Will the Cease-fire Hold in Sudan Border Regions? A Timeline of Agreements Made and Abrogated by Khartoum
By: Eric Reeves, Briefs & Advocacy: Post-Machakos ’12
7 May 2012
If history is any guide, Khartoum’s agreement to the cease-fire terms dictated by the May 2, 2012 UN Security Council Resolution, supported by the African Union, will prove meaningless; follow-up agreements will be signed, and they too will prove meaningless. The National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime has never abided by any agreement with a Sudanese party—and never will, certainly not without much more vigorous international pressure on Khartoum, pressure that is not disabled by a factitious “even-handedness,” a moral equivalency between the NIF/NCP génocidaires and the struggling leadership in Juba.
Introduction (present text): http://www.sudanreeves.org/?p=3108
Part 1 (2012) at: http://www.sudanreeves.org/?p=3101
Part 2 (2011) at: http://www.sudanreeves.org/?p=3089
INTRODUCTION
That we should be asking with such uncertainty about the fate of a cease-fire agreement that may hold the key to whether Sudan and South Sudan resume war is not surprising. At countless junctures in the past year and a half, the Khartoum regime has been encouraged to think that it can, without real consequence, abrogate or renounce agreements made with various Sudanese and South Sudanese parties. The military seizure of Abyei represents only the most conspicuous example. Present uncertainty, then, is not surprising; what is surprising is how rapidly the international community, and too often news reporting, has lost sight of the historical context out of which our uncertainty grows. Since fall of 2010 there have been a great many agreements abandoned by Khartoum—indeed, if we are even slightly scrupulous, all agreements the regime has made have been abrogated, renounced, violated, or simply ignored.
This in turn continues a pattern that stretches back to the beginning of the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime following its military coup in June 1989—a coup, we should recall, deliberately timed to abort the most promising chance for a North/South peace agreement since independence in 1956. Both the Umma of Sadiq al-Mahdi and the Democratic Unionist Party seemed prepared to reach an agreement with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army.
Instead, unfathomably destructive war continued, in which more than 2 million people were killed, and as many as 5 million displaced. The human suffering, overwhelmingly by Southern and Nuba civilians, defies all description. And yet, despite the demands of a UN Security Council resolution on Wednesday, May 2, Khartoum violated the cease-fire on Friday, May 4 according to reports from Juba: Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) used long-range artillery to target Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) positions within the Tishwin, Lalop and Panakuach area of Unity State. Indeed, on the very day following the UNSC cease-fire demand, backing the African Union peace mediation effort, Juba reported that twelve bombs again targeted Lalop, critically wounding a child and mother. There are unconfirmed but highly plausible reports of artillery fire into these same areas on Saturday, May 5. The cease-fire has already been violated by Khartoum.
We should note that the UN Security Council threw its support squarely behind the AU effort despite the fact that the Southern leadership has long been distinctly unhappy with chief AU mediator Thabo Mbeki (as were Darfuris before Southerners). Even so, it was Juba that first and eagerly embraced the cease-fire proposal and continued AU mediation, even before the Security Council resolution; it was Khartoum that accepted the AU framework only “in principle”—a qualification behind which massive violence is likely to be justified.
We have only to look at comments coming from the Foreign Ministry to see the implications of Khartoum’s “acceptance in principle,” and its claims that the SPLA is still “occupying” parts of northern Sudan. Encouraged by the hasty and deeply misguided international effort to describe SPLA seizure of Heglig as an “invasion” of the North, Khartoum is now making a series of commensurately misleading claims:
“[The Foreign Ministry cited] ‘continuous aggression and attack from South Sudan’s army on Sudanese soil until today.’ ‘The government of Sudan hopes the other party will commit to stop the hostilities completely and withdraw its troops from the disputed areas so as not to put SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) in a situation where it has to defend itself,’ the ministry added.” (Agence France-Presse [Khartoum], May 4, 2012)
Here we see the dangerous result of South Sudan becoming independent without strong international commitment and assistance in resolving border disputes with Khartoum and overseeing final border demarcation. We can expect to see this excuse for military actions on Khartoum’s part for the foreseeable future, even as some of the “disputed” areas are disputed only on the basis of regime intransigence (see, for example, the Rift Valley Institute analysis of the Kafia Kingi area in Western Bahr el-Ghazal, where the January 1, 1956 border conspicuously puts the enclave in South Sudan). Without clearly delineated and demarcated borders, the opportunities for Khartoum to initiate military actions self-described as “self-defense” will be many and continuous. In turn, the grim and dispiriting lessons of Abyei have certainly not been lost on Juba.
Yet again, the international community focuses on only one issue in Sudan
Arguably the most dangerous part of this uneasy “cease-fire” is that it diverts international attention away from the massive humanitarian crises the regime has engineered in other parts of Sudan, including the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, Blue Nile, the refugee camps for people who have fled from conflict in these regions (more than 100,000 in Upper Nile; likely more than 40,000 in Unity; and perhaps 40,000 in Ethiopia)—and of course Darfur. Relentlessly suffering, and increasingly invisibly, the people of Darfur have been betrayed repeatedly by the international community, most recently and destructively in the form of the widely despised Doha Peace Agreement (July 2011) (see Appendix 1 to Part 1 for a bibliography of recent reports on humanitarian and security conditions in Darfur). As Darfur was sacrificed on the altar of CPA completion in 2004, at the very height of the genocide—and beyond—so it is again the victim of diplomatic tunnel vision.
Despite increasingly desperate calls from humanitarian organizations, especially those working on food, water, and sanitation, many of these humanitarian efforts remain under-funded and without adequate resources. More dangerously, there is still no access to the Nuba Mountains or displaced persons in Blue Nile. Although Juba accepted a joint UN/African Union/Arab League proposal for humanitarian access to all in need on February 9—three months ago—Khartoum has recently declared that it is still studying this multilateral proposal, which it again welcomes “in principle.” The clear effort is to wait out the remainder of the dry season, and offer limited access only once the rains have begun (any week now), making delivery inordinately more difficult.
One measure of how little access there is to these desperate regions is the continually recycled figure of “417,000 displaced by fighting in South Kordofan and Blue Nile.” This figure was first promulgated by the UN in early December 2011 (see a Reuters dispatch of December 13, 2011). That the figure has not changed in five months—it continues to be regularly cited in a range of dispatches and reports, without any acknowledgement of its original date—is a measure of how little we know about the scale of the catastrophe that is unfolding, largely invisibly; substantial anecdotal reports, however, from a wide range of observers in the Nuba make clear that this number almost certainly vastly understates. That the UN is not in a position to update this figure—only the relentlessly increasing number of refugees pouring into Upper Nile and Unity States (South Sudan) and Ethiopia—should be a scandal. Instead, the figure is uncritically re-cycled.
Attention remains diverted as well from Abyei, where we are approaching the one-year anniversary of Khartoum’s military seizure of the contested region, in violation of the Abyei Protocol and the 2009 ruling by the PCA. More than 100,000 Dinka Ngok who were forced to flee Abyei to Warrap and other Southern states are still unable to return, and confront grim humanitarian conditions. There is no evident pressure on Khartoum to withdraw its forces from Abyei, despite a June 20, 2011 commitment to do so with deployment of an Ethiopian peacekeeping force under UN auspices. Indeed, Khartoum still refuses to negotiate in good faith a Status of Forces Agreement with the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA). The international community, taking its cue from the U.S., seems content to see the dream of self-determination for the “residents” of Abyei, promised by the CPA, slowly wither away.
The need for historical context
No assessment of prospects for the current cease-fire agreement, such as it is, can possibly be meaningful without taking account of the Khartoum regime’s 23 years of relentless abjuring, reneging, renouncing, ignoring, and denial of agreements it has signed or committed to. That it continues to receive international diplomatic credit for these agreements—despite relentlessly consistent bad faith—of course only encourages the regime to sign more agreements, agreements that it has no intention of abiding by.
This promiscuous agreement-making and -signing is part of what energizes the deeply misguided “moral equivalence” that has stalked Sudan diplomacy for well over a decade. It is the illusion that the political, diplomatic, and finally moral equities of Southerners and the Khartoum regime are somehow equivalent when they clearly are not. This is the same illusion that leads U.S. special envoy Princeton Lyman to oppose regime change in Khartoum, and at the same time to declare his confidence in the regime’s ability to “carry out reform via constitutional democratic measured.” Once Khartoum has been conceded this much, it is no surprise that the results are the very opposite of those Lyman professes to believe possible under this tyrannical regime.
With such a perspective dominant within the international community, we can do no more at present than survey recent and more distant history: the chances that this cease-fire agreement is more likely to hold than Khartoum’s commitment to previous agreements can be calculated only on the basis of previous abrogations.
The present time-line focuses in Part 1 on those agreements Khartoum has made and/or violated in the first five months of 2012. It extends the time-line running through December 31, 2011, which appears here—in revised form—as Part 2. Part 2 focuses on events leading up to and including the May 2011 military seizure of Abyei, which abrogated the agreement represented by the Abyei Protocol of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2005), as had the earlier denial of a self-determination referendum to the people “resident” in Abyei, as defined geographically by the 2009 PCA ruling. The timeline continues through Khartoum’s military assaults on Southern Kordofan (June 5, 2011) and Blue Nile (September 1, 2011).
[ Significant s violations of agreements, signed or committed to, are highlighted by §. All emphases, bold and italics, throughout these timelines have been added. ]
Introduction: A time-line of reneging and bad faith
§ 1999: As a framework for understanding the agreements to which Sudan has formally committed itself (Parts 1 and 2), we should recall a time when the UN human rights reports on the “situation in Sudan” were actually worth reading—here from May 1999 (E/CN.4/1999/38/17).
“As a Member State of the United Nations, the Sudan is bound by the Charter of the United Nations. Further, it is obliged to respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons within its territory, as set out inter alia in the following instruments to which the Sudan has become a party:
the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination;
the Convention on the Rights of the Child;
the Slavery Convention, as amended;
the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery;
the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the Additional Protocol thereto.
“As a member of the International Labour Organization, the Sudan has ratified its Conventions concerning Forced Labour (No. 29), the Abolition of Forced Labour (No. 105), the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining (No. 98), Employment Policy (No. 122) and Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) (No. 111).
“On 23 September 1957, the Sudan became a party to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, which set out humanitarian rules for armed conflicts.
“Further, it is to be noted that the Sudan has signed the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Although signature has not yet been followed by ratification, the Sudan has, by signing, shown the intention to accept the obligations under this Convention and, under customary international law, as reflected in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, is obligated not to do anything which would defeat the object and purpose of the Convention against Torture, pending a decision on ratification.
“In addition to the obligations arising from conventional international law, the Sudan is also bound to respect the standards of international customary law.”
This list of obligations will seem a dismaying grotesquerie to those familiar with the regime’s long history of brutal domestic repression, it policy of enslaving Southerners, its massive and continuous violations of the Geneva Conventions to which it is party, the vast crimes against humanity represented by the systematic denial of humanitarian assistance to desperate civilians, as well as by widespread and systematic bombing of civilian and humanitarian targets for more than a decade, its routine use of torture as an instrument of the security forces, and the conspicuous racism embodied not only in the practice of slavery, the widespread institutional exclusion of “Africans,” the racial basis for targeted human destruction (including the Nuba and the people of Darfur), but the present practice of “ethnic culling” of the northern population, a policy that de-nationalizes “Southerners” solely on the basis of race and ethnicity (see July 4, 2011 in Part 2).
The violations of these various “agreements” are so utterly routine that only the most dogged human rights organizations continue to make mention of them.