Darfur Peace Process

Six years of internationally-sponsored talks to end the conflict between the Sudanese government and the Darfur armed opposition movements will resume in mid-September 2010, after a break for the Moslem fasting month of Ramadan, with deep disagreement over Khartoum's plans to 'domesticate' the peace process—to shift the focus from Qatar to Sudan and, in so doing, many Darfurians fear, bring it under the control of the ruling National Congress Party.

A strategy document circulated in August and entitled 'Darfur: Towards a New Strategy to Achieve Comprehensive Peace, Security and Development' lays out the government's plans for 'a radical re-direction' of the peace process. It pays lip service to the talks underway in Doha—'The Doha forum remains the only agreed venue for the negotiation between the government and the rebel movements'—but says the 'growing obstinacy' of the still-fragmenting movements, the 'negative intervention' and 'competition' of some regional powers, and the 'limitations' of the mediation necessitate a new and 'extensive internal process' that will involve, among others, the officials elected in April's nationwide ballot (which most Darfurians boycotted).

This new process will have five axes: security, including disarmament and 'enhancing the capacity of the security organs'; development; resettlement, including accelerating the 'voluntary' return of the displaced to their villages; reconciliation, with justice to be served through national mechanisms; and negotiation. On 9 August, however, the official in charge of the Darfur dossier, Ghazi Salahuddin, told Arab diplomats in Khartoum that while the government would work to reach a negotiated settlement—it was not a priority.

A decision to relocate the inhabitants of Kalma camp, announced by South Darfur Governor Abdel Hamid Musa Kasha on 9 August—in Khartoum—deepened concern that 'domestication' will proceed in parallel with a range of coercive measures, including continued military action against the armed opposition movements in Darfur and attempts to dismantle the camps that house more than 2.5 million displaced. In July, fighting in Kalma, the largest camp in South Darfur, between supporters and opponents of the Doha process left at least five people dead. Citing this as justification, the government denied aid agencies access to the camp. Musa Kasha said the camp's continued existence posed a security threat both to the state capital, Nyala, and to African Union/United Nations Hybrid operation in Darfur (UNAMID) forces, personnel and planes based there.

The Darfur peace talks opened in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2004 but moved to Qatar in 2009 after the Darfur Peace Agreement signed in Abuja by the government and one faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) failed to halt the war. Since then, the rebel movements have continued to fragment and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), militarily the strongest rebel group, has joined the original chairman of the SLA, Abdel Wahid Mohamed al Nur, in opposing and boycotting the Doha talks. In January 2010, the government resumed land and air strikes against areas controlled by the two groups. The offensive drew only belated and faint criticism from Western nations, which are more concerned with the South's January 2011 self-determination referendum and the possibility of renewed conflict between the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army and the National Congress Party.

The muted response of internationals, both to the renewed offensives and to Khartoum's 'domestication' initiative, reflects intense frustration with the incoherence of the armed movements and a growing conviction that, although Doha is going nowhere, it has to continue to guarantee development money pledged by Qatar and to avoid alienating Western activists who accuse Khartoum of committing 'ongoing genocide' in Darfur. In speaking out, moreover, key Western nations and donors would find themselves in conflict with their own position—which echoes the government's—that the war in Darfur is over and the time has come for policies of stabilization that link security and development.

In its strategy paper, the government asks the international community to support its new, 'comprehensive political process in a manner that recognizes the Sudanese lead of the sustainable solution'. Thus far, there are no dissenting voices. But many Darfurians, Arab and non-Arab, fear that this Sudanese-led process will mark the end of hopes of a sustainable peace and, like others that have preceded it, will be characterized by oppression, coercion and bribery. The Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM), the rebel coalition that is now the only player of note in Doha, has said 'domestication' will serve only to silence opposition and weaken the negotiating position of the victims of the war. Civil society representatives, whose participation in the Doha process was portrayed as a big step forward on the road to peace, have fiercely opposed it. They contend that the government did not show any serious political will to resolve the conflict in Doha in June-July. They want the mediation, and its international supporters, to draw up indicators for government commitment and seriousness in making peace—and pin them down to it.

JEM has denounced 'domestication' as a rerun of the 'peace from within' strategy attempted in the Nuba mountains after the jihad of the early 1990s failed to defeat the insurgency there. That strategy aimed to buy off Nuba leaders and fatally weaken the insurgency. It went hand in hand with a wider economic strategy of selling to supporters of the regime large tracts of land from which Nuba had been driven by starvation and force of arms. Portrayed by the government as a two-track policy of peace and development, it initially won the support of a number of development agency personnel in Khartoum.

Click here for a chronology of events in the Darfur peace process and here for a chronology on the on-off Sudan-Chad proxy war.

Confused about the armed groups operating in Darfur and eastern Chad? Click here for a detailed "Who's Who" of Darfuri and Chadian armed opposition groups.

Updated August 2010