Just World News with Helena Cobban

There was a significant op-ed on Darfur in the NYT today. It’s by Alan J. Kuperman, who was once Legislative Director for sen. Charles Schumer– and in it, Kuperman directly takes on the arguments of those in the US who argue that outside military intervention is needed to stop the anti-“black” genocide in Darfur.
Kuperman notes that,

Without such intervention, Sudan’s government last month agreed to a peace accord pledging to disarm Arab janjaweed militias and resettle displaced civilians. By contrast, Darfur’s black rebels, who are touted by the wristband crowd [that is, people in the US “Safe Darfur” movement who wear green wristbands to signal their commitment] as freedom fighters, rejected the deal because it did not give them full regional control. Put simply, the rebels were willing to let genocide continue against their own people rather than compromise their demand for power.

This is a very strong statement of a case I’ve been making– in much more tentative terms– here on JWN over the past few weeks.
Kuperman recalls that, after US diplomatic intervention early this month the Khartoum government made even more concessions to the rebels, raising hopes that at last the two holdout rebel factions might be persuaded to join the peace agreement…

But that hope was crushed last week when the rebels viciously turned on each other. As this newspaper reported, “The rebels have unleashed a tide of violence against the very civilians they once joined forces to protect.”
Seemingly bizarre, this rejection of peace by factions claiming to seek it is actually revelatory. It helps explain why violence originally broke out in Darfur, how the Save Darfur movement unintentionally poured fuel on the fire, and what can be done to stanch genocidal violence in Sudan and elsewhere.
Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region’s blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks.
This reality has been obscured by Sudan’s criminally irresponsible reaction to the rebellion: arming militias to carry out a scorched-earth counterinsurgency. These Arab forces, who already resented the black tribes over past land disputes and recent attacks, were only too happy to rape and pillage any village suspected of supporting the rebels.
In light of janjaweed atrocities, it is natural to romanticize the other side as freedom fighters. But Darfur’s rebels do not deserve that title. They took up arms not to stop genocide — which erupted only after they rebelled — but to gain tribal domination…
Advocates of intervention play down rebel responsibility because it is easier to build support for stopping genocide than for becoming entangled in yet another messy civil war. But their persistent calls for intervention have actually worsened the violence.
The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels’ initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials’ extracting further concessions from Khartoum.
The key to rescuing Darfur is to reverse these perverse incentives. Spoiler rebels should be told that the game is over, and that further resistance will no longer be rewarded but punished by the loss of posts reserved for them in the peace agreement.

Kuperman’s conclusion is, “Ultimately, if the rebels refuse, military force will be required to defeat them.”
I disagree with this. I still maintain that there are always alternatives to the use of violence! And certainly in this situation, when the Khartoum government has expressed a commitment to general disarmament of militia forces, resettlement of the displaced, and reconstruction of the three Darfur provinces under a large degree of self-government…
Surely this is a project that could and should be easy to sell to the people of Darfur, even if not to all of their ambitious, self-appointed “leaders”.
But it’s interesting to see where Kuperman goes with his argument about the need to use force to quell the anti-humane rebellion. He argues that no UN force could achieve this. (And I would note here that if US and European forces were not so terrifically badly tied up in ill-planned missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, then they would be in a much, much better position to offer logistics and even personnel support for a UN force in Darfur… )
So Kuperman conclusion is this:

we should let Sudan’s army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes. This option will be distasteful to many, but Sudan has signed a peace treaty, so it deserves the right to defend its sovereignty against rebels who refuse to, so long as it observes the treaty and the laws of war.

Though I agree, in general, with the argument that Sudan has a right to exercise its own national soveriegnty, I’m still not sure I totally agree with Kuperman’s proposal. For the anti-violence reasons given above; but also, the calibration of allowing Khartoum to re-assert its sovereign powers in Darfur while not enacting any atrocities might be very hard to achieve…
But Kuperman also makes a very good longer-range argument regarding the direction of US foreign policy:

Indeed, to avoid further catastrophes like Darfur, the United States should announce a policy of never intervening to help provocative rebels, diplomatically or militarily, so long as opposing armies avoid excessive retaliation. This would encourage restraint on both sides. Instead we should redirect intervention resources to support “people power” movements that pursue change peacefully, as they have done successfully over the past two decades in the Philippines, Indonesia, Serbia and elsewhere.
America, born in revolution, has a soft spot for rebels who claim to be freedom fighters, including those in Darfur. But to reduce genocidal violence, we must withhold support for the cynical provocations of militants who bear little resemblance to our founders.

This is an excellent argument. Following that advice would, of course, have avoided us getting drawn by Ahmed Chalabi and all his fellow Iraqi snake-oil salesmen into the tragically criminal invasion of Iraq– and would guide us not to accede to the invasion requests now being voiced by some anti-regime exiles from Iran.
I was interested to read Kuperman’s article. In 2001 he published a controversial short book on Rwanda in which he argued (I think) that the genocide there would have been much harder to stop militarily than most people thought, and that therefore claims that “the US could have stopped it but chose not to” were misleading… But he is evidently someone who has studied very closely the many ethical dilemmas entangled in the topic that western liberals like to call “humanitarian intervention”, but that people in the international humanitarian-law field often prefer to call “military action with a claimed ‘humanitarian’ motivation.” (Noting, of course, that wars are always launched with claimed ‘humanitarian’ aims much publicized. No national leader ever says publicly, ‘Okay chaps, let’s go out and launch ourselves a highly inhumane, unjust war.’..)
I would personally love to discuss all these issues more with Kuperman some time. I am strongly of the opinion that the “international community” needs to do a lot more to fund, refine, and upgrade our ability to launch all kinds of nonviolent interventions to protect lives and help broker and buttress peace agreements around the world, and that that is a better path to focus on than simply letting national governments reassert their own sovereignty while piously bleating at them from outside about the need to respect IHL norms.
But anyway, that discussion is for another day. For today, I am just glad to see Alan Kuperman entering the debate on Darfur with this feisty and generally strongly reasoned article.

May 31 is a deadline for the parties to the fighting in Darfur to sign onto the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), that was concluded in Abuja, Nigeria, on May 5. The augurs don’t look particularly good. Reuters is reporting that the head of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Khalil Ibrahim, and representatives of the other holdouts– a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)– were heading to a last-minute meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia to try to find common ground with the AU negotiators. (Slovenia? Why Slovenia? Nice beaches?)
Ibrahim told Reuters:

“We are not going to sign this agreement unless there is a radical change including real regional government for Darfur, and reconstruction of Darfur, compensation for our people and a fair share of power.”

For his part, the AU’s Peace and Security Commissioner, Said Djinnit, told AFP today that, “Until the May 31 deadline expires, we are hopeful that the parties that have not signed will sign the Abuja peace agreement.”
That report continues,

Djinnit said that if they fail to append their signatures on the Darfur Peace Agreement, the bloc’s Peace and Security council would meet to discuss measures to take against them.
“We hope that they will exemplify a historic responsibility and to realise that the agreement is a good basis to achieve peace in Darfur,” Djinnit said.
“If not, the Peace and Security Council will meet to see what measures to take … measures will be taken.”
The AU special representative in Sudan Baba Gana Kingibe said efforts were continuing to woo the holdouts to sign the agreement.

Reuters is meanwhile also reporting that in Khartoum the two ruling parties, “are divided over sending U.N. forces to its violent Darfur region.” This, though last week veteran UN troubleshooter Lakhdar Brahimi apparently secured a guarantee from Khartoum that a joint AU-UN assessment team could begin working inside Sudan “within days.”
It all sounds like a very tangled web indeed. The near-daily reports of the UN. Country Team in Sudan make clear that throughout Darfur a continuing level of anti-civilian violence, often lethal, still continues– and that it is being committed by all sides. (You can access these reports and a lot of other great, up-to-date info through this excellent Reliefweb portal.)
Writing over at Headheeb May 26, Jonathan Edelstein noted the fragility of the DPA, and the possibility that the fighting in Darfur could spill over even more than it already has done into Chad and even perhaps the north of the Central African Republic. If you scroll down to the comments there, he makes this wise observation:

I’ve noticed the same pattern in connection with Middle East peacemaking: the international mediators move heaven and earth to get the Israelis and Palestinians to sign an agreement, but then don’t invest the time in setting up monitoring and dispute resolution mechanisms. There’s a distressing absence of recognition that peace accords require maintenance, especially during the early stages.

In other words, it’s all very fine Robert Zoellick rushing over to Abuja at the beginning of the month to try to twist a few arms and win signatures onto the agreement, as he did. (He’d also made a similar arm-twisting visit to earlier rounds of the negotiations in Nairobi, as well.) But what the people of Darfur and the rest of Sudan really need to see is sustained, high-level commitment by Washington and all the world’s big powers to back the DPA by investing in real peacebuilding there. And to Jonathan’s list of what’s needed (ceasfire monitoring and dispute-resolution mechanisms) I would add a strong and crediblepeacekeeping presence, and also major reconstruction aid and a commitment to help the war-shattered communities to rebuild the livelihoods (as well as the lives) of their people.
As it is, it’s been a terrible struggle for the World Food Programme even to get, and once again to deliver, enough emergency rations to keep Darfur’s many thousands of IDPs alive (as I noted here.) People need to be able to return to their home communities in security and dignity, and start rebuilding a future! And as we know very clearly from what we see every day in Iraq or Afghanistan, people cannot do that under conditions of prolonged warfare or rampant public insecurity… The fighting needs to end. And the Abuja DPA provides a reasonable basis on which to do this.