Tony Okerafor
31 October 2009
analysis
Lagos — "Our focus is on reducing the ongoing dire human consequences of genocide by addressing the ... suffering in the refugee camps, protecting civilians from continuing violence, helping displaced persons return to their homes, ensuring that the militias are disarmed and improving conditions on the ground."The U.S. secretary of state, Hilary Rodham Clinton).
U.S.-Sudanese relations, especially over the last twenty years have been cool at best, and at worst, they have been stormy, heavily tense and belligerent. It's important to refer to relations over the past two decades, dating to 1989, when the current rulers in Khartoum angered Washington by overthrowing the popularly elected government of Prime Minister Sadik ah Mahdi and set up a National Islamic Front, N.I.F., regime.
The Americans did not like the N.I.F. government, because they saw it as anti-Western and bearing hallmarks of the theocratic regime that Islamic revolutionaries had set up in Iran, ten years earlier, after they had overthrown the pro-Western Shah.
By the mid-1990's, their relationship had deteriorated to their lowest levels ever. The Clinton administration, some of whose African allies surround Sudan, managed to persuade much of the international community to support punitive United Nations, U.N, sanctions against the regime in Khartoum. Sudan, it was alledged, not only supported international terrorism, but, key leaders of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, including the movement's founder, Osama Bin Laden, were also reported to have been given a safe haven by the N.I.F. regime.
In August, 1998, U.S. cruise ships launched missile strikes on Khartoum, because the Clinton administration said Al Qaeda operatives based in Sudan were said to have been responsible for the simultaneous bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Darisalam, Tanzania, which claimed the lives of over 200 people.
But at present, a relatively new administrative in the Washington White House is taking U.S.-Sudan ties on a completely new path. Obama administration officials, including the government's chief diplomat, Mrs. Clinton, are calling the approach a new policy of engagement with the government of Africa's largest country. In a recent policy statement on Sudan, President Barack Obama, who took office barely ten months ago, spoke of a new era of working with the Khartoum government, instead of isolating it. The new message was delivered on the same day by the White House and the U.S. State Department, or foreign ministry, in a classic carrot-and-stick manner, with President Obama warning that more American pressure would be brought to bear on the Sudanese government, if it did not respond to the new U.S. policy, one that offers incentives to Khartoum so as to encourage it to stop genocide in the conflict-prone western region of Darfur.
Between the two "left-leaning" Democratic Party administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, an eight-year-long Republican government, under the second George Bush, applied more of the stick, i.e. pressure, and little , if any, of the carrot, i.e. diplomacy, that Mr. Obama and his secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton, are now talking about. Other than supporting the ending of sanctions and the isolations of Khartoum, the Bush administration would not remove its foot off the pedal, so to speak. It kept up the heavy rhetoric, even as the authorities in Khartoum sought to pacify the international community by carrying out a series of measures, including the improvement of ties with its immediate neighbors, the likes of Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt and Chad, the partial introduction of political reform inside Sudan, which appeared to remove the Islamist face of the regime and turn the N.I.F. into a modern-day political party, the removal of hardliners from the Khartoum power structure, the signing of a comprehensive peace deal with the southern-based S.P.L.A. rebel movement, which ended more than two decades of civil conflict in the mainly Christian and animist south.
The strategy of the Bush White House, therefore, was to keep Sudan in the front-burner, as it were, and to maintain pressure on the National Congress party, N.C.P., the senior partner in Sudan's power-sharing government, in order to force it to accede to demands for a fully-fledged U.N. peace-keeping force to be deployed in Darfur, to rein in pro-government militias and troops who are blamed for most of the atrocities in Darfur and to fulfill to the letter everything it signed up to in the January, 2005, C.P.A. (agreement) it reached with the S.P.L.M., which is the junior partner in the four-and-half-year-old power-sharing government in Khartoum. Back in 2004 and 2005, the U.N. was describing the situation in Darfur as "the world's worst humanitarian disaster". The Bush administrations took a tougher line, calling the crisis there "genocide". When, last year, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, I.C.C., indicted Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Al Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity over the atrocities he's said to have masterminded in Darfur, the outgoing administration of Mr. Bush was welcoming.
Well, in March, this year, the judges of the I.C.C. granted the wishes of the court's chief prosecutor by issuing a warrant for the arrest of the Sudanese leader. Interestingly, the Obama administration, which was less than two months old at the time, did not respond as glowing a manner as its predecessor would surely have done, except to say that justice must be seen to be done. In another instance of sharp departure from the approach of the Bush administration, President Obama proceeded to appoint a special envoy to Sudan, and over the last five months or so, the official, General Scott Gretian (retired), has been in and out of Sudan umpteenly, holding talks with the various parties involved in Sudan's complex political feuds, whether in southern Sudan, where the autonomous government there is grappling with an escalating cycle of inter-tribal violence, in Khartoum, where tempers between the two parties to the C.P.A. are flaring over unresolved issues relating to national census figures, national elections due next April, referendum in the south due 2011 and problems over the oil-rich Abie Region: and in Darfur, where the international community is still trying to broker a lasting settlement between representatives of the central government and the region's fractuous and numerous rebel factions, who have oftentimes deliberately tried to suck thousands of African Union and U.N. peace-keepers stationed there into the conflict.
For all it's worth, the Obama administration's new policy on Sudan does not seem to include, at least for the time being, two key wishes of the N.C.P.-led government in Khartoum. One is to drop the label of "genocide" that the U.S. government has ascribed to the Darfur crisis. According to the U.N., the figure of civilian fatalities from the conflict in Darfur currently stands at over 3000,000, with 2.5 million others living as I.D.P.'s or internally displaced persons. These, however, are figures that Khartoum has continually disputed. According to the government, only 10,000 people have died in Darfur since the conflict erupted there between the region's majority black African tribes and an alliance of Sudanese government forces and Arab Janjaweed militias in February, 2003.
The other wish of the Khartoum regime borders on the arrest warrant hanging on Mr. Bashir's neck. The government wants the U.S. to support calls for the deferment or revocation of the warrant.
Despite America's "silence" on those two issues, or wishes, Khartoum says it regards the "new policy" as an improvement on the past U.S. stance. However, the watchword in political circles in the north is "caution". Reacting to the policy outline, an adviser to President Bashir called it "an important development, maybe", saying it probably reflects what he described as "the new Obama spirit'; but, went on to lament that "it's unfortunate the administration reflect the realities."
Sudan is not only close to China, but, close to eighty per cent of Sudanese oil exports go directly to Chinese oil storage tanks. In exchange, China, to a lesser degree, Russia as well, sells military equipment and aircraft, such as the types that no Western government would be prepared to provide Khartoum. China being a permanent member of the powerful U.N. Security Council, it has been able to use its privileged position to thwart consistent efforts by the Bush administration to use the machinery of the U.N. to punish Sudan on account of Darfur.
So, the question has to be: Does Sudan really care about relations with America, given its close ties to China? The answer is "yes"' Sudan does, and it should be remembered that normalising relations with Washington, i.e. the prospect of so doing, proved to be a key factor in persuading Mr. Bashir to agree to the terms of the peace accords of 2005.
Also, analysts believe it is important to the Sudanese to be seen as a respectable player internationally, as well as to be part of important international issues. The sanctions that are currently in place, mostly because of the conflict in Darfur, are clearly hindering Khartoum's ability to achieve that. Improving ties with Washington is being seen as the key to removing the sanctions and bringing Sudan (fully) back into the international fold.
As for the Obama administration, there seems to be a recognition that adopting a softer line and engaging parts of the Sudan government is also key to making progress on a variety of issues.
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