MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Andrew Natsios, President Bush’s newly appointed Special Envoy to Sudan, presents a hopeful outlook on the situation in Darfur, and throughout Sudan. Special Envoy Natsios claims that in his talks with the government in Khartoum, officials stated that Sudan may be willing to accept troops from North Africa and other Muslim countries, to allow logistic and planning supplementation from the United Nations, and to make amendmendments to the Darfur Peace Agreement to broaden its appeal to all parties. He shared his opinions and findings from his most recent trip to Darfur with President Bush this past week.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Andrew Natsios, recently named by President Bush as his Special Envoy for Sudan. Special Envoy Natsios previously served as head of the United States Association for International Development and has been engaged on Sudan-related issues for seventeen years. Special Envoy Natsios, welcome to the program.
ANDREW NATSIOS: How are you?
JERRY FOWLER: Things are getting worse in Darfur, the United Nations Security Council has authorized a peacekeeping mission—they authorized it at the end of August, but Sudan is still rejecting its deployment—the African Union mission is hanging on by its fingertips; how do you see this getting turned around?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I think there are several sets of issues. The first is that the Sudanese government is objecting to 1706 as a United Nations operation, and I think there is serious discussion now among international actors in this—governments, regional organizations, Europeans, us, and the United Nations—about some kind of alternate way of carrying out the intentions of 1706 and the provisions of 1706 without calling it a United Nations peacekeeping operation in the traditional sense of the world. Our real interest here is not what it is called or what it looks like in terms of its helmet, but how robust and how efficient it is. If it is in a United Nations helmet and it is not robust and efficient, then it is not particularly useful. If it does not have a United Nations helmet, but it is very competent and very aggressive, then we have fulfilled our intention, so I think that is what we should look at; what it is going to do as opposed to the number of the resolution.
JERRY FOWLER: So, the idea is that it would continue, for example, as an African Union mission, but be supplemented by non-African Union forces?
ANDREW NATSIOS: That is one option. Another option is to have the command and control, the logistic systems, the military planning functions all United Nations functions, but sort of superimpose that over an African Union force, because those functions are well developed at the United Nations. When the United Nations started doing these missions—fifteen, twenty years ago, on a large scale—they were not really good at it. I have to say that I have watched a lot of the early missions not do a particularly good job, but with each one of these peacekeeping operations, the United Nations has become more and more competent at it, and they know that there are packages of services that if they are, as a group, installed in a peacekeeping operation, the likelihood of success increases significantly. So, the United Nations, now, after all of these years, has a competency that we need to use. It is not that the African Union is not capable; this is the first time they have done this, and they do not have these systems in place yet.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of the composition of the force—and I realized that this is all kind of under discussion—it would be talking about having troops on the ground who are not necessarily only African Union troops?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I think the Sudanese government was flexible in their conversations with me that they would accept troops from North Africa because it had been Sub-Sahara Africa only before, and there are sort of indications that they might be willing to accept forces from other Muslim countries, and that would make this more flexible. It is very unlikely anyway—the United States and the Europeans are not in a position right now, for a variety of reasons, to give large numbers of troops; the United States typically does not do that in these kinds of operations and the Europeans put a lot of troops in Southern Lebanon, and so that is taking a lot of their excess force capacity and using it, so the worry of the Sudanese government that this is going to be a Western face in Darfur is not real.
JERRY FOWLER: You had commented recently to that affect, that there were not going to be United States troops and that there were no plans for NATO troops, and there are obviously a lot of commitments that both the United States and NATO have elsewhere, but can a force, no matter how it is denominated—United Nations or African Union or whatever—meet those other requirements that you talked about—being robust and being effective—without some involvement of the United States and NATO?
ANDREW NATSIOS: That is what I was speaking about when I talked about the logistics systems, the engineering units, the communications package, the aerial reconnaissance, all of these, what I would call “technical units within a peacekeeping force,” those, actually, the Sudanese said that they did not object to having Western competencies and troops in even those kinds of positions. They do not want the troops on the ground to be Western, which I can understand.
JERRY FOWLER: You were just recently in Cairo, meeting with the head of the Arab League, and I think a lot of observers would consider the Arab League’s involvement in the Darfur situation, up to now, not particularly constructive, very supportive of Khartoum. What role do you see them playing going forward?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I think, first, that we did not solicit the active help of the Arab League until the last month or so. The President talked to Mubarak himself about intervening with Bashir, and Amar Musa, the Secretary General of the Arab League has been to see President Bashir a number of times to urge him to accommodate the international community on 1706. I think they played a very constructive role. They have done what we asked them, but more importantly, they have some of their own ideas. It is their region of the world; instability is not in Egypt’s interest in particular, and so they had some very constructive ideas when I met with them that I thought were very helpful. I think what the Arab League, or what the Egyptians say publicly, may not necessarily be exactly what they are saying privately. They have got to say things publicly because they are obviously Arab countries, they are in the same organization together, but I think they have been very helpful in urging moderation on Bashir’s part, and that appears to be why there has been a little change in the tone of the conversation with Sudan in the last month.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of your interaction with the folks in Khartoum, you were just there recently, and of course, you have been dealing with them for many, many years. They have a long history of engaging in talks, being very polite, dragging things out; is enough pressure being brought to bear on Khartoum to actually get to the point where they are going to one, agree to some type of deployment to protect civilians, and then secondly, contribute to resolving the underlying political conflict?
ANDREW NATSIOS: With respect to the first question, we are putting a lot of pressure, and the President just signed into an executive order putting in place a renewed set of sanctions on the Sudanese government which they were quite upset about, so much so that they cancelled my meeting with President Bashir over it.
JERRY FOWLER: So you did not meet with him at all?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I did not meet with him, and we were told one of the reasons was the executive order and the new legislation the President just signed on this, so it is having its effect. If it was not annoying them, I think they would have certainly had the meeting. I think, though, if you think about it, it is in the Sudanese’s government’s interest to resolve the crisis in Darfur. Their base of support, political support, in the North has always been in Darfur, and this is doing damage to their potential electoral coalition, because there are elections in two years, and they are still talking about having those elections—that is a good sign—and at one point, I asked one of the senior people a couple of years ago, I said, “This must be doing enormous damage to your base,” and that is the only time this official had ever yelled at me, and they said, “Yes, it is doing enormous damage to us politically in the North.” The problem is that they do not kind of understand sometimes that the way you resolve a dispute or a crisis or a civil war is as important as resolving it. In other words, in this particular case, the ends and the means are equal to each other and you cannot simply do anything you want to to end the crisis. They do not quite get that sometimes. I think having the internationally community involved in it may increase the whole likelihood that this effort is going to be successful. What I do not think the general public in the West understands is that this is the third war in Darfur in the last twenty years. I was at the first war in the late eighties when I ran the humanitarian relief function at AID for the President’s father. I was a political appointee and I ran the humanitarian relief office, the OFDA, Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, and I remember going out to it. Now, I did not know it was going to be one of three wars, but it turned out there was another war in 1996-1998 between the Masaalit tribe and the Arabs, and now this is the third war. Now, each one has been worse that the last. There have been more atrocities in each one and via magnitude of many times in the case of the third war. We are going to have a fourth war unless this is resolved politically. I think the Sudanese government wants to resolve it, but they do not know how to do it and people are very, very suspicious for, I think, very good reason, in Darfur, that they are not a good, neutral mediator.
JERRY FOWLER: Suspicious that the government is not a good neutral mediator?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Right.
JERRY FOWLER: Between the people who live in Darfur, in the communities there.
ANDREW NATSIOS: Exactly. I might add that this is not Africans versus Arabs. A lot of the Arab tribes—which most people do not understand—never participated in these atrocities. At the Southern Rizigat, the Baggara Rizigat as they are called, the Nazer which is sort of like a prince in the traditional hierarchy of the region, the Nazer of the Southern Rizigat refused to participate in this; in fact, he has sheltered many of the African tribes from atrocities.
JERRY FOWLER: That is a good point that often is overlooked when it is characterized as just an Arab and African conflict, but this round of conflict is much different than the previous two in the sense that there is tremendous involvement with the central government.
ANDREW NATSIOS: That is exactly correct.
JERRY FOWLER: They were not as involved before. Let us talk about resolving that political conflict. There were a lot of hopes that were placed on the signing in May of the Darfur Peace Agreement which ended up being an agreement between the government and one rebel group, which kind of contributed to a splintering of the rebel groups; where do things stand with the Darfur Peace Agreement? It seems to be in shreds. Is there a way to try to move forward on resolving the political conflict?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I think there is broad agreement now among international organizations and groups and the European and the United States and the Africans, and the price of the conflict that the Darfur Peace Agreement can be amended with some protocols attached to it, rather than renegotiating the whole document, which would not be useful. Having some protocols dealing with the compensation issue; the two million people in these camps have lost all of their animals, they have lost their farm implements—they are almost all farmers—and if they go back home without some kind of compensation, they are going to die in the villages because they cannot farm and they do not have any animals as a coping mechanism for hard times. I estimate that they have lost probably two or three million head of animal—goats, and sheep, and camels—in the conflict, and that is disastrous. So, that is one issue that the Darfur Peace Agreement did not deal with well in my view, and that is what is enraging a lot of people in the camps. The second issue is the question of representation in the parliamentary bodies, and the third issue is the institutions the government has created to control Darfur for all these years, after all these conflicts. It amounts to a pretty brutal security apparatus, and that needs to be disassembled and retired because it is causing some of the stress that the province is under now, and I think these are issues that can be dealt with, and the government has said some of these issues they will agree to some protocols that would be attached to the Darfur Peace Agreement. I think it would broaden its appeal and sew it back together again in terms of public support.
JERRY FOWLER: What would be the process of coming up with those protocols? Is it a negotiation process?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: It involves the National Redemption Front, which is now the name for the rebels who have rejected it.
ANDREW NATSIOS: That is exactly what it is, with the government.
JERRY FOWLER: When and where is that going to take place??
ANDREW NATSIOS: The government told us that they were very close to accepting a mediation offer, which someone told me has happened; I have not seen it announced publicly by the Eritrean government, as the mediators between the Sudanese government and the non-signators, the rebel groups that did not sign the Abuja Peace Accords in May of this year.
JERRY FOWLER: So, it would be in Asmara that they would meet?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Right.
JERRY FOWLER: And would there be international participation?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I expect there would be; I do not know all the details of it, but it appears to be moving along right now.
JERRY FOWLER: An issue that often comes up is the sequence between a political agreement and deployment of the peacekeeping force. How do you see that working out? We have got on one track you have discussed the possibility that there will be some compromise that will allow the deployment under some auspices of a more robust and effective force, and now you have described possible mediation to amend the Darfur Peace Agreement. How are those going to be connected, if at all? Which is going to come first? Does that matter?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I think it matters, but we have a force on the ground now. If we could strengthen AMIS; there is a new Nigerian general who appears to be doing a really good job in raising morale and getting energy back in the force, but if we could strengthen AMIS with some of these technical things I mentioned earlier from the United Nations, it would help AMIS in the interim in between the time the additional 10,000 troops come in. The sequencing of these peace accords, with peacekeeping operations, and then reconstruction is critically important. If you do not do it right, you can take a peace agreement and kill it overnight. If you take a weak peace agreement and have these other pieces fall in place well, it can actually make something that is marginally alive really work well, so it is very important. I would just summarize that implementation is at the essence of peacekeeping operations. Speaking about these things in the abstract is very easy; actually doing it on the ground, under the circumstance that we find ourselves under in Darfur is very difficult.
JERRY FOWLER: Speaking of implementation, is it part of your brief to deal with the larger issues in Sudan, including the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that was signed between the government in Khartoum and the Southern rebels?
ANDREW NATSIOS: That is a central issue, and it is also one of my own tasks; that is all not be implementing the way it was written, however, some people have said that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement is not a success, it is a failure and all of that. The fact of the matter is that there has now been peace for two years in the South almost, and people are returning to their villages after being at war for twenty-two years, where two million people died. The Northern government has transferred a billion dollars worth of oil revenues to the South. It is not what I think the South deserved, but a billion dollars is a lot of money anywhere in the world and this is an area of Africa that has been neglected for two hundred years or hundreds of years, so if you look at the South now, the economy is booming, the roads are opening up, AID—the United States government aid agency—has invested a lot of money in reconstructing the roads, building schools, and health clinics, encouraging agriculture, and the European donors are doing the same thing as well. The South is really prospering under this and the markets are opening up, prices are dropping, and the Northern government is withdrawing a lot of troops, so even if all of the provisions have not been met in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement on schedule, there still is a very large peace dividend as a result of the ending of the war.
JERRY FOWLER: Which is obviously to the benefit of the people in the South, but if the details of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement are not implemented, does that kind of raise the prospect of a return to full-scale warfare, especially with what you mentioned earlier, with elections that are due in two years, and then ultimately a referendum which would give the Southerners the opportunity to break away?
ANDREW NATSIOS: My job is to help avoid that. I do not have absolute power; it is a sovereign country; they can do what they want to, but I think the North has an interest in maintaining peace in the South because they cannot pump all of that oil if there is a war going on. Garang, the leader of the South until he was killed a year ago in a terrible accident, was able to shut down the oil fields through military action, and as a result, the Northern government realized that if they did not implement some sort of a peace agreement, to some degree, they were not going to have peace in the oil fields and they would not prosper in the North the way they are now, at least around Khartoum because the oil was not being pumped. I think the oil is a major stabilizing factor in this case. Is it possible the North may go back to war? Yes it is. I think the South needs to understand that and be prepared, but I think if we prepare for war, we are not going to have peace. We need to strengthen the peace process, implement the provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement as they are written, and try to make it work. I am not certainly ready to give up at all, and I think the peace dividend is really showing its full power right now in the South.
JERRY FOWLER: The argument that you make, obviously, is very compelling in some ways in expressing the interest that the North could have in peace, but at the same time we read that one of their goals in terms of using the oil revenues that they are getting as a result of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement is to become self-sufficient in terms of armaments productions and ammunition.
ANDREW NATSIOS: And they are certainly doing that.
JERRY FOWLER: And that sounds like a government that may be preparing for future war more than investing in peace?
ANDREW NATSIOS: I am very concerned about it, I have to say. I am troubled by it; I know what the reports are in terms of these weapon purchases. It may not necessarily be the South that they are using those weapons on. We hope they are not using them on anyone, but it is certainly troubling that that is happening now.
JERRY FOWLER: We are running near the end of our time. Let me ask you this; Sudan has apparently expelled the United Nation’s Secretary General’s Special Envoy, Jan Pronk, and even though you have described some hopeful developments in terms of reaching an agreement on strengthening the peacekeeping force, this seems to be an escalation in their defiance of the United Nations and the international community.
ANDREW NATSIOS: The Sudanese government is not easy to deal with, and they are offended easily. They use what I would call, “harassment tactics,” they cancel visas, they cancel trips, they do not allow you to come in the country, they expel people. I think in some ways, it is a sign of weakness that they would do that, but it is their option. I just do not think it was in their interest to do it. Jan Pronk—I know him very well; I have known him for a long time—is a very blunt guy. He says things that normally diplomats do not say, in or out of the United Nations system, but I respected his bluntness and I am kind of blunt myself, so I cannot complain too much, but I think he did a very good job under very difficult circumstances, despite his indiscrete remarks sometimes.
JERRY FOWLER: Andrew Natsios is President Bush’s Special Envoy for Sudan. Special Envoy Natsios, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
ANDREW NATSIOS: Thank you very much.
