Peacekeeping in Darfur Hits More Obstacles

By LYDIA POLGREEN

ABU SUROUJ, Sudan — As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world’s largest, is in danger of failing even as it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by Sudan’s government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.

The force, a joint mission of the African Union and the United Nations, officially took over from an overstretched and exhausted African Union force in Darfur on Jan. 1. It now has just over 9,000 of an expected 26,000 soldiers and police officers and will not fully deploy until the end of the year, United Nations officials said.

Even the troops that are in place, the old African Union force and two other battalions, lack essential equipment, like sufficient armored personnel carriers and helicopters, to carry out even the most rudimentary of peacekeeping tasks. Some even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets United Nations blue, peacekeepers here said.

The peacekeepers’ work is more essential than ever. At least 30,000 people were displaced last month as the government and its allied militias fought to retake territory held by rebel groups fighting in the region, according to United Nations human rights officials.

For weeks after the attacks, many of the displaced were hiding in the bush nearby or living in the open along the volatile border between Sudan and Chad, inaccessible to aid workers. Most wanted to return to their scorched villages and rebuild but did not feel safe from roaming bandits and militias.

A week spent this month with the peacekeeping troops based here at the headquarters of Sector West, a wind-blown outpost at the heart of the recent violence, revealed a force struggling mightily to do better than its much-maligned predecessor, but with little new manpower or equipment.

Despite this, the force is managing to project a greater sense of security for the tens of thousands of vulnerable civilians in the vast territory it covers, mounting night patrols in displaced people’s camps and sending long-range patrols to the areas hardest hit by fighting. But these small gains are fragile, and if more troops do not arrive soon, the force will be written off as being as ineffective and compromised as the one before.

“We really don’t have much time to prove we can do better,” said Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the Senegalese commander of the roughly 2,000 troops in West Darfur, just one-third of the expected total for the area.

“God gave the prophets the ability to achieve miracles so that people would believe. So people here will believe when they see improvements on the ground. And that cannot wait for more troops. We need to do better with what we have.”

The deployment of the biggest peacekeeping force in modern history in one of the most remote, hostile and forbidding corners of the globe was bound to be a logistical nightmare. Darfur is landlocked, water is scarce, the roads are rutted tracks crossed by the mud and sand traps of dry riverbeds.

A Troubled Mission

But those problems pale in comparison with the diplomatic and political struggles the mission faces.

When previous large missions were organized in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the central governments in those countries had collapsed or were so weak that they had little choice but to accept peacekeepers. The government of Sudan agreed to accept United Nations-led peacekeepers in Darfur only after a long diplomatic tussle and under a great deal of pressure.

The progress to get the mission in place has been slow, and much of the blame for this has been placed at the feet of the Sudanese government. For months after the United Nations Security Council approved the force, Sudan insisted on limits on its makeup and independence, demanding the power to dictate which countries contributed troops, to shut down its communication systems when the government carried out offensives and to restrict the movement of peacekeepers at night.

Ultimately, the government signed a compromise agreement with the United Nations allowing the force to operate, but Sudan was successful in insisting that the vast majority of troops come from African countries, and will be supplemented by soldiers from other regions only if suitable African troops cannot be found.

This has delayed the force’s mission, because African armies are not usually able to deploy quickly with equipment and training to meet stringent United Nations standards, United Nations officials and Western diplomats said. Sudanese government officials have argued that African troops are up to the job, and that non-African troops would be seen as neocolonial interlopers.

These problems have raised fears that the United Nations force would suffer the same fate as the African Union force, which was hobbled from the start by a weak mandate, which was to observe a cease-fire, not protect civilians. The thousands of troops deployed by Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal and other nations were mainly there to protect the military observers, who were unarmed, and the unarmed civilian police, whose job it was to guard the camps for the internally displaced people.

But the original cease-fire was quickly violated, and later agreements failed to bring peace. The African troops soon were seen, perhaps unfairly, as useless note-takers who visited the scene of atrocities long after the evidence had been carried off and the dead buried, gathering testimony that seemed to disappear into a bureaucratic black hole.

A Town in Ruins

All of that has changed with the new hybrid mission. The force has a robust mandate to protect civilians. But that is easier said than done, said Maj. Sani Abdullahi, the man in charge of the single company charged with fending off roaming militias and rebels to protect tens of thousands of displaced villagers in a handful of camps and thousands more vulnerable residents of remote villages.

One Sunday morning, Major Abdullahi, 34, a wiry Nigerian officer who served in peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, led a few truckloads of troops to visit Abu Sorouj, one of the towns flattened by a recent government offensive in West Darfur.

The town is just a few dozen miles away, but the drive took three bone-crunching hours. Abu Sorouj was attacked nearly a month earlier, and most of the villagers had fled, some to Chad. They said they were blocked by the Chadian authorities from reaching refugee camps. So within days, some were returning, afraid of losing their land if they became long-term displaced people living in camps.

Before the attack, Abu Sorouj was a bustling town of hundreds of mud-brick huts roofed with thatch, clumped together in sprawling family compounds. It had a cinder-block school and clinic supported by a nongovernmental aid agency.

Today, it is an apocalyptic scene of ashy ruin. The residents who have returned salvaged what they could, sifting through the blackened rubble to find cooking pots, bedsteads and buried troves of grain.

Fadila Ahmed Mahamat, a great-grandmother whose legs are withered stalks, sat amid the charred ruins of her home, digging holes in the sand with bare, gnarled hands to construct the frame of a makeshift dwelling out of branches from a pen that had been used to keep sheep.

“Everything is gone,” she said. “I have nothing.”

Surveying the scene, Major Abdullahi let out a low whistle.

“My God,” he said. “Look at this.”

A few of the town’s sheiks remained, and they clamored to tell him their complaints. Arab gunmen, whom the villagers here call janjaweed, roam the edge of town, they told Major Abdullahi, coming at dawn and dusk to steal what little remained here. The women could not go to the river to collect water. The men could not leave the town to find big branches to build shelters.

“We need security,” one said.

“Why don’t you patrol more often?” another asked. “When you come, the janjaweed stay away for two or three days.”

Major Abdullahi told them: “We don’t have the number of troops on ground we need. As soon as we do, we will spread out. We are doing everything we can to make you feel more secure.”

All talk ceased as a pickup truck loaded with government soldiers drove up. An officer jumped out, smiling with an outstretched hand. But his smile was tense, and after some pleasantries he asked why the peacekeepers had come.

“The place is secure,” said the officer, Maj. Amar Ibrahim. “Even the Arabs who ride on camels and horses and harass people, we have patrols to chase them away.”

Major Abdullahi smiled and nodded.

“We really appreciate that and commend your efforts,” he said through an interpreter. “But we really need to ask you to do more. People still do not feel safe.”

Despite the agreement giving the peacekeepers free rein, government troops complain about their presence. Major Abdullahi said he must be careful not to alienate these troops because he must rely on them to help provide security. “The reality is we need to work with them,” he said. “It does no good to antagonize them.”

Major Abdullahi checked his watch. It was noon, and already he had to think about heading back. The armored personnel carriers, which had been provided to the African Union by the Canadian government and had been battered by years of abuse in Darfur’s harsh conditions, were already acting up. Two flat tires and engine trouble had made the journey to Abu Sorouj slow. But he could not risk being stuck on the way back.

He promised the sheiks that he would return soon, but he could not say for sure how soon that might be.

The Task Ahead

It is unclear how exactly the deployment of troops in Darfur can be speeded up, give the built-in constraint that African troops be used first. Western activists concerned about Darfur say the Sudanese government is primarily responsible and have demanded that China, Sudan’s main trading partner and one of its suppliers of weapons, join other countries to press Sudan to allow troops of any origin the troops to deploy quickly.

While the Sudanese government has been blamed for some of the delay, United Nations requirements have also slowed the force, some diplomats and political analysts say.

The deployment “is not principally being delayed by the Sudanese government,” said a senior Western diplomat in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, who is not authorized to speak publicly. Other problems, like the United Nations bureaucracy and the reluctance of troop-contributing countries, were as much to blame, the diplomat said.

There is certainly no lack of money. Rodolphe Adada, of the Congo Republic, the mission’s civilian chief, said the force had a budget of $1.7 billion. What it needs is troops and equipment, and neither has been easy to get. More pressure on the Sudanese government, he said, would not help matters. “What more pressure can be put on the Sudanese government,” he said. “All the decisions have been taken. There is nothing left to say. What we need to do is act.”

Some countries are reluctant to commit troops in an active conflict with no peace agreement or even a working cease-fire.

“The international community had two choices — get a peace accord and deploy the mission after, or send the mission anyway,” Mr. Adada said. “It chose the latter. But how do you keep the peace when there is no peace to keep?”

Africa’s Next Slaughter

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

ABYEI, Sudan

This dusty little town of rutted dirt streets is surrounded by janjaweed, Arab militias armed by the Sudanese government and paid to do its dirty work.

But this isn’t Darfur, where the janjaweed have played the central role in the genocide that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Rather, Abyei is on the edge of southern Sudan, in a region that is supposed to be at peace.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was here that the government perfected the techniques that later became notorious in Darfur: mass rape and murder by armed militias, so as to terrorize civilians and drive them away. Now Sudan is coming full circle, apparently preparing to apply the same techniques again to Abyei and parts of the south.

With international attention distracted by Darfur and the United States presidential race, the Sudanese government now is chipping away at the 2005 peace treaty that ended the north-south war in Sudan. If war erupts, as many expect, the flash point will probably be here in Abyei, where the northern government is pumping oil from wells it refuses to give up.

“War is going to take place,” Joseph Dut Paguot, the acting government administrator in the Abyei region, said bluntly.

Chol Changath Chol, a representative of South Sudan in Abyei, agreed: “If there are no changes, war will come. It will break out here and spread everywhere.”

Since late November, there have been repeated clashes in the Abyei area between South Sudan’s armed forces and a large tribe of Arab nomads, the Misseriya, which is armed and backed by the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Mr. Paguot said that several hundred people had been killed in these clashes, and that some of the gunmen were government soldiers who had taken off their uniforms to masquerade as tribal fighters.

On Feb. 7, gunmen from the Misseriya shot up and looted a bus arriving in Abyei and began blockading the road that leads into the town from the north. That has cut off supplies, so shops in the town market are running out of fuel and food, and prices are rising.

“It is reaching a critical point for the poor,” said Jason Matus, a United Nations official in Abyei.

A group of Misseriya has appointed officials to create their own government for Abyei and has threatened to march in with thousands of armed men to install it. This is almost exactly the same approach that President Omar al-Bashir has taken in Darfur: arm the janjaweed and unleash them on a black African population, then dismiss the slaughter as just “tribal fighting.”

Mr. Paguot said that 16,000 militia members were gathered on the north side of Abyei, backed by a few tanks and many pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, ready to invade. They aren’t called the janjaweed, but it’s the same idea.

Some local officials and Misseriya elders have worked heroically to avert violence, but state-controlled newspapers in Khartoum are carrying false reports of attacks on Arabs, inflaming tensions.

In the 2005 peace agreement that ended 20 years of war between North and South Sudan, both sides agreed to accept the “final and binding” ruling of the Abyei Boundary Commission. But President Bashir has rejected the findings because they would mean giving up oil wells.

The agreement came about because of tireless diplomacy by the Bush administration, but since then Washington has dropped the ball. It is still possible to avert a new slaughter here, but only if there is a major international effort — involving the United Nations, Egypt, China and Europe as well as the United States — to ensure that the peace agreement is followed and that President Bashir will pay a price for attacking the south.

A crucial step would be for China to suspend transfers of arms to Sudan until the Khartoum government works for peace with the south and in Darfur. Unfortunately, China refuses to take that step.

Mr. Bashir’s plan seems to be to encourage Arab nomads to drive out other ethnic groups from areas with oil. Then once fighting begins, he would have an excuse to cancel national elections next year — which he would almost surely lose — and he might be able to rally Sudanese Arabs behind him in a nationalist campaign to hold on to the oil fields.

So remember this little town of Abyei. It’s the tinderbox for Africa’s next war, which will probably resemble Darfur but be carried out on a much wider scale.

“If there is just one bullet in Abyei,” said Col. Valentino Tocmac, the commander of the south’s forces here, “that will be the end of the peace.”

Dozens Killed as Sudan Nomads Clash With Ex - Rebels

By REUTERS

Filed at 9:32 a.m. ET

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Former southern Sudanese rebels said on Sunday they had killed nearly 70 armed tribesman in an upsurge of fighting in a volatile north-south border area which they said risked reigniting a north-south civil war.

Edward Lino, a senior official with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) which rules the semi-autonomous south, accused the northern ruling party of backing the Misseriya tribesmen.

He said similar attacks in the future by the tribe could reignite a civil war which ended with a 2005 peace deal.

"If the skirmishes continue it is going to spread and it is going to be a very dangerous thing," he told reporters in Khartoum. Asked if this could take the north and south back to war, he said: "Possible ... we don't want war."

Tensions have worsened in the border region over the failure of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) in the north and the SPLM to reach a deal on the demarcation of the borders of Abyei, the source of much of Sudan's energy reserves.

In December, dozens were killed in clashes between the cattle-herding Misseriya and the former rebels.

Abyei's status was left unresolved in the peace agreement ending the 21-year war which killed 2 million people.

Hassan Mohamed Sabahi, a Misseriya leader, told Reuters 37 tribesmen were killed during Saturday's clashes while around 62 were wounded. He said his tribe started the fighting in retaliation for an attack last week by the SPLM armed wing.

But Major General James Hoth, a senior southern commander, said 69 tribesmen were killed. He said six southern soldiers were killed and 26 were wounded.

The clashes took place in a village on the edge of the Northern Bahr El Ghazal state west of Abyei. "Abyei itself was not affected although the fighting happened in some areas that are supposed to be part of Abyei," Lino said.

POLITICAL TACTIC?

Lino said the NCP was using the Misseriya tribe in a tactic aimed at delaying the demarcation of the border between the north and south and a national census considered vital for the success of Sudan's first democratic elections in 23 years.

The census is scheduled to begin on April 15 for two weeks.

"We conveyed this to them (the NCP)," Lino said. "They deny it but they know that they are the people behind it."

NCP officials were not available for comment.

The Misseriya were among nomadic tribes armed by various northern governments during the civil war. Many were not disarmed after the peace deal.

The Misseriya says the SPLM are trespassing on their territory and should withdraw further south. Sabahi said as long as the SPLM remained "in our land" problems could continue.

"It is like someone moving in to my backyard and disputing my rights. What am I expected to do?" he said. "But we hope there won't be more problems."

Khaled Mansour, director of public information of the United Nations Mission in Sudan, said the world body was "very much concerned about the recent clashes and the lack of a solution in Abyei."

"We are raising this issue at every opportunity with the parties ... We think it is high time to focus on the need of the people," he told Reuters.

The north-south civil war broadly pitted the Islamist Khartoum government against mainly Christian and animist rebels, complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology.

(Additional reporting by Skye Wheeler in Juba, Sudan, writing by Alaa Shahine, editing by Myra MacDonald)

Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur

By LYDIA POLGREEN

SULEIA, Sudan — The janjaweed are back.

They came to this dusty town in the Darfur region of Sudan on horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone ran.

The militiamen laid waste to the town — burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way, residents said. Asha Abdullah Abakar, wizened and twice widowed, described how she hid in a hut, praying it would not be set on fire.

“I have never been so afraid,” she said.

The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict.

Such brutal, three-pronged attacks of this scale — involving close coordination of air power, army troops and Arab militias in areas where rebel troops have been — have rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the world’s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in Darfur genocide.

Aid workers, diplomats and analysts say the return of such attacks is an ominous sign that the fighting in Darfur, which has grown more complex and confusing as it has stretched on for five years, is entering a new and deadly phase — one in which the government is planning a scorched-earth campaign against the rebel groups fighting here as efforts to find a negotiated peace founder.

The government has carried out a series of coordinated attacks in recent weeks, using air power, ground forces and, according to witnesses and peacekeepers stationed in the area, the janjaweed, as their allied militias are known here. The offensives are aimed at retaking ground gained by a rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, which has been gathering strength and has close ties to the government of neighboring Chad.

Government officials say that their strikes have been carefully devised to hit the rebels, not civilians, and that Arab militias were not involved. They said they had been motivated to evict the rebels in part because the rebels were hijacking aid vehicles and preventing peacekeepers from patrolling the area, events that some aid workers and peacekeepers confirmed.

“We are simply trying to secure the area from the bandits that are troubling civilians in the area,” said Ali al-Sadig, a government spokesman. “There is nothing abnormal about a government doing this.”

But residents of the towns said the rebels had been long gone by the time the government attacks began, leaving defenseless civilians to flee bombs and guns. In interviews, survivors of the attacks described a series of assaults that had left dozens dead, turned large sections of towns into hut-shaped circles of ash and scattered tens of thousands of fearful residents, including hundreds of children, who fled classrooms in the middle of a school day and have not been reunited with their families.

“My son Ahmed, he ran, but I have not seen him since,” said a woman named Aisha as she waited for a sack of sorghum from United Nations workers in Sirba, one of the towns that was attacked. “I just pray he is still hiding in the bush somewhere and will come back to me.”

A Terrorized Population

The United Nations estimates that the recent fighting has forced about 45,000 people to flee their homes in Darfur, which is roughly the size of Texas and has a population of about six million people. Some fled to Chad, where they have not been able to reach the safety of refugee camps because of continued bombing along the border. Others fled to Jebel Moun, a rebel stronghold to the east, and aid workers fear for the safety of about 20,000 people who are in the path of future attacks if the government presses ahead with its offensive and the rebels vow to resist.

Military officials from the peacekeeping force in Darfur said in recent days that the Sudanese military had added nearly a brigade of troops to West Darfur, along with two dozen tanks and armored vehicles and many heavy weapons.

“You see a buildup from both sides,” said Ameerah Haq, the senior United Nations aid official in Sudan. “Both sides must desist. We have a population that is just being attacked and hit from both sides.”

Pressure is mounting on Sudan over Darfur. In January, a long-sought hybrid United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force began working in Darfur, but the Sudanese government’s quibbling over which countries the troops will come from and bureaucratic delays have stalled the force’s deployment.

Sudan’s biggest trading partner and ally, China, has also come under pressure from advocates who have linked the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer to the fighting in Darfur. China has been more publicly critical of the Sudanese government in recent weeks. Sudan has also been trying to improve its relationship with the United States, and last week, President Bush’s new special envoy to Sudan, Richard S. Williamson, visited Darfur and the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, meeting with President Omar al-Bashir. Any improvement in relations, he said, would be contingent on tangible improvements in the humanitarian situation.

“Since the first of the year another 75,000 people in Darfur have been displaced,” Mr. Williamson said in a telephone interview. “That is more than a thousand a day. There are not going to be any changes until that reverses.”

Origins of a Conflict

Despite the pressure, the government seems determined to fight on, and the most powerful rebel groups — the biggest factions of the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army — have refused to sit down for talks. So the violence continues, tracing a familiar arc as it wears on.

It was five years ago last week that an attack by rebels from non-Arab tribes like the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, seeking greater wealth and autonomy for the neglected and impoverished region of Darfur, prompted the Arab-dominated government to marshal Arab militias in the region that ultimately evicted millions from their homes, burning, looting and raping along the way. The campaign effectively pushed many non-Arab people off their land and into vast, squalid camps across Darfur and Chad.

In the first two years of the conflict, 2003 and 2004, joint attacks by the Sudanese Army, janjaweed militiamen and the government’s old Russian-made Antonov bombers terrorized Darfur, waging a brutal counterinsurgency against non-Arab rebel groups by attacking their fellow tribesmen in their villages. At least 200,000 are believed to have died as a result of the violence or sickness and hunger caused by the crisis, according to international estimates, with the majority of violent deaths in that period.

But in the past two years, the conflict has grown more complex and chaotic, and while some coordinated attacks by janjaweed militias and aerial bombardment have occurred, they were not of the same scale or intensity. But Darfur has remained a deadly place.

In 2006, before a peace agreement and then in the aftermath of its failure, rebel groups fractured and began fighting among themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and hundreds died as a result of their battles. Today, according to some estimates, two dozen rebel groups are jockeying for territory and influence in Darfur. Some analysts and human rights workers say the government has sown chaos by splintering the rebel groups to weaken them.

In 2007, Arab tribes, some of which had allied with the government and some of which had taken up arms to fight the rebels, also began to fight one another. Many of the violent deaths of 2007 were caused by these bloody battles between Arab groups and their militias, according to aid workers and diplomats in the region.

But as the conflict enters its sixth year, an older, deadly pattern is returning, and with it fears are rising among villagers, aid workers, diplomats and analysts that Darfur is headed for a new cycle of bloodletting and displacement on a vast scale.

In recent weeks, bombs dropped from government planes hit Abu Surouj, Sirba, Suleia and other towns in West Darfur, then came janjaweed militiamen, who killed, raped and burned, helping themselves to livestock and grain, furniture and clothing. In one town, the raiders pried the corrugated metal roof off a school, aid workers said. In another, water pumps were destroyed.

“This is the kind of destruction that makes it hard for people to return,” said Ted Chaiban, the Unicef representative in Sudan, who has toured the area of the attacks. “People need security. They are totally vulnerable.”

Violence in Chad

The recent violence in Chad, where rebel groups with bases in Sudan tried to topple the government in early February, has worsened matters. Rebels in Darfur, who diplomats and analysts say have received arms and cash from the family of Chad’s president, Idriss Déby, rushed into Chad to help defend him, creating a vacuum in the territory they had occupied. Sudan’s government seized the opportunity to retake the ground and now appears to be pushing farther into areas long held by the rebels, according to peacekeepers stationed here.

Few people in the region were unhappy to see the Justice and Equality Movement evicted. Banditry was rife in the territory it controlled, and for months aid groups had dodged carjackings and other attacks. African Union peacekeepers had been barred from the area, according to Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the new regional commander of the hybrid United Nations-African Union force in West Darfur.

"They were causing a lot of insecurity," General Keita said of the rebels, but he added that this did not justify attacks on heavily populated areas.

In Suleia, only a few hundred residents remained of the 15,000 who had lived here. Those left behind were too weak to run and have sought safety near the army camp at the edge of town, sleeping in the open, huddled together for warmth against the frigid night winds.

The Sudanese soldiers here have promised to protect them from militiamen who still roam the edges of town. They prevented militiamen from stealing sacks of grain delivered by aid groups, residents said.

Adam Adoum Abdullah, a former rebel fighter who joined the Sudanese Army as part of a peace deal with one rebel group in 2006, commandeered an army truck to help collect what little food, blankets and bits of shelter remained in the town for those sleeping out in the cold next to the army camp.

“I am ashamed that the janjaweed come with the soldiers,” Mr. Abdullah said. “What kind of army are we to fight like this? These people, they are suffering. We must help them.”

Chaos in Darfur on Rise as Arabs Fight With Arabs

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NYALA, Sudan, Aug. 28 — Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.

In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other’s villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims.

United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south.

Darfur’s violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers.

United Nations officials said tribal and factional fighting was killing more people than the battles between government and rebel forces, which, except in a few areas, have declined considerably.

Though the recent round of clashes between the splintering groups has not come close to taking as many lives as the thousands who were dying each month during the height of the conflict in 2003 and 2004, many aid officials say they fear that the situation is getting out of control.

“The fragmentation of armed groups is among our major concerns,” said Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Sudan. “This is making the situation even more complex, and more difficult for civilians as well as for humanitarians trying to help them.”

The rising insecurity is spelled out in two color-coded maps taped to Mr. Giuliano’s wall in Khartoum, the capital. One is from May 2006 and has only a few pockets of orange and yellow danger zones. But on the map from this June, the danger zones are everywhere.

United Nations officials say the militias may be jockeying for power and trying to seize turf before the long-awaited hybrid force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers begins to arrive, perhaps later this year. Today’s battlefields are superimposed on yesterday’s, with the Arab militias killing one another over the same burned villages and stingy riverbeds where so much blood has already been spilled.

Though many Western diplomats and a seemingly endless supply of advocates have blamed the Sudanese government for arming Arab militias in the first place, an accusation the government denies, several independent observers in Sudan said the government was not driving this phase of the conflict.

“The government is no longer arming the janjaweed,” said Col. James Oladipo, the African Union commander in Nyala, in South Darfur. The problem now, he said, is “bandits and factions.”

Some aid workers say Darfur is beginning to resemble Somalia, the world’s longest-running showcase for AK-47-fed chaos. Highwaymen in green camouflage — rebel fighters? local militia? janjaweed? — routinely flag down trucks and drag out passengers, robbing the men and sexually assaulting the women. Newly empowered warlords are exacting taxes. The galaxy of rebel armies — the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, the Popular Forces Troops, the Sudan Democratic Group, to name a few new arrivals — keeps expanding, and ideology seems to fade away. Despite peace talks among them in early August, the rebels, mostly non-Arabs, are now also battling themselves.

Among Arabs, one of the most egregious examples of the recent infighting happened on the morning of July 31 near Sania Daleibah, in southern Darfur. Terjem leaders said hundreds of Terjem had gathered to bury an important sheik. Then they were suddenly surrounded. It was Mahria tribesmen, and according to United Nations reports and witness accounts, the Mahria opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and belt-fed machine guns and mowed down more than 60 Terjem.

“It was a massacre,” said Mohammed Yacob Ibrahim Abdelrahman, the top Terjem leader. “By our brothers.”

The Arab-Arab violence is impeding the slow recovery process that had begun in some parts of Darfur. Around 2.2 million people are stuck in displaced persons camps, though some had been taking the first steps to leave, like villagers from Jimaiza, north of Nyala, who left their camp in July to go back to plant their peanut fields. They were not worried about Arab militias raiding their village, they said. Those days seemed over. But then the Terjem-Mahria feud erupted.

“It was strange,” said Abakar Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a leader of the Fur tribe, which is non-Arab and the biggest in Darfur. “A few days after the fighting, a Mahria elder came up to me and said: ‘Tell your people not to go back to the camp. They’re safe in the village. We don’t have a problem with you.’ ”

But Mr. Abakar shook his head and laughed.

“I know these people,” he said. “They killed my wife and burned my hut. I’ll never trust them.”

Not all Arab tribes joined the bloodletting when Darfur exploded in 2003. But according to United Nations documents, the Mahria and the Terjem did.

The Mahria are nomadic camel herders from northern Darfur, rugged people of the desert whose militias have helped the Sudanese government patrol the long, sandy border with Chad. The Terjem are farmers and cattle herders who lived closely with the Fur. The Mahria knew how to fight. The Terjem knew where the Fur lived.

Together, the two tribes massacred many Fur villagers, according to United Nations officials and Fur survivors. Then they divvied up Fur land. But the partnership broke down late last year, when, Terjem leaders say, the Mahria kidnapped a 14-year-old Terjem boy. For their part, Mahria leaders say the Terjem started it by stealing Mahria animals, an act that had to be answered.

Juma Dagalow, a Mahria sheik, said that after one ambush in which Terjem gunmen killed many Mahria, he called other sheiks by satellite phone and rallied the troops.

“We went to that funeral to attack them, to finish the account,” the sheik explained, adding that his people were “a little aggressive.”

It was then that the wali stepped in. The wali, or governor, of South Darfur called a peace conference and urged neutral tribes to mediate a cease-fire.

The wali, Ali Mahamoud Mohammed, said in an interview that such clashes were “just a natural part of the life of the tribes” and something he had witnessed growing up in Darfur in the 1970s.

Mr. Ali said the fighting began in December, when the Mahria headed south on a seasonal migration with their camels and trampled through Terjem territory near the Bulbul River. The fighting predictably resumed in July, he said, when the Mahria trampled back.

The governor said he sent troops to Bulbul to quell the fighting. But the Arab-Arab bloodshed, fueled by an overflow of guns in Darfur and a breakdown in the traditional order, seems to be spreading faster than anyone can control. Several tribes have recently fought over land, livestock and the right to extort money along certain trade routes. Among those fighting: Hotiya versus Rizeigat (the Rizeigat are a huge tribe that includes the Mahria); Rizeigat versus Habanniya; Habanniya versus Salamat.

Tribal feuds that used to be reconciled by sheiks before the body count reached into the hundreds are now turning into tribal wars.

And there may be a connection to the rampant banditry, which seems to spare no one — not aid workers, villagers or even Sudanese government officials.

“As these groups split,” said Colonel Oladipo of the African Union, “banditry becomes the source for weapons, money and food in order to sustain their factions.”

The 50 miles of asphalt running between Nyala and the neighboring town of Kas, which cuts straight through a Terjem stronghold, have become bandit boulevard. On a single day in late August, there were six attacks. Traveling by road has become so dangerous in Darfur that the United Nations now uses helicopters to fly even 12 miles.

“There’s absolutely no law and order in this place,” said Annette Rehrl, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The insecurity has driven away some aid workers, United Nations officials said, with 12,300 working in Darfur, 16 percent less than last year.

It has also cemented tens of thousands of Terjem, who traditionally roam with their animals for part of the year, in internally displaced persons camps where they are not free to move. Out here, newly widowed women lie in plastic huts, flies exploring the corners of their eyes. Once proud sheiks have been reduced to carrying sacks of sand on their backs for work. A Terjem baby with a three-inch, bubbly scar at the base of her spine — a recent gunshot wound — howled her head off.

“We just sit here, hating ourselves,” said Mariam Mohammed, a wisp-thin Terjem woman who said her husband had been shot dead in front of her. “Just look at me. I’m half of what I used to be.”

Sudan says Darfur rebels killed 41 in Kordofan attack

Sat Sep 1, 2007 8:34AM EDT
By Simon Apiku

KHARTOUM, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Sudanese rebels from war-torn Darfur killed 41 people in an attack earlier this week on a base for government forces in the neighbouring Kordofan region, Sudan's interior ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

"Information shows there were 41 martyrs, including people from the area," the ministry said, without saying how many of the dead were members of its forces.

On Wednesday, Darfur rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army's Unity faction (SLA Unity) said they had seized an army base in Wad Banda in North Kordofan State.

The interior ministry said the attack was on a base for central reserve forces, a branch of the police.

The fighting came just days before U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was due to arrive in Sudan to try to set a timetable to revive Darfur peace talks between the government and rebels after a May 2006 deal faltered.

The rebels said the base they attacked was the logistical and supply centre for ongoing attacks in South Darfur, where rebels say an aerial bombing campaign has driven thousands of people from their homes over the past month.

Ban, due to arrive on Monday, has deplored the recent surge of violence as "simply unacceptable" and has condemned the government bombardment as a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

The Sudanese interior ministry statement said that following the Kordofan attack, a combined force of police and armed forces pursued the rebels and captured a number of them in an ambush. It did not say how many rebels it captured.

"They will face justice and these measures will apply to all those who supported this criminal act," the ministry said.

It added that it would also prosecute anybody suspected of inciting or abetting the attack and anybody else who gave sanctuary to the rebels.

JEM commander Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr denied any of the group's men were arrested: "That's not true ... The battle is over and we defeated the armed forces."

The U.N. and AU hope to launch peace talks in October and both voiced concern about the impact of the attack on Wad Banda on the peace process.

"The attack could undermine the efforts of the U.N. and AU special envoys at a time of serious and sensitive consultations to launch the renewed peace talks on Darfur," the U.N. Mission in Sudan said in statement on Thursday.

The AU said the attack happened when the U.N., AU and "the entire international community have converged all efforts toward upcoming peace negotiations."

International experts estimate 200,000 people have died since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing the central government of neglecting the region. The Sudanese government denies the charge and says 9,000 have died in Darfur.

Sudan rebel affects peace talks by sitting out

As other opposition leaders meet today to map strategy, Abdel Wahid will wield considerable clout -- from exile in Paris.
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

August 3, 2007

PARIS — At the moment, the headquarters of Abdel Wahid's faction of the Sudanese Liberation Movement is a cafe in Paris.

"I may be in exile, but my people know I am still with them," says Wahid, reaching into his bag and pulling out four cellphones and a chunky Thuraya satellite phone with its thumb-like antenna.

"This one is for the commanders, so I can tell them what to do and what not to do. This," he said, holding up a newer Nokia, "is for civil society so we can discuss their next move. This one is for [displaced people] and refugees. This one is for students. Sometimes I address their secret meetings by speakerphone."

And who is the satellite phone for? "I can't tell you." He smiles.

Wahid, a round-faced 39-year-old, is one of Darfur's original rebel leaders, and even from afar, a man of secrets, contradictions and considerable power. He is a holdout who gains influence over the conversation about peace by refusing to talk; a would-be peacemaker who threatens more war; a fighter for the rights of displaced people, yet a figure who derives his power from their misery. And he is one reason it is so hard to stabilize Sudan.

Wahid began the SLM in 1992 while a law student in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, to agitate for a secular democratic state and a greater share of the country's power and wealth for the long-neglected people in the vast western region of Darfur. The group evolved into an armed movement, which along with other rebels attacked Sudanese forces in 2003. The rebellion resulted in widespread retaliation by militias known as janjaweed, widely believed to be backed by the Sudanese government. The militias terrorized the villages harboring rebels, resulting in more than 200,000 deaths and driving more than 2 million people from their homes into U.N.-run camps.

Though he has been living in Paris since 2004 for what he says are security reasons, Wahid remains one of the most influential leaders of the Fur tribe, which makes up the majority of Darfur's population and has been the main target of attacks.

In addition to working the phones, Wahid sends videotapes to camps, exhorting Darfur natives to press to return to the land from which they were forced, to hold out for compensation, to demand United Nations protection. It is a message of hope and defiance in a place where there is not much left but despair, and when you ask people in the camps who represents them, many still say, "Abdel Wahid."

Wahid's continued popularity explains why U.N. peace negotiators want him at the table at preliminary peace talks due to begin today in Arusha, Tanzania, not at this zinc cafe table sipping Coke Light. The talks are meant to help the splintered opposition find a common platform so they can face the government in negotiations this fall.

Unlike other rebel leaders, Wahid refused to sign the Darfur peace agreement in May 2006, holding out for additional compensation and a greater role in the central government for Darfur residents. Without the support of the Fur, the agreement quickly crumbled. But Wahid once again refuses to attend negotiations, even the Tanzania talks among fellow rebels, which run through Monday, saying that more signed paper is not the path to peace.

"There have been many agreements before and no change," he said, counting off 11 rounds of talks that yielded several unsuccessful cease-fire and peace agreements. "The government must show us they are serious by stopping the attacks.

"Just this week there were more attacks" by militias against villagers in Darfur, he said, his voice rising. "My trust of the government is under zero. I need to see action first. Once there is security in Darfur, we will know it is time to talk about peace."

Though past agreements have foundered — on account of violations by the janjaweed, the government and rebels alike — U.N. peace envoys believe that this time they have momentum.

On Tuesday, the U.N. Security Council authorized the deployment of 26,000 peacekeepers to help stabilize Darfur. The government, facing growing international pressure and seemingly losing support of some Arab and African allies, is willing to talk. Neighboring countries that have been stirring the pot have agreed to step back. Most of the dozen or so rebel groups are trying to come together for the sake of peace.

The main holdout is Wahid.

"Without him, I am afraid the talks won't go forward," said the U.N.'s special envoy for Sudan, Jan Eliasson, who has spent months trying to nudge all the players to the table. "This is the big chance."

Wahid seems to take pleasure in rejecting the high-ranking dignitaries from the U.N., the U.S. and France, who come to quietly court, or warn, him. They have let him know that if he blocks the move toward peace, he will be subject to sanctions, just as surely as if he violated a cease-fire. Specifically, France could revoke his right to stay here.

"France can go to hell," he said loudly, provoking looks from nearby patrons in the cafe. "Sanctions are for criminals. Sanction Khartoum! I am not a criminal. I am fully committed to a cease-fire, I am fully committed to the peace process, but I am in exile and I am already sanctioned. My people are in camps — those who are not are killed — and the rest are raped and hopeless. They are already sanctioned."

He gesticulates in his passion and smacks a passerby, who apologizes to him.

"If I can't stay in Paris, I can go anywhere," he said.

So why not go back to Darfur?

He stands and hikes up his beige button-down shirt to display the splash of a bullet wound scar on his right side, and rolls up his left sleeve to show another on his arm.

"To make peace, I have to be alive, not dead. That is why I am here," he said, tapping the table. "But if I have to, I will go back to my people and die with them."

Some of the other SLM factions have split from Wahid, and are anxious for peace. They would like Wahid to represent them, but appear ready to leave him behind.

"Abdel Wahid feels threatened as a leader. He has lost ground," said Ahmed Idriss, a member of the newly formed SLM/Unity faction led by Abdulla Yahyia. "He would rather remain a big fish in a small pond than be a big fish in a big pond."

Because Wahid's chair in Arusha will probably remain empty, U.N. envoys have been scrambling to ensure that other Fur leaders with popular credibility will be there: Ahmed Abdelshafie, who replaced Wahid a year ago in Darfur, and Ahmed Diraige, a godfather of the rebel movement who now heads the National Redemption Front alliance.

Wahid asserts that his ideas have formed the basis of the peacemakers' blueprints, and he says he is the only one who can ensure the backing of the Fur and the people in the camps for any agreement. He will not be left out in the cold.

"Three things will not work with me. Pressure, persuasion, and isolation," he said. "I don't get my power from the international community, I get my power from my people." He paused and frowned. "If they try to make peace without me, I will sabotage everything."

--

maggie.farley@latimes.com

Sudan's Bashir Begins Tour of Darfur

Associated Press
Sunday, July 22, 2007; A14

KHARTOUM, Sudan, July 21 -- Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, implicated by many governments and human rights organizations in Darfur's violence, visited the troubled region Saturday for the first time since the start of the four-year conflict there.

Bashir is scheduled to visit Darfur's three provincial capitals in as many days.

As many as 450,000 people in Darfur have died from violence and disease and 2.5 million have been displaced in the conflict, which began in 2003 when rebels from ethnic African tribes rose up against Bashir's Arab-dominated government.

The government is accused of responding with indiscriminate killings and by unleashing the Janjaweed militias -- blamed for the worst atrocities in Darfur. The United States has condemned the killings as genocide, a charge the government denies.

Under heavy pressure from the United Nations, Bashir recently agreed to allow the deployment of 3,000 U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur to support 7,000 poorly equipped and underfunded African Union troops already there. He has agreed in principle to an even larger force, but the deal has not been finalized.

After arriving in South Darfur's provincial capital of Nyala, 600 miles southwest of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, Bashir urged all citizens to unify against tribalism and sedition.

"We want you to unite your ranks and do not allow any intruders or agents to split you again," he said on state-run radio.

Accompanied by his ministers, Bashir is also scheduled to visit El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, where a cabinet meeting will be held Sunday. On Monday, he is to fly to El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, before returning to Khartoum the same day.

In Nyala, Bashir criticized those trying to divide the citizens of Darfur as Arabs and Africans.

"This is but a plot that seeks to divide people as Arabs and blacks," he said. "Those who make such distinction seek sedition and plotting. Do not listen to them."

Bashir also urged "those still in the bushes," an apparent reference to rebel fighters, to return home and join the peace process. He promised they would be compensated for losses incurred during the conflict.

Just two weeks ago, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Andrew S. Natsios, accused Bashir's government of resuming bombing of civilians in Darfur and warned of a "disturbing" trend of Arab groups resettling in the area. His comments in Khartoum followed what he said was a resumption of attacks in Darfur after a lull of several months.

A Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse?

By LYDIA POLGREEN

DAKAR, Senegal

THE announcement by researchers at Boston University last week that a vast underground lake the size of Lake Erie had been discovered beneath the barren soil of northern Darfur, a blood-soaked but otherwise parched land racked by war for the past four years, was greeted by rapturous hopes. Could this, at last, bring deliverance from a cataclysmic conflict that has killed at least 200,000 people and pushed more than 2.5 million from their homes?

That hope is built upon an argument, advanced by a United Nations report released last month and an opinion article in The Washington Post by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, that environmental degradation and the symptoms of a warming planet are at the root of the Darfur crisis.

“There is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification and conflict in Darfur,” said the United Nations Environmental Program report, which noted that rainfall in northern Darfur has decreased by a third over the last 80 years. “Exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered and sustained by political, tribal or ethnic differences,” the report said, adding that Darfur “can be considered a tragic example of the social breakdown that can result from ecological collapse.”

The idea that more water — unearthed through a thousand wells sunk into the underground lake — could neatly defuse the crisis is seductive. Messy African conflicts, from Congo to Liberia, from northern Uganda to Angola, have a way of defying all efforts to solve them. Instead, they seem to become hopelessly more complex as they drag on, year after agonizing year. A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

In fact, while different regions and social groups suffer severely, Sudan as a whole has riches to spare, in oil, fertile soil, and even water. Indeed, history suggests that this newly discovered lake is just as likely to become a source of conflict as a solution to the bloodshed.

Successive Sudanese governments and their colonial precursors have adopted agricultural policies that have almost inevitably led to conflict. They have favored large mechanized farms and complex irrigation schemes, controlled by the government and its allies, over the small, rain-fed farms that are the backbone of the rural economy in much of Sudan.

In eastern Sudan, where a rebellion has been brewing for years, the Beja people have nursed grievances since Britain and Egypt ruled Sudan jointly during the first half of the 20th century. Under their rule, irrigation programs for commercial farming deprived the Beja of their prime grazing land.

Post-colonial governments, which in the early years had the blessing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, took vast tracts of land in the name of agricultural development, turning farmers who worked their own land into wage laborers for the state and its allies.

Some Sudanese have even been pushed off their land entirely. In the early 1990s the Nuba people were forced into “peace villages,” where they provided a steady supply of cheap, captive labor to mechanized farms. In other areas, including parts of Darfur, intensive mechanized farming by the government and investors who were heedless to the need to protect the fertility of the land left large tracts barren.

A vast new agricultural scheme in a largely uninhabited swath of northern Darfur is more likely to fit into this destructive pattern than not, said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities.

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

During those years, the government exploited tensions over water and land to achieve its own aims, putting down a rebellion among the non-Arab tribes, who rose up because they wanted a greater share of Sudan’s wealth and power. It armed tribal militias to fight the rebels, and these militias unleashed a tide of violence that ultimately would become, according to the Bush administration and many others, the 21st century’s first genocide.

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Sudan agrees to meet with rebels

The move involving groups that rejected a 2006 accord is called 'a serious step forward' for peace in the Darfur region.
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

July 16, 2007

TRIPOLI, LIBYA — In an international summit Sunday to push peace in Sudan's troubled Darfur region, the Sudanese government agreed to soon meet rebel groups that thus far have refused to join peace talks.

If the agreement holds, it will be an important step in re-launching a peace process that has stalled since those key rebel factions rejected the widely unpopular Darfur peace agreement struck last year. The so-called non-signatories will meet the first week of August to prepare a unified position for talks with the government in late August or September.

"We've made a serious step forward," said Jan Eliasson, the United Nations' special envoy for Sudan. He and African Union representative Salim Ahmed Salim have devised a blueprint to whittle down competing peace proposals in order to have the government and multiple rebel factions discuss a single plan for peace in Darfur by the end of the summer.

After weeks of shuttle diplomacy, leaders from the five permanent members of the Security Council, the European Union, and neighboring and donor nations gathered in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, to endorse the move.

At issue is the four-year conflict between rebels and the government that international experts say has resulted in more than 200,000 deaths and the displacement of more than 2 million people. The government is accused of arming Arab militias, known as janjaweed, to attack civilians and rival tribes to crush the uprising.



Rival proposals

Before Sunday, Sudan's neighbors, Eritrea and Libya, had been promoting peace initiatives that highlighted their own interests in the war-torn region, but the countries were persuaded to step back and let the U.N. and AU take the lead. The rival plans had given the government of Sudan a chance to play one against another, diplomats said.

"Now we are all going the same direction," Eliasson said. "It's like herding cats, but we did it."

At the end of the first day of the two-day summit, they announced that they had achieved their main goals, but were still refining the wording of the agreement.

The rebel groups opposing the government had splintered into nearly a dozen factions with varying influence, making it difficult to conduct negotiations with Khartoum.

"What we need is the non-signatories to come to some sort of agreement," said Elsamani Elwasila, Sudan's minister of state for foreign affairs. "They have too many different leaders and changing demands."

In a sign of solidarity, five factions said Saturday that they would unite and join the U.N.-sponsored peace process.

The new alliance, calling itself the United Front for Liberation and Development, came together during a meeting in the Eritrean capital, Asmara.

The groups said they had joined to present a united front for peace negotiations with Khartoum and appealed "to all other movements to unify efforts."

But major groups, including the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, remain outside the new alliance.

Representatives from some of the outside groups were on the sidelines of the summit Sunday. They met with AU and U.N. officials but did not take part in the proceedings.



What's on the table

Negotiators will tackle tough issues that include how much to compensate families driven from their land, how to protect them when they return and how to disarm roving militias.

"They need a political settlement," said Andrew S. Natsios, the U.S. special envoy for Sudan, "and then we need peacekeepers. People are not going back to their villages unless there is security. "

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, the Security Council is debating a resolution authorizing a joint AU-U.N. peacekeeping force of up to 20,000 troops to help stabilize the region, which is the size of France. Sudan grudgingly agreed to accept the force after seven months of negotiations, on condition that it is nearly entirely made up of African soldiers and led by African commanders.

Elwasila, the Foreign Ministry official, said that the troops should not be allowed to use force, and that the Security Council should reward Sudan's compliance by removing the threat of sanctions.

"It is high time now to send positive messages rather than threatening proposals," he said. "We are not in a confrontation with the U.N."

maggie.farley@latimes.com

For Ugandan Rebel, A Question of Justice

Fate of Lord's Resistance Army Chief At Center of Talks to End 21-Year War

By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 12, 2007; A18

To some international legal experts, Joseph Kony, commander of the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, should be turned over to the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for him and four top commanders for war crimes during his 21-year guerrilla war.

But others, anxious to see an end to the conflict, say a compromise should be found, allowing Kony to go into exile rather than face charges, as the price for peace in the troubled Acholi region.

Kony's fate is at the center of talks on accountability and reconciliation that resumed in Juba, Sudan, in June between representatives of the Ugandan government and northern Ugandan tribes speaking for the rebel army. Last Friday, the head of the rebel team said three parts of a five-phase peace agreement had been signed, but declined to provide details.

Safety and sanctuary for Kony and his commanders, and guarantees for their livelihood, are some of the conditions the rebel delegation has demanded at the talks.

The idea of exile for repressive African leaders is not new; several African dictators fled their countries after they were deposed, before the creation of the international court in 2002. Among them were Ethiopia's deposed president Mengistu Haile Mariam, who went to Zimbabwe, where he still lives; former president Mobutu Sese Seko, who left Zaire for France and died in exile in Morocco; and Somali leader Mohamed Siad Barre, who sought asylum in Nigeria, where he died. Idi Amin, who was Uganda's president, fled to Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his death.

The war in Uganda started as a backlash to brutal excesses by the army of President Yoweri Museveni, who came to power in 1986. The Lord's Resistance Army has been accused of plucking out eyes, severing lips and tongues and amputating limbs of men, women and children. Kony's men have also been accused of abducting children and forcibly inducting them into the guerrilla ranks.

Speaking at a conference in Nuremberg, Germany on June 25, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, reiterated that his investigators proved "that the top commanders of the Lord's Resistance Army were personally responsible for conscripting and enslaving children, slaughtering their families, forcing the displacement of millions."

Because the court has no law enforcement power, Moreno-Ocampo has urged that the international community establish an apprehension mechanism. Challenges to the timing of judicial decisions and calls for amnesties "to avoid prosecution, supposedly in the name of peace," were not consistent with the court's mission, he said.

"As a prosecutor, I want to arrest Kony and his men," Moreno-Ocampo said in an interview in Washington in May. "His destiny is the dock." He added, "There is no conflict between peace and justice. Apprehend them tomorrow, and you have peace and justice on the same day."

However, Moreno-Ocampo said, if the U.N. Security Council were to request a 12-month delay of the prosecution, he would have to respect it. A suspension can be renewed for up to five years.

Michael Poffenberger, executive director of the Washington-based nongovernmental group Resolve Uganda, has argued for a more traditional form of justice. It would involve Kony and his men admitting responsibility for past crimes, asking for forgiveness and agreeing to pay some form of compensation to victims or their survivors.

Kony's supporters among the ethnic Acholi tribe have said he wants to be exiled in a third country that is not a signatory to the accord creating the International Criminal Court.

Richard Dicker, director of the Human Rights Watch international justice program, said the ultimate "arbiters and deciders" have to be the International Criminal Court judges. If Ugandan courts are to be considered an alternative to the international court, Dicker said, new laws would have to be enacted covering crimes against humanity. He insisted Kony face a trial.

Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has said it is wrong to believe the international court indictments are an impediment to peace. "Criminal justice is an instrument of peace, a crime is a breach of peace. One needs to stand by it. We have to use it consistently with its own logic with no political imperatives. You just move," she said during a visit here last month.

Activists such as Africa specialist John Prendergast are advocating the appointment of a U.S. special envoy for the Uganda crisis, especially if the U.N. Security Council decides to step in. Prendergast said he feared Kony could still cause instability in as many as three African countries -- Sudan, Uganda and Congo. "We have a very significant investment in south Sudan, both diplomatically and in terms of assistance, that is at grave risk," Prendergast warned.

Prendergast said he believes a plan to arrest Kony should be in place even if he gets asylum. "If you send him away, it is not pure justice, but it is a solution for now. If he misbehaves, we should go after him."

Jimmie Briggs, the author of "Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War," said he was torn about the issue. "To me as a Westerner, Kony should be legally accountable for the destruction and killing he caused. But it is for the Ugandans and the Acholi to see how to reconcile equal judgment or have him exiled. I don't believe justice has to be compromised, but it has to be defined by the Acholi. Ultimately, it is up to them."

Kony has 200 children with several dozen wives, some of them taken as sex slaves. Despite his eccentric behavior -- including visions, trances in which he has been described as speaking in tongues, and his predatory form of violence -- he does have lapses of lucidity and rational thinking, those who have spoken to him have said. When Ugandan mediator and peace envoy Betty Bigombe sought to persuade him to come out of the bush and join a peace process, he responded: "But look at what I have done. My fate will surely be death, prison, or maybe exile."

Poffenberger said Kony is very "victim-focused" and anxious not to be handed over to an international tribunal, like Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president now facing war crimes charges in The Hague. Poffenberger also said Kony watched a video of the execution of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein earlier this year, after the mayor of Gulu brought him the cassette at his request to observe Hussein's final moments.

Report on Sudanese Laws Exposes System that Compounds Rape Victims’ Trauma

udan’s laws governing rape expose rape victims to further abuse, shield perpetrators from prosecution, limit the ability of survivors to receive medical services and generally deny any access to justice, according to a detailed analysis by Refugees International. The crisis of rape in Sudan’s Darfur region can’t be addressed until Sudan revises its laws, says the report, Laws Without Justice: An Assessment of Sudanese Laws Affecting Survivors of Rape.

The Refugees International report examines Sudan’s laws on rape and makes a series of recommendations on how they can be revised. The report also encourages international support of Sudanese civil society organizations and opposition members of Parliament who are calling for changes to these laws. Laws Without Justice was written by Adrienne Fricke, an Arabic speaking lawyer, and Amira Khair, a Sudanese human rights advocate who has worked extensively with rape victims in Darfur, after extensive interviews and legal analysis in Sudan.

“Much has been written about the scale of rape in Darfur,” Fricke said. “But unless we understand the legal mechanisms that are creating and reinforcing the problem, it will be impossible to bring justice to the victims or reduce the incidence of rape. Denying justice to these women only compounds the terrible physical and psychological trauma of rape.”

Laws Without Justice resulted from a January meeting between Sudanese President Omer Al-Bashir and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. During this visit, the officials in Sudan’s Ministry of Justice extended an invitation to analyze the Government’s purported efforts to address sexual violence against Sudanese women. Refugees International president Ken Bacon, who was in the Richardson delegation, accepted this invitation, and Fricke and Khair, working as consultants to Refugees International, met in Khartoum in March to interview people with knowledge about the crisis of rape in Darfur. After a week, the Sudanese government turned uncooperative and gave 24 hours to leave the country.

“The Government of Sudan invited us to analyze its laws against rape,” Bacon explained. “We accepted this invitation and despite the government’s efforts to block our study, we are now providing constructive steps that the Government can take to improve these laws and increase protections for women who have been raped. Sudan’s laws can be changed and there is a strong community of Sudanese activists calling for reforms who should be supported.”

Rape of Darfuri women on a mass scale is one of the hallmarks of the conflict in Darfur. Analysts say it is part of a calculated plan to destroy communities and contributes directly to ethnic cleansing. If a woman cannot prove that she did not consent to intercourse, she can be accused of adultery – a crime that carries a sentence of one hundred lashes or even stoning—even if she was raped. Sudan’s laws also grant immunity to members of the military, security services, police and border guards. Many members of the Janjaweed militias that carry out the worst atrocities in Darfur are integrated in the Popular Defense Forces, which is also exempt from prosecution. The Government also continues to harass non- governmental organizations who work with rape victims and doctors who provide medical treatment to raped women.

Many legal and human rights experts in Sudan recognize the need to change these laws. Prominent Sudanese NGOs collaborated with the United Nations and recommended reforms to the Government of Sudan, and there is a concept paper being circulated in Parliament that addresses these reform proposals.

“There is nothing inherently Islamic about the way Sudan’s rape law is constructed,” Fricke continued. “This report provides greater documentation on the implementation of Sudan’s laws relating to rape so that the Sudanese people can continue their efforts to change them. Women who have survived sexual violence should not be penalized for seeking justice.”

In addition to urging international support for local Sudanese efforts to reform these laws, the report urges the African Union Mission in Sudan and UN Hybrid Peacekeeping Force to adopt a stronger mandate to protect women and girls and allocate sufficient resources and training to deal with survivors of sexual violence. The report also calls on international aid organizations to support rape awareness campaigns and work with local groups to improve community support for victims of sexual violence.

“Sudanese officials continue to deny that rape is a problem, and Refugees International repeats our call on the U.S. and the international community to implement tougher policies against the Government of Sudan – including stricter sanctions – to end the violence and rape in Darfur,” Bacon concluded. “In addition to the massive suffering that the Darfuri people have endured throughout this four-year conflict, the violence threatens the stability of the entire region. More pressure must be put on the warring parties to end the fighting.”