Beyond Darfur

Sudan's Slide Toward Civil War

Andrew S. Natsios

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008

Summary:  While the crisis in Darfur simmers, the larger problem of Sudan's survival as a state is becoming increasingly urgent. Old tensions between the Arabs of the Nile River valley, who have held power for a century, and marginalized groups on the country's periphery are turning into a national crisis. Engagement with Khartoum may be the only way to avert another civil war in Sudan, and even that may not be enough.

ANDREW S. NATSIOS, U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan in 2006-7 and Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2001-6, is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Far more than the Comprehensive Peace Agreement is now at risk; the future of the state of Sudan is too. Even as they are supposed to cooperate in implementing the peace agreement, the north and the south are preparing to compete in the required elections. In a mature democracy, such tensions would be a recipe for acrimony, confrontation, and intrigue. In Sudan, they could mean another war. And as one respected African diplomat told me last October, "If the north and the south return to war, it will unlock the gates of hell."

ACTING OUT

One of the enduring sources of instability in Sudan is the long-standing policies and tactics of the NCP. The party is a descendant of the National Islamic Front, a party promoting political Islam, which overthrew Sudan's last democratically elected government in 1989 with the help of Bashir, then a general in the armed forces. The NCP has since quietly dispensed with the National Islamic Front's original plan to spread political Islam across Africa and replaced it with a much simpler goal: staying in power. In 1998, the NCP expelled Hassan al-Turabi, the National Islamic Front's leader and main ideologue, who had invited Osama bin Laden to Sudan. Moving away from Turabi's vision, Bashir and the other emergent leaders focused on developing the country's newfound oil wealth. The move has helped keep them in power, but they have committed so many crimes, stolen so much oil money, and alienated so many factions that support for them has dwindled sharply, even in their traditional strongholds in the Arab triangle.

Despite their survival instinct, the NCP leaders are anything but strategic. They are remarkably disciplined when it comes to short-term defensive tactics, but with the exception of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, they have developed few long-term strategies for dealing with any of Sudan's worst problems. They react and temporize, they divide and rule, but they have sought no way out of the mess they have created. They are prepared to kill anyone, suffer massive civilian casualties, and violate every international norm of human rights to stay in power, no matter the international pressure, because they worry (correctly) that if they are removed from power, they will face both retaliation at home and war crimes trials abroad.

Many NCP leaders believe that the West -- especially the United States but also Europe and the United Nations (which they believe is a U.S. front) -- is out to depose them and facilitate Sudan's breakup. They see the hybrid UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur as a pretense for carrying out this strategy and are especially fearful that it will collect evidence of the 2003-4 slaughters in preparation for war crimes trials before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. To them, the 3,000-strong European Union peacekeeping force being deployed along Chad's border with Sudan is the vanguard of an invasion -- which is one reason the NCP helped try to overthrow the government of Chadian President Idriss Déby in early 2008. In fact, the more aggressively the international community pursues war crimes trials and Western advocacy groups demand justice in Darfur, the more aggressively the NCP is likely to resist the UN-AU peacekeeping force there, even after it is fully deployed.

Part of the reason the NCP has been able to resist international pressure so far is that Sudan's oil revenues are rising. The money allows the party to buy off opponents at home, guarantees a national growth rate of 12-14 percent a year, helps maintain prosperity in the Arab triangle, and supports a massive internal security apparatus. It also insulates the NCP from outside pressure. It has blunted, for example, the effects of the U.S. economic sanctions regime that the Clinton administration put in place in 1997 and that President Bush expanded and extended last year. These measures have hurt Sudan's banking and financial system enough that the Sudanese business community is pressing Khartoum to normalize relations with the outside world. But the pressure has been insufficient to force a major policy shift; the sanctions are disruptive but do not threaten the NCP's survival. Tightening them further is not an option: shutting off Sudan's oil exports altogether would deprive the south of revenues on which its survival and stability depend. Senior southern leaders have told me, moreover, that they would view any move by Khartoum to cut off oil revenues to the south as an act of war.

HARDBALL

Another source of instability is the hard-line tactics that the SPLM recently adopted toward the northern Arabs, largely out of frustration over the failure of international diplomacy and outside pressure to get Khartoum to implement the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Last fall, southern leaders withdrew from the national government just before peace talks were to take place between Khartoum and the Darfur rebels in Sirte, Libya. The move was intended to put pressure on the NCP: just as the party was hoping to reach a negotiated resolution to the Darfur crisis, the south's leaders belied its claim that it was representing a united national government. As one senior European diplomat told me, "The NCP is not accustomed to having the southerners play hardball, and that is exactly what they are doing."