Complex conflicts of a scarred country

CURRENT AFFAIRS: Sudan, Darfur and the Failure of an African State By Richard Cockett Yale University Press, 315pp. £14.99'THE STATE of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world," declared Tony Blair, imperiously, in October 2001.

Foremost among the continent’s scarred states then was the war-torn former British colony of Sudan, and the UK sought to expiate its guilty conscience by helping to end the 20-year war between the capital, Khartoum, and the south. Yet by 2003, even as those negotiations inched towards success, Sudan’s western province of Darfur was engulfed in a new war.

As Richard Cockett makes clear, this war, too, was rooted in the colonial legacy of the “one-city state”, a country where all investment and development was focused on the Arab north, in particular Khartoum, at the expense of the non-Arab margins.

But the war in Darfur was to be a scar on the conscience of the UK for reasons that were more urgent, also. For much of the 1990s Osama bin Laden had found Sudan a welcoming and lucrative base for his business and military operations. In the wake of 9/11, with Sudan keen to be free of its international pariah status, negotiations between the US and Khartoum over intelligence on al-Qaeda became covertly bound up with the southern peace process, which was being overseen by the UK, US, Norway and Kenya.

In Darfur, ongoing low-level violence had led to an insurrection against northern rule. Khartoum had responded, as it had done previously in the south, with a crude counterinsurgency, arming Arab militia to conduct a razed-earth offensive against the Darfuri tribes.

If 9/11 had been a good day to “bury” bad news, 2003 was a good year to wage a quasi-genocidal war: the world’s media was consumed by Iraq; British and American attention on Sudan was consumed by the issues of terrorism intelligence and southern peace.

As Darfur reared its head the diplomats looked the other way. “We said deal with it quietly and neatly,” a senior US diplomat told Cockett, “but they messed it up.” At the UN a key British diplomat argued that killings in Darfur were a “humanitarian” problem, not a political one, thus (initially) keeping the issue off the agenda of the Security Council.

“Messing it up”, in that first and bloodiest year of the conflict, resulted in the deaths of perhaps 100,000 people (according to UN estimates, disputed by the government) and the displacement of a million.

In 2005 the southern issue was finally concluded with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and Sudan looked for the promised international redemption. But by then an unlikely American coalition of Christian and Jewish lobbies, activists and celebrities had put Darfur on the front pages.

In the process a complex conflict was reduced to alleged genocide. The US reneged on promises to redeem Sudan, the Darfuri rebels were emboldened by unthinking international support, and Khartoum’s moderates were displaced by hardline Islamists hostile to any negotiations. And the Sudanese economy was booming thanks to oil and Chinese and Indian investment.

Cockett’s conclusions are bleak: Khartoum’s strategy of displacing Darfur’s tribes to make way for Arab pastoralists has largely worked, and is probably irreversible; international activism and huge humanitarian aid, though they saved many lives, probably inhibited, rather than facilitating, an indigenous resolution of the conflict; and, with a referendum in 2011 likely to result in independence for Southern Sudan, that country looks set to repeat the errors of both its colonial and postcolonial parents.

Cockett's account, as befits an editor at the Economist, is unsentimental, well sourced and eminently readable. Not for Cockett the platitudes of western guilt and consequent, pious aid: there are no easy solutions to the problems of Sudan. But a clear understanding of their genesis is a good place to start.

Colin Murphy is a journalist and former aid worker in Angola