Amir Osman: Thanks for having us here. I will start talking about the situation briefly on the ground. I might go into the details that you are aware of.

In recent conversation with some colleagues who work on the ground in Darfur — they are from Darfur and work for local NGOs, humanitarian and human rights organizations — the message they are sending to us is that the activists on the ground are really frustrated … because they lost trust in the international community. They have been living in the [internally displaced persons] camps, about 70 IDP camps all over Darfur in a difficult situation and they are hopeful that someone will come one day and rescue them . . .

Recently, most of the IDP camps that are in Darfur witnessed violence by the rebels and by the government. Some of the rebel movements went to the IDPs and tried to include some people. The government responded: We had an incident in July where the government literally went to … one of the biggest IDP camps and tried to send people back to the villages and people were resisting going back. The security agents, the international security agents and the military detained about 76 IDPs — no one knows their whereabouts. Now, the U.N. is still investigating . . .

[The Sudanese government wants] people to go back to their villages in order to make the situation look better for the international community . . . The government is about to do a census for the coming elections and doing the census of the IDPs where they are living — the IDP camps — may not help the government policy . . .

Another aspect people are highlighting about the situation on the ground is the recent . . . inter-tribe fighting through the government bribing some of the chiefs of the tribes and giving lands of the Darfurian people to non-Sudanese people. There is an issue of bringing people from Chad, Niger and other neighboring countries and providing them in some cases citizenship, IDs and giving them the land in order to change the demography or Darfur for the same reasons — the coming elections — and because these tribes are allied with the government of Sudan . . .

Dealing with the Sudanese government

Lawrence Rossin: Amir has described the situation on the ground. I think the observation that will bother experts and analysts . . . is that compared to 2003, 2004, the rate of killing has declined. I wouldn't say the rate of displacement has declined because the U.N. so far this year has recorded about 300,000 new people coming into the camps, so we're still seeing a considerable — roughly 30,000 people a month — displacement going on in Darfur. To the degree in which the killing has gone down, to the degree in which displacement continues or not, to the degree in which any of these things are happening or not, to the degree in which the situation in the camps is stable or is deteriorating, this core issue which comes out here, which to me argues more strongly than anything else for continued international engagement, continued public engagement with regard to Darfur and the undiminished need for definitive, strong international action to change the situation on the ground in Darfur, and that is that, as of now, and indeed for the whole entire period of the genocide in Darfur, there has been zero counterweight to the government of Sudan on the ground in Darfur. If the armed forces of Sudan and the Janjaweed have diminished their actual attacks on villages, having destroyed so many and displaced so many people, that does not mean that the situation is definitively stabilized.

Tomorrow, even while we're sitting here, the government in Sudan could be, for whatever reasons, making the decision to reignite that activity. And unlike other situations, similar situations in the world, there's actually no international presence that can protect the people of Darfur, that can protect the humanitarian aid on which those people depend. The thing could be turned on — just like it may have been turned off — at any moment.

The Times … has written about the peacekeeping situation and the need to get peacekeepers on the ground and the difficult challenge of dealing with the Sudanese government because it is so duplicitous and because the international will has tended to be weak. And I think where we are right now on the UNAMID force, the hybrid peacekeeping force, exemplifies the situations that you've raised concerns about a number of times in the past more clearly and more demanding of action than has been the case before.

You know the history that the first resolution that actually called for peacekeeping force passed in August of '06, Resolution 1706, and was never implemented. I had a long career in U.N. peacekeeping, and before that with the U.S. government in post-crisis diplomacy — this is the first time with the U.N. enacting a peacekeeping force that was simply not implemented because of a host country obstruction and stonewalling . . . You'll remember then that there was a meeting at Addis Ababa of all the international players, this hybrid force concept was developed in part to assuage purported Sudanese concerns, didn't go anywhere. [Sudanese President Omar Bashir] disowned his foreign minister before he got back to Khartoum. We saw a number of months of Sudanese obstruction and gradually growing pressure for sanctions in the Security Council . . .

That led to, apparently, the decision of the Sudanese government to unconditionally accept, as they stated at the time, the peacekeeping force . . .

It was interesting at the time, and I think you flagged it in an editorial in June, which I'm looking at here, that although the Sudanese government announced this, nobody was sort of thrilled about it in the international community or among a lot of foreign affairs analysts, because we had seen before these kind of acceptances that weren't quite real . . . Never did we hear that Omar al-Bashir say that he had unconditionally accepted it. And, in fact, he speaks to domestic audiences, and he spoke to one right at that very same time, and said it's only going to be African troops, and it's not going to be U.N. command and control, and it's going to be an African force with the U.N. carrying bags . . .

So we've seen since the passage of Resolution 1769 in August of this year with the hybrid force, already in October the secretary general reported to the Security Council that the Sudanese government was stonewalling. They said at the time that they were not hearing back, but it was U.N.-speak for stonewalling . . .

In November again the secretary general reported on that in stronger terms, and then of course we saw the head of peacekeeping … and the envoy … both report to the security council at the beginning of [December] . . . in extremely strong terms that the Sudanese government was reneging on all of the commitments they've made . . .

Now we have a situation where the government of Sudan is rejecting — not merely stonewalling, but now actually rejecting — the troop-contributing countries list that was sent by the U.N. and the African Union working together . . . They are rejecting the U.N. command and control. Bashir, in his remarks two weeks ago, stressed this would be an African Union force, responsive with green helmets to the African Union with U.N. assistance. And then they're raising all kind of specific things . . . no night operations, the government of Sudan should be able to UNAMID communications whenever to government of Sudan is going to carry out a military operation in Darfur, restricting the types of aircraft that can land, a whole variety of restrictive measures . . .

One of the lessons obviously that the Sudanese can draw from international behavior is that the international community is not serious about 1769, it's not serious about UNAMID success.

Paul Thornton: I just want to get your idea about what adequate pressure would be on Sudan. It just seems like it's been just a lot of talk.

Rossin: Well, the pressure that has been has been U.S. sanctions — limited sanctions, they were increased last year. Otherwise, it's been mostly scattershot diplomacy. There haven't been global sanctions. There haven't been any trade measures taken by anybody else. So really, the concrete pressure has been primarily American pressure . . . Earlier this year we think we saw some Chinese quiet engagement, but the Chinese have backed off since September. What we're told by the people in the U.N. who are pretty visible is in fact the Chinese have receded from any kind of constructive engagement, I think deciding that the Olympic pressure has been handled.

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