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Darfur crisis needs review
2006-06-26 08:36:51
By Rayner Ngonji
The recent developments in the Darfur crisis where the Sudanese president Omar El Bashir has flatly refused to allow UN troops jet in and join their AU counterparts to protect defenceless Black Sudanese who are being harassed, raped and maimed by Janjaweed Arab militia backed by the government are by any standard retrogressive to the endless attempts of finding a peaceful solution to the dispute.
Surely it frustrates the whole concept if not planned to prolong the conflict for undisclosed period as has been the case with the Southern Sudanese conflict which took nearly 20 years to resolve.
The Sudanese President arrogantly declared last week that as long as he was in power he would not allow foreign troops to set foot in his land.
He claimed that his country was the first to be freed from the colonial york in the Sub-Saharan Africa and that to allow foreign troops would be putting the state into another colonization process.
Sudan got independence in 1956, a year before Ghana, from its joint masters-Britain and Egypt who ruled it in partnership.
The remarks, paint a gloomy picture over successes of the issue. To put things in black and white the country is not yet ready for any peace deal and the little cooperation she has been extending so far in different negotiations is just a camouflage.
The United Nations has decided to send a strong peacekeeping force in the region following international community pleas in the wake of the AU forces failure to contain the situation.
The AU soldiers have not found a way out of the conflict that has provoked the death of 200,000 people and displaced nearly 2 million.
The May 5 peace deal has so far not resulted in any tangible improvement of the humanitarian situation in the troubled western region where 3.6 million people continue to be affected by the conflict, according to a United Nations report.
Some IDPs are returning to the villages of Dito and Joghana in South Darfur State, Blalock observed. More than 30,000 people had fled these settlements during attacks in April and May and had found refuge in Gereida town.
The total number of displaced remains at an estimated 1.8 million, however, many of them have been displaced or redisplaced several times since the beginning of this year.
An analyst in the region says since the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) between the Sudan government and one faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) led by Minni Minnawi, the conflict has been characterised by small but violent clashes between Minnawi’s faction and another led by Abdelwahid Mohamed al-Nur.
Due to the ongoing security problems, the UN right now has been unable to reach some 250,000 vulnerable people across the region, Manuel Aranda da Silva, UN humanitarian coordinator and deputy special representative of the Secretary-General in Sudan, said recently.
A fortnight ago, six staff members of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) were abducted by members of Abdelwahid’s faction of the SLA in Irgue, 50km west of Kutum town in northern Darfur, but were released the following day.
Further to the south, in Kaguro, the same rebel faction detained a group of African Union (AU) peacekeepers on patrol for several hours on 14 June.
The Sudanese Government, using Arab ’’Janjaweed’’ militias, its air force, and organized starvation, has systematically been engaging in killing the black Sudanese of Darfur since 2003.
Over two and a half million people, driven from their homes and displaced, now face death from starvation and disease as the Government and militias attempt to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching them.
The same forces have destroyed the people of Darfur’s villages and crops, and poisoned their water supplies, and they continue to murder, rape and terrorize according to few international agencies working in the area.
What is not clear is why the international community especially the African Unity (AU) members have failed to come up with an effective strategy that would have taken the man surrender to the international community demands and hopefully end the conflict.
When the late dictator Idd Amin Dadah of Uganda overthrew the government in coup d’tat, some progressive African leaders boycotted the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summits which the dictator attended, arguing that they could not sit together with a man who took over the government by the barrel of a gun.
Why the same principle could not be applied now at least to pressurize and let Al Bashir know that his fellow autocrats are against his subjugation policies.
Or an economic sanction could be initiated to streamline him form the world.
African trend over the years in settling their political disputes has been that of intervention from other continents.
Without that, the conflict could reign for years. Siera Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have gone under such torments and served as example.
This happens while there are repeated appeals for unity to accelerate development. But on the ground there is nothing taking place. There is no point of preaching unity while you cannot clean your own house.
An outstanding adage puts that it’s only the shoe wearer who knows where the shoe pinches. The black Sudanese are the ones who are being threatened by extinction by the Khartoum government.
They are denied all essential facilities including food as they are harassed. The implication of refusing any intervention geared at ending up the dispute has only one translation to perpetuate the suffering to the Darfur community and perhaps fulfill the zeal, and nothing else.
Why should the international community succumb to that when we have already sworn that what happened in Rwanda should not be repeated again.
There is a need to critically take a look at the problem and work for a solution to preserve the community’s rights.
rgonji@guardian.co.tz
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