As peace talks begin in Libya, expect arm-twisting, boycotts and confusion but little progress towards peace Oct. 25th. (The Economist) AS THE people of Darfur, the ravaged western region of Sudan, continue to die in droves, their representatives—or at least those who claim to represent them—are set to gather in the town of Sirte in northern Libya to make yet another attempt to persuade the Sudanese government to agree to a ceasefire and to start discussing how to fix a durable settlement. Even though the meeting, brokered jointly by the African Union (AU) and the UN, is supposed to be at best a preliminary session to set a framework for more detailed talks, the omens are bleak. The Sudanese government has given no sign that it is ready to stop its forces or its proxies from bludgeoning the Darfuris. And the Darfuris are so divided that it is hard to imagine them creating a coherent front that would command the support of the bulk of their people if they did forge an accord with the government in Khartoum.
The mélange of parties, splinters and acronyms standing for just some of the dozen-odd rebel groups who are sending people to Libya, and who claim to speak for the 6m or so Darfuris in the maelstrom of what the UN calls the “world's worst humanitarian disaster”, is a negotiator's nightmare. The biggest Darfuri faction is called the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army but it has broken into at least five factions; the SLM/A is led by Abdul Wahid al-Nur, perhaps the key rebel leader, who says he will not attend the meeting in Libya. Then there is the SLM/A-G19, which probably will come, but may or may not be talking to another SLM/A faction loyal to Ahmed Abdel Shafi, a rival of both the SLM/A-North Command and the SLM/A-Union Front, to say nothing of the Great Sudan Liberation Movement. The fractious SLM/A may in turn co-operate with a faction of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the other big umbrella group, led by Khalil Ibrahim. But that depends on the attitude of another JEM faction led by Idriss Bahar abu Garda—not to mention the Revolutionary Democratic Front Forces, the United Revolutionary Force Front or, for that matter, a faction of the National Movement for Reform and Development. Some of the expected delegates may have invented these names just to attend the talks—and may, in the words of one observer, represent “just 30 men and a jeep”. This hotch-potch of rebels has so far failed to agree to any kind of negotiating position from which to parley with the Sudanese government of President Omar al-Bashir, which has continued to launch lethal attacks against the Darfuris. Sudanese government officials will be in Libya to talk about a ceasefire. But only if the rebels sort out their own differences can they hope, at a later date, to talk to Mr Bashir.
Even that might be hard, because several of the groups so far refusing to come, in particular Mr Wahid's, are those with the most clout among the Darfuris, particularly the 2.1m-2.5m who, says the Save Darfur Coalition, a leading lobby group based in America, now fester in camps. That figure does not include the 300,000 or so who have fled across the border to Chad and the Central African Republic, and another 1m-plus who have not been counted because they migrate according to the seasons and no one is sure where they are. Yet another serious SLM/A faction, headed by Minni Minawi, who signed a peace deal with the government at the last round of talks, last year in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, may not come either. The main JEM faction says it may stay away too. The splintering of the opposition is partly due to the failure to implement the deal signed in Abuja in May last year. Then, as only one rebel group signed up, the other two main ones were left out in the cold and have since splintered into ever-smaller factions determined to improve their positions at any future talks through military gains in battle.
The UN and AU envoys, respectively Jan Eliasson, a Swede, and Salim Salim, a Tanzanian, who will chair the event under the eye of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, are unlikely to repeat that mistake; better no deal than half a deal that most of the biggest rebel groups have not signed up to. Yet if the rebels could create a front, an agreement would be timely and vital. After years of wrangling with Sudan's government, the UN has finally persuaded it to accept 20,000 peacekeepers in Darfur. The first units are due to arrive before the end of the year (provided that the UN and the Sudanese government agree to the force's composition, which Mr Bashir insists must be all-African). Their task would plainly be much easier if there were an agreed peace to keep. A much smaller AU force, less than 7,000-strong, due to be merged with the UN force, has been struggling to make an endlessly flouted ceasefire stick since 2004. But the AU's force has been battered by attacks from the various rebel and bandit groups that have proliferated, some with the wink of the government. Last month ten Nigerian soldiers serving in the AU force were killed in a rebel attack on their base at Haskanita, bringing AU deaths up to 28 so far.
In the first six months of this year, 160,000 more Darfuris were displaced by the fighting. In the same period, one in every six convoys carrying humanitarian aid to the refugee camps was attacked; assaults on aid workers more than doubled compared with a year ago. The killing and burning of villages by the government-directed Arab janjaweed militias continue. More than 500,000 refugees are now cut off from supplies. And there are ominous reports that the Sudanese government, in what would be ethnic cleansing, is inviting Arab tribesmen from Niger and Chad to occupy the lands vacated by the refugees. If they have any sense, that should make the rebels put their differences aside. They are not secessionists, like the south Sudanese who want full independence. They want greater autonomy and a bigger share of national wealth (especially from oil). Their demands are eminently negotiable. But if they cannot form a coherent front, Sudan's ruthless government will be happy to leave them in limbo, at the mercy of the murderous janjaweed.
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