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Dr. Eric Reeves is a Sudan analyst and researcher. He is also a Professor at Smith College and author of A Long Days Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide. Eric speaks with Jerry Fowler about the declining situation in Darfur and Eastern Chad, the prospects of a hybrid force, and the ownership of the peace process.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Eric Reeves. He’s a Sudan researcher, whose analysis is available at www.sudanreeves.org. He’s also author of the recent book, A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide. Eric, welcome back to the program.
ERIC REEVES: Good to be with you, Jerry.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, Eric, we last spoke, I think, in November. And the theme of our discussion was deterioration in Darfur and Eastern Chad. Here we are now getting to mid-July. Can you just give us a brief overview? Has there been any improvement in terms of the security situation on the ground?
ERIC REEVES: No, there has not. And we are now well into the rainy season, which creates additional problems for humanitarians who are already under enormous stress, and facing intolerable levels of insecurity. Two months after our interview in November, all 14 UN humanitarian organizations in an open letter, unprecedented to my knowledge, declared they’d reached the end of their rope. If security did not improve, they would be compelled to attenuate, or even withdraw, their operations. The following week six distinguished non-governmental humanitarian organizations issued another public letter saying essentially the same thing. Since January, we’ve seen no improvement in the security situation. The humanitarian organizations I speak with, obviously off the record, tell me the same thing. They remain one click away from withdrawing or suspending operations in Darfur. In Eastern Chad we have a different kind of security crisis, but one that is every bit as severe as that in Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: In what way is it different?
ERIC REEVES: Well, there is no African Union presence. The African Union has been weak, enfeebled in many ways. It’s been a disaster from the standpoint of human security, but the mere presence of the African Union, along with that of international aid workers, has certainly deterred some violence. Not nearly enough, but in Eastern Chad you have many humanitarian organizations that are too fearful of becoming involved in the situation in which insecurity is too great. You have no African Union presence. The Chadian military has concentrated its forces in garrison towns in Abéché, the major town in Eastern Chad, and has left wide areas of rural Chad, Eastern Chad, up-and-down the Darfur border completely vulnerable to predations by the Janjaweed, by Arab militia groups, increasingly by ethnic African militia groups. There is tremendous chaos on the ground as genocidal violence, ethnically targeted violence spills ever more deeply from Darfur into Eastern Chad, which is now a major crisis unto its own with some 500,000 conflict affected people, some 250,000 Darfuri refugees, 180,000 internally displaced Chadians, and at least 100,000 non-displaced families that are badly affected by fighting.
JERRY FOWLER: If we look back to Darfur right now, what is your perception of the nature of the insecurity, the nature of the violence? In other words, to what extent is it organized, orchestrated, violence against people who are in villages, or against IDP camps? And to what extent is it kind of a free-for-all where you have a lot of people with guns running around and not afraid to use them?
ERIC REEVES: It’s difficult to characterize the violence authoritatively. Moreover, we’d need to make different generalizations for the different Darfur states. Darfur being the size of France. What you find in Garadaya in South Darfur, what you find in El-Geneina in West Darfur, what you find in the big camps outside El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State. Some of the tenuous areas like Kutum, also in North Darfur. These would all be different. The humanitarian quarters would be more or less vulnerable. But since the extremely ill-conceived, and ill-fated Darfur Peace Agreement of May, 2006, what we’ve seen is a fracturing within the rebel movement, and this has produced factions, it has produced banditry, it has produced warlordism, and there can be no denying that the kind of violence we’re seeing on the ground now is quite different in many respects from the violence of 2003, 2004, early 2005, the height of the genocidal violence. What we’re seeing now in many ways are the consequences of that ethnically targeted violence, and ethnically targeted destruction of livelihoods. The rebel groups are divided. The only rebel signatory to the Darfur Peace Agreement, Minni Minnawi, has lost all political power in Khartoum, has lost control of his military forces on the ground in Darfur, and I would say of the rebel groups, probably most of the atrocities, most of the attacks on humanitarian workers are probably by elements that were formerly within the SLA Minni Minnawi faction. But there are many other factions. There are many who are unaffiliated. There are Arab bandits, there’re non-Arab bandits. As the fracturing proceeds, you find more and more areas in which a given warlord dominates. This makes it extremely difficult for humanitarians to figure out who their interlocutors are when they try and deliver food aid to more remote rural areas. So we’re seeing less and less of such humanitarian aid delivery.
JERRY FOWLER: I wanted to talk a little bit later on about prospects for meaningful peace negotiations. But you’re talking about this rebel fragmentation, and that’s been identified as a very serious obstacle to having meaningful peace talks, because you’ve got people who are not unified, or who can’t really come to the table. Are there any prospects for putting the rebel Humpty-Dumpty back together?
ERIC REEVES: It’s a tall order, and Khartoum has done everything it can over recent months to prevent the rebels from meeting and hammering out a common negotiating platform. It has received far too little notice that on many occasions since last year, Khartoum has bombed with the Antonov bombers the site where rebels are scheduled to meet. Many of these meetings have been precluded or forestalled or simply halted altogether because of deliberate attacks by Khartoum. There’s no evidence that Khartoum is doing anything but, in fact, encouraging a divide and conquer policy in its own responses to the rebels. But the rebels do need and here we need to be talking mainly about the primary rebels on the ground. The people like Jar el-Nabi, Suleiman Marjan, some of the commanders in the Jebel Mara area, in the very center of Darfur. I think an extraordinary addition to rebel unity would be the release of Suleiman Jamous, whose been effectively imprisoned in Kaduqli, in South Kordofan province. Suleiman Jamous is one of the real heroes among the rebels. He was the humanitarian coordinator for the SLA, the Sudan Liberation Army, for three years. He had a falling out with Minni Minnawi, the brutal leader of his own rebel faction. This is what’s led to the imprisonment of Jamous, with the complicity I would argue of not only the United Nations in whose hospital he sits, now well over a year, but also the international community, which has failed to do what is required to release Jamous, even as they know that he was the one who did most to secure humanitarian access in 2004/2005. He has no blood on his hands. He is a Zaghawa, interestingly. An ethnic African group that is on the outs with a number of the other African tribal groups in Darfur, primarily because of the actions of Minni Minnawi, and the disaffection with the Darfur Peace Agreement. I can’t think of anything right off-hand that would do more to provide the kind of conciliatory elder statesman that these rebels desperately need than the freeing of Suleiman Jamous, yet he languishes in Kaduqli still.
JERRY FOWLER: Just to be clear, you said that he’s in a UN hospital in Kaduqli?
ERIC REEVES: Well, he’s in a hospital. The auspices of his care are those of the UN, but as all recognize he can’t simply leave the hospital, because he would be arrested as soon as he moved beyond the UN protection, which also serves as imprisonment in the hospital in Kaduqli. He’s also very ill. I’ve spoken with him. He desperately needs medical care. He should be freed on humanitarian grounds alone. It’s really a scandal that the international community has allowed somebody who could be so valuable to the rebel cause in bringing them together and hammering out a common negotiating position, and who desperately needs medical care, who has served so courageously as humanitarian coordinator in the field for Western humanitarian organizations, is at this moment of great need receiving no assistance.
JERRY FOWLER: Now the great hoax for protecting civilians from this deteriorating security situation has been the introduction of some kind of civilian protection force, and we’ve talked about it many times on the show. When we last talked in November, it was apparent that the UN Force authorized by the Security Council in August by Resolution 1706 was not going to happen. And the talk then was about a so-called hybrid force, United Nations/African Union hybrid force. Since then the Khartoum government has nominally agreed to the deployment of the force, but I suspect that the devil is in the details. What are the prospects that there’s actually going to be some kind of hybrid force deployed to protect civilians?
ERIC REEVES: I think the odds are low, and I think the best we could hope for is the beginning of deployment sometime in 2008. The hybrid force is the third element of a three-part agreement first broached in November of last year, and Addis Ababa as a replacement for UN Security Council Resolution 1706, which it’s important to note, was not a random set of suggestions. This was the product of a study by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations that authorized approximately 22,500 troops, civilian police with a clear mandate to protect civilians, humanitarians, to stunt the flow of genocidal violence into Eastern Chad; to secure the Central African Republic / Darfur border, robust force, UN-led, UN-funded, would have made a tremendous difference if urgently and robustly deployed. China insisted that there be language, which required Khartoum’s consent, which of course, was not forthcoming. That led to a stalemate which produced the so-called hybrid “idea.” It wasn’t an agreement in November. That has finally taken form as a resolution to be introduced by the UK and Ghana. It just isn’t clear that this is anything more than a Khartoum-trimmed version of 1706, with a hopelessly muddled command structure.
JERRY FOWLER: The issue with the command structure is whether the UN or the AU will be in charge?
ERIC REEVES: Yes, and what it means to be “in charge.” Some of this is fairly detailed, but in the presidential statement, which supposedly resolved the issue of command, the New York Times accurately reported that the key sentence objected to by the African Union, which specified overall UN command and control, that’s the ultimate form of authority in a mission, that sentence was removed at African Union insistence. The result was a document, as diplomats said, that would please the Security Council, because it convinced them they were in charge; and pleased the African Union, because it convinced them they were in charge! Well, we can be sure that when push comes to shove, Khartoum will make ample use of this ambiguity. They’ve already publicly expressed objections to a number of features of the current UN Security Council Resolution. I can see this dragging on for weeks, if not months. Meanwhile, people continue to face rape, murder. The camps are cauldrons of rage and despair. We simply need to introduce in the very near term some increased security, or we could see explosions in the camps, explosions of rage. We could see, as we have in the past, frontal assaults on the camps by the Janjaweed air militia elements. We could also see the camps, as they are already awash in small weapons, become a new front in the war -- very dangerous situation, very threatening to humanitarians and much more chaotic. And I personally believe that the thing that must be done is to frontload the deployment of civilian police to those areas which are most distressed. Oxfam, for example, recently announced they would not be returning to the Garadaya camp in South Darfur. This is the largest concentration of internally displaced persons in the world, leaving the International Committee, the Red Cross, to do the entire task of providing all humanitarian assistance for 130,000 people on its own. Garadaya desperately needs civilian police. El-Fasher, the camps around El-Fasher; the town of El-Geneina, which is essentially run by the Janjaweed in West Darfur. These are intolerable security risks. As I said, the humanitarian organizations are very close to withdrawing. Some have withdrawn, some have suspended operations. If you look at an access map, and compare it to one of a year ago, we’ve seen a quadrupling of areas to which there’s absolutely no humanitarian access, or extremely limited humanitarian access.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you this, then, about the deployment of civilian police units. Can you give a few more details? Where would these police units come from, how many people are we talking about? Would they be able to protect their own selves quite apart from the protecting the people in the IDP camps?
ERIC REEVES: The police would certainly need to have military protection. You can’t send civilian police into highly volatile violent situations without a more robust protection force that is empowered to make combatants stand down. But the advantage of civilian police, which would need huge forces to protect them, is that they have a relatively small footprint on the ground, compared to troops, which are logistically, very very consumptive of resources. They have a very big footprint. Civilian police ideally would come from African nations, but there are places where emergency training can be had. The African Union, in general, has been remiss in training and even in seeing the importance of civilian police. But the hybrid force, as it’s called, designates approximately 4,000 civilian police. That’s a number we obviously couldn’t get to in the near term. So there would have to be a rolling deployment of civilian police as they became available. But we do need trained civilian police in areas, such as Garadaya, such as El-Fasher, such as the camps around Kutum. It’s no trouble coming up with places that need, Tawilah, to the west of El-Fasher is another place that is desperately in need of civilian police protection. There’re certainly within the UN system, a number of trained civilian police, who could be used, recruitment from countries that have not provided to the UN civilian police in the past, could be made on an urgent basis. But since Khartoum has nominally agreed, indeed agreed unconditionally to the terms of the hybrid force, I would argue, let’s put them to the test sooner rather than later. Let’s not wait for this hybrid, which, the actual force, which requires deployment of what’s called “the heavy support package.” Which is essentially a preparatory force that would make possible logistically, the deployment of the actual large 22,000/24,000 hybrid force. That’s what throws the time line into 2008, and perhaps well into 2008. Whereas, if you had civilian police that were accepted, who could be deployed with protection, it could begin immediately, as soon as you have the police and the protection units ready, you could deploy them to those areas most critically in need of security. The African Union, with a force of some 5,000 troops, and 2,000 auxiliary personnel, is badly demoralized, has virtually crumbled in overall effectiveness, leaving Darfur almost entirely without protection.
JERRY FOWLER: We’re running near the end of our time. Let me ask you very briefly, the other piece that people always bring up in addition to civilian protection is a meaningful peace process, negotiation process. In very brief terms, is there any organized effort at the international level to create a peace process that could bring relevant parties together?
ERIC REEVES: I don’t think so. Salim Salim, the African Union lead mediator, has proved very tired and weary, and in my view, not nearly energetic enough on behalf of the African Union. Jan Eliasson, the UN representative of Ban Ki-Moon for this process which in fact does not exist. He works part-time, he’s not located in Sudan. He’s not proved effective or even particularly well-informed. There’s no ownership of the peace process, plus you have spoilers like Eritrea and Egypt and Libya playing roles that they should not be playing, if this is to be a good faith peace agreement.
JERRY FOWLER: Where do you think ownership of the peace process should reside?
ERIC REEVES: I think it -- as with the North/South Agreement -- the African Union has to provide the auspices, but there has to be behind that something like the Troika, in the case of the North/South Agreement, the US, Norway and the UK. There has to be some manageable group of countries with substantial diplomatic resources, who can assist an African Union effort that’s failing as badly diplomatically presently as it is militarily. We just don’t have that ownership.
JERRY FOWLER: Can the US, France and China provide such a Troika?
ERIC REEVES: It’s an interesting possibility. One discussed by John Prendergast and others as a potential means of bringing different kinds of pressure to bear on the two parties, the Khartoum Regime, and the rebel groups. I see no alternative at the present. I would like to see a country like Norway involved or perhaps Italy. But in the absence of any other proposal, this is as good a chance for adult supervision to the diplomatic process as we’re likely to see. But right now, we’re spinning our wheels, Khartoum sees it, and as far as I can make out, there’s no significant diplomatic progress.
JERRY FOWLER: Eric Reeves is a Sudan researcher, whose analysis is available online at www.sudanreeves.org. Eric, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
ERIC REEVES: Good to be with you again, Jerry.
JERRY FOWLER: Yes. Stay well, my friend.
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.
