Darfur: Support An African Solution

Independant

The Best Way to Clear Up This Mess Is Not More Military Intervention, but a Return to the Peace Table.

By Gwynne Dyer
October 7, 2006

On one issue, at least, George Bush and George Clooney are in perfect accord. What is happening in Darfur is genocide and something must be done. But it isn't genocide and nothing will be done.

The end of September deadline for putting a 20,000-strong force of United Nations troops into Darfur, including large numbers of soldiers drawn from NATO countries, was always a fantasy.

The deadline has passed without any softening of the Sudanese government's total rejection of the plan and no Western troops are heading for Sudan anytime soon.

Instead, the existing force of 7,000 troops from African Union countries that tries to protect the refugee camps, under-equipped and poorly supplied though it is, will stay at least until the end of the year.

This is the best available outcome and may even save tens of thousands of lives, especially if the Western countries now give the African Union force the money, fuel, night-flying helicopters and other resources it needs to do the job.

It will continue to be grim in Darfur, but at least the West has avoided a military intervention in Africa that would have made the Somalia debacle in 1992-93 look like a success story.

Darfur, the western region of Sudan, is as big as France but has only six million people.

They are all black Africans and all Muslims, but some were Arabized long ago, while other groups, notably the Zaghawa and the Fur, have retained their original African languages and ethnic identities. (Darfur means home of the Fur.) Resources are scarce and the various groups are often in conflict over them.

Nevertheless, Darfur remained relatively quiet during the dreadful war (two million dead in the past 20 years) between the African ethnic groups of southern Sudan, where most people are Christians or animists and the Muslims of the Arabized north who dominated Sudan's government, army and economy.

It was the peace settlement between north and south in 2003 that triggered the revolt in Darfur.

That peace deal gave the southern rebels a share in the central government, a half-share of the oil revenues now pouring in from wells that are mostly located in "southern" territory and the right to a referendum on independence from Sudan in six years' time.

So some leaders of the Zaghawa and the Fur decided to emulate the southerners: launch a revolt in Darfur and try to cut a similar deal with Khartoum in return for ending it.

The regime in Khartoum used the same tactic it had employed extensively in the war in the south.

It armed and paid Arabized groups (the Janjaweed militia) to fight the rebels. And, just as in the south, the bulk of the victims were innocent civilians.

A great many people died and almost half the population fled to refugee camps that sprang up inside Darfur and across the frontier in Chad.

International aid agencies try to care for the refugees and the African Union sent a 7,000-strong force to protect them, but none of the foreigners took sides in the fighting.

At peace talks in Abuja last May Khartoum offered the rebels posts in the provincial government and a share of oil revenues and one rebel group, Minni Minawi's Sudan Liberation Army, accepted the deal.

However, two rival groups didn't -- and even the SLA split, with breakaway factions joining the rejectionists to form the National Redemption Front.

In July fighting resumed, with Minawi's SLA now co-operating with government troops and the Janjaweed against the remaining rebels. What is needed is not outside military intervention against either side, but a return to the peace table.

Alex de Waal, an adviser to the African Union mediation team at the talks, reckons another $100 million on the table would probably have persuaded most of the rebel holdouts to accept the deal.

Darfur is not another Rwanda, another Cambodia, another Holocaust in the making, as the "Never Again" slogans of protesters in the West suggest.

It is a cruel war of a kind lamentably common in Africa and the most useful thing non-Africans can do is support the African Union's mediators and its troops on the ground.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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