KHARTOUM, 8 October 2005 — When do Bush administration officials cuddle up to leaders of states that the US describes as sponsors of international terrorism? Answer: When they are in Khartoum. I know because I saw it the other day. It was in the garden of the headquarters of Sudan’s intelligence service, not far from the Nile. Fairy lights twinkled on wires draped round palm trees. African drummers played. No alcohol was served, but clearly there was something in the air.
Up stepped a senior CIA agent. In full view of the assembled company, he gave Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, Sudan’s intelligence boss, a bear hug. The general responded by handing over a goody-bag, wrapped in shiny green paper. Next up was a senior MI6 (British intelligence) official, with the same effusive routine — hug, handshake, bag of presents.
We were attending the closing dinner of a two-day conference of African counterterrorism officials, to which the US and the UK were invited as observers. The Western spooks were less than happy to have the press on hand, especially as their names were called out. But loss of anonymity was a small price for the excellent cooperation both agencies believe Sudan is giving in the campaign to keep tabs on Somali, Saudi and other Arab fundamentalists who pass through its territory.
Pragmatic Britain has had polite relations with Sudan’s Islamist government since it took power in a military coup in 1989. Ideological Washington has not. Bill Clinton designated Sudan a terrorist state in 1993 and later slapped on trade sanctions, partly under pressure from Congress and America’s Christian right.
US officials have produced no proof that Sudan finances, trains or harbors terrorists, and the Bush people would probably lift the bans if they could. But once on the terrorism-sponsor list, few countries manage to get off. It is a rare case where the great warrior on terror finds himself trapped by US politicians even more extreme than himself.
Bush’s Sudan policy contains other big contradictions. As secretary of state last year, Colin Powell described the conflict in the western region of Darfur as “genocide.” He had hesitated for months, because a finding of genocide requires a state to take immediate action to stop it. Yet what did the US do next? Nothing, or at least no more than many other states, including Britain, which did not want the genocide label to be lightly used, and so devalued.
The US supported an armed African Union (AU) mission to monitor a cease-fire and protect humanitarian relief. It pressed for a peace deal. More reluctantly than any other state, it supported an inquiry that could lead to indictments of Sudanese leaders at the international criminal court. But Washington’s lack of follow-through showed that, as with the terrorism label, the genocide finding was a sop to the Christian right and anti-Islamist neocons.
Coverage of Darfur has dwindled, but AU monitors, as well as UN officials in Khartoum, report a marked improvement since last year’s campaign of rape and killing left close to 200,000 dead and forced 2 million to flee. Janjaweed militias, usually backed by the government in clashes with rebel groups, were behind most of the atrocities.
Thriving on bad news — typical was Caroline Moorehead’s Letter from Darfur in the New York Review of Books this summer — commentators who still write about Darfur often thunder away without any sense of time or context. In fact, the UN secretary-general’s latest report to the Security Council points out that the influx of 12,500 aid workers has “averted a humanitarian catastrophe, with no major outbreaks of disease or famine.” Patrols by the hundreds of AU monitors have reduced violence and other human-rights violations. The report attacks the government for not disarming the Janjaweed or holding enough people accountable for last year’s atrocities, but it blames the rebels for most of this year’s abductions of civilians and attacks on aid convoys.
In recent weeks there has been a turn for the worse. A new chain of tit-for-tat violence is developing. Janjaweed forces attacked a displaced people’s camp in western Darfur last week, an unprecedented assault on a sanctuary in which at least 30 people died, and AU monitors report that government helicopter gunships were seen over the camp. This may have been retaliation for a rebel seizure of a town a few days earlier.
To its credit, Washington has stepped up efforts to get the anti-government rebels to stop blocking the peace talks now under way in Abuja. As interethnic tensions among the rebels grow stronger, leaders of the Zaghawa, the main fighters, are unwilling to attend despite face-to-face pleas from US and UN diplomats urging them to accept the model that ended the much longer war between the government and the south.
Former southern rebels, who recently joined the Islamists in Sudan’s new government of national unity, will soon go to Abuja for the first time, to act as mediators if necessary. This is a big step forward. As Riek Machar, the new vice president of south Sudan told me in Juba last week: “We believe we are the people who can crack the issue of Darfur. We have experience of negotiating a settlement with the group governing in Khartoum. We will take that experience to Abuja. The liberation movements have confidence in us.” Even if peace were agreed, implementation would be rocky.
The north-south deal has made a poor start. The Arab-led former ruling party denied its new southern partners any of Sudan’s key ministries; this will not encourage the Darfurians. UN analysts believe peace-building in Darfur will be harder than in the south. “Destruction progressed over 20 years in the south, and it wasn’t mainly done by locals. It was done by the Sudanese Army and militias from outside. In Darfur you’ve had dozens of ethnic groups clashing ... Some won, some lost, and it has been very quick. Bitterness and hatred are still raw,” said one official.
Grim though it has been, this was not genocide or classic ethnic cleansing. Many of the displaced moved to camps a few kilometers from their homes. Professionals and intellectuals were not targeted, as in Rwanda. Darfur was, and is, the outgrowth of a struggle between farmers and nomads rather than a Balkan-style fight for the same piece of land. Finding a solution is not helped by turning the violence into a battle of good versus evil or launching another Arab- bashing crusade.
