Can Peacekeepers Alone Bring Peace to Darfur?
WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (OneWorld) - The UN's recent decision to deploy a hybrid UN-African Union (AU) peacekeeping force to the war-torn region of Darfur, Sudan comes amid concerns that military might alone may not adequately address the fundamental causes of the conflict.
The UN’s special envoy to Darfur, Jan Eliasson, was recently dispatched to the region to attempt to reinvigorate discussions “with local authorities, tribal leaders, civil society groups, Arab nomads, and internally displaced persons.” To this extent, Eliasson has begun to meet with principal Sudanese government officials to discuss the outcomes of the “pre-negotiation” talks that he and his AU counterpart, Salim Ahmed Salim, conducted with rebels recently in Arusha, Tanzania. The dialogue, held the first week of August, was an orchestrated attempt to lay out a common agenda among the various, divisive rebel factions in preparation for peace talks with the Sudanese government to be held in the coming months.
Casting a shadow over such advancements, however, was the absence of two influential leaders of rebel movements. The first, Suleiman Jamous, is the humanitarian coordinator of the SLA and is widely known and highly respected for “his highly conciliatory nature, his elder statesman qualities, [and] the fact that he has no blood on his hands.” Mr. Jamous was unable to attend as he is currently being held by Sudanese authorities under ‘hopsital’ arrest in a medical center where he was treated roughly a year ago. Abdel Wahid Mohammed, the other key figure whose presence was missed during the Arusha talks, chose not to attend due to his conviction that "the mediators speak about rebel unity, but in fact they encourage rebels' divisions because they invite anyone with a gun, a vehicle, and a satellite telephone to attend." Despite these ominous absences, it appears from a political and military standpoint that wholehearted efforts are being made on behalf of all parties involved and concrete results may actually be expected.
According to Sachs, conflict and strife are much more prevalent in low income regions as poverty sets off the chain of desperation, competition, loss of confidence in government, political instability, and finally, as in Sudan, a government that resorts to the illegitimate use of force. All of these ingredients had been brewing over the last several decades in Sudan before they provoked the principal actors to take up arms. Since the 1930s, desertification, propelled by both natural and human processes, has claimed huge swathes of grazing and arable land as the boundary between semi-desert and desert shifted an estimated 50 to 200 kilometers. Large-scale irrigation and mechanized farm projects, driven by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and supported by the government, have caused further deforestation and soil depletion, explains the Worldwatch Institute. Exponential population growth has also exerted an extreme pressure on already scarce resources. Accompanied by a 30-percent drop in precipitation over the past 80 years, all these events have induced increasing food insecurity and intermittent famine.
A recent UN report cautions, however, not to overlook as well the significance of “legal changes by the central government” and “the influx of small arms.” Modifications made to Sudanese governance structures have eroded the traditional method of negotiation previously employed at the local level to settle disputes between Arab pastoralists and ethnic African farmers, explains the report, "Sudan: Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment." The increasing availability of weapons has only served to further brutalize the means by which conflicts are now settled, it adds. It remains to be seen whether the amplified AU-UN force will be sufficient to address the intricate amalgamation of factors that has allowed the current crisis to deteriorate to such an extreme degree. ....................................................................................
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