"World hails Darfur peace deal as first step to peace." That is just one of the headlines (from Africa News, 6 May 2006) to emerge in the last few days since Minni Arco Minnawi, leader of the "main" faction of the rebel Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army, urged on by the recent arrivals of Bob Zoellick and Britain's Hillary Benn, signed the proposed Darfur Peace Agreement on Friday, May 4. The text of this headline underscores two questions that have emerged in the wake of Minni's signing of the document. The first prompts us to assess the way in which the "world [is] hail[ing]" the agreement" - how we interpret what happened in Abuja and how we are reacting to it in the press. The second, encompassing a great number of underlying questions, involves the extent to which the agreement can legitimately be called a "peace deal" at all and whether it does in fact signal the "first step" in a progression toward peace.
The attention generated by the peace accord, inspiring prominent stories in the New York Times and Washington Post among others, is greatly welcome at a time when many are still unaware of what is occurring in Darfur. The darker side to this, of course, is that newcomers to the issue reading headlines like above may very well think that this disastrous genocide has been contained and is on the safe road to resolution. This carries with it the danger of absolving people of their concern, leading them to close their checkbooks (especially harmful in a context in which donor fatigue has led to only a fraction of pledged aid actually reaching Darfur, aid even more desperately needed with the recent withdrawal of humanitarian organizations from the more dangerous areas and the UN World Food Program's heart-wrenching budget cut halving the calorie ration afforded to refugees and IDPs to an unviable 1000 per day) and turn their attention elsewhere. Some press, the Times especially, has, however, accurately portrayed the unchanging situation on the ground as a remonstrative foil to the promise that we have cultivated from the Abuja agreement. I have carefully avoided the phraseology that the DPA has "provided" or "generated" actual promise, because I believe it warrants enough cautious skepticism to withhold building castles of peace in the sky out of a document that does not even garner the full support of the people it purports to protect and that, more significantly, relies on the goodwill of the Sudanese government and the enforcement capacity of the African Union, both of which have consistently failed to demonstrate their reliability in the past two years. While I truly want to be hopeful that perhaps this peace accord, supported by the efforts of the US, will bear fruit, that the support of the United States, which did, after all, send its Deputy Secretary of State on a red-eye, last-ditch mission to Abuja, will prove genuine, that the Janjaweed will be disarmed, that Darfurian representatives will be incorporated into the Government of Sudan, and that the painfully deceptive banners of "Peace and Unity" currently flapping with murderous irony in the winds of Khartoum will actually achieve some meaning, all of my familiarity with the GoS and its history tempers my hopes and reduces me to simply praying that nothing will go more horribly awry than it already has.
The DPA is unfortunately lacking in both the depth and the width of its adherence. It does not span the wide gulfs separating the one SLM/A faction that signed it from the other, that of Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur, nor the ideological divide between both of these groups and the Justice and Equality Movement. While the motives behind the JEM's refusal to sign are questionable (mistrust is justified by the JEM's supposed ties to Hassan al-Turabi, the prominent Islamicist idealogue and former mentor of and co-conspirator with Omar Hassan al-Bashir), the reservations of the el-Nur faction parallel a similar wariness toward the agreement manifested by the Fur tribe, el-Nur's primary "constituents" (to the extent to which any of these factions can even be pinned down as truly representative of innocent Darfurian civilians, a goal that has in the past seemed to lose the prominence it deserves amidst internecine squabbles and jockeying for position). Many Fur seem to be even resentful toward Minni's faction for signing an agreement they do not support, a resentment surely the result of perpetual frustration, which reached its tragic culmination today in the brutal killing of an African Union translator in troubled and overcrowded Kalma camp. This horrendous event, and the violent mass protests that prompted the UN to expeditiously evacuate Jan Egeland from the camp, have at their source the growing friction among displaced persons in the squalid conditions of one of Darfur's largest camps about their seemingly interminable situation, the persistence of the Government's active creation of "conditions of life calcuated to bring about [their] destruction," (to quote the much-ignored, but most relevant, prong of the definition of genocide by the 1948 Commission on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide), and the repeated insufficiency and failures of international efforts to improve these people's lot. The impetus for today's outburst of frustration was likely inhabitants' sense that they have been left out of the signed peace agreement that brought Mr. Egeland to Kalma. A large proportion of the IDPs in Kalma camp are of the Fur tribe, and many of them echo the animosity felt by el-Nur toward Minnawi and reflect that the divisions within the SLM/A are not limited to a struggle for power and that very real tensions exist between the primary "members" (both those in the movement itself and those "virtually" represented by it) of the two factions. One banner at the protest epitomized the extreme of the resentment felt toward Minni for signing the DPA, declaring that "To the Darfur, Arco Minawi is destroyer'' ("Angry Darfur Refugees Riot in Demand for U.N. Troops," New York Times, Lydia Polgreen, 9 May 2006). The divisiveness espoused by many Fur in Kalma - remember, one of the earliest camps to arise and boom in population - can largely be explained by the fact that the Fur and Massaleit tribes bore the brunt of the early Government/Janjaweed attacks of 2003 and 2004 ("Unifying Darfur's Rebels: A Prerequisite for Peace," International Crisis Group, Africa Briefing No. 32, 6 October 2005, pp. 3-5). Furthermore, the traditional predominance of Zaghawa (Minni's tribe) in the military component of the movement, cultivated and emphasized by Minni as he forced himself up the chain of power, has undercut relations between this faction and that of el-Nur, representing the Fur and seeking to compensate for their underwhelming influence in military matters by focusing on the movement's political wing (Idem.)
The Fur protest in Kalma attests to the personal loyalty many feel toward el-Nur, for they trust that a peace agreement that their leader calls "a big disaster" ("Darfur talks yield imperfect 'peace,'" Toronto Star, 6 May 2006) must leave something to be desired for their protection. El-Nur's primary objection, and the most dire concern of the people of Darfur, is that the agreement does not do enough to ensure immediate and total disarmament of the Janjaweed militias stalking the Darfurian countryside. IDPs have developed a very rational fear of these terrifying "devils on horseback;" the women who arrive at camps recount their inhumane stories of fleeing their village, watching their husbands summarily executed, their children riddled with bullets, and their subjection to strategic genocidal rape. The identity of those whom they fear is obvious in the cry of "Janjaweed! Janjaweed!" that accompanied the mob attack on the innocent Sudanese humanitarian workers who were the unfortunate objects of Darfurians' displaced anger.
The popular agreement with el-Nur's reservations is not, however, limited to personal loyalty and trust. The Darfurian people have very real reasons to be skeptical toward the GoS's intentions to disarm the Janjaweed and thus follow el-Nur's attempts to hammer out specific delegations added to the agreement specifying who will ensure that this occurs (“Darfur’s main rebel faction says Abuja accord is still incomplete,” Sudan Tribune, 13 May 2006). As of now, the task remains in the hands of the African Union, whose mandate prevents them from exercising sufficient authority to ensure disarmament, so this effectively results in a perpetuation of the status quo, a status quo dominated by death and unimpeded Janjaweed raids, as documented mere days after the DPA was signed (see "Truce is Talk, Agony is Real in Darfur," Lydia Polgreen, New York Times, 12 May 2006). It is difficult to take Khartoum's word when it hedges out of its commitment by casting ambiguity over what groups it is even supposed to disarm, evidenced by Government spokesman Amin Omar's statement that "...Janjaweed is an ambiguous term. It represents many groups holding arms in Darfur" and that many of these groups "will be harder to control." (“Darfur prepares for uneasy peace,” Associated Press, Alfred de Montesquiou, 13 May 2006). A refugee in Gaga, Chad voiced the popular acknowledgment that Khartoum's profession to disarm the Janjaweed does not necessarily amount to anything in reality and raised the logical question - one that the international community seems to be blindly ignoring - of "if these marauders are still in Darfur, how on earth can we be expected to go back and live there?" ("Refugees too scared to go home despite Darfur peace deal," The Independent, Claire Soares, 9 May 2006). The conditions for security simply do not yet exist, and until they do, people will not feel ready - and we cannot force them, for they likely know better than we that if they venture out of what little safety they have in the camps, they will be killed - to return to their homes. Even Zoellick acknowledged that "…Darfur is going to remain a dangerous place and it's going to be a place of violence," though he did so in practically admitting that the DPA as signed represents a "second-best" alternative, taking solace in the "assurance" of having secured "at least the commitment of the major rebel movement and the government not to be conducting violent operations…” (Abuja press conference, 5 May 2006, can be found at US State Department website), which of course leaves out the most dangerous force - the Janjaweed military proxies.
Ultimately, any guidance looking toward the future of this peace accord must factor in the mistrust that the GoS has earned through its three years of continued genocide and failure to uphold any pact or ceasefire. A refugee in Chad best expresses the impossibility of returning home with conditions as dangerous as they are and with the Government having acquired no legitimate degree of reliability whatsoever: "I'd like to go home in 2006," Ismael Haron says, "but I doubt it will happen...We know Bashir. We have seen him make agreements and then break them 10 minutes later, and that worries us.'' Unfortunately, the only response to Mr. Haron is that we in the international community have seen this too, but we seem too shortsighted or bullheaded to allow it to worry us.
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