It's looking like the war in Sudan will never end.
Tarjab Jalab, a sinewy, bearded rebel commander in the Sudan Liberation Army militia, limped across this scarred and half-empty village on a bandaged foot. Dozens of leather pouches hung from his arms and legs, each containing Koranic verses. The amulets had not saved Jalab from being shot by pro-government militiamen, but he was still eager for battle. "We will keep fighting," he vowed one recent morning, as young men clanking with guns and grenades listened to his combat instructions, then clambered into three pickup trucks and roared off in clouds of dust. "Darfur is not over."
Forty miles away from Muhajara, in another charred village called Marla, Mussa Mohamed Hassab, a hulking tribal militia leader, sipped tea and surveyed Darfur's war from the other side. Hassab, 47, said his tribal security force had pledged its allegiance to the Sudanese government to keep fighting the rebels. "It's a war," declared Hassab, who wore a billowing white robe and leopard-skin slippers. "We were told to fight by the government. We also wish for this. Why would we stop now?"
In some ways, the towns of Muhajara and Marla are virtually identical. Both swarm with teenage soldiers, swimming in baggy camouflage outfits and lugging Kalashnikov assault rifles. Both are half-deserted, haunted by hungry, sick people who have been pushed off their land into sweltering camps. Both groups of inhabitants resent the combatants' presence and wish the fighting would end.
But neither militia, it became clear after visits of several days to each town, is in any hurry to put down its guns.
Even though the International Criminal Court in The Hague is seeking to prosecute a number of Darfur's war crime suspects, including government officials and rebel leaders, there are few signs of change in this vast, ravaged region of western Sudan after more than two years of conflict, flight and suffering. Civilians remain trapped in camps and reliant on aid, and villages continue to be burned. Rebel groups have become fractured and more difficult to negotiate with, while officials are finding it tougher to rein in the government-allied Janjaweed militiamen. The small force of about 2,400 African Union peacekeepers has been unable to curb the violence.
Trying to persuade nearly 2 million people to return home has proved futile, according to aid officials. Permanent mud houses are being built in dozens of camps, replacing the flimsy shelters of sticks and plastic. Women collecting firewood are still raped so often that aid groups have introduced fuel-efficient stoves to discourage them from venturing outside the camps.
Now, there are growing fears that Darfur's struggle may join the list of long, intractable conflicts on the African continent, including northern Uganda's 19-year war and Burundi's 12-year civil war, in which sporadic fighting has continued despite several peace plans.
Sudanese officials have questioned the Hague process, suggesting that an international court could not understand the complexities of Sudanese society and that the trials might add to instability. Foreign observers agree that a court thousands of miles away will not be enough to make combatants relinquish their weapons.
"Court or no court, everyone is very scared here," said B.M. Anuwa, a Nigerian army lieutenant on patrol near Muhajara. "We have serious problems. This is not the season of peace for Darfur. Unless more is done, Darfur will keep suffering." [...]
SUDAN: Militia attacks in Darfur intensified in April - UN
NAIROBI, 13 May 2005 (IRIN) - Militia attacks and other forms of violence in Sudan's western region of Darfur continued to cause human suffering in the strife-torn area in April, a senior UN official told the Security Council.
"Attacks on civilians, rape, kidnapping and banditry actually increased from the previous month," Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hédi Annabi, told the Council on Thursday when he presented UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s latest report on Darfur. "While there was no evidence of direct involvement by regular government forces last month, there were widespread reports of abuse by militia," he added.
The report said the government had made some efforts to restrain its Popular Defense Forces militia and prevented some criminal acts, but these efforts were "evidently inadequate", judging from the extensive reports of abuse against civilians by those groups in areas not controlled by rebels [...] Short-term stability in the region, he added, would require considerable strengthening of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), which currently consisted of 2,409 troops and 244 police. "The Council applauds the vital leadership role the African Union (AU) is playing in Darfur and the work of AMIS on the ground," the Council president for May, Ambassador Ellen Margrethe Løj of Denmark, said in a statement on Thursday. The Council supported the decision taken by the AU’s Peace and Security Council on 28 April to expand its mission in Darfur to 7,731 personnel by the end of September 2005, she added.
The refugee camp itself sounds not only like it's going to become a permanent city, but a walled city; if women are still being raped with such frequency, it will be the only way to keep them at all safe. (As fewer of them venture outside, it's very likely that these rapists will increase their depredations inside the essentially undefended camp itself. It's what predators do, after all.) And it's not a viable walled city; if people can't go outside the camp to collect firewood, they certainly can't go outside to grow crops. Foreign aid groups will never be able to sustain a sufficient flow of food and medicine; even if they could do so on their own, as Darfur fades into yet another endless African conflict, foreign governments will begin to scale back their contributions, husbanding their resources for the next human disaster. And, of course, there will be another, and another and another...
It is an interesting, if appalling, study in unintended consequences. While the Sudan government was likely perfectly happy to arm the Janjaweed militia and let it engage in ethnic warfare against Sudan's own people, they can't possibly have meant for things to go on as long as they have. There are very few people who can profit from endless civil war; it's sharply curtailed what trade Sudan did have. As government and rebel resources run low -- looting without allowing people to replant and replenish their own resources eventually leaves looters without anything new to take -- they'll be unable to pay their arms merchants, the people who must be bankrolling this charge into insanity.
It may eventually be that exhaustion will provide an end to the war. However, the examples of Burundi and Uganda, the periodic civil wars in Liberia and Angola and Cote d'Ivoire do not provide a salutary example. More likely, the Janjaweed will start more extensive pillaging over the Chad border -- they have, after all, left themselves little recourse, and Chad isn't much more able to defend itself than the people of Sudan.
The problem is that the Organization for African Unity is unwilling or unable to provide a large enough police force to stabilize the area. While they will be increasing their force to nearly 7800 from the current 2400, this is manifestly too small a force to provide protection even within Darfur itself. Without the participation of the United States, the United Nations seems unable, or unwilling, to do so, and at the present time, the United States is unable to contribute more than a small token force ... and the Arab and Muslim northern Sudanese would be (and should be) understandably reluctant to trust the United States to conduct an evenhanded truce in any event.
And just to make matters even worse for Sudan, Uganda's ongoing civil war is spilling into Sudan's southern areas, just as it seemed that Sudan had quieted its own civil war in those regions:
KAMPALA, 16 May 2005 (IRIN) - //CORRECTED// At least 5,000 people in southern Sudan have fled food shortages and attacks by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and sought refuge in northwestern Uganda since January, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said.
"[Some] said they were running away from LRA attacks, while the majority have fled their camp of Nimule in southern Sudan to Arua in Uganda due to food shortages, as relief supplies to the camp stopped some time back," UNHCR spokeswoman Roberta Russo, told IRIN on Saturday.
The refugees, she added, were from Torit, Nimule and Yei. They were being registered at the Ugandan border districts of Adjumani, Arua and Moyo, where UNHCR was feeding them.
Ugandan government officials said most of the new arrivals crossed the border in mid-March after the LRA stepped up attacks against civilians. The government and UNHCR were trying to find land on which they could set up homes and begin farming to supplement relief supplies, one official said.
"The rebels attacked [some of them] with machetes and clubs, looted and set grass-thatched huts ablaze and in one such attack, 12 people were killed," an official from the Ugandan prime minister’s office in the capital, Kampala, told IRIN.
According to the official, who had been to Palorinya, a makeshift reception centre in Arua, some of the recent arrivals had wounds sustained during such attacks. Many had walked for 10 to 15 days to reach the Ugandan border and were in poor health. A number of children had died on the way....
