There
is no military solution for the Darfur
conflict – but peace may be achieved by better management of the region's
dwindling natural resources.
September 2007
The last week or so has seen two items of good
news emerge about Darfur, a part of the world
that has seen little more than catastrophe in recent years. At the weekend,
field commanders of the various splinter rebel factions met, under the auspices of the UN and the African
Union, in the Tanzanian resort of Arusha to hammer out a common position
ahead of talks with the Sudanese government.
Peace talks offer the best opportunity for an
end to the violence and the international community should make every effort to
prevent splits in the ranks of the rebels to form, as they did last year
causing the collapse of the May 2006 Darfur peace agreement. It should also use
carrots and sticks to persuade Khartoum
to attend peace talks without unnecessary preconditions.
The second promising development was last
week’s unanimous UN Security Council resolution authorising the deployment of
26,000 peacekeeping troops and police to beef up the AU peacekeepers which have
been on the ground for the last couple of years. The passage of the resolution
shows a promising trend away from the aggressive unilateral militarism
advocated by Washington and so disastrously
being played out in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
As Conor Foley pointed out, the UN resolution “confirms a
growing trend towards ‘regional interventions’”. This is significant, he
explained, because: “the suspicion in much of the world that ‘humanitarian
interventions’ had become a code word for western imperialism has hardened into
certainty since the invasion of Iraq”.
Perhaps in recognition that sanctions do little
to hurt corrupt regimes but inflict massive suffering on vulnerable civilian
populations as was the case in Iraq, the threat of economic sanctions
was removed from the final resolution.
However, optimistic estimates show that the UN force
would not be fully deployed before the end of the year. In the meantime, the
near-bankrupt AU peacekeeping mission on the ground should be beefed up and
given a broader mandate to protect civilians, with the EU and the US footing the
bill.
But even assuming that the joint UN-AU force is
deployed successfully and manages to arrest the violence, its efforts alone
will not bring an end to the violence – that requires a wholly different sort
of intervention.
Some critics of the puny international response
to date, such as certain elements of the Save Darfur Coalition, argue that “genocide” could have
been averted with timely international action. I totally agree. However,
whereas they advocated a “non-consensual deployment of UN troops” (i.e.
invasion), what I have in mind would have been a large-scale humanitarian and
developmental investment two decades ago.
It is generally accepted that the Darfur
conflict started in 2003. However, this is actually when it turned into
full-scale warfare, when rebels fed up with the economic neglect of the Khartoum government
launched their offensive. The conflict really began in the mid-1980s during an
extended drought, and its accompanying desertification, coupled with
overpopulation.
Had the international community paid attention
to the warning signs and invested adequately in the sustainable management of
the region's dwindling water reserves and natural resources, the underlying
environmental catastrophe fuelling the mass murder would have been resolved.
The reductionist and simplistic talk of
“Africans” versus “Arabs” currently dominating the discourse on Darfur, masks the environmental roots of the conflict
that have aggravated traditional tribal relations. The absence of water and
arable land has pitted the Khartoum-backed, cattle herding Baqqarah (meaning
cow in Arabic) tribes of north Darfur against the settled farming tribes (the
Tunjur-Fur, Zaghawa and Massaleit) of the more arable south.
Sceptics of western intentions draw parallels
between Darfur and Iraq,
saying that the humanitarian disaster is just a fig leaf the west is using to
disguise its interest in Sudanese oil which the Chinese are currently making
the most of. However, a more telling parallel is between now and the time of
British colonial rule.
Before the British arrived, Darfur
was an independent kingdom ruled by the Keira dynasty. In the 17th
century, it was the most powerful realm in the Sahel region of Africa, but internal strife and war with its neighbours
weakened it significantly. In the 19th century, Egypt, under the guidance of its British
masters, destroyed the last remnants of the Keira kingdom in its bid to construct
a unified “Egypt and Sudan”, which would be easier to manage from London. At the time, the
main interest in Darfur was control of the
slave and ivory trade to the south. Sudan's
legendary Mahdi liberated Darfur from British
rule but continued the old colonial practices.
In 1898, the Anglo-Egyptian government in Khartoum decided to
recognise Darfurian independence. But then in the first world war, Britain had a change of heart and decided to
annex it forcibly to the Sudan.
The Sudanese government, taking its cue from the British, has considered it an
integral part of the country ever since and has used the same colonial
brutality to keep hold of the region.
With the unfolding human catastrophe in Darfur, no one can afford to be smug or take a holier-than-thou
attitude. Many parties – the British, Egyptians and the modern Sudanese
government – are reaping what they sowed there: forcible annexation and
criminal neglect of Darfur's development.
Regardless of past injustices, our main concern
should be turning Darfur’s fortunes around.
The international community must put in place a generous global fund to tackle
the environmental catastrophe subsuming Darfur
and help ensure that there is sufficient water and arable land for its poor
citizens to grow their crops and graze their cattle without coming to blows.
“Sudan is unlikely to see a lasting
peace unless widespread and rapidly accelerating environmental degradation is
urgently addressed.
Investment in environmental management, financed by the international community
and from the country's emerging boom in oil and gas exports, will be a vital
part of the peace building effort.”
Handled correctly, Darfur could be an important
dress rehearsal for similar disasters that will occur in the coming decades,
potentially sparking conflicts in the NileBasin, particularly between Egypt and Ethiopia, and possibly worsening the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Experts have been warning of the prospects of
21st century “water wars” in the Middle East and Africa for decades. It’s time the world paid them
some heed. In his speech to the UN, Gordon Brown recognised that “as
peace is established, [we must] offer to and begin to invest in recovery and
reconstruction”. Let’s hope that Brown and the international community back up
this pledge with deeds. After all, for the cost of the war in Iraq, a hundred Darfurs could have been greened.
