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Darfur: One-sided reporting that is delaying an end to the killing
Western media and US Christian support for the Darfur rebels, guilty of their own atrocities, has held back a peace deal
Jonathan Steele
Friday May 5, 2006
The Guardian
By the time you read this, there may be good news from Africa. A peace agreement could have been signed for Darfur, the place often compared with Rwanda as a cause for international shame because warnings of genocide went unheeded. If done by last night's midnight deadline, a deal will surprise most people, since with very few exceptions the world's press has ignored the negotiations that have been inching forward under African Union (AU) mediation in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
I call it the Darfur Disconnect. One TV reporter after another does the standard tour into Sudan's western region, guided by rebel groups. Out comes footage of miserable refugees huddling in tents or shelters of sticks and plastic and recounting stories of brutal treatment by government-backed Janjaweed militias. Commentators thunder away at the need for sanctions against the regime in Khartoum and denounce western leaders for not authorising Nato to intervene.
Last weekend the outrage took a new turn, with big demonstrations in several American cities, strongly promoted by the Christian right, which sees the Darfur conflict as another case of Islamic fundamentalism on the rampage. They urged Bush to stop shilly-shallying and be tougher with the government of Sudan.
The TV reports are not wrong. They just give a one-sided picture and miss the big story: the talks that the rebels are conducting with the government. The same is true of the commentaries. Why demand military involvement, when western leaders have intervened more productively by pressing both sides to reach a settlement? Over the past few days the US, with British help, has taken over the AU's mediation role, and done it well. Robert Zoellick, the state department's number two, and Hilary Benn, Britain's development secretary, have been in Abuja urging the rebels not to waste the opportunity for peace. Sudan's government accepted the US-brokered draft agreement last weekend, and it is the rebels who have been risking a collapse.
It is hard to see why. The as yet unpublished text, which I read this week, gives the rebels most of what they went to war for. In many insurgencies, Northern Ireland for one, rebels are asked to come out of hiding and join the political process with or without an amnesty. In the Darfur peace agreement, large areas of territory are recognised by the government as being under the rebels' control and therefore closed to government troops during a transition period. This is a humiliating recognition of loss of sovereignty. The Janjaweed militias will have to be disarmed before the rebels are. Foreign peacekeepers from the AU will oversee security around the camps for internally displaced people, and government forces will be barred.
Darfur's marginalisation (which was one of the issues that led to the conflict) will be addressed through extra funding from Sudan's national budget. Affirmative action will give Darfurians public-service jobs. The rebels will have the right to nominate the governor of one of Darfur's three states, and the deputy governors of the other two. The rebels will also have a top post in Sudan's presidential administration in Khartoum.
Why were they reluctant to agree? One reason - rarely reported in the media rush to paint the rebels as heroes - is that they are seriously divided. Splits along ethnic lines have recently widened, even leading to armed clashes. There are reports that the rebels themselves have been using janjaweed-style violence, storming each other's villages on camels. The rebels are also guilty of blocking aid to the displaced. Jan Pronk, the UN special representative, this week charged them with jeopardising aid to 450,000 vulnerable people through attacks on UN agency vehicles and non-governmental relief agencies.
One-sided international media treatment of the crisis may have emboldened the rebels to increase their demands. In many forgotten conflicts, the TV and commentary spotlights help to sound the alarm and bring pressure for action. In the Darfur case, they could be having a pernicious effect and be delaying the chance of ending the killing.
Western governments, at least, have been more even-handed. It is widely accepted the Sudanese government was responsible for the initial atrocities by overreacting to the first rebel attacks three years ago. Khartoum armed the Janjaweed, and may still control some of them. UN officials fear that without a peace deal government forces may attack the rebel-held town of Gereida, putting another 100,000 people to flight. But the US, Britain and UN now blame the rebels for atrocities and the lack of peace. The security council last week put international travel bans on four people suspected of serious crimes in Darfur. Two were mid-ranking rebel leaders. At Abuja, western mediators have been conspicuously fair. Jack Straw was there some months ago, calling on rebel leaders to be realistic and ready to compromise.
The fact that Benn took over this week as Britain's negotiator marks an important trend. There is growing recognition that the Department for International Development cannot just be a body that handles post-conflict reconstruction and humanitarian relief. Resolving conflicts or preventing them from worsening are also legitimate DfID tasks - it is engaged in politics as well as aid.
Last year, DfID took the British government's lead role in Ethiopia by cutting funds to the government over the repression of opposition activists. Several went on trial in Addis Ababa this week on absurd charges of "genocide" for allegedly provoking demonstrations in which more than 40 people were killed by the police. Benn's role at the Darfur talks is another useful step.
If a peace agreement for Darfur has been signed by the deadline which the mediators set, the crisis will be a long way from over. Helping 2 million displaced people to go home will take time, care and money. There must not be another Darfur Disconnect, this time between delight at the peace deal and a failure to follow through and see it implemented. The big UN agencies are already complaining of lack of funds. The World Food Programme has had to halve its rations for the hungry. Unicef says it is only getting 15% of what it needs. The AU will need financial help to bring in the extra ceasefire monitors the peace deal requires.
And that deal may yet not be struck. This morning's news could be bleak after all. If that is the case, the marchers in America and the world's TV cameras should focus their anger on the rebels rather than on Khartoum.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,,1768001,00.html
Friday May 5, 2006
The Guardian
By the time you read this, there may be good news from Africa. A peace agreement could have been signed for Darfur, the place often compared with Rwanda as a cause for international shame because warnings of genocide went unheeded. If done by last night's midnight deadline, a deal will surprise most people, since with very few exceptions the world's press has ignored the negotiations that have been inching forward under African Union (AU) mediation in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
I call it the Darfur Disconnect. One TV reporter after another does the standard tour into Sudan's western region, guided by rebel groups. Out comes footage of miserable refugees huddling in tents or shelters of sticks and plastic and recounting stories of brutal treatment by government-backed Janjaweed militias. Commentators thunder away at the need for sanctions against the regime in Khartoum and denounce western leaders for not authorising Nato to intervene.
Last weekend the outrage took a new turn, with big demonstrations in several American cities, strongly promoted by the Christian right, which sees the Darfur conflict as another case of Islamic fundamentalism on the rampage. They urged Bush to stop shilly-shallying and be tougher with the government of Sudan.
The TV reports are not wrong. They just give a one-sided picture and miss the big story: the talks that the rebels are conducting with the government. The same is true of the commentaries. Why demand military involvement, when western leaders have intervened more productively by pressing both sides to reach a settlement? Over the past few days the US, with British help, has taken over the AU's mediation role, and done it well. Robert Zoellick, the state department's number two, and Hilary Benn, Britain's development secretary, have been in Abuja urging the rebels not to waste the opportunity for peace. Sudan's government accepted the US-brokered draft agreement last weekend, and it is the rebels who have been risking a collapse.
It is hard to see why. The as yet unpublished text, which I read this week, gives the rebels most of what they went to war for. In many insurgencies, Northern Ireland for one, rebels are asked to come out of hiding and join the political process with or without an amnesty. In the Darfur peace agreement, large areas of territory are recognised by the government as being under the rebels' control and therefore closed to government troops during a transition period. This is a humiliating recognition of loss of sovereignty. The Janjaweed militias will have to be disarmed before the rebels are. Foreign peacekeepers from the AU will oversee security around the camps for internally displaced people, and government forces will be barred.
Darfur's marginalisation (which was one of the issues that led to the conflict) will be addressed through extra funding from Sudan's national budget. Affirmative action will give Darfurians public-service jobs. The rebels will have the right to nominate the governor of one of Darfur's three states, and the deputy governors of the other two. The rebels will also have a top post in Sudan's presidential administration in Khartoum.
Why were they reluctant to agree? One reason - rarely reported in the media rush to paint the rebels as heroes - is that they are seriously divided. Splits along ethnic lines have recently widened, even leading to armed clashes. There are reports that the rebels themselves have been using janjaweed-style violence, storming each other's villages on camels. The rebels are also guilty of blocking aid to the displaced. Jan Pronk, the UN special representative, this week charged them with jeopardising aid to 450,000 vulnerable people through attacks on UN agency vehicles and non-governmental relief agencies.
One-sided international media treatment of the crisis may have emboldened the rebels to increase their demands. In many forgotten conflicts, the TV and commentary spotlights help to sound the alarm and bring pressure for action. In the Darfur case, they could be having a pernicious effect and be delaying the chance of ending the killing.
Western governments, at least, have been more even-handed. It is widely accepted the Sudanese government was responsible for the initial atrocities by overreacting to the first rebel attacks three years ago. Khartoum armed the Janjaweed, and may still control some of them. UN officials fear that without a peace deal government forces may attack the rebel-held town of Gereida, putting another 100,000 people to flight. But the US, Britain and UN now blame the rebels for atrocities and the lack of peace. The security council last week put international travel bans on four people suspected of serious crimes in Darfur. Two were mid-ranking rebel leaders. At Abuja, western mediators have been conspicuously fair. Jack Straw was there some months ago, calling on rebel leaders to be realistic and ready to compromise.
The fact that Benn took over this week as Britain's negotiator marks an important trend. There is growing recognition that the Department for International Development cannot just be a body that handles post-conflict reconstruction and humanitarian relief. Resolving conflicts or preventing them from worsening are also legitimate DfID tasks - it is engaged in politics as well as aid.
Last year, DfID took the British government's lead role in Ethiopia by cutting funds to the government over the repression of opposition activists. Several went on trial in Addis Ababa this week on absurd charges of "genocide" for allegedly provoking demonstrations in which more than 40 people were killed by the police. Benn's role at the Darfur talks is another useful step.
If a peace agreement for Darfur has been signed by the deadline which the mediators set, the crisis will be a long way from over. Helping 2 million displaced people to go home will take time, care and money. There must not be another Darfur Disconnect, this time between delight at the peace deal and a failure to follow through and see it implemented. The big UN agencies are already complaining of lack of funds. The World Food Programme has had to halve its rations for the hungry. Unicef says it is only getting 15% of what it needs. The AU will need financial help to bring in the extra ceasefire monitors the peace deal requires.
And that deal may yet not be struck. This morning's news could be bleak after all. If that is the case, the marchers in America and the world's TV cameras should focus their anger on the rebels rather than on Khartoum.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,,1768001,00.html
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1 Nearly everyone is Muslim
Early in the conflict, I was traveling through the desert expanses of rebel-held Darfur when, amid decapitated huts and dead livestock, our SUV roared up to an abandoned green and white mosque, riddled with bullets, its windows shattered.
In my travels, I've seen destroyed mosques all over Darfur. The few men left in the villages shared the same story: As government Antonov jets dropped bombs, Janjaweed militia members rode in on horseback and attacked the town's mosque -- usually the largest structure in town. The strange thing, they said, was that the attackers were Muslim, too. Darfur is home to some of Sudan's most devout Muslims, in a country where 65 percent of the population practices Islam, the official state religion.
A long-running but recently pacified war between Sudan's north and south did have religious undertones, with the Islamic Arab-dominated government fighting southern Christian and animist African rebels over political power, oil and, in part, religion.
"But it's totally different in Darfur," said Mathina Mydin, a Malaysian nurse who worked in a clinic on the outskirts of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. "As a Muslim myself, I wanted to bring the sides together under Islam. But I quickly realized this war had nothing to do with religion."
2 Everyone is black
Although the conflict has also been framed as a battle between Arabs and black Africans, everyone in Darfur appears dark-skinned, at least by the usual American standards. The true division in Darfur is between ethnic groups, split between herders and farmers. Each tribe gives itself the label of "African" or "Arab" based on what language its members speak and whether they work the soil or herd livestock. Also, if they attain a certain level of wealth, they call themselves Arab.
Sudan melds African and Arab identities. As Arabs began to dominate the government in the past century and gave jobs to members of Arab tribes, being Arab became a political advantage; some tribes adopted that label regardless of their ethnic affiliation. More recently, rebels have described themselves as Africans fighting an Arab government. Ethnic slurs used by both sides in recent atrocities have riven communities that once lived together and intermarried.
"Black Americans who come to Darfur always say, 'So where are the Arabs? Why do all these people look black?' " said Mahjoub Mohamed Saleh, editor of Sudan's independent Al-Ayam newspaper. "The bottom line is that tribes have intermarried forever in Darfur. Men even have one so-called Arab wife and one so-called African. Tribes started labeling themselves this way several decades ago for political reasons. Who knows what the real bloodlines are in Darfur?"
....
5 The "genocide" label made it worse
Many of the world's governments have drawn the line at labeling Darfur as genocide. Some call the conflict a case of ethnic cleansing, and others have described it as a government going too far in trying to put down a rebellion.
But in September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to the conflict as a "genocide." Rather than spurring greater international action, that label only seems to have strengthened Sudan's rebels; they believe they don't need to negotiate with the government and think they will have U.S. support when they commit attacks. Peace talks have broken down seven times, partly because the rebel groups have walked out of negotiations. And Sudan's government has used the genocide label to market itself in the Middle East as another victim of America's anti-Arab and anti-Islamic policies.
Perhaps most counterproductive, the United States has failed to follow up with meaningful action. "The word 'genocide' was not an action word; it was a responsibility word," Charles R. Snyder, the State Department's senior representative on Sudan, told me in late 2004. "There was an ethical and moral obligation, and saying it underscored how seriously we took this." The Bush administration's recent idea of sending several hundred NATO advisers to support African Union peacekeepers falls short of what many advocates had hoped for.
"We called it a genocide and then we wine and dine the architects of the conflict by working with them on counterterrorism and on peace in the south," said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert for the Congressional Research Service. "I wish I knew a way to improve the situation there. But it's only getting worse."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101752.html