Imperial, Neo-Liberal Africa? || Darfur: Stop! Confrontational Rhetoric

ROAPE Publications Ltd.

Darfur: Stop! Confrontational RhetoricAuthor(s): Julie FintSource: Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 34, No. 113, Imperial, Neo-Liberal Africa?(Sep., 2007), pp. 535-540Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20406427 .

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Briefings: DARFUR: STOP! Confrontational Rhetoric 535

Oneko (Nyakech, Mbalawandu) a gen eration of profiles in courage in Kenyan politics is gone. The only unfortunate thing is that Oneko did not live long enough to witness the final transition to democracy in Kenya. This, I dare say, is a legacy we have to pass on to Oneko's family as a cherished memory of one who fought wisely and enduringly that we may be free from colonial oppression as well as post-colonial authoritarian ism.

Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, e-mail: anyongo~yahoo.com. See also Anyang' Nyongo's' articles in ROAPE: Special Issue on Kenya, 1981 (No. 20) and in July 1992 (No. 54).

DARFUR: STOP! Confrontational Rhetoric Julie Fint

The one bright light in the dismal inter national response to the slaughter and starvation in Sudan's Darfur region has been a humanitarian effort that has kept more than two million displaced people alive. In the fifth year of the war, mortal ity levels among Darfurians reached by relief are marginally better than they

were before the war - and lower, remark ably, than in the suburbs of the capital, Khartoum. In South Sudan, where a peace agreement signed in January 2005 officially ended a 21-year civil war, children have worse life chances: higher death rates and lower school enrolment.

This is a formidable achievement, better than achieved in any other comparable

war zone in Africa. Credit is due to the likes of Oxfam, Mercy Corps and

Medecins Sans Frontieres, and their

13,000-strong army of relief workers - 90% of them Sudanese.

All this would be lost if US Democratic presidential candidates got their wish and a no-fly zone were militarily en forced over Darfur in an attempt to pressure the Sudan government into allowing the immediate deployment of a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force. 'If they fly into it, we will shoot down their planes,' Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said recently. 'It is the only way to get their attention.'

That it most certainly would. But what then?

Aid agencies operational in Darfur are quietly but unanimously appalled by the prospect of a no-fly zone. They believe Khartoum would respond by grounding humanitarian aircraft and, in a worst case scenario, by forcing all aid agencies to leave, with no possibility of return. They warn, too, that, there is a high probability that humanitarian assets would be hit if government assets at airports were hit, since the two share the same locations and warehousing sites.

Without humanitarian air access, Darfurians would soon suffer massive health and food crises. The quickest and safest evacuation routes for humanitar ians would be cut. In the event of height ened military activity on the ground, Darfurians would either be trapped or caught in the crossfire. The people of Kosovo and Bosnia had easier access to host countries. Darfur is vast and dry. Its people would not be able to flee to safety easily.

We do not support the military enforce ment of a no-fly zone over Darfur,' a relief planner told ROAPE. 'We are skeptical of its effectiveness to stop the main source of insecurity for civilians: attacks on the ground by proxy militias, between rival groups and between parties to the conflict. We also do not support non-consensual military intervention. We believe both



536 Review of African Political Economy

measures could do more harm than good, because of the expected retaliation against civilians and aid workers and end to aid operations.

Today, as Khartoum's proxy Janjaweed militias turn against each other, rebel movements fragment and banditry spi rals out of control, millions of Darfurians who depend on humanitarian assist ance can be reached only by air. UN and AU traffic accounts for nine of every ten planes flying in Darfur, and some agen cies deliver as much as 90% of their supplies using aircraft. The collapse of the humanitarian apparatus would be a death sentence for Darfurians - espe cially those who are receiving food, clean water and shelter in the camps for the displaced in government-controlled ar eas.

A major concern is that aircraft belong ing to the Sudan government would be difficult to distinguish from humanitar ian aircraft, making it hazardous to fly. The United Nations and African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) have both publicly have reported that the Sudanese Air Force has intentionally made its aircraft look like humanitarian and AU aircraft in order to hinder monitoring of the ceasefire. Humanitarian workers are concerned that deceptions like this could escalate if a no-fly zone were military imposed, perhaps with disguised mili tary planes taking off at the same time as humanitarian flights.

'My first concern is how to implement the no-fly zone without hindering hu

manitarian air flights,' says a relief offi cial with long experience of Sudan. 'The Humanitarian Air Service of the World Food Programme alone operates 16 air craft doing 30 rotations a day between Khartoum and Darfur and within Darfur. One can fear that distinguishing be tween military flights, humanitarian flights and commercial flights would be very difficult. This might imply a pre flight clearance system with the military

authority in charge of enforcing the no fly zone, a system which could hinder the flexibility of the humanitarian air service. This without considering the fact that enforcing a no-fly zone means basically shooting at planes without clearances - an act of war which might trigger retaliations by the Sudanese army against humanitarian workers on the ground ...

The cost might be politically acceptable if aerial bombardments were responsible for a large number of deaths. But while air bombing has a major psychological impact in distilling fear and terror among the population, the number of people being killed by aerial bombardment in Sudan is limited.

In April 2003, addressing an open-air rally in el Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, President Omar Bashir promised to 'unleash' the army to crush the rebellion launched a few months earlier by Darfur's two newly-emerged rebel movements - the Sudan Liberation

Army and smaller Justice and Equality Movement. But it was not just the army and its proxy Janjaweed militias that the regime unleashed. It was the air force.

Ground attacks that killed hundreds of people were coordinated with Antonov bombers and helicopter gunships that flew before, during and after the offensives - often, it seemed, to ensure that there were no survivors.

I spent a month in West Darfur early in 2004 and met hundreds of members of the Masalit tribe, a farming people who had already been the target of a govern ment-supported war in the late 1990s. Their stories were remarkably consist ent. Government planes, they said, had bombed Masalit villages heavily and systematically between August 2003 and February 2004, when I began my re search.

Typically, the village of Tunfunka in West Darfur was bombarded by two




Antonovs on 7 February 2004, killing eight people. A 28-year-old villager who witnessed the bombardment said the Antonovs returned the following day, but did not bomb. He surmised this was because the village had been completely destroyed; there was nothing left to burn. On 27 August 2004, at least 26 civilians died in the town of Habila when Antonovs launched the fiercest bom bardment of the war thus far. Jamal Abdul Hamman Arbab, a graduate of Khartoum University who was visiting relatives in Habila at the time, saw his brother, sister and two nephews killed. Five others were wounded, including his mother and another two brothers.

Antonovs bombed Habila six times that day,' he told me. 'There are many ques tions about this bombing: there were police in Habila, and army. But Habila was full of people displaced by attacks on villages all around. We think the bombing was because of the displaced.

The air campaign of 2003-4 was qualita tively different from aerial bombardment in other, earlier Sudanese theatres.

Antonov cargo planes were no longer blindly scattering barrels of explosives. The army had acquired ground-attack helicopters and tactical support aircraft that delivered their deadly loads with a new precision - most lethally, according to eyewitnesses, when targeting columns of displaced people.

When it was finally, belatedly taken to task, the Sudan government simply de nied it was using planes. In Darfur, this claim was treated with the contempt it deserved.

'We have cows,' one old man told me. 'Only the government has planes!'

A no-fly zone as a solution to Darfur's increasingly complex crisis is an easy sound bite for presidential hopefuls ea ger to harness the massive grassroots support enjoyed by the Save Darfur

Coalition, the high-profile, high-decibel advocacy movement which has cam paigned vigorously for this. But those who are demanding a no-fly zone are reading from an outdated script. The numbers of civilians killed by air attacks this year is in the dozens. It's a shocking crime for a government to bombard its own people. But it's simply wrong to say, as Senator Hillary Clinton did during a speech in Washington at the end of June, that US action should be 'focused on the air support the Sudanese provide to the Janjaweed as they rape and pillage their way through villages.' Aerial bombard ment, Clinton claimed , 'comes before, during and after.'

In 2003-2004, it did. In 2007, it does not. The worst violence in Darfur this year has not been caused by aerial bombard ment, or by Janjaweed attacks against villages, as it was at the height of the conflict in 2003-4. Darfur in 2007 is not Rwanda. There is a multiplicity of con flicts in Darfur today - government vs. rebel, rebel vs. rebel, former rebel vs. rebel, Arab vs. Arab, Janjaweed vs. Arab, Central Reserve Police vs. Popular Defense Forces, armed bandits vs. any one with anything to loot ... The most lethal battles this year have been caused by fights over land between Arab militias initially armed by Khartoum but now fighting each other. A distant second is attacks on rebel-controlled villages by former rebels now alighed with the Su dan government. Not once has there been bombing 'before, during and after' attacks. Today, stopping military flights wouldn't make much of a difference to the Darfurian people.

On 13 July, the US envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, seemed to imply that it would, thereby giving fuel to the inter ventionist lobby in the US - a lobby that some see as an obstacle to peace because of the influence it exerts over the US Congress. This infuence, one of Ameri ca's most eminent Sudan scholars says, 'intimidates the State Department and




hinders any rational approach to Su dan.'

After a brief visit to Darfur in July, Natsios told a news conference in Khar toum:

After a halt in the bombing between the beginning of February and the end of April in 2007, the Sudanese government has resumed bombing in Darfur ... We urge the Sudanese government to end all bombing in Darfur immediately.

Natsios's words were problematic for several reasons. Firstly, he got his facts wrong. There was indeed a brief upsurge in aerial bombardment in the first half of 2007, but it was heaviest in April, when, according to him, it had not yet recom menced. Secondly, and most importantly, he gave no context or detail and did not even attempt to suggest the human cost of the bombardment. I know of three confirmed deaths - two in the village of Amarai in north Darfur, and one in a smaller village a few miles south. There will be more, but it is unlikely that there were many more. Rebel commanders have thuraya satellite telephones and are not backwards in coming forwards with headline news for the world's media.

The background to the renewed bom bardment is this: addressing visitors to the Holocaust Museum in Washington on Remembrance Day, in mid-April, President Bush launched a broadside against the rebels who refused to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement in May 2006. 'They're roaming the Darfur countryside

pillaging and stealing at will,' he said. 'They have killed civilians, they've plun dered vehicles and plundered supplies from international aid workers, they've added to the lawlessness. The govern ment in Khartoum has been unable to control the problem.' He might as well have said 'unfortunately'.

A few days after Bush spoke, Khartoum

took its helicopter gunships out of wraps and attacked the area of north Darfur where scores of non-signatory command ers from the Sudan Liberation Army were meeting to try to unify their ranks and their negotiating position. First Antonov bombers struck north of Amarai, the village in which the commanders were gathering. There were no casual ties. Then they struck south, killing a young woman. Four days after Bush's grotesquely exaggerated accusation, they hit the conference site itself - unleashing two Antonovs and two helicopter gun ships in the most brazen and egregious violation of the ceasefire in many months. They did not hit the commanders, who were hidden from sight in Amarai's wooded valley. They hit Amarai village and its small market. One SLA leader claimed the bombardment killed 26 civil ians. Privately, another said the true toll

was two. A third said it was three.

'I do not think we have to convince the world there are abuses in Darfur,' he said. 'We have to keep ourselves honest, or we

will lose our credibility.'

Nastios' words deepened concern that Bush might incline more towards the interventionist urgings of many in the Save Darfur Coalition. Relief agencies operational in Darfur scrambled to see if there was anything they had missed, a degree of aerial bombardment that might change their calculations. There was not.

'Yes, the air strikes need to stop,' said one relief official in Darfur, 'but this is no more than one of many protection issues - and it's not the biggest problem. It's still completely true to say that the biggest threat to civilians is from ground attacks rather than air.'

Enforcing a no-fly zone would in any case be a phenomenal challenge: Darfur is bigger than Iraq and nearly 50 times larger than Kosovo, with the nearest airfields in Chad themselves a vast dis tance away from any NATO bases. Many




Bosnian war or the Rwanda genocide, but which bear little relation to the realities of Darfur today. In his testimony to the House of Representatives in April, John Prendergast of ENOUGH spoke of the dangers of a no-fly zone, remarking that taking this action resulted in a humanitar ian crisis, that crisis would be on 'our

watch' and therefore the US should be ready to deploy ground forces to sustain the humanitarian effort. It is a short step from this position to advocating an inva sionfor humanitarian purposes.'

Khartoum is already claiming that inter national aid organizations are agents of hostile Western governments whose ulti mate goal is regime change. Threats of coercive military action are giving oxy gen to regime hardliners. A military strike would most likely hand President Omar al Bashir the same kind of propa ganda victory he scored when American cruise missiles knocked out a pharma ceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998.

Sound bites are no substitute for solu tions. To address the problem of air strikes, those who work in Darfur - and who understand how the Sudan govern ment works - want strengthened moni toring of hostile flights as envisaged under UN Security Council resolution 1591. This would require permanent AMIS access at airfields, where govern ment officials routinely make access dif ficult, with no curfew limitations. To be really effective, it would require new resources for the already overstretched AU forces.

Those concerned about Darfur - prima rily the United States, Britain and, since the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy, France - must stop indulging in confron tational rhetoric, empty threats and mega phone diplomacy. Instead, they must support efforts to mend rebel divisions, engage constructively with Khartoum, and encourage new peace talks that are not tied to artificial deadlines. They must push for strengthened monitoring and

military planners doubt its practicality. Humanitarians are concerned that a military approach to a no-fly zone would require bases in Chad. They believe this could exacerbate tensions between Su dan and Chad and undermine security and the peace processes in and between both Sudan and Chad.

The humanitarians' opposition to a no fly zone has not diminished the enthusi asm for it of presidential hopefuls. In a YouTube debate among them on 23July, Sen. Clinton proposed that the US mili tary take over the humanitarian airlift to

Darfur in the event of a no-fly zone leading to the grounding of humanitar ian flights. She did not explain how the

US military would deliver aid to those whose lives depend on it even if, as seems unlikely, US troops got as far as el Fasher without adding fuel to the exist ing fire.

'In theory perhaps 2500 US troops could secure the airfields and the supply routes to the camps for the displaced,' said Alex de Waal, programme director at the Social Science Research Council and a director of Justice Africa. 'But we can be sure that the Sudan government would strenu ously object and we would be locked into another cycle of escalating threats and counter-threats. For what? To stop the air force - a minor player in Darfur's crisis today - from flying. I cannot think of a serious humanitarian or human rights organization that advocates anything ap proaching this. It's very strange that politicians should be advocating a no-fly zone when most activist groups have abandoned the idea.'

De Waal warned that Darfur was becom ing a blank screen onto which US politi cians projected their moral credentials.

'A simplified genocide narrative is getting in the way of seeing Darfur with any clarity,' he said. 'The presidential hopefuls arefloating military proposals that might have made sense at the height of the




public reporting of hostile flights, and develop an international consensus for effective actions to change the situation where it would really make a difference - on the ground. AMIS needs to be strength ened immediately, with a new mandate that authorizes its troops to protect the camps for the displaced.

As with medicine, the humanitarian's first obligation is to do no harm. All talk of coercive military action must end - it's recklessly dangerous and doesn't ad dress real solutions. The road to hell is still paved with good intentions.

Julie Flint, e-mail: flintjulie~hotmail.com

Editor's Note: In the cacophony buzz that surrounds these issues the frustration is acute amongst those who care passionately about the Sudanese people. We ask ourselves, 'have they taken leave of their senses'? The 'they' being those who profit from this despicable tragedy.

Many thanks to Julie for continuing to speak out where few do (and a plug for her book!)

Darfur: A Short History of a Long War by Julie Flint & Alexander De Waal published by ZED Books, London.

Nigeria: Contested Elections & an Unstable Democracy

Usman A. Tar & Alfred B. Zack Williams

On 14 and 21 April 2007, Nigerians went to the polls to elect a President, 36 State Governors, 109 Senators (Upper House of Parliament), and 360 members of the House of Representatives (Lower House). The elections were supposed to show case Nigeria's capacity to conduct - for the first time in the country's 47 years of independence - a peaceful transition from one 'democratic' regime to another (HRW, 2007c). Two previous elections of this nature (1983 and 2003) proved disappointing, as they became a mere charade for reproducing regimes in pow ers. Indeed, 2007 turned out to be a case of deja vu, as President Olusegun Obasanjo who had been rebuffed by the legislators in his quest for an unprec edented and unconstitutional third term, succeeded in thwarting the political am bitions of his rivals by imposing his chosen successor - Musa Yar'Adua - the younger brother of his erstwhile military comrade, General Shehu Yar'Adua.

Like all previous post-Independence elec tions, the 2007 elections were full of controversies and were widely con demned as fraudulent, violent and stage managed by the outgoing president Olusegun Obasanjo and his ruling Peo ples Democratic Party. The nature of the conduct of the elections has generated widespread anger and fury amongst Nigerians, as well as local and foreign observers. In spite of this, both the outgo ing President and the Independent Na tional Electoral Commission (INEC) defiantly declared that the elections though far from perfect, yet, the faults do not warrant cancellation. Indeed, Obasanjo warned that the elections should not be judged against the stand



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Imperial, Neo-Liberal Africa? || Darfur: Stop! Confrontational Rhetoric