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David Morse interviews Alex de Waal November 21, 2006

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Alex de Waal is an anthropologist and activist in African affairs whose book, Darfur: a Short History of a Long War, co-written with Julie Flint, offers one of the clearest glimpses of this hemorrhaging western part of Sudan. He shows the origins of today’s conflict and of the so-called “Janjaweed” who continue to terrorize farming villages in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.

De Waal was a key advisor to the negotiating team that struggled to create a viable Darfur Peace Agreement, signed last May by only one of the rebel groups. After spending several months in the process, De Waal was the last to leave. He spent additional days trying to get the other major rebel commander to sign, to no avail. The essential political issues were not resolved, he says, and there were personality clashes, as well.

Now all sides are violating the treaty. The Sudan government has gone back to bombing villages and arming the Janjaweed, and rebel factions are fighting each other and raiding refugee camps. The recent explosion of violence has forced humanitarian aid agencies to withdraw, leaving refugees and IDPs vulnerable to starvation. The ethnic cleansing and turmoil has spread into neighboring Chad. The crisis continues to loom.

In this interview, Alex de Waal analyzes what went wrong with the treaty. What position should the U.S. government take now? Is a military response called for? He says what is needed is diplomacy, not confrontation, as he argued in a recent article.

The interview took place at his home, not far from the Harvard campus, where he teaches.

David Morse is an independent journalist and novelist based in Connecticut. He is an activist on behalf of the Darfur cause, and is writing a book about Sudan. Morse has examined the role that oil plays in the conflict.

His novel, The Iron Bridge (Harcourt, 1998) predicts a series of petroleum wars in the early 21st century.

David Morse: Were you there [advising, at Abuja, Nigeria, where the peace talks were held] at the behest of the State Department?

Alex de Waal: I had worked for the African Union on and off on different issues, since before it was the African Union, when it was the OAU [Organization of African Unity] and I was asked to join the mediation team but I was vetoed by the Sudan Government. And then in the end Salim Ahmed Salim, the chief mediator, got around that and had me seconded to his personal staff. So the chief negotiator on the Sudan Government’s side, Majzoub Al-Khalifa, was very annoyed about that but there was nothing he could do. So I was there, I was seconded from Harvard to the African Union and the AU finally got around to asking for this seven months after it had happened.

David Morse: So who paid your checks?

Alex de Waal: Harvard continued to pay my salary and then my hotel bill was paid and food and so on was paid by the African Union most of the time.

David Morse: So you were on loan [from Harvard]?

Alex de Waal: On loan, yes. I had interactions with the State Department. I gave them my advice because there were State Department people there. And then I went to see them in Washington. They didn’t often listen to my advice. Well they listened, but they didn’t often take it.

David Morse: What was some of your advice?

Alex de Waal: I think the key pieces of advice that I gave to them – well I’ve given the same advice to everyone, but particularly to them – I thought they were overestimating the importance of Minni Minawi, I didn’t think he was such a significant figure. I felt that the key person on the movement side was Abdul Walid, although Abdul Walid was a very difficult interlocutor, very unreliable. He was sitting atop the most important constituencies. I felt Minni number one had too small a power base and number two had too bad a human rights record to be a credible leader, and the majority view in the U.S. Government was the other way.

David Morse: Overlooked the human rights record?

Alex de Waal: Yes and I think actually exaggerates its importance. The other point that I repeatedly made, which was based partly on the experience of the North-South talks, was the importance of doing this at the right pace, not trying to rush it, because although the rationale for doing everything very rapidly was very clear, you want to end the war, you want to end the suffering, at the same time these things will only work if they are done according to their own logic, if people have the time to talk through the issues, to build confidence.

When I first became involved in the process, which was a year earlier, at the end of 2004, I went to Addis Ababa in January of 2005 and I made an assessment with some colleagues who were security experts about how long it would take to get the security talks, the talks on the ceasefire and security arrangements, to make them work, and the consensus among the people I talked to was it would be a six to nine month job which would require a lot of time explaining things to the rebel commanders, because they were not very conversant with the key concepts, and some time confidence-building, between them, amongst each other, and then them with the government side. This was the strategy that had been followed in the North/South talks.

David Morse: Which took three years?

Alex de Waal: Yep. Exactly, and my role in that was very limited but the particular role I had was to to push for a separate confidence-building track on the security side which worked extremely well. It took a long time but because the overall talks took so long nobody noticed. And I wanted to do the same thing with some of the same people in Abuja. And when I went to Addis Ababa I spoke to the African Union and also to the UN at that time, which was January of 2005; their response was ‘we don’t have that length of time. We can’t wait six to nine months to get this settled; we need to do it in two or three months,’ and this was always the story.

David Morse: Were they pressured by anyone that you are aware of? What pressures was the AU under?

Alex de Waal: [The African Union] pressured themselves, but the key pressure came from Washington and to a lesser extent London, saying, “This has to be settled as quickly as we can.” And I think because it hadn’t been, or wasn’t perceived as being a long war (I think, as you know, that actually the roots are quite deep) people thought because it’s a short war, it can be fixed quickly. I don’t think that’s correct. Even a short war has complicated issues, and it takes a while to get them sorted out.

So I was very much emphasizing the importance of doing it very methodically, especially on the security side. And when I began to engage in Abuja I came with the same advice which was not listened to.

David Morse: Can you explain for a radio audience what you mean by the “security provisions?”

Alex de Waal: The security provisions include the ceasefire. Now the ceasefire is a lot more than simply a cessation of hostilities, what it actually involves is a whole complicated set of military maneuvers. It involves the contending armies withdrawing, disengaging, I should say, so they are not actually fighting each other; so they need to be mapped, their positions need to be verified; so they need to disengage, and then they need to withdraw to, on the government side to garrisons, and on the rebel side to specified areas, Then you need to begin the process of arms control and disarmament which, particularly applies to the militia, to the Janjaweed, but also to the heavy armaments and crew mounted weapons on both sides. So that’s already quite a complex process that would take something like six months to implement in a complicated situation like Darfur, which is then followed by the process of the encampment and the disarmament and demobilization of some of the rebel forces; the withdrawal of the majority of the government forces from the region; the disarmament of militia.

So the security arrangement also includes the arrangement then for the integration of the demobilized, or some of the former rebel combatants, into the national army; at what level and how are the units to be integrated and so on and issues to do with the demilitarization of society, the ultimate disbandment of tribal militia and so on. It’s really quite a complex process.

David Morse: Early on in that process there is a No-Fly agreement?

Alex de Waal: What we agreed on was that there is a ban on hostile military flights and a provision whereby all military movements including flights needs to be notified and approved by the AMIS, the African Union Mission in Sudan, seventy two hours in advance, and there was quite an intrusive monitoring regime whereby AMIS monitors, or if it gets replaced by the UN, the UN monitors can go to all military facilities including air fields to monitor. So there is not a No-Fly zone in the sense that there are no jets patrolling the skies to shoot down Sudanese military aircraft at take off, but on paper there is a commitment to no hostile military flights and all other military flights being authorized, being given an OK by the peacekeeping force with the monitoring regime that’s there. Then if there are violations of that they can get reported up the line to the peace and security council and so on, which is pretty much as good as you will get given the difficulties of actually operating a No-Fly zone using aircraft because its very unlikely that, let’s say it was a French military aircraft coming out of Chad, it’s very unlikely that it would shoot down a plane that it found in violation. What it would do is it would report it. So whether it’s reported from an aircraft in the sky or from the monitor on the ground doesn’t make a huge amount of difference.

[In addition to the complexities of working out the security agreement, and the sometimes contentious negotiations over future power-sharing and wealth-sharing between the rebels and the Sudan government, there was also a clash between two of the leaders of the SLA (Sudan Liberation Army): Minni Minawi (Minni Minawi Arkoi) who is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, and Abdul Walid (Abudal Walid Mohammed Al-Nur) who is from the more numerous Fur.]

David Morse: It’s appeared, from what I saw looking at the text, that a lot of thought had gone into security. And after the signing of the agreement in May you made some optimistic noises. Were you hopeful? I mean, or were you whistling n the dark?

Alex de Waal: I felt it was actually quite a good text. I felt the government conceded far more, particularly on the security side, than I would have expected. I felt the text was more deficient on the political side. But I thought the wealth-sharing and the security were very strong, could have been strengthened still further, but it was still pretty good. The main problem was that it was never going to work with Minni Minawi, (Minni Arkoi Minawi, leader of the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army, as the only signatory from the rebel side, which was why I stayed on in Abuja. Everyone else left and I stayed on.

David Morse: To try to get others to sign?

Alex de Waal: Yes.

David Morse: And was there hope even when you left, that with time they might have actually come around and signed?

Alex de Waal: Opinions were divided. I thought it was worth a try. I thought the odds on were fifty-fifty. It was certainly worth a try, and actually I also went to Nairobi. It happened in three stages. The first stage was when several of the other members of the mediation were present in Abuja for the first week after May 6th in which we were trying to get the African Union to give a commitment to Abdul Walid that it would continue some form of negotiation, which it wouldn’t do. It just fell slightly short. And then the next stage was also in Abuja when I was facilitating directly between Abdul Walid and the government, working on a memorandum of understanding with several points in it, one was security, which agreement was reached on, there were some small enhancements of the security text that Abdul Walid wanted, compensation where he didn’t get what he wanted and on power-sharing, where there was no progress.

David Morse: He was holding out for a Vice Presidency wasn’t he?

Alex de Waal: Not at that stage. No earlier on he had wanted the Vice Presidency.

David Morse: That simply was not on the table?

Alex de Waal: It was sort of ruled out of court. And possibly the mediation could have pushed harder in that direction but it didn’t. The key issues that they were looking for were more representation at the local level in Darfur at that stage. Then the third stage of this was in Nairobi where we got the SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the chief rebel group in the North/South civil war) involved and we were trying to set up a meeting in South Sudan where Salva Kiir Mayardit, the Vice President of South Sudan, would actually agree to the mediation process. And then Abdul Walid pulled out of that.

David Morse: What must he be like to work with? Is he a little paranoid?

Alex de Waal: He’s extremely erratic. He changes his mind from one hour to the next. He trusts absolutely nobody. He is just a hopeless leader. I think in a way he’s quite charming and quite humane. He’s not a killer. And he has some quite good political instincts. But he has no organizational skills at all.

David Morse: One sensed that from afar. It’s a shame that he did pull back from the talk with Salva Kiir.

Alex de Waal: Yes.

David Morse: Has that talk subsequently taken place?

Alex de Waal: No. What then happened was that several of his own lieutenants were so angered by his own ineptitude that they split from him and actually they announced his overthrow which was not fully consummated; so now that group of SLM which was at times put into two, because one group we had already moved to the so called G-19.

David Morse: And that was Minni Minawi?

Alex de Waal: No the Minni people had left earlier and then the Abdul Walid camp split in March into two camps with this G-19 which controls most of North Darfur, splitting off, and actually I convened in Abuja three attempts to try and get them back together but it didn’t work.

David Morse: Good for you for trying.

Alex de Waal: The lack of success in that maybe should have deterred me from continuing to try these things. But what can you do? There is only one option which is to keep on trying because I think had Abdul Walid signed, had he agreed to sign this DPA in May there would have been peace, I’m quite sure of that, but it was his failure to sign in May, even after May the 5th, he had about three or four weeks when he had sufficient credibility and standing among the people on the ground that he could have swung it and he just refused.

David Morse: It’s amazing when at different junctures in history one person can hold the cards.

Alex de Waal: Yep.

David Morse: It must have been hugely frustrating for you.

Alex de Waal: It was profoundly frustrating. And now, even if he does sign, it doesn’t matter because things have now gone out of his control, because the whole of the SLM is now fragmented. You have about a dozen different groups.

David Morse: Was it your impression that for two or three weeks after the signing that Minni Minawi had a favored relationship with the Sudan Government and that they were actually engaging in some joint attacks?

Alex de Waal: Not immediately. No. He was very reluctant to actually go to Khartoum. It took him a long time to make the move. Having decided to sign, under a lot of pressure, he expected that Abdul Walid would join and in fact he made various gestures in that direction, none of which obviously worked. And then he found himself trapped. He was trapped because the majority of his group were against him signing but he had no option. Now having signed he couldn’t pull out because they still wouldn’t trust him. He doesn’t have popular support because of his human rights record and so his only option at that time, by July, was to go – which was when he went back to Khartoum – was to throw his lot in with the Sudan Government. And it was really then at that point that we began to see the joint military operations. [Minni Minawi forces combining with Sudan government forces to attack Fur villages.]

David Morse: He was offered a post and accepted it?

Alex de Waal: Yeah. Well actually he insisted on it. “Senior Assistant.” In theory it is the fourth ranking post in the government. You have the President and the two Vice Presidents and then you have the Senior Assistant and then number five is the Assistant President. And he would come in at number four, and that post had been designed as an alternative to the Vice President’s post which was what the movement had originally demanded. And in fact it has all of the powers of the Vice President; it just doesn’t have the name. And that post would have gone to Abdul Walid if he had agreed. Minni insisted that it should go to him[self] as a precondition for his going to Khartoum.

David Morse: In your book, a “Short History of a Long War,” you show the seeds in a wonderfully anticipatory way that there is no love lost between [Minni Manawi and Abdul Walid] or at least, there is a lot of personal, and to what extent did that personal – apart from tribal animosity – to what extent is the personal animosity important?

Alex de Waal: I think the personal was much more important than any ethnic or tribal issues, because in fact in Abdul Walid’s group, I mean the one thing that Abdul Walid did was he managed to maintain good relations with all of the tribes including the Arabs, throughout, and his, for example, the leader of his delegation to the security arrangements is a Zaghawa. and said he, one of the things that you can really say about Abdul Walid is he’s just not a tribalist. The problem was a personal one, and Abdul Walid really felt that Minni had stolen the movement from him and didn’t trust him and feared him.

David Morse: Despite his not being a tribalist were there grounds, in your opinion – or do you think he felt there were grounds – for the fear of [Darfur] becoming a Zaghawa state.

Alex de Waal: I don’t think anyone who has a senior position within any of the Zaghawa groups, groupings, feels that there is a prospect for establishing a Zaghawa state. However they do want to do two things. Number one is to keep control of Chad. Chad is up to now still run by the Zaghawa [Chadian president Deby's tribe] essentially. And secondly they wanted to further increase the Zaghawa representation in the way that Darfur is run. But that in itself was creating a lot of dissention among the Zaghawa because the Zaghawa are a relatively small minority, probably only eight or nine percent of the Darfur population. A lot of Zaghawa leaders were saying that, “If we go down this track of trying to dominate Darfur we will have a reaction against us and we will be the losers,” and that’s exactly what’s happened.

David Morse: What about the prospects now?

Alex de Waal: It’s very uncertain now. I think the meeting that was in Addis Ababa last week with Kofi Annan was a step in the right direction. What was reported in the media was that they had watered down the UN troops issue and its true, they have, but that’s not the central issue. The central issue is not peace keepers. The central issue is the political solution. And what Kofi Annan managed to do was to get all of the key international players united for the first time since May, for the first time for more than six months, behind a political strategy. And the political strategy, a ceasefire and new round of negotiations to resolve the outstanding differences. Then this three-step approach towards improving the peacekeeping: Number one which is what’s called, “light support” from the UN to the AU, which is already happening. Number two is, “heavy support,” a lot of UN infrastructure going in to support the AU on the ground, and the third is a joint operation, which the Sudan Government has not agreed to.

Now there are two points to make. One is I think that the political strategy is the correct one. It’s not guaranteed of success and the main reason for that is it doesn’t fully take into account Chad, and the war in Chad, which has its own dynamic quite separate from Darfur. Even if Darfur is settled Chad will still be at war. And the fact that the JEM (Justice and Equality Movement) [component of ] The National Redemption Front, partly for that reason, are not willing to join this political process. So this political process is incomplete. If it brings in the SLM and the G-19 who call themselves “SLM”; they call themselves “SLM Unity.” Then it will have something.

The other point to make is – to my mind, and this also is an issue on which I advised the AU and the UN and the State Department – I said “don’t make peacekeepers the key issue.” It seemed to me that this issue of UN troops was always a distraction, for two reasons. Number one, there was never a prospect of sending a UN force in without Khartoum’s consent. It just was never going to happen. It was not practical.

David Morse: Can you say why?

Alex de Waal: It’s not practical because, well let me explain how the figures were arrived at. When we had the security talks in Abuja in March and April of this year, part of what we were doing was mapping all of the forces. We got a huge map and overlays, transparent overlays, and we got the Sudan Government to put on all of its garrisons and camps and so on. On one overlay, Minni Minawi, on another Abdul Walid, etc, so each one could only see their own, and then we could put them all together. And based on those overlays, which have got all of the military positions marked out, there was an implementation team with the AU force commander and the UN working together and someone from the State Department as well; two UN generals, and they worked on an implementation plan which involved demilitarizing certain areas, certain roads, all of the withdrawal, all of the different activities that would be required in order to make the ceasefire and security arrangements work. And on the basis of that, then the AU force commander and the two UN generals estimated what it would take to implement the different stages of the ceasefire. And they said the full strength to properly implement this would take about 20,000 troops. The initial stage would take about 11,000. Then it would be something like 14,000 or 15,000, then it would be 20,000, which would be 17,000 troops 3,000 civilian police, the civilian police mainly for the IDP camps because there is a provision for the Sudanese Police to withdraw from the camps and the IDPs to have their own police, a community police, but that has to be trained and supervised by an international civilian police.

So just in order to police this quite complex ceasefire you need 20,000 troops. If you want to disarm the Janjaweed you need a lot more. The Janjaweed is something like 20,000 to 30,000. To disarm them by force you would need a huge force, maybe 60,000. The government can do that and the government is obliged to do that under the DPA. If the UN is to do it, the UN will need an enormous force. Now if the UN is to go in not only to implement this, but to go in without the consent of the Sudanese armed forces – there are about 60,000 of the Sudanese armed forces in Darfur to include allied militia, probably about 40,000 regular army, 20,000 to 25,000 militia.

David Morse: Those numbers don’t look good.

Alex de Waal: Yeah. Well some of them wouldn’t want to fight, but you only need a few of them to fight and you have a very serious problem. You can’t do it.

David Morse: And civilians caught in the middle.

Alex de Waal: Yep. Exactly. And what we know from, say, Somalia, where the UN got into a fight with Aidid, (General Mohamed Farrah Aidid, former President of Somalia, who forced UN peacekeepers out in 1995) in Mogadishu, the moment you get into that situation, you run the risk of seriously antagonizing the population. And you can’t do anything else, I mean other than fight. When you are fighting a war, you cannot protect civilians and have a humanitarian operation and fight a war all at the same time. You can’t do it. So to me this was always a nonstarter and it was never really a realistic prospect to put it on the table. The other point is that if you look at the history of the UN, when has the UN ever really effectively protected civilians? It didn’t do it in Sarajevo or in Srebrenicka. It didn’t do it in Rwanda. It didn’t do it in Somalia.

The UN peacekeepers can only keep a peace if there is a peace. And if you recognize that, and you recognize that what you need to do is make something happen that is under the command and control of the local people rather than trying to impose something however welcome in principle, you then have a very different concept of operations. And what I was arguing for was let’s get away from the question of, “what is the mandate? What is the color of their helmets? Who is to do it?” Let’s actually ask, “What is it that needs to be done?”

If you look at the demilitarization and stabilization of Darfur, anyone who seriously looks at it, realizes this is a six to ten year job. Whatever forces are there will need to be there for six to ten years in order to stabilize Darfur. And in order to get that done you need the support of the key players. The key tribal leaders and key communities–You will need some green light from the government, but you don’t need the agreement of the government at every step if you have the agreement of the communities. That’s what counts.

Then if you are considering something like the challenge of disarming the Janjaweed, what you want to do is you want to get the Janjaweed to a position where either they will voluntarily disarm or you can get all of the other forces in the region to side with you against them.

[Julie Flint article on Darfur - The Arabs are Victims, Too, Monday November 27, 2006.]

You don’t want to fight them you want them to do what you want, which is to lay down their weapons. And if they are going to resist, you want everyone else in Darfur to be on your side against them, and this is actually not difficult to do. This is the standard approach to peace-building, and it was done, for example, in South Kordufan next door in the Nuba Mountains, where you had a very complex situation, very complex ceasefire, with militia etc. An agreement was signed there in January of 2002.

No one predicted it would hold, but it did, and it held with just two dozen unarmed ceasefire monitors. And the reason why it held in the Yuba Mountains was that the ceasefire monitors worked with the local community leaders, and used them as their eyes and ears in order to make sure that both sides stuck to it.

David Morse: Do you think that’s a realistic model for Darfur?

Alex de Waal: I think it is the only model. I would say I don’t think you could do it with two dozen unarmed ceasefire monitors, I don’t think you could do it with two hundred or two thousand unarmed ceasefire monitors, but the approach has to be the same. The approach has to be one which is nine parts community relations and politics to one part force, because if you are going to do it by force you are going to need a force of 200,000 troops or something like that and you are going to need to fight, and that’s simply not going to happen – and it’s probably not going to work if you try it. So what you need to do is use the mechanisms that have been tried and have been shown to work in these situations, and while Darfur is pretty horrible its not unlike other situations that we have had in the past: parts of Somalia and parts of Ethiopia, and other parts of Sudan, where you have a complex militarized society with people fighting each other, massacres of civilians, but you also have authority structures that are ready to get on side in stabilizing the situation.

David Morse: Assuming the best possible scenario and that something like this is worked out what do you do with the Janjaweed? Once they have laid down their weapons what becomes of them? How do you incorporate them into civilian society?

Alex de Waal: The Janjaweed are a number of different groups.

David Morse: You’re speaking of where they have come from, and I think that’s incidentally another thing where your book has been very valuable, the origin of the Janjaweed.

Alex de Waal: And what we are seeing now is that some of them are going back to Chad, which is not a solution. It doesn’t help.

David Morse: It sounds like a prescription for disaster doesn’t it?

Alex de Waal: The groups that they come from have to have a place. There has to be some accommodation for them because historically they have been shortchanged.

David Morse: They have no place at the table do they?

Alex de Waal: Exactly. This is one of the problems.

David Morse: They have no representation in government?

Alex de Waal: Not directly. Some of the political leaders of the groups from whom the Janjaweed are formed are in [the Khartoum] government, but the government doesn’t trust them either and the government is quite fearful of them. One can quite easily imagine a situation in which there is some sort of settlement, but [that] a lot of the Janjaweed feel that they have been betrayed, let down, and they have no stake in this. You don’t want that situation. Then they can create more havoc.

David Morse: And if I understand it, there are no corridors contrived by which they can move their livestock?

Alex de Waal: There can be. There were plans, in fact that were drawn up for them to have their corridors, but the government typically tried to manipulate that. If the government would just let things be! If they just allowed these people to work things out themselves they would often solve their own problems, but the government always wants to manipulate something to its own end.

David Morse: It’s congenital.

Alex de Waal: Yes.

David Morse: I’ve often thought that Khartoum is more like an ancient city state exploiting its hinterlands than a modern capital.

Alex de Waal: I think that’s very true. I think it has a lot of continuities from when it was essentially a trading emporium in the 19th Century [trading ivory and slaves] and the concept of citizenship really isn’t there. You have the city and you have various degrees of the immediate periphery, which is actually relatively well treated. The immediate 100 kilometers outside Khartoum is actually relatively prosperous. Then you have the out-of-periphery places like the south of Darfur which are ruthlessly exploited, and then the periphery extends out into Chad and the Central African Republic—and it’s not a concept of a territorially bounded state; it’s degrees of places of closeness and exploitation.

[Reliefweb Map showing parts of Darfur in detail.]

David Morse: Earlier you said that one needs to look at what has to be done rather than get obsessed over the color of the helmets and so forth, and approach it from that functional point of view. It seems to me, functionally — and I don’t know whether this is even a fair question — functionally, it’s clear that for regional peace to obtain somebody has got to sit down with these people regionally and arrive at some kind of social equity, some basic delivering of services and that sort of thing. If not Khartoum, who? And we’re getting right up against the inviolate state, but we’ve got a semi-failed state, it seems, or at least a state that’s dysfunctional.

Alex de Waal: It’s a state that’s deeply dysfunctional, but it still manages to survive and will continue to survive. What’s interesting about Khartoum is that it has this combination of being economically hyper-dominant, I mean it is completely dominant, not only of the Sudanese territory but even beyond it in economic terms with a very capable quite cohesive capitalist class. But within it, politically, it is unstable. They don’t agree politically among themselves. There is a level of instability and turbulence within that state which is one of the reasons why it is so continually at war. It’s not because they are incredibly clever and Machiavellian at deluding people. It’s that they are always shifting their own internal coalitions which means that any deal you do with Khartoum it’s only good for as long as that particular coalition holds. Then if it shifts the deal changes. That’s why it is so perfidious. It’s not because they’re liars. The reason all governments behave in the same way is because of this structural feature that they have never managed to consolidate control over the state in the same way. They are always shifting, with different groups emerging.

David Morse: What would it take – pie in the sky, perhaps – what would it take to get them to behave in a more coherent way? Not that we can affect this but –

Alex de Waal: I think the key is to look long term. If you look at the question of how was peace achieved in the South, the key to it was a mixture of the right strategy and tactics. And strategically the essence of it was an assurance that came from the United States, from Senator Danforth, who to my mind is a much underestimated figure, I thought he was remarkably astute, and he assured both President Bashir (Lt. Gen. Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir) and John Garang, (former leader of the SPLM, killed in a helicopter crash in July 2005) that the United States wants a united Sudan that functions. That’s it, that is the U.S. interest, and if you can deliver that we will support you.

When you have a long term vision, quite a simple vision that the parties can buy into, then you have something to work with. Tactically it worked because there was a system of tests which were, ‘If you pass this test, if you stop bombing, if you have an investigation into slavery, if you have a ceasefire in the Yuba Mountains, then something will follow from that.’ And it worked tactically, as well, because it wasn’t stuck with artificial deadlines. It allowed enough time to work through these issues at the negotiating table.

Those lessons seemed to get jettisoned when we got onto Darfur, where there was no certitude coming out of Washington as to what the outcome was going to be. There was no clear goal post. Now of course the Sudan Government was deeply hypocritical when it said, “look the U.S. has changed its policy.” Well of course the U.S. changed its policy because the Sudan Government wasn’t going out and murdering tens of thousands of people in Darfur before that, so of course. But the reality of politics is you do need to accommodate what is the other side’s legitimate interest. No matter how murderous a government a state does have a legitimate concern and the worst possible outcome for Sudan would be a contested partition, if the South were to withdraw in a contested way.

Now we know what happened in India in 1947, and in Yugoslavia, when you get a contested partition everything else, forget it. And that is what we are looking at if we don’t have a core common concern, “is this about what?” –Where Sudan is going to be somewhere down the road.

David Morse: And if I might add, that has to include China.

Alex de Waal: Right, afraid so. Yes, it has to be in there.

David Morse: But what you have described — the idea that the U.S. Government through Danforth was expressing that we want a functional and coherent Sudan — I could imagine that as being a realistic goal for the Chinese. So what’s keeping us from getting on the same page with the Chinese?

Alex de Waal: It’s interesting, in this meeting that Kofi Annan had in Addis Ababa last week with the Security Council ambassadors, the most helpful one was the Chinese. And one of the reasons was that Kofi Annan came out and said, “This is what we want,” and suddenly you’ve turned the Chinese from an adversary into an ally. And the Chinese are now engaged in pushing the Sudan Government to accept UN troops precisely because it says well we’re comfortable with the overall strategy and the direction of this.

The Sudan Government, or rather the [National Congress Party], about six months ago held its internal review of its relations with the U.S. and it came to the conclusion that whatever we give to the U.S. it will demand something more. Whatever we, Khartoum, give to the US the US will want something more, so there’s nothing we can do to satisfy the U.S. And I think that arises because there is not clear vision for Sudan that is arising from Washington.

What is happening is a whole lot of tactical maneuvers and threats; “We want you to do this and if you don’t we will do that.” And the “this” that Washington wants Khartoum to do is always something very short term like accept UN troops and they are thinking, ‘What is this, why do they want us to accept U.N. troops?’ And they can’t figure it out and so they get deeply suspicious, they dig their heels in and we get into this stand off. And the fact is that it’s a grotesque regime but it’s not an irrational regime. You can understand why it behaves the way it does, and that has a lot to do with its own internal instability and its own apprehensions and the only way to stop this is by accommodating it.

David Morse: Speaking of those internal divisions what do you think is the likelihood that Darfur is an effort at regime change in Khartoum?

Alex de Waal: I think there are two groups that are going for regime change at the moment. There is the [Darfur] National Redemption Front which has links to Chad, also to the Turabi group in Khartoum [Hassan Turabi, an Islamist politician and thinker who would implement strict Islamic law.] And then some other groups in Washington who basically see the only way of stopping this is a policy for regime change. I don’t think it’s workable. I don’t like this government, but I think the idea of regime change by force is a disaster.

[What's next?]

Alex de Waal: I think a lot of things could change by January. Things are moving very fast at the moment. We could quite easily see regime change in Chad, the Central African Republic, by then. The internal crises in both countries is accelerating. If this current strategy, this current attempt to get the politics back on track, doesn’t succeed in the next four weeks then the US Government could I think mistakenly escalate its rhetoric –because I don’t think there is much it can do. And I think if it did that, I mean they are talking about a “plan B” without saying what it is.

Alex de Waal: Plan B. And the implication being that it’s going to mean some kind of military action. To me that’s just going to make things worse.

David Morse: So things could all fall apart in Chad. Meanwhile, we’ve also got dynamics that just seem to be just shifting across the border where Janjaweed in the North are attacking Chadians in the South. And those, I assume you are suggesting that that’s part of the instability?

Alex de Waal: Yes. I think there is a temptation to see the Chadian crisis just as a spillover from Darfur and I think that’s a mistake. You have to recognize that it has it’s internal origins in Chad which are very significant.

David Morse: And is Mohmar Gaddafi still playing an active role in all of this behind the scenes? [Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, leader of Libya.]

Alex de Waal: Yes, he’s in there. I think he just wants to be seen to be playing a role as he wants to keep out international troops. When people in Sudan talk about international troops they talk about the “Quwat Dawliya” or “international forces” and it’s the same term in Arabic that’s used for the coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan so the implication being that it is the same thing, it’s regime change.

David Morse: And the incipient potential for Jihad?

Alex de Waal: I think they would then declare a Jihad I think that their credentials for doing so are very very flimsy but I think there would be enough people prepared to take it seriously.

David Morse: Just because of our low level of credibility and trust.

Alex de Waal: Yes, exactly.

David Morse: It’s so sad, the cost of Iraq.

Alex de Waal: Yep.

This interview aired on Talk Nation Radio, November 23, 2006
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Relevant links

See David Morse’s remarks on the deepening crisis, and what can be done here.

David Morse interview with Samantha Power November 21, 2006

AU envoy due in Sudan for Darfur talks Independent Online, South Africa – Nov 26, 2006

Bush, China’s Hu discuss Darfur in phone call Reuters Monday, November 27, 2006; 7:38 PM

Global Security, Darfur

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