By Anne Bartlett
April 10, 2012 — There is an old Indian story about a group of blind
men and an elephant, which does a remarkable job of illustrating
exactly how the NCP has managed to get away with its campaign of
bullying and state sponsored violence against defenseless people
throughout Sudan. In the story, six blind men are asked to describe an
elephant. Struggling to know the whole elephant, each man touches a
different part of it. One feels the tusk, one the trunk, one the body
and so on. Each comes back with a different description of the
elephant and fails to agree with the other about the nature of the
animal under study, and what it looks like.
At the risk of stating the obvious here, there are some very sharp
parallels to be drawn between this story and the current state of
inaction where the NCP is concerned. Chief among them is the
propensity of the international community to deal with each instance
of slaughter, starvation and political coercion as if it is a discrete
or ad hoc event in Sudan. Why, for example, are Darfur, South Kordofan
and Blue Nile treated as if they different problems, rather than
instances of the same genocidal impulse? Why are 20 years of brutality
against the people of the South, previous violence in the Nuba
Mountains and over a decade of violence in Darfur not lesson enough?
Is the case of selective blindness on the part of international
community a matter of incompetence where the butchers of Khartoum are
concerned, or perhaps just diplomatic indifference to the people who
are suffering?
If I sound angry about Sudan’s unfolding nightmare, then it is with
good cause. Over recent decades, the world has been happy to turn its
back on certain conflicts while taking decisive action on others.
Notably, issues that have direct bearing on the West’s resource needs
are solved with resounding speed and decisiveness, while those that
pose moral or ethical questions are largely ignored, or even worse,
left to China’s amoral political pandering. Sudan’s fundamentalist
clique has been allowed to get away with murder – quite literally –
even though on the face of it, they are more deserving of decisive
action to halt their obnoxious behavior than almost any rogue
government on earth. Yet today, even in the face of wholesale
slaughter, we are still wringing our hands and debating what is to be
done. Is the picture really that opaque that we can’t figure it out?
Where diplomacy is concerned, the predilection for moral equivalency
continues to set the terms of the policy being followed. The first
plank of this policy is the argument that there isn’t enough evidence
to take decisive action. Both the British and United States
governments have become very adept at using this argument, even going
so far as to question whether the NCP is actually capable of genocidal
action where its people are concerned. U.S. Envoy Princeton Lyman, for
example, has made precisely such an argument where the Nuba Mountains
are concerned, by saying he does not believe that SAF is capable of
ethically “cleansing” the local population in large numbers. Besides
the obvious duplicity of such a statement, it also begs the question
of whether Lyman should be treated for chronic amnesia on account of
his inability to recall Sudan’s recent history.
The other diplomatic ruse used to deal with each situation is to cloak
it under the banner of “humanitarian crisis”. This inevitably reduces
the solution to aid, rather than concerted political action to stop
the tactics of the regime. However, this policy not only tinkers with
the edges of Khartoum’s brutality rather than getting to the core of
the issue, but it also sets a highly dangerous precedent of
politicizing aid delivery. Through this policy the international
community plays right into the hands of the regime in Khartoum: it
allows the NCP to play God by deciding which NGOs can operate, who
will be allowed to eat and who will die. It also further lines the
pockets of Bashir and his relatives who, with the sanction of HAC,
have generated fake humanitarian agencies to supply aid where external
agencies have been banned. Finally, and of more concern for Sudan over
the long term, the policy of supplying aid rather than dealing with
the root cause of the problem also perpetuates the issue of food
insecurity by failing to protect the agricultural sector. The net
result is that instead of Sudan being the breadbasket of Africa as was
often predicted, it will instead become an agricultural basket case
that is very difficult to resolve.
Today on the ground, the ramifications of these policies are playing
out in a slow motion cycle of desperation and despair. For example,
where Darfur is concerned, the myth of peace perpetrated by
irresponsible news agencies is showing itself to be a completely
specious argument. For close to three years now I have argued that a
massive program of demographic and cultural re-engineering has been
underway in Darfur that has been bringing NCP supporters from outside,
rounding up local people like sheep and allowing the imposters to
police the very people they have displaced. Today, the evidence of
this policy is starting to surface with rumors of mass graves and
other atrocities. Even in the last few weeks, the residents of
Kabkabiya in northern Darfur have been subjected to indiscriminate
violence as a result of NCP attempts to rezone land in their area. On
the 27th of March residents around Birgi market and al Salaam
neighborhoods were terrorized by NISS and police officials, leading to
5 deaths and 6 admitted to hospital. A subsequent demonstration also
failed to resolve the situation. Instead, a further 13 people
sustained gunshot wounds and a man later died as a result of violence
around the UNAMID compound where demonstrators were actually fired
upon. Is this really what peace looks like in Darfur? And, perhaps
more importantly here, what exactly is UNAMID playing at?
All of these points illustrate a fundamental weakness in the West’s
policy towards Sudan. It demonstrates the actual reality of the
partial truths and the hidden agendas employed by outside governments
and their spokespeople. The US and UK notion that the NCP is a case of
“better the devil you know” may yet turn out to be extremely ill
advised. For a start, the corrupt and power hungry cabal at the center
of the government in Khartoum is now not only highly unstable, but
also perpetrating so much state sponsored violence that the cost of
dealing with their behavior is prohibitively high. It may be true that
at the end of the day, it is the people of Sudan who pay the ultimate
price for these diplomatic missteps. Yet there is another side to this
argument too. Doing deals with the devil is never a good policy. Even
if it is in the guise of diplomatic self-interest and geopolitical
expediency, this policy may yet come back to affect western
governments in a way that they neither anticipated nor counted upon.
The time has now come to chart a different course of action in Sudan,
and for once in recent history that course now needs to be based on
the needs of humanity, rather than naked self-interest.
Dr. Anne Bartlett is the Director of the International Studies
Graduate Program at the University of San Francisco. She is also a
director of the Darfur Reconciliation and Development Organization
(www.drdoafrica.org). She may be reached at albartlett@usfca.edu
http://www.sudantribune.com/
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