Crunch Time for Sudan

In just over a month, on 11 April, the people of Sudan will go to the polls in the country’s first democratic elections in 24 years. The elections are meant to signal the start of the country’s transfer to democracy and set the scene for the 2011 referendum on secession for the people of the South, following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between North and South Sudan.

But international observers and aid agencies say the polls are democratic in name only and have described the process as a sham that will legitimise the reign of terror of president Omar al-Bashir, who’s been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes.

“I just wander if Pol Pot was running in Cambodia would we send in an election observer mission?” asks a bemused John Prendergast, co-founder of enough!, a project to end genocide and crimes against humanity. “Would we send an election observer mission to Uganda if Idi Amin held an election? This is what we’re talking about here.”

In January, Human Rights Watch issued a report that claimed that there was evidence of intimidation of voters and violent oppression of political opponents by government forces and called on the international community to act. “The Khartoum government is still using its security forces to harass and abuse those who speak out against the ruling National Congress Party,” says Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “That is no environment for holding free, fair and transparent elections.” Yet despite temperate words from US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, little has been said or done to chastise the accused or appease their accusers.

Sudan is a country at war with itself. Its various civil conflicts have proved to be some of the most intractable of the twentieth century.  Since gaining independence from Britain in 1956, the people of Africa’s largest nation have enjoyed just one period of prolonged peace, between 1972 and 1983, and there continues to be fighting on all fronts.

They’re also proving to be the deadliest of the twenty-first century. The on-going fighting in Darfur, in which 300,000 people have been killed and two million displaced, has invariably been described as “the first genocide of the 21^st century”. It’s also been called “Rwanda in slow motion” in reference to the short, sharp killing spree that saw the slaughter of 800,000 people in 100 days through a systematic campaign of state-sponsored mass murder.  Situated in the west of the country, the well-publicised war was described as “genocide” by President Bush in 2004 but no real intervention took place to put a stop to the ethnic cleansing. “We now know firsthand from Darfur in a very tragic way that the default position of the international community in the face of genocide is to do very little to stop it, whether you use the term or not,” explains Prendergast. “And we had a bigger domestic constituency in the United States pressing for something to be done in Darfur than any other African issue during the last two or three decades.”

Though the situation isn’t as inflamed as it was – at its peak government forces were alleged to have employed a “scorched earth” policy in which whole villages and swathes of land were razed to the ground - the situation continues to smoulder with mass internal displacement and widespread rape and sexual abuse of women and girls still being reported despite pronouncements that the war in the region is all but over.  

Further south, disputes over resources and the proceeds of oil wealth have fuelled protracted inter-ethnic fighting between rebel factions and government forces. But in 2005 the government and the Southern People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed an agreement that effectively ended the bloody, 21 year civil war in the region and committed to holding a referendum to let the people decide whether to form their own independent state and secede.

Though the CPA expires in 2011, its provisions, which have managed to stand the test of time and various incursions, will be tested to the fullest when a referendum takes place in January 2011. But even this remains tentative. The demarcation of the oil-rich border region, Abeyi is yet to be agreed though it is widely believed that Southern voters will vote to become an independent state, taking Sudan’s oil wealth with them.

The concentration of power and wealth in the capital Khartoum, in Sudan’s north, to the detriment of the rest of the country, is the cause of many of the country’s problems, campaigners argue. “Even if there were a peace agreement in Darfur tomorrow, the imbalance of power and the systematic denial of fundamental human rights would likely lead to new conflicts in the North, South, East, the Nuba mountains, Southern Korodofan, Blue Nile, and elsewhere in the country,” Prendergast says.

However, last month, the government signed a peace deal with the main rebel faction in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) signalling the formal beginning of the end of the seven year war and strengthening the ruling party’s hand in the forthcoming national elections in one month’s time.

 

President Omar al-Bashir

The leader of the ruling NCP, Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir has been accused of directing some of the most heinous crimes against his own people in recent history. Al-Bashir, who came to power in a military coup in 1989, is the first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) but his defiance in the face of international condemnation is resolute.

In response to his indictment, the Sudanese Embassy in London issued a press release claiming that the international community had used “weapons of Mass Deception” to sully the reputation of the President and called into question the ICC’s legitimacy. ”The fact that the ICC pre-trial chamber has dismissed a charge of genocide against President Bashir is another proof of the Prosecutor’s already shaky credibility,” it said.  “The ICC, which considers only situations in Africa and closes its eyes to atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza has no credibility at all.  The Sudan (like the USA, China and Russia and tens of other countries, including India and Indonesia, which combined together make more than half of the world’s population) is not a member of that “club”, has not ratified the Rome Statute and does not accept the legal basis of the Security Council referring Darfur investigation to the ICC. The ICC is now well on the way to become Europe’s Guantanamo.”

Journalist Jeff Johnson is one of only two Western journalists in recent years to interview al-Bashir, who had not granted interviews to American media in over thirteen years when he spoke to Johnson in 2006. The Sudanese government launched a PR offensive to counter what they believed to be Western propaganda about the situation in Darfur and the alleged genocide and was expecting a sympathetic ear from the delegation of African-American journalists they invited to witness the situation on the ground for themselves.

Johnson worked for Black Entertainment Television (BET) at the time, hosting the network’s flagship current affairs series and saw a journalistic challenge in the opportunity to sit down with one of the most hated men in the world.

“He was a very pleasant person but very calculated”, Johnson concluded.

“In our conversation prior to the interview he spoke to me in English and explained how he enjoyed coming to his home village because there was no CNN, Al-Jazeera or any other press agencies there and he could just be himself. He said he came back to that village for every wedding and funeral because he was not only the president of the nation but the patriarch of that village. It was a very enjoyable conversation and I found myself not wanting to enjoy it because of my preconceived notions about what I believed his role to be in, not only the disenfranchisement but the murder of the Darfurian people. “

At the time, BET came under fire for agreeing to go to Sudan under the patronage of al-Bashir but, Johnson says, they were motivated by the search for journalistic truth: “The real point for us was there’s so many members of the international press and activists that are calling Bashir a liar and there were many people that were critical of us for going as guests of the Sudanese government that didn’t feel like we would have the ability to tell the story the right way. So what we felt more than anything else was, if someone is a liar at least let the liar tell their story in their own words as opposed to someone else calling them a liar based on what their feelings are.”

Johnson won a 2008 National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Salute to Excellence Award for BET’s “Life and Death in Darfur, Jeff Johnson Reports” series, which also featured the stories of Darfurian refugees in border camps. He says the programme allowed the public to gain a much needed insight into the story that it wasn’t able to get elsewhere.

Dying interest

Despite all the publicity – high-profile international campaigns and celebrity advocates - interest in Sudan, and Darfur, in particular, has waned. What with the war on terror stretching both US resources and the public’s patience with an interventionist foreign policy to breaking point, and America’s preoccupation with its own domestic issues, Africa’s problems are the last things on Joe Public’s mind.  

John Prendergast worked at the White House and State Department during President Bill Clinton’s administration, through the time the genocide in Rwanda was taking place, and has been a long-time advocate for Africa. He believes it only takes a handful of people to express concern to their political representatives to provoke serious political action. “You don’t have to have thousands of people spilling into the streets to get the US attention,” he says. “Foreign policy is the most complex entity in the world. It’s the largest employer and it’s doing 500 things at any one time. Just because it’s working on Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t mean it’s not going to work on the other things. And because there’s no opposition to doing something on Sudan it’s much easier if you get fifty congresspersons to say ‘we want something done’ then the administration will do it because that’s all they need. They just need a little bit of political backing, a little bit of cover.”

But while Prendergast believes the American people have the willingness and the capacity to fight multiple issues, Jeff Johnson disagrees saying: “The American attention span, like so many others, is limited. I would say the American public it’s not even on their radar let alone their vision or peripheral vision. It’s unfortunate but when you’re dealing with a troubled economy, the level of unemployment that America has, the media’s coverage of Haiti. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the American public can only handle one international crisis at a time and as tragic as that is I think that’s the reality.”

Rob Crilly, a freelance journalist and author of Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War argues that the Save Darfur campaign has presented a one-sided story to the world about the complexity of the situation in Sudan. Crilly, who was sent to East Africa as a correspondent for The Times, arrived in the country in 2005 and found a conflict very different to the one popularised by the Save Darfur movement. The conflict in Darfur has often been painted as one between Arabs against Black Africans, Muslims against Christians but in reality the situation is a lot more complex than simplistic media characterisations suggest. 

“The Save Darfur movement with its celebrity supporters came down very clearly on one particular side of the debate. This very simple straight-forward narrative which demanded our intervention was the only view being heard. Africa is a continent riddled with conflict. Most are forgotten wars that rumble away unnoticed for years. Darfur is different. For five years an unlikely coalition of the religious right, the liberal left and a smattering of celebrities have kept Darfur's bloody conflict in the headlines.”

While Crilly and Prendergast disagree on the ramifications of the Save Darfur movement they do agree about the attractiveness of the Darfur conflict for the international media (Crilly says it was a ‘sexy conflict’) and its subsequent disinterest. “The media was attracted to the violence and the storyline of genocide that was the case during 2003-2006 when it was very graphic and a great story. But it’s become much more complicated and less violent now. The villages that were the target of the counterinsurgency campaign of the government of Sudan were all burned; therefore, there weren’t any more villages to burn. Now you have people in camps and a less visible effort that supports the militias to continue to create havoc in the rural areas of Darfur. There’s an incredible human cost, that’s mostly invisible now, of sexual violence where raping women traveling outside of the towns and the camps is commonplace. The main reason why the media’s dropped off is because the situation’s changed on the ground there than when it was an active counterinsurgency. Since then it’s warehousing these people in refugee camps, low visibility rape as a tool of war and cutting off of aid access.”

Crilly says, “The war is no longer a conventional war in the sense we’d understand – that there’s one side against another. A line where peacekeepers could have intervened between two sides has completely broken down into a system of lawlessness resembling something almost like Somalia.”

Many believe President Obama and international governments hold the key to resolving Sudan’s strife. Before winning the presidency in 2008, Obama had been a vocal supporter of the campaign to save Darfur. However, since coming into office in January 2009, his rhetoric and his actions haven’t married up. While Prendergast believes that he’d like to do something, he says the President has been held back by his administration’s inaction: “President Bush wanted to do something in Rwanda and President Obama certainly talks about doing something in Darfur. The problem in both cases has been that, in Rwanda you had active opposition to doing anything. In the Darfur case, you had the opposite - growing support to do something within the US government but then doing the wrong thing. President Bush and President Obama have both been undermined by poor implementation. The tragedy of Rwanda is that there wasn’t the political will to do anything. The tragedy of Darfur is they use the term genocide, the will is generated but then the actions are incommensurate with the intention.”

What next?

So, will the election be the catalyst for change that the Sudanese people so desperately need?  “Who in their right mind would believe that anything is going to change as a result of the elections?” demands an incredulous Prendergast. “This is a stolen election from the day it was announced and it’s shameful that the British and American governments are helping to underwrite it financially. We need to suspend our support and say respectfully that this is an election that is already stolen – it’s not free, it’s not fair, it’s not credible - but instead we’re playing the game that we always play.”

However, as one diplomat told Crilly, arresting Bashir “would be like arresting Martin McGuiness during the Good Friday negotiations”.

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Tagged as: Africa, Mar/Apr 2010, Sudan