MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Alex de Waal discusses recent upsurge in fighting in Darfur, how it connects to events in Chad, and what to watch for in southern Sudan.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic and with me today is Alex de Waal who is the Program Director at the Social Science Research Council. Alex, thank you for joining me today.
ALEX DE WAAL: It’s a pleasure.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I want to speak with you today about some of the shifts that have been occurring among rebel groups, Arab groups and the Sudanese government in terms of what is going on with the conflict in Darfur. I wonder if you could start by telling us [about] some of the shifts and who’s fighting with whom and what the immediate goals seem to be.
ALEX DE WAAL: The situation in Darfur is one of turbulence. It’s constant movement, constant shifting of alliances, but at the end of the day very little in the way of actual forward motion, any real strategic change. This is a characteristic of the way that the Sudan government has managed its peripheries for actually well over a hundred years, by what Sudanese call “Retail Politics”: buying the allegiance of local leaders -- be they tribal leaders and militia leaders, mercenary leaders on the periphery, really irrespective of who they are -- and getting their loyalty, which is always a condition of loyalty irrespective of any ethnic or tribal or racial ties. What we’ve seen in the last year is very clear patterns of that continuing. The most important things that have been happening at a local level are on the one hand we have had an incipient revolt amongst the Arabs. Many of the Arab groups who were either neutral in the war of 2003-2004 or who were enlisted by the government as janjaweed became deeply disillusioned with the government. They felt they were being sold out in the peace agreement of 2006. They felt that the government allowing in UN troops that said that they were coming to implement UN Security Council Resolutions which include disarming the janjaweed. All this meant that they no longer trusted the government. They felt they hadn’t been paid for their services. They hadn’t been compensated for the people killed etc. etc. And the largest of these groups, headed by a man called Mohamed Hamdan Hemeti, received a major delivery of armaments in September and October of 2007 and then promptly mutiny, rebelled, fought the government, fought them very fiercely actually for a few months.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: When was this?
ALEX DE WAAL: The fighting was at the end of 2007, the mutiny was really in October. Hemeti claims he has 20,000 troops with him, others say there are as few as 5,000, but either way he’s one of the most substantial fighting forces in Darfur and had they gone over the rebels -- and they did sign some memorandums of understanding with the rebels -- it would have decisively shifted the military balance against the government. The government however managed to buy them back with monetary compensation, offers of positions in the army, etc. but it doesn’t mean they bought their allegiance; it’s just a tactical shift. The reality of Darfur is nobody trusts anybody and absolutely nobody trusts the government. So we have a situation in which the major Arab groups are aligned with the government, but are still pursuing their own local agendas and at the moment those local agendas are ones of local peace and reconciliation. So we have a lot of local peace initiatives ongoing in areas where the Arab militias in previous years were spreading havoc and disorder.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And can you tell us a little bit about how these developments inside Darfur fed into or crossed borders with fighting that recently occurred in Chad?
ALEX DE WAAL: The wars in Darfur and Chad are to all intents and purposes one and the same. They have the same belligerents, the same militias and rebel movements fight on both sides. And as far as the key players are concerned it is one and the same battlefield. The Darfur rebels, particularly the JEM, have been extensively armed and supported by Idriss Déby the President of Chad for about 2 years now and have done a lot of fighting in Chad, in fact including doing a lot of police and security work in N’djamena. In response to the Chadian arming of JEM and JEM offensives in western Darfur at the beginning of this year, the Sudan government revived old plans, went back to ideas for changing the regime in N’djamena, put together a rebel coalition. It timed it’s offensive on in N’djamena in order to preempt the deployment of the European Union Protection Force that was due to arrive in February. They gave a lot of arms to the three Chadian rebel groups. They didn’t however give them anti tank weapons or anti helicopter weapons. One suspects they didn’t do that because they feared those weapons may end up shooting against the Sudanese Government tanks and helicopters and it was the absence of those weapons that was actually critical in the rebels’ failure to capture N’djamena in the first weekend in February. The Chadians and JEM, essentially indistinguishable one from the other, have now gone on the counter offensive again and we have had fierce fighting with civilians has always been the main casualties, the main people suffering in the northern part of West Darfur. And this is likely to continue for some time unless some deal is done that brings JEM back into the government fold, which is never out of the question but it’s looking rather remote at the moment.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And recently there’s been coverage of that upsurge in fighting which referenced a return to the combined forces of Janjaweed and Sudanese Government armies and scorched earth tactics, is that how you would also represent the response?
ALEX DE WAAL: I think it’s correct that it’s a combined response. What we’ve seen in the last 3 years, major hostilities in Darfur ended in about January of 2005 and then the last 36, 38 months, we’ve probably seen about 6 or 7000 civilian fatalities, primarily among non Arabs but probably about a third of them -- at a guess -- among Arabs. But about a 1500, 1600 people killed in the 12 months up to the beginning of this last offensive. Now what we have is occasional spikes. We have a chronic conflict with attacks by rebels, attacks by governments, attacks by militia, banditry etc. which are responsible for many of these casualties and occasional spikes when the rebels go on the offensive or the government has what it sees as an important strategic military aim. In this case the government was responding to what it recognized were heavily re-armed JEM forces with Chadian military support that threatened to take the war deep inside Darfur once again until there was a combined response and along the border there was scorched earth, forced displacement, killing etc. So it is correct to say a return to the bad old days, though the number of fatalities is much fewer than ever occurred in 2003, 2004, the area of operations is relatively confined.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You basically mentioned the government’s, what they say is their strategic aims, I wondered if you could speak a little bit more about what the government, other rebels, armed units, Janjaweed at the strategic level, what are they trying to accomplish at this point?
ALEX DE WAAL: The government’s attitude is that essentially it has militarily defeated the rebels and were it not for the continuing support of Chad, they wouldn’t have a military problem on their hands. They have really little interest in peace talks because they don’t frankly see any leverage that the rebels bring to bear other than the pressure from Chad. What they’re concerned about in Khartoum is the international response. They see the European troops in Chad as partisan. And in that they surely are correct insofar as there is no ceasefire in Chad, there is not political process in Chad. And the troops in Chad, who are principally French, deal solely with the Chadian government, not with the rebels in Chad. The UNAMID, really the hybrid UN-African Union Mission, as the advance party for a western intervention aimed at regime change -- are very clear about that -- even though at an international level I mean there is really very little appetite among any of the governments today for regime change, for that type of forcible action. But the fear on Khartoum side is that once the camel’s nose gets into the tent the rest of the beast will follow. So they want to do everything they can to slow down or neutralize that deployment. And there’s really no trust at all between Khartoum and the western capitals, particularly Washington DC, also obviously Paris, and London. What arises from this is a Khartoum strategy of exhaustion, of wearing down the other side, of essentially being the only one left standing at the end of the day. They think that the western countries will lose patience, will run out of interest, will recognize that this problem cannot be solved with the tools they have and therefore go away and leave it up to the Sudanese. And the Sudan government’s attitude is well, we will just hold on long enough, we will keep enough control of events in order to be the only major player left in the arena when the internationals lose interest.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And from Khartoum’s perspective obviously Darfur is the western most region, but they have concerns in other parts of the country and I wonder if you could put some of these events in Darfur into the larger Sudanese picture.
ALEX DE WAAL: In domestic Sudanese politics Darfur is a sideshow, the real issue in Sudan as far as the government is concerned is the north/south issue -- the question of whether Sudan will be one country or will divide into two when the south has it’s referendum on self determination in 2011 as it is entitled to do under the comprehensive, so-called, peace agreement of 2005 between the north and the south. That is the major issue, most of the oil reserves are in the south. The question of national unity is very, very, deeply felt in the north. It’s a very, very fundamental political question for Sudan, in fact the fundamental political issue. For the Sudanese political elite handling the national elections that are due and that referendum is what is preoccupying themselves. And they are frankly astounded at the way in which the internationals having shepherded through the comprehensive peace agreement have almost entirely lost interest in it. There’s been very, very little attention until just a few months ago in how that is being implemented. All the major attention has gone to Darfur and that perplexes the Sudanese elite. They think, why is it that a conflict that is militarily largely over, that is costing 100 - 150 Sudanese lives every month is the major thing that is driving international policy towards Sudan when there is the prospect of the country breaking apart in a few years time. And if that were to happen in a disputed non consensual manner the war that would be unleashed would something much, much more serious.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And what are the hotspots there to keep an eye on?
ALEX DE WAAL: The key point in the north/south dispute that is causing most concern at the moment is Abyei, which is an area directly on the north/south border inhabited predominantly by people who are Dinka, ethnically the same as the southerners but geographically through an accident of history part of the north. The agreement allows for the people of Abyei to go, to join the south should they so want. And this becomes particularly crucial because there’s a lot of oil in Abyei and the northerners don’t want to see it go. And no agreement has been reached on how the question of Abyei ultimately ought to be handled and particularly over what is the northern boundary of the district and also how much oil lies under its soil. Other key issues to look out for are the Nuba Mountains, an area that is within Northern Sudan, doesn’t have the right to join the south as part of the agreement, but whose majority ethnic groups, the Nuba people would, if they had the choice, much prefer to be part of the south. Many of them are with the SPLA, they’re heavily armed. They’re in the north. Also the oil fields which are incontrovertibly in the south where they Sudanese Army was supposed to withdraw but it’s actually maintaining a military presence. The Sudanese government is very unlikely to want to withdraw those troops in advance of a referendum or even afterwards.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And finally I wanted to touch on a question that I think you’ve done several rounds about already, one here at the Museum, also on your own blog, Making Sense of Darfur and in Newsweek, about the question of the role that activism, particularly US centered activism has played in relation to the conflict. One of the things, your intervention on this topic reminded me quite a bit of some of your earlier work on humanitarianism where you’re asking people to look not only at intended consequences whether they fail or succeed in case of Darfur getting UN troops or, you know, getting better access for humanitarian aid and so forth. But also for the unintended consequences and to take that into consideration as activism moves forward. So that’s my reading of what you were trying to do but I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about what discussions and debates you are hoping to prompt by addressing the role of activism in Darfur.
ALEX DE WAAL: I think you’ve put it very, very well, I think that the unintended consequences are absolutely essential to our assessment of what the activists have achieved or haven’t achieved. There are no prizes for Darfur, clearly the situation hasn’t been resolved and the situation on the ground is dreadful and no one can really congratulate themselves other than those humanitarians who kept people alive over the last few years. My worry about possible unanticipated, unintended consequences is that when you have a peace process and you have a clamor for international troops to go in, that changes the political dynamic of the peace process. Now there’s no doubt in my mind that the Sudan government became more suspicious, less willing to make a deal or stick to a deal because of the anticipation that whatever it did, this clamor for troops would continue and western governments, notably the Americans would actually then deliver on troops. The argument from the Sudan Government side is what’s the point in making a concession of dismantling ourselves if it’s all that is going to happen after that is the demand for troops is going to continue or intensify. And on the rebel side this also has a perverse incentive in, anincentive among those rebel leaders who don’t have only immediate practical interest in peace for holding out for longer because then they may get the intervention which would be in their favor. If you look at Kosovo which is the example that is often given as a parallel, the ultimate outcome of Kosovo, the Kosovo intervention was deliver Kosovo as an independent state into the hands of Kosovo people. That’s what the Darfurian rebels want well then they’re absolutely calling for intervention is the right thing. But it’s not exactly humanitarian intervention and that sort of intervention is very, very clearly and undeniably going to frighten the Sudan government.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Alex, thank you again for joining us.
ALEX DE WAAL: You’re very welcome.
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.
