The U.S. should help fix the Sudan it helped break
After Two Decades The Violence Continues
Long before Mohammad Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began tearing apart Sudan, the U.S. could have helped prevent the violence, death and destruction. But our foreign policy apparatus was captured in 2003-04 by domestic politics and the opportunity to introduce international peacekeeping in Darfur was lost. Without robust peacekeeping, the Janjaweed swept through Darfur and eventually grew into the RSF which turned on the government, using the same brutal attacks on civilians as they deployed in Darfur. Instead of simply watching this violence continue to kill desperate men, women and children, the U.S, should correct its past failure to act by working with the African Union to move a new UN Security Council resolution to authorize peacekeeping, armed if necessary.
I arrived in Khartoum in August 2003 as the Charge d'affaires of the newly reopened U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. The Embassy had been closed since 1996 over concerns about the Islamic fundamentalist regime’s ties to terrorism (engineer Osama bin Laden “built roads” in Sudan between 1991-96) and the shooting of an embassy officer. In August 1998, President Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike at the Al-Shifa “pharmaceutical factory” just north of Khartoum. After 9/11, the U.S. sought to work with Sudan on counter-terrorism and the government of Omar al-Bashir (aware of the reach of the American military) became receptive. In 2002, U.S. staff started digging out the sand from the former embassy building.
My mission had two parts, keeping up counter-terrorism cooperation (CT) and helping end the Sudanese civil war between the regime in the Arab north and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the Black African, “Christian” south. American Christian fundamentalists had been pushing the Bush Administration to support the SPLM and had captured the leadership of USAID. The AID mission in Khartoum operated more as a pro-SPLM NGO than a government agency. While Special Envoys were working on the peace process, the Embassy focused on CT. This presented challenges as there were still terrorists in the government. (A senior government minister once took me aside to say he could have me killed and get away with it. Indeed, in 1973, the U.S. Ambassador and deputy were assassinated in Khartoum.)
By September 2003, however, violence in Darfur began to raise concerns among the Western chiefs of mission in Khartoum. The Sudan Liberation Movement (SPM) – drawn from the African cattle herder side of the sometimes conflicted relationship with their neighboring (and fellow Muslim) Arab camel herders – saw the possibility of doing their version of the successful SPLM rebellion. In April 2003, they captured Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur. Bashir – his military occupied fighting the SPLM – decided to use against the Darfur rebels a tribal militia drawn from the camel herders. These became the Janjaweed. With government support, they unleashed violent ethnic cleansing, reports of which were reaching us in Khartoum.
I joined a small group of Western Embassy colleagues – notably the UK, Dutch and German – that began closely following events in Darfur and bringing them to the attention of our capitals. However, AID officials remained focused on helping the SPLM and some thought little of “Muslims killing Muslims” except as how it could be used against Khartoum in the effort to press for regime change. (During Embassy efforts to broker peace negotiations between the SPM and the government, we became aware of apparent AID back-channeling to the rebels to keep them from the negotiations.) Only when the need to be seen providing humanitarian assistance to the women and children the Janjaweed had cleansed into camps did AID take on their humanitarian traditional role.
U.S. policy on Sudan had been hijacked by a domestic constituency that led to our never coming to grips with the Darfur violence when we might have been able to help stop it. In June 2004, I visited the newly deploying African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) in Darfur to find it lacked the necessary logistics, especially vehicles, for peacekeeping. After coordinating with the U.S. Combined Joint Task Force in Djibouti, I recommended to Washington that we provide support. To address concern about U.S. “boots on the ground,” I advocated providing only logistics. But Washington remained focused on helping the SPLM and uninterested in doing anything about Darfur beyond escalating our rhetoric. (In September — after visiting Darfur — Secretary of State Powell labeled the violence genocide.) AMIS itself suffered attacks and only in 2007 did the UN combine with the AU to become the more effective UNAMID (downsized during the Trump administration and withdrawn in 2021.)
In 2011, South Sudan achieved independence, a failed state at birth.
