GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: The Failed Darfur Peace Agreement

by Eric Reeves

For the past seven years, Eric Reeves has worked full-time as a Sudan researcher and analyst. He publishes regularly on the topic and has testified several times before Congress. He is a professor at Smith College and runs the endlessly informative sudanreeves.org.

The Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) has collapsed with shocking rapidity. No facile comments from the UN’s Pronk, US officials, or other international actors who pushed through this deeply flawed agreement can change the brutal realities on the ground, and the rapid deterioration in security. The African Union may have been funded through October 1, 2006---perhaps even beyond---but it has lost all credibility with the people of Darfur. It simply cannot function meaningfully in providing security for civilians or humanitarians.

The Darfur Peace Agreement was from the beginning without meaningful international guarantors of the security arrangements; the current escalation of fighting could have been, and was, predicted. The implementation of the various provisions of the DPA is failing because Khartoum feels no meaningful international pressure, indeed is content to abuse publicly the very notion of a UN peace support operation. The International Criminal Court is held in similar contempt. The large-scale military offensives in Jebel Moon and North Darfur are not aberrations but deeply symptomatic of the National Islamic Front’s contempt for all agreements it makes with all Sudanese parties. Indeed, the DPA has perversely come to serve as “justification” for Khartoum’s assaults on those who are not signatories.

Here it is instructive to look at comments made today by the leadership of the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement regarding implementation of the north/south “Comprehensive Peace Agreement” (January 9, 2006). Besides the failure to respect the key findings of the Abyei Boundary Commission, or to move to establish north-south boundaries in the oil regions, or to draw down its regular military forces in Juba and surrounding garrisons, Khartoum continues to support various militia forces in the south, particularly in the oil regions of Upper Nile Province:

“Sudanese armed forces are still arming and supporting militias in southern Sudan in violation of a peace deal which ended two decades of a bloody civil war, a southern official said on Saturday. Under the north-south peace deal signed in January 2005 all southern militias were told to join the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) or the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army, or lay down their arms. But hundreds of people have been killed in continued clashes between militias in the southeast Upper Nile region and the areas around Sudan's main oil fields which are in the south.”

The existence of these militias, and Khartoum’s continuing support for them, is well known to all who will look honestly, though this evidently does not include the UN’s Pronk, who absurdly speaks of “former South Sudan Defense Force commanders . . . getting support from what I have called . . . on other occasions ‘forces in the dark’ in Khartoum.”

What does Pronk mean by his apparently reiterated phrase “forces in the dark in Khartoum”? Does he mean to suggest that there are consequential members of the National Islamic Front who are “in the dark” (i.e., don’t know what’s occurring) with respect to payment and support to the militias? Or does he mean to suggest that those supporting the militias are on the “dark side” of a regime that somehow has, elsewhere, enlightened members?

Both readings are absurd---contemptibly absurd. So, too, is Pronk’s suggestion the militia umbrella known as the South Sudan Defense Force (SSDF) is a thing of the past: a number of senior SSDF commanders---most notoriously Gordon Kong---still consider themselves SSDF commanders, and are amply encouraged in so believing by various forms support and payment from Khartoum.

The point here is not so much Pronk’s dismaying and destructive incompetence as it is about the failure of Khartoum to honor the terms of the CPA. Thus it matters little what may have been written into the Darfur Peace Agreement: without credible international guarantees and guarantors, the document is worthless and proves itself more so every day.

That the international community has no intention of providing such guarantees and guarantors is also clearer by the day. The current disintegration in Darfur that has left humanitarian assistance “hanging by a thread” is accelerating, and the thread will soon break entirely.

(Photo from matthewgood.org's flickr stream.)