Sudan Pact Complicates Ending Darfur Conflict

As the Security Council discussed peace prospects for Sudan with the country’s new joint leadership Tuesday, it faced a conundrum: Should it punish those responsible for war atrocities if they are also the ones responsible for future peace?

Sudan’s vice president, Ali Osman Mohammed Taha, traveled to New York with his erstwhile enemy and soon-to-be co-vice president, rebel leader John Garang, to tell the council that last month’s peace agreement had opened a new chapter in their nation’s history. The pact ended a 21-year civil war between the north and south.

But the council also heard from U.N. experts that a separate conflict, in the country’s western Darfur region, was raging on. Sudanese government leaders are key to holding together the north-south peace deal, but human rights groups charge that many of them have overseen the systematic attacks on rebels and civilians in Darfur.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his special envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, placed the blame for the continuing conflict in Darfur squarely on the government’s shoulders. It has failed to take promised steps to protect human rights in Darfur and is allowing those responsible for “atrocious crimes on a massive scale” to go unpunished, Annan said in a report released Monday.

Although the report acknowledges that rebel groups have launched attacks to provoke government retaliation, it notes that in the last six months, attacks on civilians by government-allied militias have continued and recently intensified.

“Militias continue to attack, claiming they are not part of any agreement. The government has not stopped them,” the report says. “Disarmament and arrest of the perpetrators of these brutal acts is the single most important demand of the [Security] Council and the clearest case of failure by the government to live up to its responsibilities.”

The conflict began in February 2003 when rebel groups took up arms against the government. Under Khartoum’s “scorched earth” response with allied militias, tens of thousands of people have been killed and nearly 2 million displaced in rebel areas. As people have fled, hundreds of thousands have died of starvation and disease.

The U.S. has labeled as genocide the government-backed militias’ systematic killing of farmers in Darfur.

An independent U.N. investigation concluded in January that there had been massive human rights violations, rapes and killings, and it named 61 militia and government leaders in a sealed list as potential war criminals who should be tried in a special tribunal outside Sudan.

Many Sudan observers say members of Sudan’s Cabinet are on that list. If they are named as suspected war criminals, they will not be allowed into the United States to talk about Sudan’s peace. And Sudanese diplomats say no official would be cooperative with efforts to work with past enemies if one faced prosecution.

Taha said Tuesday that Sudan had agreed to prosecute violators of human rights, but only within its own judicial system.

“We strongly believe that there are no grounds to warrant taking suspects outside the country, and we strongly feel that such an action would ... push things to degenerate rather than maintain peace,” he told reporters after the Security Council session.

Although the fighting continues in Darfur, world leaders will focus on supporting the new “unity government” made up of government officials and their former opponents.

The European Union released some of Sudan’s frozen assets last week as a reward for concluding the north-south peace accord, but the U.S. and Britain are trying to link financial and economic rewards to peace throughout the country.

“Until Darfur is settled, there will be no big carrot,” said a senior U.S. official who deals with the Sudan issue.

Garang, the leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, said that when he formally joins the government in a few weeks, he will work to ensure that the north-south pact can be used as a model for Darfur and other parts of Sudan.

“We have a political and moral obligation to help bring peace in Darfur,” he said. He added that leaders who had committed crimes could not have immunity, but that peace should come before punishment.

“I want to focus on the immediate problem, and the immediate problem is to achieve peace in Darfur. That really should be our concentration,” he said.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes, met with U.N. diplomats Tuesday to push an alternative to the International Criminal Court, which Washington opposes.

He said that the Security Council was united in its desire to hold Sudanese leaders accountable but that members disagreed over where and when.

Asked which should come first, accountability or stability, he said, “The key is to stop the violence, to stop the killing. It’s hard to do justice before there is a stable environment.”