A Decade-Old War in Darfur: Confused Accounts of Profit & Loss Balance
03 September, 2014KHARTOUM (SUDANOW) With the civil war in Darfur now going beyond 10 years, there are still many questions that need clear-cut answers. Those questions are related to the total gains and losses that resulted from the war in the region, assuming that the conflict flared up for achieving goals and demands as conceived by its architects. Those demands are connected with development, power- and resources- sharing, ending marginalization, etc. The questions include: who is bearing the brunt of the war? Who is the beneficiary from the war and its continuity? Are they the people of Darfur, the armed movements or some other organizations?
The repercussions and consequences of the war which was given several names such as war, crisis, catastrophe, etc., posed real challenges to the Sudan such as exhaustion of the country’s economy, and loss of human and physical resources which could have contributed to the development of the country, in addition to the marginalization. The war made tremendous effects on the domestic and regional political situation, sprouting such terminology as relocation, exclusion, rape, Janjaweed and mass genocide. New roles were accorded to youths and women such as using them as fuel for the war. Mud was further dampened by the expanding repercussions of the war world-wide, inviting interventions in the Sudanese internal affairs due to the humanitarian catastrophe as was manifested in the presence of international forces, accusations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to the Sudan and branding of failure of addressing the conflict, citing a situation of spreading weapons and tribal conflicts. Other challenges include the obstacles for implementation of the peace agreements concluded with the armed movements and inability to pay compensations for the losses caused by the war. These losses are topped by insecurity as a traveler used in the past to travel long distance fearing nothing other than a bear attacking his sheep but now such a traveler feels unsafe.
SUDANOW put forth these questions to a group of researchers, managers of research centers, university teachers, activists, leaders of armed movements, parliamentarians, political leaders and native administrators. The outcome was frank and clear-cut remarks on the consequences of the war in Darfur, what has to be done immediately, the Sudanese people’s ability to control this war which some people believe has become uncontrollable and is manipulated by war-mongers. The interviewees also pronounced predictions on the outcome of the national dialogue under the current political developments and conflicting positions and the regional interactions towards this dialogue. They based their viewpoints on the lessons gained from the South Sudan war which ended with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005 and on scientific analyses, personal experiences and stories on the crisis in a bid to explore the future and to find a way for peaceful coexistence in the aftermath of the intensive bloodshed.
Failure in Conflict Control:
A number of those took part in the opinion poll agreed in consensus on the excessive loss brought on the Sudan as a result of the war in Darfur and resulting humanitarian disasters, the outspread of weapons, international sanctions, economic siege and tarnishing the country’s international image. The respondents pointed out that the result of the war, after more than 10 years, was a Big Zero, attributing this to incapability of the State in dealing with the conflict and its failure in handling the diversities.
Dr. Malik Hussein, Director of the Sudan Center for Strategic Studies, attributes the continuity and complexity of the war in Darfur to the failure of the government in controlling the conflict. He bitterly added that “Darfur is one of the examples of our flagrant failure in handling conflicts in the Sudan because we could not comprehend the ethnic, cultural and historic diversities”.
He added: “The demands by the rebels, at the beginning, were extremely simple, representing one of the forms of failures that characterized the history of the Islamic movement and the Ingaz (Salvation) government. It was possible to positively respond to the majority of those demands, but did not make any intellectual effort for management of the state and management of the cultural and ethnic disparity, as was the case of secession of the South. We did not discuss this issue nor did we make any effort for establishment of the State of Islam, not the State of Muslims.”
Dr. Hussein went on to say: “We always planned to establish the Islamic movement State, rather than the State of Islam which involves the communist, the atheist, the Christian, the hypocrite and all political spectrums. We did not exert any effort to introduce a political ideology that can bring all people together and to practice the devolution of power.”
The Justice and Equality Movement- Redemption Leadership (JEM-RL), according to its political secretary Mohamed al-Hassan Khalid, believes the war has been motivated by logical demands which were partially aggravated by the political conflict in the center. Another factor that contributed to fanning the armed conflict was the “Black Book” – a survey on imbalance of wealth and power in Sudan circulated secretly in Khartoum in 2000 - which made the people aware of the services which did not exist, including the western Ingaz highway.
Khalid said the Black Book was the cause of sedition as it discussed such important issues as the services and the injustice the center exercised on Darfur with regards to the civil service. The book sparked the conflict that ramified into bloody frictions between Arab and non-Arab tribes and over land ownerships.
“Those issues could have been tabled in Parliament by a deputy from Darfur and those development demands could have been tackled by specific mechanisms,” Khalid said.
The Coordinator-General of the Revolutionary Committees Movement, Mahmoud Abdin Salih, attributed the rebellion in Darfur to the lack of response to the demands of the marginalized regions by the traditional political parties which ruled the country before the Ingaz and to the lack of discussion of the issue.
This made the groups that defended the environmental and geographic demands resort to a partial armed struggle which cannot change the power because it is based on racist motives, Salih said.
He added that the total absence of the State and the presence of armed forces in a vast region in the Sudan made of the rebel movements instruments of subversion that dared to assault the capital but were defeated and lost sympathy.
Salih said politicization of the conflict and division of the Islamists into two parties- the National Congress Party (NCP) and Popular Congress Party (PCP) aggravated the conflict. While the splits multiplied, the development was ignored and senior officials in the government got involved in the conflict, causing the failure of a peaceful settlement.
Adam Ali Shogar, of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement-General Command (SLM-GC) disagreed on holding the armed movements responsible for the failure by the government in management of the conflict for their stubbornness. He said the movements were not responsible alone because the war was between two sides. “We believe that the war has exhausted its purposes and we have come for peace and we are seeking solutions to the problems in collaboration with the government,” he said.
High-jacked War- the Pirates and Mongers Story:
The emergence of the armed movements and their endless divisions and their signing of peace agreements and walking back on them explain deviation of the war from its track and its being high-jacked by war brokers and mongers.
Dr. Al-Amin Abdul Gadir, the former Secretary-General of the Council of the National Government Parties and member of the high committee entrusted with conducting a study on division of the states of Darfur which was recommended by the people of Sudan conference which was held in Kenana, narrated his personal experience with the Darfur issue as he was close to the decision-makers and well informed of the details of the war in the region. “The war in Darfur region has become out of control because pirates and mongers have taken it over,” he said.
The government’s viewpoint about those who steer the war is not distant from branding them as mongers. The Head of Darfur Peace Office, Dr. Amin Hassan Omar, has described the Sudanese Revolutionary Forces (SRF) which groups the Darfur armed movements and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) as only an alliance of “warlords", adding “The West neither support nor oppose it but keeps it as a card of pressure on the government.”
Dr. Omar called for a larger measure of preference of the public interest and public benefit to the party or personal interest, noting that the effective presence of the government in Darfur sent firm messages that made the armed movements seriously take confrontation of the government forces into consideration.
The Secretary-General of the Darfur Parliamentarian Bloc, Hamid Abdulla Hammad, opines that all people of Darfur have participated in the crime of continuing the war by responding to the fighting and the displacement.
The Coordinator-General of the Revolutionary Committees, Mahmoud Abdin Salih, said “The armed movements abandon their launching positions when they become victims of paying external invoices and committed to defending the host regime in case the latter faces a political or military shock and the movements are forced to commit acts of terrorist violence. This situation makes the movements acquiescent and unreliable as national movements and their fighters are driven into a war that is not of their concern.”
When the military commanders become warlords and classified as mercenaries, they are entirely excluded from the power struggle in the homeland, Salih said.
Adam Ali Shogar of the SLM-GC admitted that the war in Darfur resulted in emergence of gangsters and mercenaries. He remarked that anywhere in the world the war result in adverse effects, including the spread of weapons, intimidation of the civilians, territorial trespassing, warlords, unidentified militias, abductions, targeting individuals and relocation of villages. Shogar said his movement was convinced that the war has exhausted its purpose.
Distortion of the Sudan image:
There was consensus on distortion of the external image of the Sudan as a result of the war. The JEM-RL Political Secretary, Mohamed Al-Hassan Khalid, conceded that the armed movements played a major role in tarnishing the Sudan image and in fabricating accusations against the government.
“We have toured 18 nations, marring the image of the Sudan and giving non-existent pictures so as to gain money and sympathy and we have delivered our message in this concept. The movements still play an immoral and abusive role against the Sudan abroad,” Khalid said.
He added that the obstacles that face the external action are the erroneous information the movements circulated about the government.
However, Mahmoud Abdin Salih, the Secretary-General of the Revolutionary Committees, said Darfur has become a region open to the enemies of the Sudan in which intelligence services operate and conspiracies are planned.
He added that the war in Darfur has become a conspiracy of exhaustion of all the existing resources of the country and there is no way for stopping except through a serious and binding dialogue.
He said the movements which signed peace agreements and repeatedly complaining that the government did not implement the agreements, they reversed their positions and returned to the war. Figures of those movements went into asylum and began to work against the interests of the Sudan. One of the factions which founded the armed action recognized Israel, opened offices in Tel Aviv, recruited its fighters in the Israeli army and thus became part and parcel of aggression on the Palestinian territories. This is shameful to all the people of Sudan whose blood mingled with that of the Arabs for liberation of Palestine after members of that faction alleged that the Zionist regime sympathizes with the Darfur armed movements, contrary to the Arab and Islamic regimes.
Associate political science lecturer in the University of Bahry, Dr. Ibrahim Mohamed Adam, said the war has attracted a flagrant international intervention in the country’s internal affairs and has tarnished the country’s image in the sphere of human rights through dubious reports submitted by organizations interested in continuity of the war. This led to intensive foreign military presence in the country of no precedence even during the British occupation.
Dividends of the War:
The armed movements disagreed with the political parties over the gains of the war in Darfur. Adam Ali Shogar of the SLM-GC said: “The gains included delivery of our message and demands with respect to the historic injustices and recognition of the existence of a genuine cause of the marginalized regions, especially Darfur. We have firmly delivered our message in a way that the government sent delegations for negotiation and conclusion of several agreements and the Darfur Regional Authority has been formed for addressing those issues and for political sharing in the framework of a fair division of power and resources. These issues were agreed upon as principles included in the agreements and an evidence of this is the presence of large numbers of Darfurians in the central power.
Shogar remarked that everyone who takes up arms must be having a cause. Some of those fighters want to reach power and fame and others, “like us”, want to participate in genuine peace-making for attaining stability in the Sudan.
The Losses:
The former Secretary-General of the Council of the National Unity Government Parties, Dr. Al-Amin Abdul Gadir predicts a wide chance of a sustainable and gigantic development, particularly in the water aspect as the government of Sudan has obtained a $350 million dollar Chinese credit from the Islamic Development Bank for the water project in Darfur. This project was planned to halt exploitation of the Darfur crisis which was allegedly attributed to an altercation between the farmers and shepherds, but the anti-development activity soon began by assassination of the water engineers causing suspension of work on the project.
The Darfur Al-Youm newspaper published on its virgin issue an opinion poll with a number of civilians about the war in Darfur. The result of the poll was that the war did not achieve 1% of its goals.
Shogar regretted the tearing up of the social fabric and occurrence of violent tribal conflicts and supremacy of the force of arms over the force of law.
Considering the hazards of the tribal conflicts on the social peace in Darfur, the Chairman of the Darfur Regional Authority (DRA), Dr. Tigani Sese, called for resolving such conflicts by military force and for fighting any two conflicting tribes. He said any tribe in Darfur got to taking the law in its hand, perpetrating assaults and killings. Sese said the diyyah (blood money) has become an incentive for killing and therefore suggested issuance of a fatwa imposing the death punishment in the case of recurrent murders by the tribes which resort to fighting soon after payment of the diyyah. He said there are persons, he did not name, who invest the suffering of their kin for personal interests while, he went on, there are others who invest in their own lives. Sese called for holding social peace conferences as soon as possible for resolving the problems pending between the communities. The DRA Chairman stressed that the rights of the people who return to their regions must not be confiscated and that the right to citizenship must be guaranteed to all citizens.
The JEM-RL Political Secretary, Mohamed Al-Hassan Khalid, acknowledged that some people have benefitted from the Darfur war and others are still trading in it while the national of Darfur gained nothing. Instead, the numbers of pupils who leave schools have increased, diseases and narcotics spread out, the Khalawe (schools of Koran) deserted and the culture of arms also spread out to the extent that a weapon is reserved for a seven-year-old child until he grows up.
The conflict has eliminated the values of the people of Darfur which was called paradise and its people angels but now most of them are either abroad or in the camps, Khalid said.
The Director of the Sudan Center for Strategic Studies, Malik Hussein, warned against the risk of demanding secession as, according to Hussein, was shyly expressed by some groups. He did not preclude the Zionist plot of disintegrating the Sudan into mini-states. The Israeli-Zionist project regards the Sudan, in its present status, poses a threat to the Israeli national security and therefore the resources in this country must be disintegrated, said Hussein, adding that the first step in this project was secession of South Sudan.
“If we do not pay attention to this matter, Darfur will secede and will be followed by the east soon afterwards,” Dr. Hussein warned.
The Coordinator-General of the Revolutionary Committees, Mahmoud Abdin Salih, confined the negative effects of the war in Darfur to the deaths, demolition of the infrastructure, blocking the roads and growing armed robbery. He said the armed movements could not achieve any accomplishments for the benefit of the people of Darfur, adding that the conflict could have taken the form of peaceful negotiation which could have resulted in gains for the Darfurians without use of arms. He considered the use of arms for attaining gains which could be achieved peacefully a form of terrorism.
He said the suspension and failure to exploit the resources of the region to be liable for looting and pillage will result in physical and human losses from which the coming generation will suffer as the conflicts and exchanged armed attacks claimed the lives of numerous guardians.
The hazards and losses caused by the Darfur war were further aggravated by placing the Sudan on the list of nations which violate the human rights and imposing on it diplomatic and economic sanctions and an American blockade in addition to calls for taking a
number of the government officials to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and issuing a warrant by the ICC for arresting President Omar al-Bashir, something which led to suspension of the diplomatic contacts between Khartoum and countries of the world which recognize the ICC and are willing to implement its decisions, Salih said.
He added that the war caused a grinding financial crisis to the Treasury of the State and the cost of the war could have been spent for meeting the needs of the people all over the Sudan.
Dr. Ibrahim Mohamed Adam, associate political science lecturer in Bahry University, said the start of the politically oriented military rebellion in 2003 further complicated the situation. The social fabric was torn and the war which was declared against the central government turned into fighting between the people of those states, he said, adding that this situation resulted in problems difficult to be resolved, precipitating psychological barriers among the people, particularly those who were forced to go into internal displacement and seek refuge abroad. The internally displaced persons (IDPs) reside in camps which are lacking in the basic living necessities and the generations brought up in those camps will never forget the misery they have experienced there, Adam said.
He added that the harvest of ten years of the armed movements experience is a bitter one with insecurity prevalent everywhere in absence of personal safety, the declared goals of development and power-sharing unachieved and the past infrastructures destroyed. Nothing was achieved from the armed rebellion and even worse the situation turned into fighting between tribes, which were in the past peacefully living together, and between branches of one tribe, Dr. Adam said, questioning the value of power-sharing for which people pay a high price in the form of killings, displacement, insecurity and loss of the means of living.
The National Dialogue:
The political scene nowadays witnesses strenuous efforts and intensive activity to forestall the political settlement that will result from the national dialogue and Paris Declaration. For its part, the government revealed consultations being conducted by African chief mediator Thabo Mbeki in Doha, Qatar, for participation by the armed movements in the national dialogue. The member of the government delegation to negotiations on the two regions (South Kordofan and Blue Nile), Hussein Karshom, said the Doha deal, DDPD, includes political and military agreements which preceded the national dialogue and Mbeki is asking Doha, in its capacity as a sponsor of the DDPD, to insert amendments that make the agreement flexible for the other movements to join it. Karshom indicated the possibility of inserting amendments which make no fundamental changes in the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur.
On its part, JEM-RL considered the national dialogue a last chance for the people of the Sudan to get together, and a gift by the President to the Sudanese people and to the coming generation. The political secretary of the former rebel faction, Mohamed Al-Hassan Khalid, called for rallying around the national dialogue as it is a property of all people of the Sudan. It places the problems of the Sudan on one round table for discussion in which no one in excluded, Khalid said. The armed movements, after the success of the national dialogue, can make efforts for correcting the image of the Sudan which they previously distorted by reaching the organizations they previously used to contact and confess that they were not telling the truth, Khalid suggested. He called upon the leader of the opposition National Umma Party (NUP), Sadek al-Mahdi, as well as the armed movements to join the national dialogue which he believes is the shortest course for addressing the country’s problems.
The Secretary-General of Sudan Liberation Movement(SLM) faction that signed the peace agreement, Ali Hussein Dousah, called for acceptance of the Paris Declaration and table it for discussion in the national dialogue for reaching a unified vision by all political forces.
What Needs to be Done?
The associate political science lecturer in Bahry University, Dr. Ibrahim Mohamed Adam, said what must be done immediately is to halt the war by the armed movements and the government forthwith so as to allow a chance for open negotiations for finding a solution that is satisfactory to all parties and for the sake of the children who are paying for a war they have nothing to do with.
The Coordinator-General of the Revolutionary Committees, Mahmoud Abdin Salih, has urged all the people of Darfur of all components to shoulder their responsibilities and embark on dialogue for removing the disparities and getting rid of the traditional ideas and put forth their own ideas and demands for discussion. This, Salih went on, will enable the Darfurians to reach a settlement through dialogue which he said, unlike fanaticism, is the peak of democracy.
After this lengthy discussion of the Darfur issue, we are concluding with a remark by an excerpt from a book titled “Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State”, by Richard Cockett, who is in charge of Africa section of the Economist magazine:
This war which exhausted all ingredients of the state can be halted only in serious and binding dialogue, after the war has become formidable to solution, for reaching a settlement required by the situation. The armed movements of Darfur are different from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) of South Sudan in a number of aspects, the most important of which are that the Darfur movements do not demand secession and the war is not a religious one between Muslims and Christians. Moreover, the situation now is not in favor of the armed movements after they have dispersed and scattered in many countries and dissociated themselves from their main goals and specialized in assaulting the regime.
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