Whether a momentary pause or real peace, Africa is calmer now than it has been for decades. This change has come about partly because the rest of the world is taking Africa more seriously. And on the African side, its governments have become more engaged in issues outside their own countries.
The Chairman of the African Union Commission is Alpha Oumar Konare, a former president of Mali, who talks reality, not rhetoric, and treats African heads of state as equals. At the African Union summit earlier this month, he bluntly told Sudan’s President Omar Bashir, that he knew that his government was arming militias and bombing civilians. He did not want denials, he wanted it stopped. Furthermore, the summit agreed to send peacekeeping troops to back up AU observers on the ground in Darfur — even though the Sudan government opposed the idea. That would have been unthinkable five years ago. Darfur will be the test of Africa’s determination to deal with its own problems. The AU’s credibility depends on making peace there.
Darfur’s war has its roots in a centuries-old conflict — essentially the competition for land between settled farmers and the cattle-herding pastoralists who bring their cattle south in the dry season to graze. Where once growing and grazing areas were agreed and disputes settled with a few spears and swords, today the competition for land and the alarming spread of automatic rifles means that such disputes end quickly in total war.
In Darfur, the pastoralists are Arabized Bedouin of the semi-desert zones and the settled farmers are from black African — but Muslim — ethnic groups. Although distinguished as Arab and African, outsiders would be pushed to tell the difference in looks. Intermarriage is common, making “Arab” and “African” political rather than racial labels.
Locally everyone knows who is who and whose side they are on. Now the local land disputes and rivalries are subsumed in a larger and more significant war and when there is an overall cease-fire, there will need to be hundreds of local agreements renegotiated on land rights. It will be a nightmare task. The rebels started the war because they realized that peace was imminent in the war that has divided Sudan on and off for 50 years. Peace between the Khartoum Arab clique and the southern rebels, the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army, led by John Garang, looked like a stitch-up to the rest of Sudan. Areas such as Darfur, neglected and marginalized like the South, saw they would be cut off from power and the new oil wealth by this new deal. They also saw that war had got Garang into government so they copied him. In turn Bashir saw that if he even began to negotiate with them, he would be sending a message to the rest of Sudan too — war gets you a slice of power and wealth. The Darfur rebellion had to be stopped dead.
Darfur may be a remote province but its politics link directly into the government in Khartoum. What happens here may lead to a fragmentation of the whole country. A settlement on terms too favorable to the rebels could spark revolts among other marginalized peoples. The president is weaker than he looks.
It is against this tricky background that a cease-fire must be negotiated and agreement secured to allow humanitarian aid to reach those in need. Then there must be peace-making and reconstruction. The lead player in all of this must be the AU. Tony Blair has already hinted British troops should be sent. Maybe, but only in close cooperation with the AU. This is its war and unilateral action by outsiders trying to save Africa will cause resentment and undermine this new organization’s role. British troops should certainly be kept away from the front line, not just for their own safety, but because, as British, they could be a target for Islamists. Darfur is one of the areas in Africa where British troops would not be welcomed because of their role in Iraq. That is an added complication Darfur does not need. The same goes for the Americans. Britain’s role should be to provide logistics and perhaps airborne surveillance. It could also provide help for a rapid reaction group that could respond quickly to hotspots. Even more important, it should support the laborious and long-term process of bringing leaders of the myriad small communities together to negotiate the competition for land and water.
Successful humanitarian aid missions can be only judged against what might have been and that is hard to quantify. This time, we see what is happening on television every night. If we are still looking at the same pictures in a month, it will not just be a humanitarian mission that failed. It will demonstrate that Africa’s new bid to fix its own problems has failed, too.
— The writer is director of the Royal African Society
