Be tough on Al-Bashir, activists tell Obama

The context for the Obama administration’s Sudan policy has been further altered as a result of a new set of dynamics in Darfur. The six-year conflict there is essentially over, the former head of the United Nations’ Darfur peacekeeping force said recently.

“We can no longer talk of a big conflict, of a war in Darfur,” Rodolphe Adada told the Associated Press just prior to stepping down from his peacekeeping post.

Adada’s assessment echoed that of Gration, who in June characterised conditions in Darfur as “the remnants of genocide” – as opposed to an ongoing genocide.

By the UN’s count, there were 16 killings in Darfur in June, compared to a rate of 130 a month in 2008. But nearly three million Darfuris have been displaced from their homes, mainly due to a terror campaign carried out against black African tribes by Arab militias allied with the Sudan government.

The uprooting of a substantial proportion of Darfur’s population explains why the violence has decreased, says Abdelwahid Elnur, leader of one of the main rebel groups in the region. “There are no more people on their land to kill,” Elnur told the Associated Press.

Sudan’s leader, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on war crime charges. And relief workers in Darfur continue to be attacked, a Human Rights Watch official recently noted in The New York Times.

Those factors lead many activists to argue that the Obama administration must continue to exert pressure on Khartoum to bring about a settlement in Darfur.

Other analysts maintain, however, that the black African rebel groups who rose up against Khartoum’s rule in 2003 have become as much a part of the problem in Darfur as the Sudan government and its local allies.

The rebels have splintered into more than 30 factions, which sometimes fight one another and which have carried out atrocities of their own. Three rebel leaders have also been indicted by the ICC for war crimes.

Marc Gustafson, a Sudan expert at Oxford University, criticises Darfur-focused activists for having misrepresented the conflict in order to advance their own agendas.

“In Darfur, the use of the term ‘genocide’ has allowed the rebel groups to slip under the radar and commit crimes against humanity without the rest of the world taking notice,” Gustafson wrote recently in the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor. “Had ‘genocide’ not been the focus, activist campaigns might have challenged the rebel groups and checked their criminal acts.”

Gustafson continued: “For example, Eritrea, Chad and the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement were the principal funders of the rebel groups in Darfur. They were and are also allies and aid recipients of the US government, which means they could have easily been pressured to cut their lifelines to the rebel groups.”

(Eritrea cannot accurately be considered an ally of the US government. Washington has warned repeatedly that it will move to punish Eritrea unless it ends its reported support for Islamist fighters in Somalia.)

The Obama administration’s conciliatory approach to Khartoum is meanwhile being defended by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, an NGO that issues research reports sometimes critical of US policies. Fabienne Hara, a leader of the organisation, said some Darfur activists are “out of touch with reality” and that President Obama’s stance marked a much-needed change in US relations with Sudan.