MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Ken Bacon, President of Refugees International, speaks with Jerry Fowler about the current vulnerable status of humanitarian aid efforts to Darfur, his experience with recent peace negotiations, and the effect groups like Save Darfur are having on President al-Bashir.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Ken Bacon. He is President of Refugees International and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for public affairs. Ken welcome back to the program.
KEN BACON: Glad to be here Jerry.
JERRY FOWLER: Ken let us turn to Darfur and start with an overview. In general the situation seems to be continuing to deteriorate even since the last time I talked with you. Can you characterize the amount of humanitarian space that exists in Darfur and the status of relief operations right now?
KEN BACON: Sure, I think the first thing everybody needs to remember is that this is the world’s largest humanitarian operation. The world food program is sustaining about 2.5 – 2.8 million people in Darfur. Now that includes about 2.2 million people who are internally displaced and are in camps, and then there are some parts of the general population. The access that the world food program and humanitarian workers have to these people is steadily shrinking. The reason is violence. The violence is expanding and when violence expands access decreases. So this huge and very successful humanitarian operation is facing new challenges every day. Both the United Nations and major humanitarian agencies like Care and Save the Children have announced that they may not be able to sustain their operations anymore and may have to pull out. This would be a tragedy of huge proportions because it would add starvation to the problems that the people are already placing, and that is death displacement and rape.
JERRY FOWLER: And in numerical terms what would be the consequences of the United Nations and major organizations stopping their operation?
KEN BACON: Well, first of all there are about 10 to 12 thousand humanitarian workers in Darfur. Most of them are Sudanese, but to the extent that they left or could not do their work, this would be a huge number of people who are no longer working to get food, medical supplies, etc. out. But overtime clearly the death rate would increase; the mortality rate would increase from illness starvation, exposure, if these services are no longer being provided. I cannot predict what it would do in terms of increased deaths. It would depend a lot on the growing season, it would depend a lot on access to water and other things, but it could be horrific.
JERRY FOWLER: You said that the thing that is putting pressure on the humanitarian organizations is increasing violence, lack of security. There has been this long extended effort to try to get greater protection forces on the ground for civilians. At first there was a United Nations resolution passed authorizing a United Nations force, and then that kind of transitioned to a hybrid force involving the African Union and the United Nations, but even that seems to have hit a dead end. Where do things stand in terms of getting protection for civilians?
KEN BACON: Well things are receding as you say. The efforts to get a United Nations force have failed so far, and the efforts to get a so-called hybrid force that is primarily African Union but a much bigger force than the seven thousand people currently there are also stalled. But the real reason for the increased insecurity is not just the lack of peacekeepers. The real reason is an increase in the fighting and the fighting has increased for two reasons. First, there has been a proliferation of rebel groups so the attacks by the rebel groups has actually increased and have become more sustained and more successful, the attacks against the government troops and its militia, the Janjaweed, that is the first thing, and there is fighting amongst the rebel groups as well, so some of this fighting is between rebel groups, not just between rebel groups and the government. The second is that the government is hitting back with more and more force. And then you also have an increase in banditry and sort of random crime by people who need vehicles or fuel or other things, so they attack humanitarian workers to get that. There is chaos in Darfur right now. The government does not have control. The government can attack but it cannot control, it cannot provide peace or security on its own.
JERRY FOWLER: Can I just press on that for a second? You are suggesting that even if they had good will, which it does not appear that they do, that they just do not have the capacity to gain control of this situation and provide security for civilians?
KEN BACON: They do not have the capacity to protect their own people even if they wanted to, but they do not, so let us not give them benefit of the doubt, because they do not deserve any benefits. But this stresses an important point and I think sometimes we and the international community lose track of this point. The key to ending this is diplomatic. It is a negotiated settlement, it cannot be won militarily. We could put twenty thousand United Nations peacekeepers in there and they would not pacify Darfur or bring security to the people. Only an agreement can do this, and that is why I think we have to put much more pressure on both the government and the rebel groups to get to a bargaining table and figure out how to end this terrible war.
JERRY FOWLER: This is an issue that has come up obviously a number of times with different guests; I think we talked about it with Alex de Waal a little while ago, but the sequential relationship between providing some additional protectors on the ground and a peace process. How far along do you have to go on a peace process before you are getting more protection on the ground? Or can it be done simultaneously? I hear you saying that you cannot provide protectors on the ground without at least some progress on the peace process or they will not be able to do anything.
KEN BACON: Well protectors, if they went in now, if you sent in twenty thousand good United Nations troops, could make a difference. They could protect camps for instance, they could protect the perimeters of camps so that women could go out and collect firewood without being raped, so that Janjaweed raiding parties would not come in and steal animals. They could do that and that would be a step in the right direction, in fact it would be hugely important for the people in these camps. These camps are huge, one camp has 135 thousand people in it, and one camp in Nyala has ninety thousand people in it. So these are huge areas, they are cities basically, primitive cities. So that would help, but they could not provide overall security that would give people the confidence to move back to their villages that they have abandoned, that would give people the confidence to travel on roads with the knowledge that they would not be attacked. That can only come, that type of area security can only come through a peace agreement.
JERRY FOWLER: Where do things stand in terms of revivifying serious peace negotiations? There was a peace agreement that was signed between the government and one rebel faction really almost a year ago now, which had one of the consequences of leading to this fragmentation of rebels that you have been talking about. And since then there have been talk about more talks, and maybe even the going through the motions of talks, but seriously what is happening?
KEN BACON: Well first of all, the history of peace agreements is that you do not have one until you have one. But there is more activity now pressing both sides, all sides I should say, towards peace. First, there is much more active engagement by the United Nations through the United Nations Secretary General Special Representative Jan Eliasson, who used to be Sweden’s Ambassador to the United Nations and was the President of the General Assembly before he took this job, and Selim Selim who is the Ambassador for the African Union. Two, other countries have gotten more involved: Libya; Eritrea; to some extent Egypt; the Arab league. So there is more pressure from regional players, and remember this war is metastasizing. It is spilling over into Chad and the Central African Republic. The war has not spilled over into Egypt but there are more than one million Sudanese refugees in Egypt. So many surrounding countries are paying a price for this fighting and they have an interest in ending it. So, the fact that they are involved is helpful, but I cannot tell you that we are closer to a tangible agreement at this stage. There is more talk, there is more pressure, and we hope overtime this will lead to productive negotiations, but we are not at that point yet.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me press a little bit about the involvement of the regional countries, because in the past with regard to Sudan that has not always been a good thing. I mean if they are providing pressure that could be a good thing, but often regional countries, including especially Egypt and Libya, provide a kind of pressure release for Khartoum where they create alternative forums so that instead of having all the effort devoted to one focused set of negotiations there is a bunch of different forums and nothing gets accomplished.
KEN BACON: You are absolutely right. Sudan is very good at playing off one group against another, and sort of siding with the country or group that appears to give the best cover or the best deal, while rejecting other efforts, and they do that. And you are also right that Libya and Eritrea and Egypt, more Libya and Eritrea, have been meddlers as much as they have been helpers, and their motives are always suspect since like all countries they are protecting their own national interests more than the people of Darfur. Still, I think everybody agrees that to get a successful settlement you have to involve the neighboring countries in some way. So, the mere fact that they are engaged now is a step in the right direction. Will it lead to a settlement? Hard to tell. Will they ultimately be helpful or harmful? Also hard to tell. To a certain extent it is up to the United Nations and other countries to put pressure on Libya, Eritrea, Egypt, and the other players to say that the time has come to end this, you have to be constructive not deconstructive, let us work together. We are probably not at that point yet, but the mere fact that they are engaged is at least a step in the right direction.
JERRY FOWLER: There was something that happened recently, that I found to just be kind of remarkable. You know this United Nations human rights council appointed a commission to go look at Darfur, and the new Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met with President Bashir of Sudan at the end of January, and this is according to the report that the investigative team ultimately released. President Bashir gave his personal commitment to the Secretary General that Sudan would cooperate with this, and then immediately afterwards they refused to let the team into Sudan. Something like a dozen or more efforts to get visas to go to Khartoum and Darfur. So, after giving his personal word to the Secretary General then the government stone walled, and this suggests someone who is actually not feeling much pressure. Who is feeling emboldened to defy even the Secretary General in a very direct way.
KEN BACON: Well sometimes I wonder if the name Bashir means broken promises in Arabic, because he is the master of the broken promise. And I had some personal experience with that in January when I was there with New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. He made a number of promises to us in a joint statement we issued, all of which have been broken so far. So this is not new behavior on his part. I think in a way it shows his disregard and disrespect for the international community and the United Nations, and it is a way of thumbing his nose really and saying “I do not have to deal with you guys so I will tell you what to hear when you are in my office and then I will do what I want when you leave.”
JERRY FOWLER: Tell me a little bit about the process of meeting with him. Sitting in his office how did he appear? Was he charming? Was he remote? Was he aggressive?
KEN BACON: Bill Richardson met with him twice. He invited in the people who were traveling with him for the second half of the second meeting, and there President Bashir was relatively combative and what struck me most by the meeting, and I was somewhat encouraged by this actually, was how angry he was about the Save Darfur coalition and the impact that he felt it was having in the United States. It is clear he is irritated by the ads that Save Darfur have been running, and he is irritated by the political pressure that Save Darfur is able to bring in the United States. He sees this as interfering with his efforts to get the US sanctions against Sudan lifted, and he is right, it is interfering with that and thank God it is. But I was very struck by how effectively Save Darfur, and the whole Sudanese opposition movement in the US, has been under his skin. This is good. We need to keep this pressure on. It is beginning to irritate him. It has not created a positive force that is driving him towards peace yet but it may, and it is good to know that he is paying attention to what is being said about him and his government in the US and the rest of the world.
JERRY FOWLER: If we could step back, one of your positions is co-chair I think of the Partnership for Effective Peace Operations, which is dealing with this Peace Operations, kind of a broad term that includes helping to police peace agreements or helping to protect civilians in cases. What lessons can we start to draw from Darfur for effective peace operations?
KEN BACON: Well I think this is a very good question and there are really to parts to the answer. The first is that peace operations cannot really be effective unless there is a peace to enforce. They on their own cannot create a peace, only negotiators can create a peace. They can help protect people in limited ways as I mentioned protecting people in camps if they have the man power. The second point is, if you are going to commit peacekeepers to a difficult area you have to commit enough of them, you have to give them the right mandate and the right equipment. In Sudan today there is a relatively small African Union force, seven thousand people in an area as big as Texas. They do not have enough people, they do not have enough supplies, and their mandate is not strong enough, it does not specifically order them to protect civilians. There are many reasons for this, and we can be very critical of the African Union, but the main thing to remember is no one else has sent troops to protect the people of Darfur. The African Union is the only group that has done it. They have been there now for several years. They have taken fatalities. They have been under attack themselves, and they have hung in there under great difficulty. Sudan has not made it easy for them. The government has not made it easy. They have not gotten enough support from us, the US, or from Europe. The people who have money have not given them enough money. The money they have gotten they have not managed effectively all the time. But this is a new operation, it is a new organization. The African Union itself is only a couple of years old, and early in their life after they were formed they accepted this peacekeeping mission and I think they deserve great credit for that, and they deserve a lot more support than they have been given.
JERRY FOWLER: I was reading, there is a blog by one of the African Union soldiers that is on the web and a lot of the entries are about the fact that the soldiers do not get paid. They go months and months without getting a pay packet.
KEN BACON: All of this is more complex than it seems. They in general have the money to get paid, but we are not dealing with a country that has Citibank ATMs on every corner. They are paid in cash. The cash has to be carried out there. It has to be properly accounted for. When I was in the US army in 1969 I was paid in cash and it took all day to pay a company of soldiers, and they do not have the systems to do this. So, there are many reasons but they should be paid and it is dispiriting to any soldier, not to be any body, but particularly to be a soldier, not to be paid on time. But if we were using modern payment systems, they would get some of their pay and the rest of the pay would go to their families’ directly in Ghana or Rwanda or wherever they would be able to choose this and it would go directly into their families’ bank accounts. That is the way to do it. That way you eliminate the potential fraud, the potential theft. You get it to the people who need it, which are the wives and children at home, with some money for incidental expenses going to the soldiers themselves. But as I say it is a young organization operating in very primitive area, without the types of conveniences and support systems that we take for granted here.
JERRY FOWLER: Ken Bacon is President of Refugees International. Ken thank you for taking the time to be with us.
KEN BACON: Thank you Jerry, I appreciate it.
