In this special webcast, Save Darfur Coalition President Jerry Fowler and Senior Director of Campaign Advocacy Mark Lotwis discuss what they saw on their recent trip to Sudan and give their thoughts on the challenges facing the country as it prepares for the first multi-party elections in more than two decades.
The webcast was recorded at 2:00 PM on Thrusday, March 4th:
The big news as I arrived in Khartoum from Darfur earlier this week was of a “framework agreement” and ceasefire between the Sudanese government and one rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).
The agreement was formally signed on Tuesday in Doha, Qatar. Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir was there, as was JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim, Chadian President Idriss Deby and a host of envoys, including U.S. Special Envoy Scott Gration. The agreement creates a “framework” for negotiations – basically a list of items to be discussed and agreed upon.
Notably, and worryingly, justice and accountability – which so many IDPs told us was important to them – are not on the list. It also establishes a temporary ceasefire, although as with the whole framework, the details are still to be worked out. A final agreement is supposed to be completed by March 15, a hugely ambitious – if not unrealistic – target.
Almost exactly a year ago, Khartoum and JEM signed another “framework agreement” and ceasefire in Doha. It went nowhere, as have a sheaf of other agreements in recent years. So there is ample reason to be skeptical. Still, this year’s framework may be more robust. It seems to have high level buy-in from Bashir and JEM leader Ibrahim. And both sides have near term incentives to follow through. Bashir is running on a peace platform (“Symbol of Unity and Peace” says one of his omnipresent campaign posters) in the April elections. JEM is pressed as a result of the recent peace agreement between Khartoum and Chad. In fact, the Sudan-Chad rapprochement caused JEM to move more of its forces into northwestern Darfur, leading to a new round of fighting that promised to be devastating for the civilian population in that area.
To that extent, the ceasefire – if it holds – is definitely a good thing. But although a step forward, a lasting ceasefire – even a final agreement – between JEM and the government is far from a final resolution of the Darfur crisis. JEM is militarily the strongest rebel group, but it has a narrow constituency within Darfur. Giving its officials a handful of government posts would scarcely begin to address the underlying problem of marginalization and exclusion.
Bashir traveled to Darfur after the framework agreement was signed and declared, “The crisis in Darfur is finished; the war in Darfur is over. Darfur is now at peace.” What we saw and heard in Darfur tells us this is plainly not true. The problem of insecurity is cited widely by internally displaced persons, UN officials, civil society leaders and others as one of the principal impediments to peace. This day to day insecurity is felt all over Darfur, impedes a durable end to displacement and restricts the presence of NGOs and UN agencies in the “deep field.”
As I write this I am in Khartoum, Sudan, having just returned from a week of traveling through Darfur. Although I’ve traveled to eastern Chad to meet with Darfuri refugees who fled the country, this is the first time I’ve actually been to Sudan and Darfur. I applied for a visa in 2004, but only recently did the Sudanese government give me permission to come. I came with my colleagues Mark Lotwis and Sean Brooks.
Visiting Otash camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
The chance to meet with displaced Darfuris inside Darfur, and in general to see firsthand this country that I have read and thought so much about, has been profoundly moving. One of the most striking things in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs), as in refugee camps in Chad, is the children – living in the present, as children everywhere are so good at doing, but not totally unaffected by the turmoil that has swirled around them. As we were leaving one camp, a little girl who couldn’t have been more than three and a half feet tall flashed the omnipresent thumbs up sign and chanted, “Bashir is a criminal, the khawaja (foreigner) tells the truth.”
We will be providing more in depth reporting on our trip, which is continuing as we leave to spend several days in southern Sudan. But I wanted to give you a very quick update based on our time so far in Khartoum and Darfur.
Two big points have been reinforced from our time here. First, the issues of Darfur cannot be resolved in isolation from the larger issues of Sudan, and vice-versa. And the most significant issues of Sudan involve marginalization and exclusion. A great danger is that Darfur, seen as an isolated issue, gets ignored in coming months as attention focuses on the referendum on the independence of southern Sudan scheduled for next January. We must view Sudan holistically.
Second, there is an important role for the international community to play in helping to create a space for Sudanese to resolve the issues of Sudan without the use of extreme violence against civilians. It was such violence, used particularly by the government and its allies, that riveted the world’s attention on Sudan. Extreme violence is not happening now, but the potential remains.
Camp leaders meeting in Otash
In that regard, in Darfur we found an uneasy situation – “neither peace, nor war,” we heard a number of times. From IDPs we consistently heard expressions of fear and a pervading sense of insecurity. Clashes between the government and rebels are happening in some areas, but such organized fighting is not widespread. Nor is there systematic violence against civilians. But neither is there a sense of stability, security or peace. Quite simply, nothing is resolved. And a large portion of the civilian population remains extremely vulnerable.
We heard over and over from the IDPs and other Darfuris that they long for peace and security. One of the most poignant comments we heard was from a leader in one of the camps we visited. “Once milk is spilled on the ground,” he said, “it is impossible to get it back in the pail.” This proverb recognizes how challenging it is to create a durable peace and that it is not merely a matter of restoring things as they were. Creating that peace will require a sustained effort by the Sudanese themselves and sustained engagement by the international community.
Stay tuned as over the coming days, we will be reporting more on our assessment of the current situation on the ground.
Thank you for all you do for the people of Darfur and Sudan.
Please, sign up to watch the webcast and submit a question you’d like our team to answer on the 4th here: http://action.savedarfur.org/campaign/asksavedarfur
In recent years Americans have heard a great deal about the “invisible wounds” some people carry with them after a traumatic experience. Whether it’s a story about a returning veteran of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or that of a Katrina survivor, public awareness of invisible wounds has increased considerably over the past few years.
As someone who has dealt with the invisible wounds of war, both personally and with comrades, I cannot even begin to imagine the difficulties faced by untreated victims of the genocide in Darfur and Sudan.
In today’s Washington Post, Michael Gerson pens an article that tells some of these very troubling tales:
On May 15, a woman near the Al Hamadiya camp in Zalingei was collecting firewood. Three armed men in khaki uniforms raped her, stabbed her in the leg, inflicted genital injuries and left her bleeding. She spent 45 days in the hospital. In 2003, the same woman was raped and shot while fleeing her village.
Her story is in a recent, exhaustive, chilling report on Sudan written by a panel of experts at the United Nations. A U.N. official told me, “We have not talked to a single woman [in Darfur] who has not stated that sexual violence is their first concern.” The panel documented sexual assaults against pregnant women and 12-year-old girls. Prosecutions are nonexistent. Local officials are indifferent.
The crisis in Darfur is anything but over. If anything, aid from the world is needed now more than ever.
We must not allow war criminal Omar al-Bashir and his deadly regime to outlast our resolve. We must not allow our care to fade; our spirit to be broken; or our commitment to be anything but stalwart. We must, in chorus-as fellow humans, demand from our leaders a new day in Sudan.
We have to demand that our leaders deal with the invisible wounds.
Amanda Taub at Wronging Rights has published a three-part series of investigative blogging examining the use of quotes attributed to a Darfuri spokesperson in the Internally Displaced Camps, known as Abu Sharati. She explores whether Abu Sharati speaks for all displaced Darfuris, as stated in a number of articles, or espouses the views of only one particular Darfuri rebel faction. After talking with journalists from The New York Times, The Associated Press, and Reuters who quoted Abu Sharati in their stories on Darfur, she writes:
After weeks of research, I have been unable to find any information that makes me think Abu Sharati, supposedly the “representative” of Darfuri refugees and IDPs, exists -except to the extent that someone, who possesses neither that name nor that position, has been making statements to the press. And that whoever that person is, he is apparently awfully fond of the rebel leader Abdel Wahid Al-Nur.
I cannot think of any way to interpret the information I have been given that would allow me to conclude that no journalist has either (a) lied to me, (b) failed to follow the professional ethics that a journalist should, or (c) been duped by a fake “refugee representative” when any minor amount of digging or critical thought would have alerted them that there was more to the story. Frankly, the Occam’s Razor explanation here really seems like it’s (d): all of the above.
The trail that leads her to this conclusion is definitely worth a read, as are her conclusions for why this misreporting matters. She believes first that “Abu Sharati’s” claiming to represent all Darfuris deprives other IDPs of their ability to tell their own stories and, furthermore, that “presenting a political argument in the guise of a humanitarian sentiment is disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst.” With 2.7 million Dafuris scattered over numerous camps in Darfur, it seems highly unlikely that they are organized and represented by one voice with one message.
On June 16, 2009 I attended the 2009 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2009 annual report. The UNHCR Annual report is a yearly update of refugee statistics and global trends. The forum, which was led by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, reported that there are 42 million persons displaced worldwide. According to the UNHCR a “person of concern,” or someone who falls into the refugee category are asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, returned refugees, returned IDP’s and stateless persons.
Sudanese Refugees
(photo courtesy of Radu Sigheti)
There are a reported 2 million internally displaced persons in Darfur, Sudan and thousands of people have found refuge in Chad and other neighboring African nations. During the forum the high commissioner also mentioned several other noticeable trends in refugee displacement including the significant decrease in refugees since 2007, however as conflicts develop and become more intense those numbers can rise.
UN Humanitarian Chief John Holmes visited Darfur and reported back that he thinks gaps created by the expulsion of major aid groups in early March will be filled enough to avert a major catastrophe:
“We now have access [to warehouses where relief supplies are stored], we’ll be working extremely hard to make up for lost time. But we’re not in as good a position as we would have been otherwise,” Holmes said.
“The rainy season is always a period of increased risk, the risks are even greater than they would have been otherwise because of the expulsions. But I’m reasonably confident we’ll get through it without a major crisis.”
Holmes said the most “critical life-saving gaps” in aid, particularly in food, water and emergency shelter, had been filled, albeit in an ad-hoc way.
“So that there is not as far as I can tell a threat of an imminent humanitarian crisis at the moment in Darfur.”
Let’s hope his optimism is justified – though there are so many variables and uncertainties that it’s not certain. But even if a full blown catastrophe
is averted, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this is just getting back to zero. It’s not progress.
The increased risk to civilians was created by the government’s callous cynicism, just as civilians need aid in the first place because of the government’s campaign of destruction and displacement. Nobody should be satisfied if the situation merely returns to the status quo that prevailed before March 4, when the aid groups were kicked out.
And even as Bashir took some steps to avert the crisis that he himself set in motion, he also scuttled a civil society conference that promised to advance the cause of peace and appointed indicted war criminal Ahmed Haroun to be
governor of Southern Kordofan, a tense region that saw genocidal violence
against the peoples of the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s and where new
violence may be in the offing.
This behavior underscores that a viable strategy for peace means
presenting the Sudanese government with a choice. If the Sudanese government permits unimpeded humanitarian access, removes indictees and secures peace in Darfur and the South, a clear process toward normalization should be mapped out. If President Bashir and his party continue to undermine efforts at peace for the country – as they did last week – a series of escalating costs should ensue, including diplomatic isolation, targeted multi-lateral economic sanctions, and an effective multilateral arms embargo
Now is the time for bold, agenda-setting leadership by President Obama to
end the Sudan crises, instead of managing them from week to week and month to month.
By Stella Kojo Kenyi of Enough Project
ESPN recently featured the Darfur Dream Team’s Sister Schools Program in a special segment that aired on SportsCenter. Basketball star Tracy McGrady of the Houston Rockets and Enough’s Omer Ismail and John Prendergast were shown in footage from their trip together to eastern Chad.
The Darfur Dream Team is a dynamic partnership of organizations and professional basketball players working together on the Sister Schools Program, an initiative to connect American middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities with sister schools in the 12 refugee camps in Chad. As part of the Sister Schools Program, U.S. sister schools are raising funds to improve the education of their Darfuri peers through the construction and rehabilitation of school buildings as well as by providing teacher training, sports equipment, and other school supplies. The program also aims to foster cross-cultural relationships and mutual understanding between American students and Darfuri refugee students through letter exchanges and video blogging.
Visit darfurdreamteam.org today to sign up your school, become a sister school, or learn more about the Darfur Dream Team.
By Ann Dahlkemper
On April 27th twelve Duquesne University students in Pittsburgh, PA took part in a 24 hour water only hunger strike in solidarity with the people of Darfur. Our group was inspired by actress Mia Farrow who began a 21 day Hunger Strike on April 27th. Mia Farrow began this strike as a personal expression of outrage at a world that can stand by while innocent men, women, and children die in Darfur. We made tie dye tee shirts and painted the words “Hunger Strike” across them to bring attention to the genocide in Darfur. Throughout the day we asked fellow student to sign ‘A Million Voices for Darfur’ post cards and spread awareness around campus about Darfur.
Through this experience we felt a small part of the pain that refugees in Darfur face every day. We hope that this made a difference for the people of Darfur and that our story can inspire others to do the same.
Our partners at Stop Genocide Now are on their 7th iAct (interactive activism) trip to refugee camps in Chad. Above, you can see them with children in schools in the camps. Although the joy and resilience of these children is evident in this video, Gabriel from SGN sent a message yesterday saying “I asked a classroom of 52 students for anyone that ate something that morning to raise their hand, 8 of them did.”
Below is a sad story from their friends, Adef and Achta.
For more video from the camps, check out www.stopgenocidenow.org
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