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Dr. Gerard Prunier, is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research. He joins us from his office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to discuss with Jerry Fowler his recent trip to Southern Sudan and the progress in Darfur.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Gerard Prunier. He’s a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, and he joins us from his office in Addis Ababa. Gerard, welcome to the program.
GERARD PRUNIER: Thank you.
JERRY FOWLER: Gerard, you just recently returned from south Sudan, so before we talk about Darfur, I’d be interested to know what your impressions were of the progress of peace, as it were, in southern Sudan.
GERARD PRUNIER: It was very ambiguous, and in a way, Darfur is kept from view from the public eye the fact, that all is not well in the southern Sudan. The peace agreement was signed in Nairobi on January 9th, 2005, and its main features were a sharing of power and a sharing of wealth between the former Sudanese government in Khartoum and the SPLA rebellion. Well basically, this has not worked, or rather, the only part that has worked to some degree is the sharing of the oil revenues, whereby the southern government in Juba gets about, I would say, 40 percent of the money produced by the exports of oil, which is a little bit paradoxical, because 80 percent of the oil wells are in the south and the south gets only 40 percent of the total. And that is the only thing that has worked. It has given the southern government a little bit of money to operate, because the international monies are not coming. What is called a multi-donor trust fund, which is international money for southern Sudan frankly is not working very well at all, and disbursements have been very slow.
JERRY FOWLER: Is it not working because the money is not there, or because the money’s not being distributed?
GERARD PRUNIER: It’s not working because the World Bank has been entrusted with dealing with it. The World Bank is incapable of dealing with it, because the World Bank is a very heavy, big, bureaucratic institution which is used to deal with governments, I mean, proper governments. And the southern Sudan has a makeshift government, which is created out of former rebels two years ago, and frankly it doesn’t have the administrative capacity. The World Bank has all kinds of bureaucratic requirements which the southern Sudanese are not capable of fulfilling, therefore the money is not coming, or it’s coming in very small quantities, in dribbles. But the other part of the agreement, which was about power sharing in Khartoum, is simply not working at all, for a variety of reasons. Number one, the southern Sudanese don’t have many of the necessary well trained personnel that could hold their own in a proper government. Number two, the late Garang, the leader of the rebellion, did not like the southern Sudanese diaspora, which is educated, but he did not like it, because they threatened his control over the guerilla movement, therefore he kept them out, and they’ve been kept out of the power sharing agreement. The people who had been promoted to positions of power sharing in Khartoum are former guerillas who are mostly uneducated and mostly incompetent. And then there is sabotage on the part of the Khartoum authorities, who do not want the former guerillas to share power with them. So they shunt them into positions where they are bureaucratically isolated, and they put some members of the National Islamic Front close to them to keep tabs on them, and the guys simply don’t operate. So the agreement is not working well at all.
JERRY FOWLER: If you go to the south, is the sentiment of the population strongly in favor of secession, at it was for so many years?
GERARD PRUNIER: Yeah, practically 100 percent. Everybody wants to secede, which of course will pose a big problem in 2011 when the time for the referendum comes, because if secession takes place, and no more oil has been found in the north, it would mean that the government in Khartoum would lose 80 or 85 percent of its oil, and frankly I don’t see them doing that. So the greatest likelihood is that war starts again.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of the preparations in the south for creating something that’s self-sustaining, one of the issues that Khartoum exploited for many years was divisions among people in the south. Has there been any move towards greater unity of the groups, such as the Dinka and the Nuer.
GERARD PRUNIER: Well, it’s hard to say. I would say yes and no. Halfway, partly. They are conscious of the fact that their divisions have cost them dearly in the past, and they’re trying to bridge some of the gaps between the groups. And it’s not so much the rank and file of the tribes. It’s more political leaders and the guys with the guns, but the gaps have not been fully bridged. There are still lots of tensions, and not only between Nuer and the Dinka, although those exist, of course, but also between the Dinka, who are the vast majority of the population of the south, and other tribes to the south, where the people that are loosely in a general way called Equatorians, that is the tribes that extend along the Congolese border and the Ugandan border, and all the way to the Kenyan border, the southern tribes.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of the basic relationship of power between the south and the north, as you mentioned, one of the provisions of the peace treaty is a referendum, that’s supposed to be held in 2011, that would give the south the right to determine whether to stay part of Sudan or not, and you’ve suggested that the north, the government in Khartoum, would be very reluctant to let the south go, because that’s where the oil is. But is the south building up a structure, including a military structure, that would give it the wherewithal to secede if that’s what they decided to do?
GERARD PRUNIER: They’re trying, but this is a big problem. There are a number of reasons for that. First is that everybody was very happy when peace came in 2002, when the shooting stopped. People have suffered enormously during the 19 years of the war between 1983 and 2002. Nobody will know exactly the number of deaths, but I would say it was around 1.5 million, which is very large, because the population of the south before the war was about 7 million. So in terms of proportions, you imagine what 1.5 million casualties out of 7 does create. It’s hugely traumatic. So everybody was happy about the peace. Since this was a guerilla army, it sort of self-disbanded. Discipline is poor, and they have to rebuild themselves into a conventional army if they want to fight the next war, because the north has a good army, and with the oil money they have been buying a lot of equipment in China and in the former Soviet Union. They are armed to the teeth, and they have a good military experience. They will have the backing of China in the next war. So for the southerners, the picture is not rosy at all from the military point of view. They are trying now to overhaul their military system and turn it into a conventional army, but this is a daunting task, because the southern Sudan is over 700,000 square kilometers. It’s very, very large. It has a very thin population. It has no communications, so building an army in such circumstances in not easy. And then, there is enormous corruption in the southern government, money simply vanishing, so all the contracts are an occasion for kickbacks and for money being stolen and that includes military contracts. So the situation is not easy to put right.
JERRY FOWLER: Let’s turn to the situation in Darfur. Let me start, with regard to Darfur, with the fact that you’re in Addis Ababa, which is the headquarters of the African Union. One of the, I should say, recurrent themes over the last now six months has been the idea that the African Union force that is on the ground in Darfur is going to be replaced by a so called hybrid force. What are the prospects for that actually happening?
GERARD PRUNIER: Well, it depends whether we talk about reality or whether we talk about paper constructs. On paper, it’s very likely to happen, because the international community has put a lot of pressure, and President Bashir is not stupid. He knows that standing, like stonewalling the way he has been doing in the last year or so, will not in the end work. So since his government is extremely clever, what they’re probably doing right now is to have something that will be called a hybrid force, but is going to be a Canada Dry version of a hybrid force. Therefore that’s what is most likely, because Bashir has been insisting that the troops in Darfur and the command of these troops should be purely African. So we can already see the policy that is sketching itself. It will be the old African Union force with the blue helmets instead of green ones. Perhaps they will be a bit more numerous. Perhaps they will have a bit more equipment. Perhaps their salaries will be paid, which was not the case for the President Force of 7,000 men, which is very sorely not only undermanned, under equipped, but also ridden by a terrible corruption. The officers and the administrators of that force are stealing their men’s money. Some soldiers are not paid for three or four months at a time. So if we see a hybrid force, which is a carbon copy of the present force, we will have a hybrid force, but I doubt that it would make very much of a difference.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of protecting civilians.
GERARD PRUNIER: Of course.
JERRY FOWLER: The other piece of approaching Darfur that most people talk about, in addition to providing increased civilian protection, is a meaningful political process that brings the different parties together. Where do you things stand on that?
GERARD PRUNIER: Well, this is another of the Khartoum government’s manipulations. They want all the guerilla groups to get together in the hopes that they can sign with them the same type of unworkable arrangement that was signed with the southerners in January 2005 in Nairobi. That is the target of their diplomacy. But it is proving very difficult for a number of reasons. First, the Darfurians have learned from experience, from what happened to their cousins in the south, that signing a peace agreement doesn’t mean it’s going to work. So they’re extremely careful. Second, they are very divided. The SPLA that signed this agreement in 2005 was relatively solidly united. This is not the case with the Darfur guerillas, which are divided between five or six different groups. And the government doesn’t want them to get together so that they can fight better, of course. It wants them to get together so that they can put their name at the bottom of some kind of an agreement, of a treaty. Then, the way the treaty will be carried out, that is another cup of tea, because we have already an idea of what could happen with the already existing Darfur Peace Agreement that was signed in May 2006 in Abuja, Nigeria. And this agreement was signed only with one of the factions in Darfur, but the government never kept its word. All the things that were promised in that agreement never even began to take shape. It would have been a policy that the government could have followed, for example, by picking one of the groups, and saying, “Okay, we’re going to give you control over part of the administration, money, possibilities to actually do things,” and then hoping that the other groups would then lay down their weapons and gravitate towards that first group by saying, “After all, it is better to stop the war, because we can achieve something if we join the peace process.” But it has been exactly the opposite. The learning curve is going in the other direction. The ones who are still fighting, they look at the ones who stopped fighting, and they see that these people who signed the agreement and stopped fighting are getting absolutely nothing. So it is not much of an incitation towards joining a peace process when you see that the people who have done so have derived absolutely no benefit whatsoever, either for themselves, or for the general population.
JERRY FOWLER: But why- when you explain it like that, it’s very clear, but you can also see the benefit from Khartoum’s perspective of giving something to the people who have signed peace in order to induce others to join it. Why has Khartoum not even given a few table scraps to the Minni Minnawi faction that signed the agreement with it in May of 2006?
GERARD PRUNIER: Because they are not interested in peace, and frankly, first of all, it’s extremely difficult. Even if they had practiced that policy, it would have been very difficult to achieve. Let’s be honest. It’s not simply waving a magic wand and then wonderful things happen. It would be very difficult, extremely difficult. But then there is no will. It is exactly the same as in the case of the south. The government in Khartoum has no will or intention to actually share power with anybody, and share money especially. You know, the last remarks by President Bashir about the UN budget for the planned Darfur force are obscene. He said- the United Nations is planning to put $2 billion for the Darfur force- “If I had only a fourth of that money, I could bring peace to Darfur.” Well they have a fourth of that money and even more, and they are not using it in the least to try to bring peace to Darfur. This is a government which is extremely limited, which is isolated in ethnic and ideological, sociological terms, and it’s simply not willing to share anything with anybody, first because it wants to fill its pockets, and second because it fears that any kind of sharing, it would lose control. Because if there was an election, a free and fair democratic election in the north, they would not even get the Arab vote. They’re a minority government that would get perhaps 15 percent of the vote, because they represent a mixture of radical Islamists and corrupt businessmen, and the population hates them. Therefore they would be voted out of office. So why should they share anything with anybody and run the risk of being voted out of office? They don’t want to.
JERRY FOWLER: Is there any combination of pressure and inducements that could get them to revise that view, or do they just have nothing to lose by hanging on and being obstinate?
GERARD PRUNIER: No, it’s the second thing. They have nothing to lose. And actually, the one man who said it very plainly was Mr. Jan Pronk, who was the UN representative in Sudan until he was kicked out by the government for being a little bit too frank. And he, in his blog a few months after he was thrown out of the Sudan, he said that he had discussed with leaders of the present government the reasons for their opposition to the deployment of a UN force in Darfur. And they told him quite plainly that this was very dangerous for them, because there were the, you know, past experiences like Milosevic, or perhaps also what happened to Charles Taylor and a number of other cases, where international justice is just beginning, but it’s beginning to get some kind of a leverage on dictatorial and murderous governments, and they said, “The danger for us, in resisting this deployment of the UN force, is less than the danger we would run in accepting that UN force, because this would be a Trojan horse through which our regime could be overthrown. And frankly, it is difficult. We’re fighting in order to push off the international community, but if we accepted it, it would be more dangerous. So why should we run the bigger risk?”
JERRY FOWLER: I guess that’s a difficult question to answer, although it would seem that no more will than the international community has shown to date to really put the screws to the government in Khartoum would suggest that it’s not really interested in replacing the government.
GERARD PRUNIER: Well, it’s due to the situation in Iraq. Since the American government has made such a drastic mistake in the invasion of Iraq, now it has buried itself in a hole out of which it cannot crawl. And it has drastically limited its capacity for intervention in other parts of the world, particularly of the Muslim world. And the government has a tremendous-- actually, another comment that President Bashir made recently was that he said he feared, quote, unquote, “an Iraq-ization-” I don’t know if it’s a good word, of Darfur. And of course he doesn’t fear it at all. He threatens it. It means, “You try to tamper with the Darfur situation beyond a certain limit and you’re going to end up with an Iraq situation, because I am going to arrange for such a situation to develop.” Since there are also similar situations in Afghanistan and in Somalia, I think the Americans find that their plate is full, and they’re unlikely to put some more poisonous food on it. Therefore, the Sudanese government feels that it is fairly safe, that the international community is going to go up to a certain limit, and everybody knows that the American army is the only capable of intervening. The Europeans are incapable from every point of view, politically, ideologically, militarily. So if the Americans are hobbled to a point of non intervention, if the Europeans are incapable of intervening, then there won’t be any intervention. So in a way, Mr. Bashir is playing a kind of brinkmanship, but he is, I think, safe in doing so.
JERRY FOWLER: Gerard Prunier is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research, and he joined us from his office in Addis Ababa. Gerard, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
