
In 1984, when the Sudan’s civil war was
just beginning, I testified before the House Sub-Committee on
African Affairs, urging Congress not to see the Sudanese
conflict through a Cold War lens. The fighting in the Southern
Sudan was a product of internal political grievances, I
argued, and not the meddling of Sudan’s enemies—at that time
also the US’s enemies—Qaddafi’s Libya and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.
At the same hearing the Defence Department took the opposite
line, and while the State Department was reluctant to go as
far as the Pentagon in attributing the civil war to external
subversion, it still saw Libya and Mengistu as major causes of
the war, and the removal of their influence would help to
restore peace to the Sudan.
It is important to remember that when the Sudan’s civil war
began in 1983 both the United States and Israel were on
Khartoum’s side. Under Nimeiri the Sudan was one of the few
Middle Eastern states to support the Camp David Agreement.
Washington saw him as an important regional ally and gave him
the weapons, and the financial credit, he needed ostensibly to
protect himself from his external enemies, but which he used
to wage war against his own people. Without America’s
unconditional support Nimeiri could not have fought his civil
war. And denied Israel’s support (previously given to Southern
rebels in the first civil war) Nimeiri’s opposition had to
look elsewhere for its own sources of funds and military
hardware.
The United States held to this line right throughout the
1980s. But both the Pentagon and the State Department were
wrong. Qaddafi changed sides and withdrew his support from the
rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army as soon as
Nimeiri was overthrown in 1985. The war continued long after
the collapse of Mengistu’s communist regime in Ethiopia in
1991. And while the external actors switched sides (the U.S.
abandoning Khartoum in the 1990s to support the Sudanese
opposition, the new Ethiopian government at first expelling
the SPLA from their bases, but then re-allying with them
against Khartoum’s expansionist Islamist policies) the
political objectives of the SPLA remained remarkably
consistent, aiming for a transformation of political and
economic power within the Sudan, with Southern Sudanese
secession only as a last option.
Washington’s Sudan policy in the 1980s was guided by its
prevailing strategic vision, then dominated by Cold War
calculations. The US did not use the economic and political
leverage it had over the Sudan at the beginning of the war,
and by not doing so it willingly contributed to Khartoum’s war
aims, while publicly distancing itself from them. This is one
reason why the war did not end with the fall of Nimeiri, and
the U.S. continued to support all Khartoum regimes up through
the fall of Mengistu. It was during this period that
Washington formed a working alliance with the Sudan’s state
security agencies and with some of the country’s leading
Islamists, then also working for the overthrow of the Mengistu
regime.
Washington appears to have changed sides yet again, and is
waging war on Islamic terrorism and has denounced genocide in
Darfur. But how much is the U.S. inhibited from real action in
Darfur by its current strategic vision of the ‘war against
terror’? What deals have been struck with its old allies in
Khartoum’s security hierarchy?
An opportunity was lost in 2002 when the U.S. re-engaged in
the Sudan peace process, a re-engagement that started only a
few days before 9/11 with the appointment of former Senator
John Danforth as the President’s Special Envoy on the Sudan.
Just as it had in the 1980s, the U.S. misread the nature of
the civil conflict in the Sudan, and did not realize that the
civil war had become larger than the North-South split by
which it was usually described. The U.S. also made the mistake
of assuming the Islamic state imposed by military coup in 1989
represented the will of the Muslim majority in the country.
The Danforth Report was tailored to Khartoum’s outlook, and
proposed the restarting of peace negotiations very largely on
Khartoum’s terms: the retention of the Islamic state, no
self-determination for the South, and no wider engagement with
the other, mainly Muslim, opposition forces in the Sudan.
In early 2002 Khartoum was frightened of being bombed by the
U.S. It had been bombed once before, and with its past support
for Osama bin Laden, world opinion was against it. So why did
such concessions have to be made to get Khartoum to the
negotiating table? What sort of deal was made over the
intelligence Sudanese security could offer about its former
political bedfellows? It is reported that Abdallah Saleh Gosh,
the chief of Sudan’s state security, handed over to the U.S.
the names of Al-Qaeda operatives in Saudi Arabia. This would
have cost him little, but it brought him and Khartoum some
protection. The Sudan peace process became subordinated to the
‘war against terror’ from the start.
Had the U.S. used this opportunity to better effect, they
would have been in a position to get negotiations going on a
broader basis, bringing more of the political opposition to
the negotiating table, trying to achieve a real constitutional
change in the country. This might have prevented the
escalation of fighting in Darfur. Contrary to what most
Western commentators claim, the war in Darfur did not start in
2003. Violence had been growing throughout the 1990s, and
increasingly the Khartoum regime was mobilizing it around the
twin ideologies of Arabism and Islamism, to the extent that
even before 2003 government militias (many drawing on the
veterans of Qaddafi’s old Islamic Legion in Chad) were
espousing an ideology that equated being Muslim with being
Arab (in the Sudan always more a state of mind than a matter
of genetics). The war in Darfur escalated to a new level in
2003, in part because the peace talks then taking place in
Kenya had excluded the Sudan’s other opposition forces and
‘marginalised’ groups.
The diplomatic consensus at the time was to focus on the
North-South peace talks at the expense of the war in Darfur.
It was felt that pressing Khartoum on two fronts would
jeopardize the talks. Unfortunately the same diplomatic
consensus was to not press Khartoum too hard on violations of
the cessation to hostilities agreements it had signed with the
South. While a Civilian Protection Monitoring Team was set up
and reported directly to the State Department it did little
more than report. Using the same tactics later deployed in
Darfur, of using air power to support militia attacks on the
ground, Khartoum devastated the southern oil fields and other
areas of the South with no sanctions imposed on them by the
same governments facilitating the peace talks. Khartoum
learned from this, and from the lack of international action
over Darfur, it learned that it could, quite literally, get
away with murder.
With the North-South peace agreement signed in January 2005
the international community turned its attention to Darfur.
But peace in Darfur as a separate deal, as opposed to being
part of a comprehensive peace in the Sudan, was undermined by
the precedents of impunity already established. The Darfur
rebels were understandably skeptical about the ‘guarantees’
offered them by the U.S. and U.K. governments; for while the
international community is now focusing on Darfur, it has
taken its eye off the ball in the implementation of the
North-South peace. Khartoum has refused outright to implement
one protocol of that peace agreement, and is delaying
implementing other protocols in full. In the meantime it is
exerting military pressure on various parts of the borders of
the Southern Sudan, including sending janjaweed to occupy that
part of Southern Darfur that is supposed to be re-transferred
to the South. No international sanctions have been put in
place to ensure Khartoum’s compliance with an agreement it has
already signed.
And in all of this the U.S. and the U.K. have continued to
consult with Abdallah Saleh Gosh about ‘international terror’,
have exerted pressure to remove his name from the original
list of those to be sanctioned by the UN for their role in the
Darfur, and have similarly protected others complicit in
Khartoum’s Darfur strategy. The party line in Washington is
that Sudan’s intelligence is valuable. Those within the U.S.
intelligence community who doubt this are keeping quiet. So,
as in the 1980s, action on the Sudan is subordinated to and
inhibited by Washington’s prevailing foreign policy ideology,
this time the ‘war on terror’ rather than the Cold War. And,
as in the 1980s, such subordination is contributing to the
growing violence and repression in the Sudan.
Focusing exclusively on Darfur will not bring peace to the
Sudan. War in Darfur could have been avoided if it had been
included as part of a comprehensive peace plan in the Sudan
from the start. Achieving peace in Darfur has to be connected
to implementing the peace agreement in the South. The
breakdown of the North-South peace agreement will not only
contribute to further violence in Darfur, but it will also
spread violence throughout the country. Darfur peace activists
must broaden the scope of their activities. And they should
ask themselves—and their governments—what price must be paid
in Sudanese lives to maintain their own security in the ‘war
on terror’?
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