was produced in Abuja—and I think in most respects it is really quite a fair document, certainly quite a sophisticated document—was one that was essentially imposed on the parties; it was not owned by the parties. The reason why two out of the three rebel groups—the SLA of Abdul Wahid al-Nour and the JEM—rejected it was not so much that they disagreed with the content, but because they disagreed with the process. They felt that they had not had time to work through these issues and come to an understanding with their adversary, the government, and that is the main reason why they rejected it. What they wanted was longer, and when they rejected it, it soon became clear that it simply was not going to work. The SLA of Minni Minnawi may have been militarily the strongest, but it had very, very little popular support in Darfur, just really minority support among certain groups, and so it was unsustainable. What that meant was that as the weeks passed by, the DPA, and especially the security arrangements, were completely unimplementable. How can a government—a government we dislike as much as the Sudan government for all its human rights abuses—how can a government actually implement an agreement in good faith if it does not have another party to implement it with? How can it withdraw its forces? How can it disarm its militias if it is under military attack? It was not going to be possible to implement it. The government knew that. The government had agreed to bring in United Nations forces to help implement a Darfur peace agreement on the assumption that everyone had signed it; it had agreed to this in March. Now when the Darfur peace agreement was put on the table with only one signatory out of three, it was not a peace agreement, it was only halfway there, and in that context, any international force that came in would have to have a completely different mandate; it could not be one that was implementing an agreement; it would have to be one that was imposing its will, and for that reason, the Sudan government felt, “this simply is not going to work,” and it was valid, that was a valid line of reasoning. However, being the government that it is, being perfidious, being militaristic, it certainly thought to manipulate the agreement to maximum affect, and that is why it broke down, and locked us in the current situation where we have this game of chicken, of the United Nations posturing and the Sudan government posturing, and I fear no solution will come out of this.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me push a little bit more on the negotiations of the DPA. You mentioned the high level of distrust, especially on the part of the rebels toward the government, and obviously a source of that distrust is the record of the government, first in using violence, but also in not abiding by agreements that they have signed. Can this government be trusted to implement agreements that it agrees to?
ALEX DE WAAL: This government has a deplorable record on implementing agreements, but it has implemented some. If you look at the North-South agreement there, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement; the key aspect of that which is an end to the war has been implemented, the government of Southern Sudan has been set up, the SPLA has been brought into the government of National Unity at the highest level. While there are many, many short comings, the key provisions have been implemented. We face a very stark choice, with two alternatives, neither of which are terribly good. One is to go for regime change, and regime change by force is almost certainly not going to work; it is almost certainly going to either fail or it is going to make the situation worse. The second alternative is to deal with a government. The major part of the problem also has to be part of the solution, and deal with it knowing its bad record, and deal with it knowing that it is going to try to circumvent key aspects of the accord, and use them to its own advantage where it can. I think the reality is that that is the only alternative we have if we are to find a solution.
JERRY FOWLER: The point that we have reached now is that the Darfur Peace Agreement was signed in May, the situation has deteriorated, there has been—partly as a result of the Darfur Peace Agreement—seemingly an increasing fragmentation among the rebels. How is this situation going to be salvaged?
ALEX DE WAAL: The current approach, whereby the United Nations is threatening the Sudan government and the Sudan government is, in turn, threatening the United Nations back is very unhelpful I think. If it becomes a contest of wills, a continuation of diplomacy and politics by ultimatum, it is not going to work. What is going to happen is that the United Nations is going to say, “This is a test of whether the Sudan will subject itself to the United Nations,” and Sudan will say, “No,” and they will say, “This is a test of whether Sudanese sovereignty is uphelp, and the United Nations will say, “We are trying to uphold Sudanese sovereignty while recognizing,” actually they are not, and the United Nations will end up punishing Sudan, not punishing it hard enough to really make a difference, just punishing it enough to make the situation more intractable, more polarized. Where I think the key mistake has lain has been to make the issue of international troops the central issue. What should have happened is to keep the issue of a political settlement, and inclusive political settlement, the central issue. If that can be resolved, than the issue of peacekeeping troops can be settled, if it is auxiliary to a political settlement. If it is the other way around, we are locked into a polarized situation in which no one can be the winner. I think the next steps are to postpone these deadlines, for both sides to take a step back, to back down and say, “We recognize this can only be settled politically, by discussion, and the first step has to be to reopen the negotiations, bring in the rebels who did not sign up. Many people will argue that the DPA should not be reopened because the government has signed up to it, one rebel leader, Minni Minnawi has signed up to it, and it is being adopted into the Sudanese constitution. I do not think that argument washes any longer. It needs to be renegotiated in important respects because it has been violated and because the level of trust that existed a few months ago has been shattered. That needs to happen, and then on the basis of progress towards a new settlement, only then do I believe that it will be possible to get United Nations peacekeepers in. But the very fact of reopening discussions, reopening the political process will allow for ceasefire de-escalation, confidence building measures, the implementation of simple measures like the comprehensive ceasefire that have been agreed to.
JERRY FOWLER: What you are proposing is to try to establish a political solution as a prerequisite for bringing in an international force. It would seem to me that the problem with that sequencing is the very real issue of who is going to protect civilians who are very much at risk, and can the civilian population survive during that time that it would take to reopen negotiations and go through the process of achieving some type of political solution?
ALEX DE WAAL: Any mediator who is confronted with a complex crisis, with people suffering and exposed to violence, faces a terrible dilemma of what can that process do, immediately, now, to provide protection, and I think the answer is that a credible process that has the confidence of all the parties is first of all, some protection in itself because parties that are engaged in talking to one another and can see the light at the end of the tunnel, can see an agreement, are much less likely to attack each other and to attack civilians, and perhaps more importantly, or equally importantly, under those circumstances they are ready to consider an international peacekeeping force. I think we have made a lot of progress backwards in the last six months, and one of the reasons why the negotiations process did not succeed was the concern that there needed to be a protection force now. Now, I fully sympathize with that; it was a profoundly frustrating experience watching people die, watching the ceasefire violated routinely while these negotiations were going on and making no progress, but the approach that was adopted was throwing up collective hands in frustration and saying, “Let’s impose a peace,” simply did not work. Clearly there does need to be protection, and I think the two steps that are required are number one, respect for the ceasefire, and that will happen only when there is a credible process, not an outcome—there does not have to be a completely negotiated outcome, that can take awhile—but at least a process underway which will allow the parties to observe and respect a ceasefire. Then hopefully, one could bring in troops. Let us not imagine that United Nations troops are going to be the answer to this problem. When has a peacekeeping force actually been the answer to any problem, anywhere, other than a standoff between two neighboring sovereign states with well disciplined armies? It is not going to be a solution in Darfur; it is part of a solution, and while we focus on issues such as the mandate, the force strength, the level of armament, what we neglect is the reality that however many troops are sent in there, they can only achieve protection and stabilization of Darfur. First of all, would the consent of the majority of all the people in Darfur, and secondly, over the long term, and if we take that as a starting point, the mission of the forces in Darfur needs to be conceived of as a five or seven year mission, and they need to recognize that 10, 20, 30 thousand troops are not enough to protect three million, four million people at risk. The only way of actually doing that is getting the support of the Darfurian communities, including the armed communities, and using the community leadership, the community structures, including many of the self-defense militias in the region as your allies in this struggle to achieve stability. Once you use the Darfurians as a force multiplier, if you like, and as your main allies, then I think the job can be done with a relatively small force. If you are sending in an international force to protect all three million civilians who are at risk, and disarm the Janjaweed, the force required will be several hundred thousand, and there is no guarantee of success.
JERRY FOWLER: One aspect of the Darfur Peace Agreement that is along the lines of what you are describing in terms of getting the community involved is the creation of a Darfur-Darfur dialogue in consultation that was supposed to bring together the communities. Where do things stand with that? Is that still a viable process or does that also have to go back to square one?
ALEX DE WAAL: There is a bit of a tussle going on over the Darfur-Darfur dialogue at the moment. Some, including the Sudan government and the Minni Minnawi group, want to see it as a political quick fix, another example of what we have been through before, and there is the African and the United Nations who would go along with that. There are others—and I think they are winning the argument—who say that the Darfur-Darfur dialogue in consultation has to be fully inclusive, and it has to be extremely patient, but they also recognize that that can only begin when there is a political settlement or progress towards one. There is no way that it can work under the present circumstances; things are just too violent and too polarized. I think there is a good conception out there, but it is not going to work just yet under the current circumstances.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you this about the political process; the Abuja talks were basically between the government, on the one hand, and then three rebel organizations, on the other, and representatives of the so-called Janjaweed were not there. Representatives of the non-Arab communities, other than the rebels groups were not there. Who all has to be at the table for there to be a meaningful peace agreement?
ALEX DE WAAL: Ultimately, everyone has to be at the table. I think the Abuja process made some necessary compromises because in order to have a process that was not unlimited, some choices had to be made as to who would be represented. Interestingly enough, that was accepted by most of the groups that were not represented. Most of them recognized either that the government would represent their interests or the rebel movements, but as the Darfur dialogue proceeds all groups have to be there and that includes representatives of the communities from which the Janjaweed are drawn. We need to get all of the Arab groups in there, and we need to consider ways in which the consent can be obtained from militia leaders across the board. Clearly, there are very, very tricky issues of accountability for crimes against humanity that need to be addressed, and for certain individuals it will be extremely difficult and probably unacceptable to bring them into any political dialogue, certainly not for a very, very long time, but all of these communities are part of the Darfur social fabric and need to be represented.
JERRY FOWLER: Alex de Waal is Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Global Equity Initiative and the author of “Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.” Alex, thanks so much for being with us.
ALEX DE WAAL: Thank you.
