In 2002, when Darfur was as familiar to most people as Outer Mongolia, Sudanese regular forces and aircraft as well as pro-government militias attacked Jebel Marra, the mountainous center of Darfur where rebels were organizing an insurgency. I learned about it when Abdul Wahid Mohammad al-Nur, the chairman of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), called me by satellite telephone to invite me to witness “the genocide being committed against my people.” He had to shout to drown out the noise of helicopter gunships rocketing the mountain. I had to hold my mobile away from my ear.
As I left the restaurant where I took the call, an elderly lady at the next table reached for my hand and said: “I don’t know where you’re going, dear, but it sounds very dangerous! Do be careful.”
It was very dangerous and, eight years later, it is once again. I still have no idea how many people died in 2002. Darfur remained under the international radar for the next year at least. When the slaughter finally became impossible to ignore, there was no time to look back and count the dead. More were piling up. Khartoum’s response to the insurgency gathered such momentum, and such violence, that the United Nations Security Council referred the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and mandated one of the world’s largest ever peacekeeping forces, UNAMID. “Save Darfur” groups mobilized celebrities, organized rallies and printed t-shirts, dividing Darfur into tidy categories: victims and victimizers, heroes and villains.
A young “Arab” acquaintance of mine from western Jebel Marra, a poor farmer, would beg to disagree with this unsophisticated characterization. He and a dozen other “reds” – “Arabs” – were ordered off a bus early in the war and taken to SLA camps in Jebel Marra. Abaker was the only survivor: militiamen attacked the camp where he was being barbecued, alive, and his captors fled. Abaker’s legs now end at the calves and he walks on his knees. The tale of Darfur is more complicated than any of us have made out. But I digress.
“Never again!” the activists shouted, claiming that the progress being made was being made because of them.
What progress? And where are the cries of “Never again” now that they are needed? 2002 is being rerun in 2010 – despite Save Darfur, despite UNAMID, and despite the ICC. SLA-controlled Jebel Marra is once again under attack, threatened, according to UNAMID sources, by an estimated 35,000 regular troops and 12,000 militiamen. Air support was stepped up over the weekend, with white Antonovs (transport planes converted into bombers) patrolling the skies, some of them allegedly with UN markings. As in 2002, there is little or no news coming out of Jebel Marra. As in 2002, civilians are being targeted. As in 2002, schools have been bombed, clinics and markets looted and destroyed, and water supplies damaged. The government denies any hand in this. But NGOs have suspended operations and observers, including the UN’s Panel of Experts on Sudan, have been denied access.
An estimated 200,000-300,000 people live in Abdul Wahid-controlled areas of Jebel Marra. Several hundred are already reported to be dead, the heaviest civilian toll since the deployment of UNAMID 27 months ago. Many tens of thousands are displaced. Why now?
This year was to be the one in which the international community shifted its focus away from Darfur to nationwide elections in April, before a referendum in 2011 that will divide Sudan into two separate states, North and South. Everyone wants Darfur to go away. Not just because of the fear of violent, non-consensual partition if southern Sudan continues to be ignored; but because no-one has the answer to its problems. UNAMID is a lumbering beast that cannot keep the peace (when need be) without a peace to keep. Peace talks are going nowhere, stymied by poor mediation, a fatally divided SLA and a second rebel movement, the Justice and Equality Movement, that insists on being the only interlocutor (even though few Darfurians want or trust it). As time passes and more regional players become involved, peace becomes more complicated, more elusive.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir wants – and by hook or by crook will get – an election victory in April that will enable him to hold his middle finger up to the ICC, which accuses him of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This means Darfur must fall off the agenda. Cue another attempt to control Jebel Marra – especially after the Abdul Wahid-led SLA, which refuses to join the peace talks in Doha, replayed the start of the insurgency in January by attacking the town of Golo, the insurgents’ first target seven years ago.
As one of Abdul Wahid’s supporters says: “You either make peace or war.” Abdul Wahid has done neither. The danger for “his” people now is that the international community, which despairs of his intransigence and lack of leadership, turns a blind eye to Jebel Marra and allows Khartoum to fix “the SLA problem” militarily, exploiting rebel in-fighting.
The people of Jebel Marra are between a rock and a hard place – the rock of Abdul Wahid’s insistence that security be restored before he negotiates; and the hard place of Khartoum’s response. Khartoum made clear that it intended to resolve the Darfur situation by the elections in April. From the comfort of Paris, Abdul Wahid ignored those signals. The result was entirely predictable: more death, destruction and displacement. How dismally we all have failed.
Julie Flint is co-author, with Alex de Waal, of “Darfur: A New History of a Long War”,
published this month by Zed Books. She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
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