21 Jun 2007: ISS Today: Sudan: People Before Process?

21 June 2007: Sudan: People Before Process?

 

Let’s face it, the daily news is depressing. It would seem that the array of disasters from natural-climate-change-induced floods to protracted civil wars are just not absorbing enough to keep us interested for too long. Indeed, in an era so obsessed with the ‘personalisation’ of almost every human experience it is rather surprising that international political troubleshooting processes remain so glaringly technocratic, unable to capture the imagination of citizens. The problems of diplomacy in Sudan’s western region of Darfur is a case in point. This week saw a whistle-stop tour of five African states by the UN Security Council envoys in another overestimated ‘high level visit’. The envoys’ stopover in Khartoum on Sunday 17 June had journalists asking whether they would be able to influence the Sudanese government to make good on the agreement to allow the deployment of a UN-AU force. And while the discussions on the command and control functions of a hybrid force and where the projected 23,000 troops are likely to come from are crucial to the viability of such an operation, they have also obscured some of the more fundamental questions currently facing the Darfur and Sudan in particular.

 

Such questions include those about the role of indigenous civil society actors in conflict resolution? What are community level views on the best ways in which to engage with the non-signatories? Who has legitimacy to speak on behalf of a community or IDP grouping, as is now the case? How has the impact of the war fed into a revision of basic livelihood security, particularly with regard to access to water and pasturage? How will access to water be affected by a larger deployment of international forces and operations? How can environmental challenges possibility feature in a revised Darfur Peace Agreement? How has the medianisation of the conflict influenced Darfurians’ own perceptions of the war, and what do they expect from the ‘international community’?

 

It should also be clear that the ‘magic bullet’ theory of peacekeeping deployment cannot be sustained in any part of the world. At the end of the day, local ownership over governance and development need to shape processes and their implementation. What is most striking about Darfur is that, far from being discovered through the exposés of international human rights organisations, it was the work of ordinary Darfurians who had tediously documented inequality and abuses that formed the foundation for further international human rights reports. Another important element is the role of student activism in both Darfur and Khartoum, where a highly politicised and active student body are key to mainstream politics and have traditionally been a relatively accurate indicator of the health of party politics. Essentially, the question is about the extent to which the Sudanese government and civil society have been represented as having agency over their actions? With regard to the latter, much has been said about the government’s courtship of China and vice versa, and while this is an influencing factor on Khartoum’s decisions it cannot be reduced to a simple causal relationship. China cannot make Khartoum do anything it does not already have interest in doing. Equally a UN-AU deployment is unlikely to change anything positively if the sentiments of the Sudanese themselves are not actively acknowledged.

 

Although the global awareness of Darfur’s plight has been a consequence of the marked changes in technology, the ability to effectively harness civil society concern both in Sudan and internationally remains a key challenge for policymakers. Who are the Sudanese? What does being Darfurian mean? How have people in the area successfully negotiated overlapping identities over centuries and how has this war fundamentally altered Darfurians’ expectations of the ‘international community’?

 

It is clear that early characterisations of the conflict as one between African and Arab have been unable to accommodate present allegiances, which question this simple dichotomy.  But that does not mean that we have moved beyond the rather useless victim-saviour/villain binary. One of the great missed opportunities of the Naivasha process was its assumption that the National Congress Party represents ‘Northern’ Sudan, and the CPA consequently allowed for Sharia law as it is currently practised to remain applicable in the North. This is despite the great diversity of views on whether Shariah should form the basis for law among Northern civil society and even some traditional leaders.

 

The words of captured BBC journalist Alan Johnson reprinted in the Guardian newspaper this week serves to emphasise the importance of a people centred approach to political narratives. On the craft of radio reporting Johnston says,

 

I normally never tell war stories "... when I was in Jalalabad with the mortars coming down ... blah, blah, blah." But, on this one occasion, there is something I can remember from Grozny that illustrates the point. I was with a journalist, not a BBC bloke, who very much liked being in a war zone, and during the battle for the city, we were in an abandoned block of flats. We went into an apartment where a shell had come through the living-room wall. And I remember hearing this guy immediately start talking about whether it had been a bazooka shell or a rocket-propelled grenade that had done the damage, and where the soldier who fired it must have been standing on the street outside.

But if you looked around the room for a minute, you could see the life that used to go on in it. You could see the books that the family used to read, and the sort of pictures that they liked to hang on the walls, and, from photographs, you could see that they had three kids and that the oldest girl had graduated from university. Of course, their story, what had happened to them - what they were, and what they had lost - was what the war was all about. It did not really matter whether it was a bazooka or a rocket that had turned their world upside down.

Mariam Bibi Jooma, African Security Analysis Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)