[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Sudan: Justice Africa Analysis

[Alfred Kagan]

>To: akagan at uiuc.edu
>Subject: Sudan: Justice Africa Analysis
>From: africafocus at igc.org
>Sender: World Wide Web Owner <www at africafocus.org>
>Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 09:04:47 -0700
>
>
>Sudan: Justice Africa Analysis 
>
>AfricaFocus Bulletin
>Jun 18, 2004 (040618)
>(Reposted from sources cited below)
>
>Editor's Note 
>
>As overwhelming evidence of atrocities in Sudan continues to
>emerge, there are new calls for action to stop the genocide. This
>issue of AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from a mid-May
>briefing by Justice Africa focusing on key elements needed to
>inform such action. These include identifying the political forces
>within the Sudanese government responsible for directing the
>violence.
>
>The London-based Justice Africa (http://www.justiceafrica.org),
>which works closely with the Pan African Movement secretariat in
>Kampala and the Inter Africa Group in Addis Ababa, has extensive
>experience in the Horn of Africa. It has coordinated a series of
>conferences with Sudanese civil society and human rights
>organizations. Justice Africa's directors include  Alex de Waal,
>Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Yoanes Ajawin, Abdul Mohamed, and Paulos
>Tesfagiorgis.
>
>In response to the question "Is the Darfur conflict genocide?"
>Justice Africa replies, "If we strictly apply the provisions of the
>1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
>Genocide, there is no doubt that the answer is yes." However, this
>establishes a firm international obligation to act, which is why
>governments and the United Nations are wary of using the term. Such
>action, Justice Africa implies, must lead to changes in Khartoum.
>"The ruthlessness with which the security elite at the heart of the
>Government of Sudan have operated, and their readiness to turn
>Darfur into an ethics-free zone, mean that Sudan's future stability
>rests on the political exclusion or containment of key members of
>this security elite."
>
>In Washington, testifying before a Senate hearing on June 15, John
>Prendergast of the International Crisis Group concluded a detailed
>listing of steps needed for stronger action on Darfur with a
>parallel point. "The best way to end this tragedy," he said, "is to
>bring home the costs of the atrocities in Darfur to the Sudanese
>officials who are directing them."
>
>For Prendergast's testimony see
>http://allafrica.com/stories/200406160578.html
>
>Also available on http://allafrica.com/sudan, with extensive
>additional material on the current situation in Darfur, is
>testimony from US Acting Assistant Secretary of State Charles
>Snyder, USAID Deputy Administrator Roger Winter, and Human Rights
>Watch Darfur research Julie Flint. Full testimony at the hearings
>is also available at
>http://foreign.senate.gov/hearings/2004/hrg040615p.html
>
>Africa Action (http://www.africaaction.org) has launched a petition
>campaign calling on the US to acknowledge that the campaign of
>slaughter in Darfur amounts to genocide, and to take action to stop
>it, including the use of military force.
>
>For additional background and links to current sources visit
>
>http://www.africafocus.org/country/sudan.php
>http://www.reliefweb.int
>
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
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>++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>PROSPECTS FOR PEACE IN SUDAN BRIEFING
>
>MARCH-MAY 2004
>
>Justice Africa 19 May 2004
>
>[Excerpts only. For full text of this and earlier briefings on
>Sudan from Justice Africa, visit
>  http://www.justiceafrica.org/smb_archive04.htm]
>
>...
>
>Political Repercussions of Darfur
>
>11. The war in Darfur threatens to paralyse and fragment the 
>Government of Sudan (GoS). The conflict reaches into the heart of 
>the GoS power structure and the wider socio-political consensus of 
>northern Sudan in a more destabilising way than the war in the South 
>ever did. If the Darfur conflict is not resolved rapidly and 
>decisively, the GoS may become incapable of governing. This would 
>benefit nobody. But the ruthlessness with which the security elite 
>at the heart of the GoS have operated, and their readiness to turn 
>Darfur into an ethics-free zone, mean that Sudan's future stability 
>rests on the political exclusion or containment of key members of 
>this security elite.
>
>12. Many middle-ranking and senior army officers hail from Darfur.
>Reportedly, a number of senior air force officers refused to bomb
>civilian targets in Darfur, leading to fears of a widespread
>refusal to obey orders or worse. There is also discontent among
>army officers about the use of the Janjawiid militia. The levels of
>disquiet in the army over Darfur should not be underestimated.
>
>13. The GoS continues to see the Darfur rebellion largely through
>the lens of its own intra-Islamist dispute. This has contributed to
>the arrest and detention of Hassan al Turabi and the closure of the
>PCP. These actions are unlikely to have the desired effect. While
>Turabi's potential for destabilising any political process can
>never be underestimated, his control over events in Darfur is
>minimal at best.
>
>14. In truth, the Darfur conflict signals the end of Sudan's
>Islamist project. The National Islamic Front was always a coalition
>between Arab nationalists and Islamists, a coalition signified by
>Turabi's Popular Arab and Islamic Conference, established in 1991
>to bring together radical Islamists and Arab nationalists (the
>secularist Palestinian George Habbash was among the non-Islamists
>who attended the first conference.) Within Sudan, the Arab tendency
>was primarily represented by the elites of the northern region who
>have traditionally dominated the Sudanese state. The Arab
>supremacism of members of the former Islamic Brigades who had been
>in exile in Libya in the 1970s and 80s is a second, more neglected
>component. The Islamist tendency reached out to non-Arab groups
>that had been marginalized in the Sudanese state, notably including
>the Fellata, Zaghawa and Fur. (The Fellata, descendants of west
>African immigrants from the pre-colonial and colonial periods,
>first received Sudanese citizenship under the NIF).
>
>15. Hassan al Turabi's sympathy for the JEM rebels is therefore
>more than simple opportunism. It indicates his appreciation that
>the GoS has abandoned its last Islamist credentials, and is simply
>interested in power. The Darfur conflict has sundered Sudan's
>Islamist coalition right down its most sensitive fault line: race.
>The GoS looks more and more like an ethnic and political minority
>that has control over state power and wants to keep that power at
>any cost, knowing full well that any liberalisation will spell its
>political demise.
>
>16. By the same token, the war in Darfur could easily prefigure a
>conflict that could tear apart the fabric of the Sudanese state
>itself. The GoS is doing its utmost to black out any news from
>Darfur and keep the citizens of Khartoum in the dark. This is for
>the real fear that determined opposition could spread to the
>capital. The arrest of army officers including air force commanders
>alleged to have been planning a coup reflects this fear. However
>hard it tries, the GoS will be unable to prevent news of the Darfur
>atrocities reaching Khartoum, and fuelling opposition.
>
>17. The Darfur conflict is irrevocably internationalised. Despite
>the best efforts of the GoS to argue that it is an internal or at
>best a regional affair, it cannot any longer rebuff international
>engagement. The GoS strategy of a rapid all-out offensive in
>January-February, intended to defeat the rebels and present a fait
>accompli to the international community, has completely backfired.
>Rather than dividing the international community, the GoS has
>further united it in horror at what is going on. ...
>
>18. Even more seriously, the level of outrage among all social and
>political classes in northern Sudan has surpassed anything
>witnessed during 21 years of war with the South. The Darfur
>conflict hits all the most sensitive points of the government. It
>divides the Islamist movement, it pits the riverain elites in
>government against the westerners, and it challenges the unity of
>the armed forces. ...
>
>The Darfur Arabs' Point of View
>
>19. The Arabs of Darfur have their defenders. Members of these
>communities make a number of claims. First, they have argued that
>they too have been the victims of human rights violations,
>including massacres, at the hands of the SLA and JEM. Certainly
>there are credible allegations of such abuses, some of them
>reported in documents by Human Rights Watch and the UNHCHR, that
>warrant further investigation. Second, they claim that the war was
>started by the military insurrection of the rebels. This is not in
>dispute, but it is also not questioned that Darfur has long been
>neglected by central government (and indeed that the Darfurian
>Arabs were as much victims of that neglect as the non-Arabs)....
>
>20. Lastly, spokesmen for the Arabs claim that the current conflict
>is a continuation of a history of dispute over territory between
>farmers and herders, in which farmers have usually got the upper
>hand. There is an element of truth to this. Since the mid-1980s
>there have indeed been numerous clashes and although in direct
>military confrontations, the herders may get the better of the
>farmers, in the long run sedentary farming communities have the
>upper hand in terms of expropriating pasture land and blocking
>transhumance routes. But it is important to note that before the
>1980s, the most common clashes were between pastoralist groups
>themselves, and large scale fighting between herders and farmers
>began only in that decade. This irruption of conflict had clear
>political dimensions, beginning with struggles to control the
>regional government of Darfur (established in 1980), and
>intensifying with meddling by the Sadiq el Mahdi government after
>1986 and the return to Darfur of former Ansar fighters who had been
>in exile in Libya, where many of them had been members of
>Ghaddafi's Islamic Brigade, and where they had absorbed an Arab
>supremacist ideology.
>
>21. Sadly, neither party to the conflict has emphasised the
>interconnections between the Arabs and non-Arabs in Darfur. Not
>only have pastoralists and farmers had a long history of economic
>interdependence, including intermarriage, but the boundaries
>between ethnic groups are themselves blurred. The term widely used
>in western Sudan for Arab pastoralists, 'baggara', means 'cattle
>herder', and historically, members of the Fur and other ethnic
>groups possessing substantial numbers of cattle have themselves
>'become Baggara'. An ethnic map of the region resembles a
>chequerboard, with few areas that can be said to be exclusively
>'belonging' to one group, but rather a complex and overlapping web
>of villages and transient pastoralist camps.
>
>Is it Genocide?
>
>22. Is the Darfur conflict genocide? If we strictly apply the
>provisions of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
>of the Crime of Genocide, there is no doubt that the answer is yes.
>The definition of 'genocide' in Article II of the Convention is
>'acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or part, a
>national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing
>members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to
>members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group
>conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
>destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to
>prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children
>of the group to another group.' The numbers of killings may not yet
>come close to those perpetrated in Rwanda or Nazi Germany, and the
>entire destruction of the targeted ethnic groups does not seem in
>prospect, but these extreme manifestations are not legally
>necessary for a crime to count as genocide.
>
>23. Is this a crime planned at the highest level of the Sudanese
>state and executed according to a carefully designed central plan?
>Or is it a counterinsurgency that has got out of control, running
>wild beyond the designs of its sponsors? It would seem to be a bit
>of both. During the last twenty years, the characteristic mode of
>action employed by successive governments in Khartoum, when they
>want to fight a cheap and effective counterinsurgency, has been to
>employ militias and to give great discretion to commanders on the
>ground. Thus the militia massacres in Bahr el Ghazal and the
>killings and forced relocations of the Nuba were carried out, in a
>way that the government could pretend was not at its direct behest.
>On every occasion, however, it subsequently became clear that
>military officers were involved in supplying militias and directing
>their activities. The involvement of the air force, whose raids
>must be directly authorised by the chief of staff's office in
>Khartoum, is evidence for high level involvement.
>
>24. The culprits for this strategy are the individuals who have run
>the Sudanese security apparatus since 1989. Each time there has
>been a major massacre Juba in 1992, Nuba Mountains that same year,
>repeatedly in Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile the trail of evidence
>leads to the same people. Are President Bashir and Vice President
>Ali Osman among them? Most likely, the two most senior figures in
>government instructed their immediate subordinates to do whatever
>was necessary and not report back. An unspoken signal would have
>been sent that Darfur was a free-fire zone, and ethics-free zone in
>which anything could be done without consequence. With a history of
>gross violation with total impunity following on from such signals,
>there would have been no need for any more detailed instructions.
>
>25. The implication of determining that genocide is being committed
>is that no effort should be spared to stop it, and to punish those
>responsible. It does not, however, mean that peace negotiations
>should be abandoned in favour of an international policy of regime
>change. The Darfur genocide is not a single, centrally planned
>exercise (as was the Rwanda genocide for example). There is a
>serious danger that the fabric of the state itself will
>disintegrate under the current stresses, unleashing communal
>violence on genocidal scale across different parts of Sudan.
>Although the leadership in Khartoum has blood on its hands, there
>is currently no alternative but to pursue the existing strategy of
>negotiating with it for an end to the conflict.
>
>Where Next for Darfur?
>
>26. The mediation structure that is emerging resembles the IGAD
>process in important respects. An African regional organisation is
>in the lead role (in this case the African Union), supported by a
>regional government (Chad) and key international players (the U.S.
>and European Union). Achieving a consensus among the international
>players is a crucial step in ensuring that there is a credible
>peace process, to avoid forum shopping by the parties (especially
>the government). However, a common negotiating stand by the
>international mediators is complicated by the resurgence of the
>anti-Khartoum lobbies in Washington. Having been kept at bay during
>the IGAD negotiations, this lobby group has seized its chance with
>the atrocities in Darfur. While criticism of the GoS human rights
>record is amply justified, the major concern for governments must
>be with the outcome of the process. Given that regime change in
>Khartoum at present is a strategy for chaos, a strategy of
>engagement to complement the criticism must be followed. However,
>such an approach is possible only when the GoS has converged on an
>internally agreed position.
>
>27. Where the Darfur mediation differs markedly from the post-2001
>IGAD process is that there is no pre-existing literature of accord.
>The GoS-SPLA negotiations benefited from a decade of rounds of
>talks which may not have reached a final agreement, but had
>nonetheless clarified consensual positions on key theoretical
>issues such as self-determination. No such literature of accord
>exists for Darfur. The SLA and JEM have yet to agree on a set of
>common negotiating positions, while the GoS is divided on whether
>it can negotiate on political issues at all, and if so what its
>position should be.
>
>28. However, some of the basic demands of the SLA and JEM are
>clear. These include: ending the marginalisation of Darfur in
>Sudanese political and economic affairs; democratic elections at
>the regional level; reconstituting Darfur as a single state (it was
>divided into three by the current government); and providing
>greater autonomy for the region. These are all eminently reasonable
>demands. The GoS will fear that if it concedes to these demands,
>then other northern Sudanese regions (especially the East) will
>also make comparable demands. This fear may be justifiable. The
>only way to address the long catalogue of grievances from all
>regions of the country is through open and democratic processes,
>rather than repression.
>
>29. Absent progress, or the immediate prospect of progress, on
>political issues, the parties have agreed on a 'humanitarian'
>ceasefire. This freeze on hostilities needs several additional
>elements if it is to be meaningful. First, it needs to be
>monitored, with effective mechanisms for complaint and recourse if
>it is violated. The AU is preparing to deploy ceasefire monitors in
>late May. This effort needs to be supported, both logistically and
>politically. Second, the ceasefire needs to be an opportunity for
>the accompanied return of refugees and IDPs to their homes. This
>will be a means for minimising humanitarian crisis, restoring
>livelihoods and preserving land rights. If the conflict is frozen
>with up to a million Darfurians displaced and indefinite recipients
>of international aid in their places of displacement, then the
>international community may find itself merely financing a process
>of ethnic cleansing.
>
>30. The involvement of Sudan's northern neighbours in helping
>resolve the Darfur conflict is conspicuous by its absence. Neither
>Egypt nor Libya, nor the Arab League nor Organisation of the
>Islamic Conference, has played any role whatsoever. Colonel
>Ghadaffi has described the war and massacres as 'only' a 'tribal
>conflict' and condemned non-African 'interference'. The lack of
>condemnation by these governments and regional organisations has
>been deafening, a point that will not be lost on Sudanese citizens.
>
>31. Does the African Union have the capacity to play a leading role
>in resolving the Darfur conflict? The Chairperson of the AU,
>President Alpha Oumer Konare, has made Darfur one of his highest
>priorities. It is the first major challenge to the recently
>established AU Peace and Security Council. The Sudan Government
>welcomed the AU offer of mediation, in part because they
>anticipated it would be a softer touch than the U.S. or Europeans.
>They may have underestimated the determination of the AU leadership
>to prove itself.
>
>32. A durable end to the conflict will require a political solution
>at the leadership level. A first step in this regard would be
>Declaration of Principles, akin to that drafted by IGAD in 1994.
>Such a DoP should include an assertion of basic citizenship and
>residence rights, human security including right to a livelihood,
>power-sharing at both regional and national level, and new
>provisions for law and order in the region, which has been scarred
>by banditry and organised crime for the last two decades. ...
>
>34. The problem of the proliferation of light weapons in western
>Sudan will need to be addressed. Part of the reason for the
>escalation of the conflict was that there was no effective police
>force in the region, so that different communities resorted to
>arming themselves for self-defence and as protection against
>endemic banditry. Darfur will need a new, well-equipped and
>well-trained police force, probably with international technical
>and logistical assistance, and a graduated programme of mutual
>disarmament among communities. A prerequisite for this is the
>disarmament of the Janjawiid. This should be done by the GoS, which
>has responsibility for the militia.
>
>...
>
>Accountability
>
>45. The issue of accountability for human rights abuses has
>received new attention, both from the demand of Sudanese civil
>society (which released a statement on the issue on 29 March), and
>from the international focus on atrocities in Darfur. This agenda
>will not go away, and is reinforced by the evident way in which
>senior GoS figures revert to policies of extreme brutality. The war
>in Darfur compels diplomats and human rights activists to ask, who
>is responsible for this policy? Suspicion falls upon the clique of
>senior security officers who have, over the years, presided over
>serious abuses in Juba, the Nuba Mountains and the oil fields, and
>on those who have been most closely associated with the militia
>strategies in Kordofan and Darfur, reaching back as far as the
>early years of the war in the 1980s.
>
>46. The Darfur conflict underlines the simple reality that many of
>those most responsible for egregious abuses of human rights during
>the war, cannot be permitted to remain in government. The argument
>that the removal of Hassan al Turabi and the engagement in the IGAD
>peace talks was disempowering the ruthless security elite, can no
>longer be considered tenable. ...
>
>*************************************************************
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>providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu