Combating the Crisis in Darfur

▪ 2009

      In 2008, five years after conflict broke out in the Darfur region of The Sudan, the prospect seemed dim for a political settlement to end the war that had killed as many as 300,000 people. In early 2003, soon after local rebel groups took up arms against the Khartoum-based regime of Sudanese Pres. Omar al-Bashir (Bashir, Omar Hassan Ahmad al- ) , long-standing tensions in Darfur erupted into what the U.S. government later described as the first genocide of the 21st century. The rebels felt marginalized by their government, saw that other rebels in southern Sudan were likely to be granted major economic and political concessions as their own civil war against Khartoum ran down, and realized that they themselves were being left out in the literal and figurative desert with no hope of similar concessions or improved conditions. An oil-fueled economic boom was producing skyscrapers in Khartoum, while Darfur continued to exist largely without roads, hospitals, or a sufficient education system and was suffering through a brutal drought.

      Following a few initial conventional battles with new rebel groups in Darfur, the Khartoum regime switched tactics and began to fight a hate-fueled counterinsurgency war in Darfur by funding, arming, and unleashing proxy militias known as Janjaweed—made up of fighters from nomadic groups who identified themselves as “Arab”—on villages whose people identified themselves as “African.” This strategy depended on exploiting this self-proclaimed racial divide in Darfur, and it worked, despite the fact that both “Arab” and “African” Darfurians were predominantly Muslim, spoke Arabic, and shared the same skin tone. The result was an undisciplined paramilitary campaign that targeted men, women, and children.

      In addition to the hundreds of thousands killed since the beginning of the campaign, approximately 2.5 million more were forced from their homes and into the Sahara. Horrific stories of mass rape, murder, and unspeakable atrocities became commonplace. Survivors gathered in camps for internally displaced persons throughout Darfur and in refugee camps across the border in eastern Chad and in the Central African Republic. (See Map on page 468.)

      For its part, the international community reacted to different aspects of the crisis with varying degrees of success. The biggest bright spot was the Herculean effort put forth by governmental and nongovernmental aid agencies, providing food, medicine, shelter, and basic services to the millions of Darfurians in need. More than 13,000 international and Sudanese aid workers built the world's largest humanitarian life support system in Darfur, saving countless lives that otherwise would have been lost to starvation and disease. A number of countries, led by the U.S., as well as multilateral organizations such as the UN contributed to this effort.

      Less successful were international efforts to reduce the threat of physical violence to Darfuri civilians and to achieve a lasting political solution to end the conflict. To achieve the former, the African Union (AU) in 2004 deployed a 7,400-strong peacekeeping force, the African Union Mission in The Sudan (AMIS). When AMIS went into Darfur, the rest of the international community stood by and watched; once troops had been deployed, they helped protect women from rape, but it soon became clear that AMIS lacked the manpower, equipment, funding, and mandate to truly protect civilians and help restore order to an area as large as Darfur (roughly the size of France). The international community eventually settled on a plan of sending a much larger UN peacekeeping force to the region. On Aug. 31, 2006, the UN Security Council authorized the generation and deployment of just such a force with Resolution 1706.

      The Sudanese government, however, rejected Resolution 1706, effectively putting the UN between a rock and a hard place: in the entire history of the UN, no peacekeeping mission had ever failed to deploy once authorized by the Security Council. On the other hand, only one mission—the “police action” better known as the Korean War—had ever been deployed over the objection of a sovereign host government. A compromise was sought to bridge the impasse, and the result was a joint peacekeeping force known as the hybrid United Nations/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), authorized by the Security Council on July 31, 2007. While initial command and control elements of UNAMID began augmenting AMIS in the fall of 2007, UNAMID did not formally take over for AMIS and assume responsibility for peacekeeping in Darfur until Dec. 31, 2007. President Bashir initially agreed in writing to accept the new force, but reports soon began to emerge of efforts by the Sudanese government to obstruct the deployment of UNAMID troops and to limit their movements in the province. Also posing an impediment to progress in the region was the fact that the vast majority of the proposed 26,000 UNAMID peacekeepers and police were not yet on the ground, with the force's troop and military personnel level reaching 12,374 by the close of 2008. Until such time as the force is fully and effectively deployed, UNAMID will remain simply the best yet in a series of unimplemented peacekeeping plans designed to help protect the people of Darfur.

      Efforts to arrive at a lasting political solution have arguably fared worse. Several cease-fires were adopted, celebrated, promptly violated, and thus rendered moot. More frustrating still were the nearly 20 months of peace talks that took place in Abuja, Nigeria, culminating on May 5, 2006, in the partial signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement, or DPA. The Sudanese government and only one of what were then just three rebel factions signed the agreement, and with the exception of a few initial concessions to the one rebel signer, almost none of the agreement was implemented. After the signing and subsequent collapse of the DPA, the original three rebel factions split into more than a dozen. The international community, operating through a combined UN-AU effort, regrouped, pooled their efforts, and organized new peace talks that began in Surt, Libya, on Oct. 27, 2007, but these stalled after representatives of several leading rebel factions refused to participate in the talks. A similar effort in late 2008 to resume peace talks in Doha, Qatar, has thus far yielded no tangible results. Meanwhile, as the international community moved forward, albeit slowly, on fully deploying UNAMID, the violence in Darfur continued, including attacks by rebels and, in some instances, government forces on UNAMID peacekeepers, government and Janjaweed attacks on villages thought to support rebels, and interrebel fighting. As always, Darfuri civilians have been caught in the middle, with the humanitarian life-support system that sustains them growing ever more fragile and the memories of their former, peaceful lives growing ever more faint.

Alex Meixner

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