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A flawed peace pact

BY TINA SUSMAN | Newsday Staff Correspondent

May 15, 2006

African Union soldiers have been in Darfur since 2004, but their efforts to stem the tide of genocide have been largely hamstrung by a series of government maneuvers. (Newsday / J. Conrad Williams Jr. / March 13, 2006)

NYALA, Sudan - The tattered tents stretch as far as the eye can see on the edge of town. The narrow paths buzz with weary-looking people, bleating goats and whining donkeys hauling rickety wooden carts, a vision almost medieval in its wretchedness.

If a peace accord signed earlier this month is implemented, this squalid city, actually a camp for people displaced by Darfur's civil war, will disappear and its 95,000-plus inhabitants will return to their abandoned farms.

But few are counting on it. Sudanese and foreign policy experts say that's because the plan, signed May 5 amid much diplomatic pomp in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, is fraught with problems that all but guarantee its failure.

Chief among them is the deal's dependence on a regime that has broken past vows to quell violence in Darfur, where the United Nations and other international organizations say as many as 400,000 people may have died. War began in February 2003, when rebels accusing the Arab-dominated government of discrimination against non-Arabs in Darfur attacked military installations.

Beyond that, two of the three main rebel movements, including the one representing the Fur, Darfur's biggest tribe, refused to sign the accord.

Pact's timeline

If the plan falters, the question is whether the world, which until now has failed to use tough tactics against Sudan's government, will do more to ensure the peace.

The pact gives Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a little more than a month to offer a plan for disarming pro-government militia known as the janjaweed, who are blamed for most of the atrocities in Darfur. It gives him until October to complete the disarmament and assumes a UN force will enter Darfur to enforce compliance.

President George W. Bush, who led the last-ditch international efforts to get the plan approved, wasted no time trying to jump-start deployment of the UN force following the signing ceremony. First, he phoned al-Bashir and urged him to drop his past opposition to a UN mission. Then, he sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the UN, where she pressed the Security Council on Tuesday to expedite deployment of a force, envisioned at a minimum 14,000 soldiers, to Darfur.

Al-Bashir, however, has yet to approve the UN force, and in the past year, he has ignored UN resolutions demanding disarmament of the janjaweed. Critics say that is not likely to change now.

"We have seen more times than I can count the Sudanese saying one thing and doing exactly the opposite," said Susan Rice of the Brookings Institution, who was President Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of state for African affairs. "It is a perpetual pattern."

Rice and other diplomats who have dealt with al-Bashir, who has ruled Sudan since seizing power in a 1989 army coup, say he has a history of making false promises merely to appear accommodating and to get international critics off his back. They cite government violations of an April 2004 Darfur cease-fire, and its failure to uphold four separate 2004 agreements promising to disarm Darfur's militias.

Al-Bashir allegedly blocked AU troops

Juan Mendez, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's chief adviser on the prevention of genocide, the term the Bush administration has used to describe atrocities in Darfur, says al-Bashir also was less than genuine in 2004 when he agreed to let a force of African Union soldiers, from several African countries, into Darfur to monitor the war.

After bowing to international pressure and consenting to the mission, al-Bashir did everything possible to block its effectiveness, Mendez said. That included withholding jet fuel from the AU, which effectively grounded its missions, and blocking delivery of armored vehicles sent by Western countries to help the force.

"It's high time the AU, the Security Council, and all of us tell the government of Sudan that consent ... has to be given in good faith," Mendez said. That means not letting the government call the shots over the makeup or mandate of the future UN mission, he said, something that would render it as ineffective as the AU operation.

Now at its height, the AU force numbers about 7,700 - 1,500 of them unarmed civilian police with no arrest powers - covering an area nearly as big as Texas. Its mandate has limited it to monitoring the April 2004 cease-fire, not standing between anti-government rebels and Sudanese soldiers and their allied militiamen. The result has been an inability to establish an authoritative presence.

"Folks have figured out how much AU troops can and will do, and they've learned to work around it," said one Western diplomat, summing up the warring sides' attitudes toward the African force.

That has cost it support among civilians, who hoped the AU would protect them from janjaweed attacks but learned this was not to be. For example, when janjaweed ambushed women searching for firewood on Feb. 27 outside Kalma, a displaced persons' camp in Nyala, AU troops watched from a distance but did not intervene.

"What were we supposed to do? We are supposed to observe first, see what is happening, not just shoot," said one of the AU force members, Lovedelia Mothusiemang of South Africa, shortly after the incident.