20 Aug 2007: ISS Today: Sudan Held Secret Talks With UN Chief on Darfur Force

20 August 2007: Sudan Held Secret Talks With UN Chief on Darfur Force

 

‘Sudanese officials have been holding secret talks with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in different parts of the world regarding the Darfur peacekeeping force’.  - Wasil Ali. Sudan held secret talks with UN Chief on Darfur force. 13 August 2007 (copy received from Martin Plaut, BBC)

 

Commentary

 

Barely two weeks after the passing of Security Council Resolution 1769 (2007) on 31 July 2007, which authorised the 26-000 strong hybrid AU-UN force for Darfur, Sirag Al-Deen Hamed, head of the peace department in Sudan’s foreign ministry is reported to have claimed to have had direct channels of communication with Ban Ki-moon. This is in strong contrast with the approach taken by the new UN head’s predecessor, Kofi Annan.

 

Prior to this claim and admission, one had wondered: why did the government of Sudan appear to have so suddenly capitulated to international pressure, after nearly four years of vehement opposition to the presence of ‘foreign forces’ in Sudan’s Darfur region?

 

The world was led to believe that the capitulation was as a result of yet another triumph of European diplomacy, to add to a range of conflict resolution ‘breakthroughs’ in Africa from Liberia to Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, the DRC, Chad and Congo Brazzaville. The new duet in European politics, Britain’s Gordon Brown and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, were quick to claim the honours, or had the honours bestowed upon them by the Western media.

 

Sudan’s claim, however, suggests that the answer to the puzzling capitulation owes more to secret diplomacy between the UN’s chief executive and the strongman of Sudan, Omar Hassan El-Bashir.

 

After his insistence on a ‘softly softly’ approach in international relations, Ban Ki-Moon was arguably in desperate need of some substantive achievements in the resolution of the most devastating conflict since Rwanda. Sudan’s quid-pro-quo acceptance of the AU-UN hybrid force seems to have provided him with such success, while Bashir comes off looking like a rational peace-loving person, and the AU is vindicated on its policy stance of ‘African solutions to African problems.’

 

The hard question that remains to be asked is this: why did the international community have to resort to secret diplomacy to achieve a substantive entry point into the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Darfur, even if Sudan is perceived as being non-democratic?

 

The simplest answer lies in the fact that, since the regime change interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the world has grown increasingly wary of the interventionist agenda of the United States and its coalition, even when that agenda is disguised under the pretext of Tony Blair’s doctrine of humanitarian intervention and is supposedly intended to alleviate the plight of millions impacted by ongoing genocide, serious crimes against humanity and war crimes. Given the inadequacies of this doctrine and the difficulty of achieving a Security Council consensus on a chapter VII enforcement action, the only recourse for the UN system was secret diplomacy to leverage Sudan to accept the hybrid force.

 

A more complex answer may be found in international relations theory which suggests that like all secret deals the Darfur secret diplomacy is, following Scott Burchill’s definition, ‘a foul thing’ which gives ‘no credence to the common interests of humankind and the just claims of small nations [such as the Darfurians] seeking self-determination’. Thus, applying Burchill’s argument, the deal is a ‘product of elite collusion…resulting in an ‘arranged’ international relations to suit Great Power interests,’ arguably that of the US, China and Russia, as well as Sudan and all the defiance that it stands for.

 

Indeed, one can posit that the deal has only served to bolster the state of Sudan rather than guarantee the chances of the speedy, durable peace in Darfur that has been heralded as the impending consequence of the agreement on the deployment of the hybrid force.

 

The truth of the matter is that Sudan Resolution 1769 (2007) is, as a Sudanese official has claimed, a ‘victory for Sudanese diplomacy’ in that it effectively preserves ‘the African character of the operation’ by the AU Mission in Sudan (AMIS) since 2004. That African character has been and will continue to be informed by, among other determinants, the following challenges:

1. Force generation of well equipped African national contingents in the required numbers, on a sustainable basis, for as long as the conflict ebbs and flows
2. The difficulties of coordinating the heavy support package between the UN and the AU on the ground
3. The conditionalities regarding the use of force for mission accomplishment, especially in terms of force protection and the enduring need for civilian protection
4. The lack of assured compromises towards a common position on the part of the rebels for effective peace talks with the government of Sudan, necessary to establish a respectable peace that is worthy of keeping
5. The possibility of a continuing non-permissive environment in which both the forces of the government of Sudan and the rebels will be prepared to use force to achieve their political objectives and to maintain and restore the domestic balance of force and power in the Darfur region, and
6. The valid assumption that the warring parties will also not hesitate to deny freedom of movement and humanitarian access, as well as to resolve their political and operational differences with the hybrid force.

 

For all intents and purposes these factors suggest the strong likelihood of robust warfighting operations for the hybrid force – or more aptly the hybrid operation - which the international community may not have the appetite to stomach. For all these reasons, the conflict in Darfur will continue to occupy centre stage in contemporary international relations, in spite of the West’s preoccupation with the ‘war on terror’.

 

The quickest solution, if one can stake out such a venture, will be to muster critical consensus within the Security Council to sanction a chapter VIII enforcement action. But such a neo-liberal agenda will be difficult, if not impossible to achieve in the foreseeable future. The second best option is the hybrid operation which, nonetheless, should be backstopped not by the heavy support package put together by the UN, but rather by other regional hybrid coalitions from the North. This limitation notwithstanding, the hybrid force should be prepared to give weight to its chapter VII protection mandate by demonstrating the will to use force for critical tasks from the start.

 

Festus Aboagye, Head: Training for Peace Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)