Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  I continued to visit Darfur regularly but enjoyed less freedom to roam around, unlike my early trips. Even in my restricted visits to Darfur, it became abundantly clear that no military solution could be achieved. The African Union-UN hybrid monitoring force could achieve little. It was understaffed, lacking in proper intelligence and kit, especially helicopters. Only a political solution, along the lines of the north-south agreement, could end the war. Despite past brutality, it was clear that the new government of national unity in Khartoum (including Islamists and the SPLA, from 200510) was trying to bring peace. The Darfur rebels, ever fractious, were holding out for more and more. What was needed was the kind of Western (and now also Chinese) political investment – banging heads together – that secured the north-south deal.

  The various Darfur peace talks had been so close, down to a few million extra US dollars for the hold-outs’ personal bank accounts in some cases, to be entirely cynical. By March 2009 the talks between the Justice and Equality Movement and Khartoum were doing well in Doha. Then came the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for the Sudanese president, for his alleged crimes in Darfur. In theory, it was possibly a good idea for monsters such as Mugabe to be dragged off to The Hague. In the case of Sudan it would be a disaster. In the north-south talks, in which President al-Bashir played a paramount role, no mention was made of punishing the many war crimes on both sides. What the ICC decision meant was the Darfur rebels would drag their heels indefinitely, waiting for regime change in Khartoum. They would have had to wait a long time, because the ICC action was taken as an insult to nearly all northern Sudanese, regardless of whether they hated or loved al-Bashir. The ICC entrenched not destabilized him. Moreover, most southern leaders I spoke to were terrified that the CPA deal might collapse and war return.

  So the causes of the war were multiple: drought, desertification and rapid over-population had intensified the traditional nomad versus settled famer disputes.

  Nor had Darfur been immune to the political changes of the 1980s and 1990s. Arabization and Islamicization had impacted especially on the African tribes. Many of the tribal structures among and between Arabs and Africans had been eroded, not least by Khartoum’s attempts to destroy the old loyalties to the Umma party. Moreover, the southern peace talks were a catalyst to longstanding grievances about Darfur’s marginalization, although the west had been considered prosperous in comparison with other far-flung areas. Most of the SLA’s demands were local, while JEM’s were clearly national or even international. JEM’s Islamist leaders had been acolytes of al-Turabi. Some Darfur rebels wanted reforms and more power in Khartoum and provincial improvements, while a few dreamed of secession. JEM, however, wanted al-Turabi-directed regime change. JEM was in some respects a tool of revenge for the ever-meddling Imam. The war’s causes were complex, while the consequences were to prove disastrous and long-lasting for Darfur and the rest of Sudan. The army’s initial cack-handed COIN turned possibly a short sharp revolt into a very messy and prolonged civil war. It took Sudan’s army and military intelligence officers decades to achieve that result in the south; in the west they did it in just over a year.

  One savvy critic of Khartoum, Rob Crilly, put it well. There was no intent to wipe out certain groups, he maintained:

  …unlike the cases of Rwanda or Nazi Germany. Darfur was a bungled counter-insurgency that got wildly out of hand and ended up as ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, almost all of the mass killings took place in the first year; by the time the genocide activist campaign got going after 2004, Darfur was much more of a low-intensity guerrilla war than the arena for genocide.1

  The course of the war

  Flint and de Waal, in their seminal work on the war, describe rebel attacks before 2003.2 On 21 July 2001 a group of Zaghawa and Fur (the latter being the largest African tribe) swore on the Koran that they would unite to fight government onslaughts on their villages. In their view, they would fight an Arab apartheid that was practising ethnic cleansing against non-Arab Muslims. (Nearly all Darfuris are Muslim. Many in Darfur, the source of much military support for the Mahdi, regard themselves as the purest Muslims in Sudan, if not the Middle East.) The rebels started training in their redoubts in the Jebal Marra massif, the greenest mountain range of Sahelian Africa. Various police stations and isolated army garrisons were attacked in 2002. In early March 2003 the rebels seized the garrison town of Tine on the Chadian border, capturing a large quantity of arms and supplies. Al-Bashir furiously responded by saying he would ‘unleash’ the army. At that time he had little professional manpower in reserve because of the overstretch fighting in the south and east.

  The next rebel attack was dramatic. At 5.30 am on 25 March 2003 a joint JEM and SLA force in a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers swarmed into the capital of El Fasher in a surprise raid. At the airfield they blew up four Antonov bombers and three helicopter gunships, according to the rebels. They killed over seventy-five soldiers and captured thirty-two, including the base commander, a major general. It was daring, bold and highly successful. Sudan was not used to Israeli-style military efficiency. It literally caught the Sudanese army napping.

  Khartoum had to retaliate against such a humiliation. The army formed the core of the COIN, with police units and the PDF as well as militia groups from Arab tribes including the Rezeigat. The insurgents were mainly from the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit groups. The first year of the war was intense. The greater strength of the government forces could not initially be brought to bear on a highly mobile enemy who used hit-and-run tactics in the desert. The government resorted to very heavy-handed methods. The (surviving) Antonovs were deployed as bombers – simply rolling barrels with 250lbs of explosive out of the back; then gunships would go in, followed by ‘technicals’ – the open-backed 4x4s plus, sometimes, militia – called Janjaweed – on horseback or camels. Although they did hit armed JEM and SLA camps when they could find them, the army’s targets were sometimes unarmed villagers. Critics claimed that to remove popular support for the rebels, villages were razed, women were raped as a weapon of war, and all who could not flee were sometimes killed. Wells were poisoned. A donkey or two were used to sample the water. This was scorched earth policy with a vengeance. Many non-Arab peoples fled to the internal refugee camps or across the border to kinsmen in Chad.

  Khartoum denied the atrocities and especially the allegedly high number of fatalities among civilians. Al-Bashir was also personally incensed by the accusations of mass rape. ‘It is not in the Sudanese culture or people of Darfur to rape. It doesn’t exist. We don’t have it.’ Khartoum also insisted that poisoning water was considered absolutely haram in Islamic tradition.

  The COIN in the first year was largely organized by military intelligence officers, who were keen to ensure the loyalty of Dafurian other ranks in the armed forces. Critics alleged that sometimes soldiers, Darfuris and others, were forced at gunpoint to kill unarmed villagers and indulge in rapes. Whatever the truth of the allegations, support for the rebels accelerated among the local non-Arab population. Their counter-attacks against the government forces were often highly successful and they were now inclined to take fewer prisoners. The SLA began to shift its area of operations farther east, threatening to extend the war to Kordofan.

  The failure of the first attempt at suppression and the shortage of professional soldiers had forced the government to deploy more militia fighters, especially the Baqqara who had generations of tribal warfare throbbing in their veins. They were given money, training, new guns and modern communications. Khartoum supplied the air power and intelligence. This sort of militia strategy had been deployed more or less successfully in the Nuba Mountains and in the south, especially around the oilfields. Within a year of the El Fasher opener, the militias were gaining the upper hand. Hundreds of thousands of refugees created a humanitarian disaster and soon an international crisis, especially after the CPA was signed in January 2005. Another international factor was the increasing involvement of
Chad, not least when its army intervened across the border to protect allied tribes against Khartoum’s forces.

  The Chad government brokered a temporary ceasefire with some of the rebel groups and Khartoum; in August 2004, the African Union sent a small detachment of Rwandan troops to monitor the very shaky ceasefire. The Rwandans were there because they were well-trained, effective and instantly deployable (with US air transports), and they certainly knew a lot about ethnic cleansing. Soon they were joined by 150 Nigerian troops. The UN Security Council now took more interest in what was happening, and the AU boosted the numbers in AMIS (African Union Mission in Sudan) to around 7,000. The fighting continued as did the humanitarian disaster. Sudanese reprisals and hot pursuit raids on rebel camps inside Chad increased the traditional hostility between Khartoum and N’Djamena.

  President al-Bashir felt personally betrayed by the Americans after signing the CPA and handing over so much high-grade intelligence. He had done all he had been asked to do and more, he believed. Al-Bashir told me straightforwardly: ‘In 2005 at Navaisha the Americans promised to remove sanctions. But they wanted the SPLM to take over from the inside.’ He had not sought a war in Darfur, partly energized by his intemperate rival, al-Turabi. Ignoring the al-Turabi connection, the President told me that ‘Darfur is 100 per cent US made.’ A surprising claim, but not in the context of al-Bashir’s view of the gang of four’s mischief-making in the south. He added: ‘There was war for twenty years in the south and there was no involvement with the UN Security Council, but it became involved in the first year of the Darfur.’ The Security Council, as we saw, was rather reluctant, not eager, to get involved in Darfur, especially as the catastrophic occupation of Iraq was exercising the world body. Washington, however, felt disinclined to remove Khartoum from sanctions and from the list of states supporting terror, not least because of the increasingly high-decibel lobbying about Darfur in the USA.

  The Darfur lobbies in America became as active as the anti-apartheid protesters of twenty years before. For all the good intentions, the lobbies often complicated the work of the diplomats actually trying to secure peace. One acute observer commented on the task of diplomats versus celebrity PR: ‘The former lived in a world of negotiations, deals, incremental progress and the fine grain of local politics. The latter breathed the purer air of universal principles and moral absolutes.’3

  The State Department did try to broker peace in Darfur. Under Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick as well as the AU, Arab League and EU representatives had been busy in May 2006 in Abuja, Nigeria. Abuja was to be first of many rounds of peace talks, but it did produce an agreement between Khartoum and a faction of the SLA led by Minni Minnawi, who was made a senior advisor to the president. JEM and a rival faction of the SLA refused to sign. The agreement had some similarities with the CPA and was indeed called the DPA, Darfur Peace Agreement. It offered power sharing, economic and infrastructure benefits and a referendum on the status of Darfur as well as integration of the rebels into the government forces. If the rebels had gone to war to grab some of the concessions offered to Juba, then this approach made sense. But it would fall on deaf ears with those in JEM who plotted regime change.

  The fighting continued, including the rebels killing, assaulting and kidnapping aid workers. Kofi Annan called for a much bigger UN force to replace the AU peacekeepers. Al-Bashir, however, still opposed the introduction of UN troops. The head of the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, Jendayi Frazer, warned that the tragedy in Darfur would spiral without a beefed-up UN presence. Khartoum initially wanted to find a military solution to Darfur, not suffer the presence of foreign troops. The Sudanese government had tried peace talks, but now that so many troops were being freed from duty in the south, the regular army had enough numbers to do what the militias could not. In September 2006 a major offensive was launched. It was directed by a new intelligence structure. The government of national unity had led to a surprising (if not total) integration of northern and southern intelligence capabilities. The NISS was re-divided into two services, the internal Amn (al-Jabha) and the external traditional Mukhabarat role, which liaised with foreign agencies. The military operations section of Amn had responsibility for Darfur. The significance was that now southerners, who controlled the southern operational branch, had a much bigger, and perhaps moderating, influence on COIN in the western war.

  At the same time the AU troops were asked to leave, as their mandate was about to expire. They did not have sufficient numbers or mobility to monitor effectively the conflict let alone contain it. Poorly led and sometimes unpaid for months, they were often demoralized. AU troops were sometimes disarmed, and occasionally attacked by the rebels.

  Minni Minmawi broke ranks and also called for UN involvement. But al-Bashir said that it would be like a return to colonialism. ‘We do not want Sudan to turn into Iraq,’ he said. As a compromise, the AU mandate was extended, and 200 UN troops were allowed in to help with the severe logistical and communications problems. The Nigerian government sent their foreign minister to Khartoum to emphasize the need for UN help. In October, President George W. Bush imposed extra sanctions, some particularly targeted against any US individuals trading with Sudan and preventing Sudanese directly involved with the war in Darfur from entering the USA. Khartoum retaliated by kicking out the senior UN official in the country, Jan Pronk, but also offered an olive branch. The government said it would hold unconditional talks with the National Redemption Front, the joint alliance of those who had rejected the earlier agreements. To underline the complexity, some Arabs groups started fighting the Sudanese army. The latest Arab formation was dubbed the Popular Forces Troops, which then allied with the National Redemption Front. Meanwhile, fighting between Arab groups, along traditional nomadic versus pastoralist lines, added to the mayhem. The latest was the feud between the Terjem and Mahria tribes in South Darfur.

  While some SPLA officers had been involved with training rebels in Darfur, former SPLA commander Lam Akol, now the new foreign minister in the joint administration in Khartoum, took the government line and argued that the UN presence should be minimal and restricted to technical support. Meanwhile, the AU forces on the ground complained of a new Sudanese army offensive. The UN Commissioner for Human Rights reiterated the claim that the army and militias were targeting unarmed civilians. The Save Darfur Coalition in the US became the most vocal lobby in condemning Khartoum. Well-known Hollywood stars, the most famous being George Clooney and Mia Farrow, became prominent media commentators, demanding more intervention. The first Save Darfur Coalition mass rally was held in Washington DC in April 2006. It was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. According to one journalist there, ‘It was a wonderfully eclectic mix of orthodox rabbis, scruffy students, bible-belt Christians, New York intelligentsia, black activists and film stars.’ A few of the celebrities crossed illegally from Chad to visit refugees in the border areas. Access via Chad, although arduous, was a means for journalists to enter the war zone. Khartoum sometimes made it difficult for reporters to get to Khartoum or then from the capital on the few civilian flights to El Fasher.

  Pressure was mounting on Khartoum: in April 2007 President Bush gave a speech at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in which he threatened even more sanctions if the human rights situation in Darfur did not improve soon. The military options, such as a naval blockade of oil exports from Port Sudan and no-fly zones in Darfur, especially with French jets stationed in Chad, were extensively debated in public, and extensively rejected in private in the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defense. Both departments were up to their necks in the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the AU took notice of the international furore over Darfur; the planned Sudanese presidency of the AU was stalled. The Chinese were now inclined to shift slightly in their hardline support for Khartoum. They softened on the UN involvement, not least because the Western lobbies on Darfur had touched a vulnerable nerve: the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The lobbies m
ass-produced slogans about the ‘Genocide Olympics’ because of Beijing’s relentless support for Sudan. Al-Bashir could not ignore Chinese nudges and so some concessions were made on setting up the UN-AU hybrid force (UNAMID – African Union UN Mission in Darfur). Beijing allowed Khartoum, however, to impose many restrictions on size, composition and equipment. The lobbies were calling for NATO-style troops, but the new force was essentially a re-hatted AU. The few capable Western officers were sometimes not given visas by the Sudanese government. Al-Bashir insisted on African troops with a sprinkling of Asian contingents. The force never reached its projected size of 27,000 soldiers and police and never secured the mobility it needed, especially helicopters. Like its predecessor, it could monitor and report, but it did not have the resources or mandate to protect more than its own troops and, perhaps, some IDP camps. Above all, it could not be a peacekeeping force, for there was no peace to keep.

  The ICC then intervened for the first time in the conflict. Ahmed Haroun, Sudan’s minister for humanitarian affairs, and ‘Ali Kushayb’, a prominent militia leader, were charged with fifty-one counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was a prequel to a major international controversy.

  The government of national unity in Khartoum was still functioning despite its many frictions – the SPLM withdrew from the joint administration for a few months in late 2007 – but the siege mentality among the northerners was mounting because of the drumbeat of world condemnation. Just as his government had acted to assuage foreign pressures on previous occasions in the 1990s, al-Bashir set out to mend diplomatic fences, this time with Chad, the key western neighbouring state. The domestic conflicts in Chad were highly complex and also strewn with an alphabet soup of rebel groups. The neighbour had a long history of north-south/Muslim-Christian animosities, but it also shared many kinship ties with Darfur; at one time hundreds of thousands of Chadians were employed in Sudan, especially in the cotton industry. Both sides meddled in each other’s affairs by backing rebel movements that regularly crossed the 600-mile largely unmarked border. Khartoum had supported Muslim rebels in the 1960s. In the 1970s, relations improved because both feared Gaddafi’s expansionism and destabilization. Libya had long claimed a large section of northern Chad.