Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The door out of Darfur

The latest London Review of Books carries a fine and fine-grained piece of analysis on the conflict in Darfur by the expert commentator Alex de Waal. De Waal speaks with great authority on the topic, having not only written about it widely but served in a diplomatic role in the country. About the cease-fire talks in Sudan in 2004, he writes, with parenthetical modesty:

(I was on the margins of these talks, the African Union having called me in as an adviser. The Sudan government vetoed my attendance until the chief AU mediator, Salim Ahmed Salim, overrode their objections and attached me to his personal staff.)

According to a widely respected Africa analyst who spoke to me, de Waal has been doing the finest work on the Darfur crisis. In this piece he says with depressing directness that military intervention is bound to fail. UN troops are not the answer, though they may be overdue to get in there. The hope is in diplomatic talks, because, says de Waal, "the political differences are small." De Waal spends perhaps too much time, for a general magazine article, on the minutiae of earlier failed talks, but there is great value in his stated views, and he discusses facts I was not aware of. For example:

On 28 July, the Sudanese air force used a plane painted in [African Union] colours to resupply the front line and evacuate their wounded. This was an act of perfidy -- a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, with so many dismal precedents in Darfur that paragraph 376 had been specially written into the DPA to prevent it.

But he closes with a merciful expression of cautious hope about the latest glimmers of a diplomatic solution: "Darfur has one last chance, and the formula is the best so far. If there’s a workable peace agreement, the odds are that Khartoum will accept a joint AU-UN force to keep the peace. But is it too late?"

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:44 PM

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