Regional Shift Helps Darfur, Amid Doubts

Regional Shift Helps Darfur, Amid Doubts
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — The preliminary peace treaty signed Tuesday night between the most powerful rebel movement in Darfur and the Sudanese government is the culmination of a shift in regional politics that could help bring Darfur’s sputtering conflict to an end, Sudan observers say.
But many are still skeptical.
Just look at the Darfur Peace Agreement of May 2006, they say, or the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement later that year, or the unilateral cease-fire that the Sudanese government declared in Sirte, Libya, in 2007. None of these gestures, all heralded as potential “game changers” at the time, changed much.
Darfur, the enormous western region of Sudan, is still home to roving militias, burned-down villages and nearly three million displaced people. If anything has reduced the conflict’s intensity, it seems, it is the fragmentation among rebels and sheer fatigue, not the previous peace deals.
“It’s all about the follow-through with these agreements,” said Nick Donovan, head of policy, research and campaigns for Aegis Trust, an anti-genocide group.
In perhaps the most important case, the Sudanese government has largely followed through, under intense international pressure, in the landmark agreement it signed with southern rebels in 2005 to end a civil war that was far more devastating than the conflict in Darfur. But the ultimate test of that agreement is still to come, when the southerners are scheduled to vote on independence next year, possibly cutting Sudan in two.
Sudan is edging into a very uncertain period right now, and one of the factors fueling suspicion of this latest peace deal — which calls for a temporary cease-fire and the release of prisoners, and paves the way for more Darfurian rebels to get government posts — is the timing. In less than two months, Sudan is supposed to hold its first free elections in decades, and President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has reasons to be concerned.
His country has been racked by rebellions in recent years in the south, east and west. The oil money that has buoyed Sudan’s economy, and bought off many enemies, may plummet if the south splits off. And Mr. Bashir holds the dubious distinction of being the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, connected to the bloodshed in Darfur.
“The government cannot win without Darfur,” said Ibrahim Mirghani, a dean at Al Zaiem Al Azhari University in Sudan. “It’s a big constituency, and now they get what they were looking for — voters!”
The government is not shy about acknowledging the potential gains at the polls. Referring to Mr. Bashir’s National Congress Party, Ghazi Salahuddin, a top adviser to Mr. Bashir, said, “If this agreement improves N.C.P. prospects for elections, it would be well deserved.”
But, he added, “what made the difference this time was the qualitative change in Sudan-Chad relations, which allowed Chad to play a constructive role in prevailing on” the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, the powerful rebel group.
The group has been given sanctuary in neighboring Chad for years. It was Chad’s recent thawing with Sudan, also a result of focused international attention, including Washington’s, that nudged the rebels toward the negotiating table. In a sense, they had no choice.
“JEM was looking at a very different military and logistical situation in eastern Chad and West Darfur,” said Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College who has followed Darfur closely.
Referring to other rebels, he added, “The real question is what the other S.L.A. factions do, and that won’t become clear for several days or weeks.”
The Justice and Equality Movement is the toughest, most ambitious and most unified of Darfur’s increasingly disorganized rebel groups, so it would be a major breakthrough if the movement laid down its arms. In 2008, hundreds, if not thousands, of Justice and Equality Movement fighters thundered across the desert in a phalanx of heavily armed pickup trucks and blasted their way to within a few miles of the presidential palace in Khartoum before the Sudanese military defeated them.
But the group, guided by an Islamist ideology, is not the most popular rebel force. That title probably goes to the Sudan Liberation Army. Its father figure, Abdel Wahid al-Nur, in exile in France, dismissed the peace deal on Tuesday as “ceremonial.”
Most of the political groups in Sudan, like the former southern rebels who are now ostensibly part of the government (though they said they were not consulted about the recent peace deal), do not trust the Justice and Equality Movement.
Part of that distrust stems from the history of the group’s leader, Khalil Ibrahim, during Sudan’s north-south civil war. According to several academics, Mr. Ibrahim led a government-sponsored militia in the 1990s that burned southern villages, killed civilians and enslaved children, a harbinger of the brutal counterinsurgency tactics that would be unleashed in Darfur in 2003.
On Tuesday, when the peace treaty was signed in Doha, Qatar, Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bashir shook hands and embraced.
“As far as we are concerned, JEM and N.C.P. have the same philosophy,” said John Duku, a representative of the southern Sudan semiautonomous government. “They are both fundamentalists.” Mr. Duku called the peace treaty “more of a reunion, between friends,” and said the only real difference between the rebels and the government was “who can pursue the Islamic agenda better.”
He was also concerned that the Justice and Equality Movement might succeed in persuading Mr. Bashir to delay the national elections, a development that could, in turn, delay the referendum on southern independence.