Darfur Humanitarian Update
by Eric Reeves
31 August 2010

Amidst a rapidly deteriorating security and political climate, and at the height of the rainy season and “hunger gap,” Darfur’s people face severe challenges to survival, both in camps and rural areas. Recent events at Kalma camp portend increased violence directed against Internally Displaced Persons throughout Darfur, and Khartoum’s new “peace from within” plan ominously recalls similar plans during the genocide in the Nuba Mountains (1992-99). The UN refuses to provide substantial data and reports on humanitarian conditions in Darfur, continuing a trend of over a year. For its part, the US is “de-emphasizing” the Darfur crisis and shifting its focus to the southern self-determination referendum.

Detailed analyses of humanitarian conditions in Darfur and eastern Chad from earlier this summer remain all too telling in their depiction of human suffering and deprivation:

(June 18, 2010)

(July 4, 2010)

Sections of the present analysis:

•Political Context

•Khartoum’s proposed “New Strategy” for Darfur

•US support for the “New Strategy”

•Implementing the “New Strategy”

•The catastrophe at Kalma

•A climate of intimidation for humanitarians

•Humanitarian conditions:

[a] health/medical needs

[b] water

[c] sanitation

[d] malnutrition

•An increasingly grim future for Darfuris

•Addendum: Rwanda’s threat to withdraw from UNAMID

We are presently at the very height of the rainy season (historically August is the rainiest month in Darfur, and September the second rainiest month). The “hunger gap” began unusually early this year following the poor harvests of 2009-2010, and fall harvest is still many weeks away. The success of this harvest is deeply dependent on the rains as well as security at the time of harvest. Right now, the food and other humanitarian needs in many camps are acute. Deaths from malnutrition alone are likely in the thousands. But these needs have been forced into a grim political and diplomatic context, one essential to any broader understanding of humanitarian shortfalls, rising malnutrition, and the longer-term threats to human survival and welfare throughout Darfur. The recent violence at Kalma camp and the ensuing international responses are particularly revealing of this larger context.

POLITICAL CONTEXT

The events at Kalma and other politically radicalized camps are at once cause and pretext for Khartoum’s pushing of plans that have been long in the making; these plans call for a “New Strategy” for Darfur, one that entails a “domestication” of the peace process. While continuing to give lip service to the peace forum in Doha (Qatar), the regime has clearly decided upon a very different approach in bringing “peace” to Darfur. Ghazi Salahuddin, who currently holds the Darfur portfolio for Darfur, told Arab diplomats on August 9 that “while the government would work to reach a negotiated settlement, it was not a priority” (Small Arms Survey, Geneva, August update).

The decision to relocate residents of Kalma camp—announced by the Governor of South Darfur, Abdel Hamid Musa Kasha, also on August 9—has “deepened concern that 'domestication' will proceed in parallel with a range of coercive measures, including continued military action against the armed opposition movements in Darfur and attempts to dismantle the camps that house more than 2.5 million displaced” (SAS August update). There has been no significant resistance by the international community to Khartoum’s initiative; indeed, recent reports suggest that the African Union and Thabo Mbeki, UNAMID, US President Obama’s Special Envoy Scott Gration, and others have acquiesced—frustrated by the lack of progress in Doha and unwilling to confront a regime with the power to collapse the southern self-determination referendum (January 2011). Khartoum’s patience and refusal to negotiate in good faith have allowed the regime to prevail, and the consequences will be disastrous for Darfur.

The rebel movements, including the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM, the only group still engaged in Doha), have all warned of the extremely dangerous implications of this new policy. The LJM has said “‘domestication’ will serve only to silence opposition and weaken the negotiating position of the victims of the war.” Civil society representatives, “whose participation in the Doha process was portrayed as a big step forward on the road to peace, have fiercely opposed it” (SAS August update). JEM has denounced “domestication” as a “rerun of the ‘peace from within’ strategy attempted in the Nuba Mountains after the jihad of the early 1990s failed to defeat the insurgency there” (SAS August update). This “peace from within” strategy resulted in concentration camps, brutal treatment of camp residents, forced conversion to Islam in order to receive food, appropriation of land from native Nubans, and widespread starvation. Initially supported by some development personnel in Khartoum, the strategy amounted to genocide.

A telling action on the part of Khartoum’s negotiators in Doha is reflected in the peremptory rejection of the Heidelberg Document, and the evident contempt for real civil society engagement in the peace process. Khartoum’s actions were the focus of an earlier Small Arms Survey update on the peace process (June 22, 2010):

“Government negotiators in Doha turn[ed] away delegates of the Heidelberg Committee—Darfur academics, activists, and civil society organizations brought together in 2008 by the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, in tandem with the Peace Institute of Khartoum University. The delegates had travelled to Doha, at the invitation of the [UN/African Union-sponsored peace] mediation, to present proposals for peace drawn up in nearly three years of discussions. The proposals, strongly supported by the LJM, include reuniting the three states of Darfur as one administrative territory, creating ways to allow IDPs to return to their homes and be compensated―both individually and collectively―and expelling settlers from neighbouring countries. The government spokesman in Doha, Omer Adam Rahman, claims the Heidelberg group is biased towards the armed movements. The LJM warns that rejection of the Heidelberg proposals will mean a return to war.”

Khartoum is not interested in negotiating peace in Darfur, and certainly has no intention of engaging meaningfully with Darfuri civil society. Khartoum’s bad faith has been obscured by the hopelessly fractious and irresponsible negotiating tactics of the larger rebel groups, but there can be little doubt that Khartoum would have been as intransigent and disingenuous on key issues as it was in the Abuja negotiations that produced the disastrous 2006 “Darfur Peace Agreement.”

Now, however, with no resistance from the international community, Khartoum has begun to implement its new strategy. As The Sudan Tribune reported on August 27, 2010:

“Chairman of AU Panel on Sudan, Thabo Mbeki, Joint Special Representative (JSR) of the AU-UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), Ibrahim Gambari, US Special Envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration met Thursday with Presidential Adviser, Ghazi Salah Eddin Attabani to discuss government’s new strategy to end Darfur conflict through development and resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). ‘We strongly support this strategy to resolve the conflict in Darfur,’ said Mbeki in statements to reporters following the meeting.”

U.S. SUPPORT FOR “NEW STRATEGY”

Acquiescing in, indeed “strongly supporting” a “strategy” so transparently threatening to vulnerable Darfuris is consistent with US policy, which has recently been determined by Obama’s disastrously incompetent envoy Scott Gration, who is reported to be pushing heavily to be named ambassador to Kenya. Obama himself has sought to stay above the debate within his administration over Sudan policy, but given his close relationship with Gration and his acceptance of his policies, the President ultimately bears great responsibility for what unfolds in Sudan in the coming months. We catch a glimpse of the Obama administration in action in the wake of a “contentious principals-level meeting at the White House [in the first week of August], in which Gration clashed openly with US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice over the direction of Sudan policy”:

“At the meeting, Rice was said to be ‘furious’ when Gration proposed a plan that makes the January referendum a priority, deemphasizes the ongoing crisis in Darfur, and is devoid of any additional pressures on the government in Khartoum. According to multiple sources briefed on the meeting, Gration's plan was endorsed by almost all the other participants, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and will now go to the president for his approval.” (Foreign Policy on-line, August 13, 2010)

This US “de-emphasis” on Darfur policy is a signal to Khartoum to accelerate its “New Strategy” for the region, and the policy implications of the US shift should be clearly understood by all. The regime’s buzzword in the document (“Darfur: Towards New Strategy to Achieve Comprehensive Peace, Security and Development”) is “development,” which occurs again and again. The clear expectation is that the international community will support this shift in emphasis from humanitarian relief: “The government expects UNAMID and other partners to play decisive role in this anticipated shifting from relief to development.” And while it is certainly the case that Darfur has remained almost totally undeveloped during the twenty-one years of National Islamic Front/National Congress party rule—indeed for virtually all the 20th century—the regime’s idea of what constitutes “development” requires substantial glossing. What this word really signifies, in the multiple contexts in which it appears, is unmistakable: “It is a top priority for the government to re-direct the humanitarian efforts towards rehabilitation and shifting from depending on the relief to development and self-reliance.” Translation: international humanitarian organizations must leave, Darfuris must return to their villages and become “self-reliant,” and the regime will take on all security responsibilities, leaving only a short-term role for UNAMID. “Rehabilitation” and “development” are also the pretext for Khartoum’s dismantling of IDP camps, with Kalma first on the hit-list.

IMPLEMENTING THE “NEW STRATEGY”

Indeed, while acknowledging in one breath that the humanitarian “crisis” in Darfur could deepen, the regime declares that it is “important to continue efforts and direct the humanitarian activity towards resettlement of war-affected persons.” Such “resettlement” is the complement to “development” and means the return of all IDPs to their villages or to new camps, which in nearly all cases have yet to be constructed. Such resettlement will inevitably be forcefully or violently implemented, as Kalma clearly reveals.

There some 90,000 IDPs were confronted with violence from within and without that worked to disperse tens of thousands. Using a conservative UN World Food Program (WFP) registration figure of 82,000, the retiring UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, very recently estimated that “some 15,000 [Kalma residents] seemed to have fled to Nyala town and another 10,000 to surrounding areas, including nearby Bileil camp.” According to Holmes, in his August 23 briefing of the UN Security Council on the events, both Kalma and Bileil were denied all humanitarian access from August 2 through August 18, with the exception of one brief assessment and delivery mission on August 16 (with characteristic mendacity, Khartoum repeatedly and shamelessly denied such denial of access). Access appears to remain open for the moment, but this may prove short-lived—merely an expedient concession given Security Council attention to the matter.

As context for his remarks on Kalma, Holmes notes that, “the humanitarian situation in Darfur has been steadily deteriorating again this year….” He also notes that “access restrictions, in the form of denial in practice of permission for humanitarian actors to travel, still prevail in Eastern Jebel Marra,” where more than 100,000 civilians have been denied all humanitarian relief since February; he might have added that many other places in need are or have been denied access by Khartoum.

[For a recent comprehensive overview of issues of humanitarian access, the blockade of Kalma, and violations of human rights and international humanitarian law throughout Darfur and Sudan as a whole, see “Sudan Human Rights Monitor, June – July 2010,” from the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies.]

Holmes notes the expulsion of key leadership staff from the (intergovernmental) International Organization for Migration (IOM)—an act that compromises the effort to distribute non-food items (NFI—tents, tarpaulins, jerry cans, soap, mosquito nets, medicine). IOM took over the NFI “common pipeline” for humanitarian organizations in Darfur after another humanitarian organization, CARE/US, was expelled in March 2009—along with twelve other large international humanitarian organizations representing roughly half the aid capacity in Darfur. IOM would also be one of the key organizations, along with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), undertaking supervision of voluntary returns by displaced persons. But two members of the scrupulously neutral ICRC were also recently expelled from West Darfur, as were the regional heads of the UN High Commission for Refugees and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (the latter for circulating a petition on world hunger). A worker for Danish Church Aid in South Darfur was expelled on August 31, 2010, reportedly charged with urging a newly released aid worker to disclose her mistreatmentat the hands of her kidnappers.

On the subject of returns, Holmes made several ominous observations:

“[It is] vital that displaced populations are not threatened with violence or otherwise forcibly moved.”

“[The tense situation in Kalma] was further aggravated when local authorities denied NGOs and UN agencies access to the camp for 15 day after August 1, amid suggestions that they want to get rid of the camp altogether.”

“[T]he situation remains tense and fragile, and there is still government talk of moving the IDPs out of Kalma and dismantling the camp.”

This is not mere talk: it is part of Khartoum’s new strategy of “accelerating” the return of IDPs. Since 2004 the regime has been eager to return people to their lands and villages, with or without security. Although declaring that the returns will be “voluntary” and “sustainable,” there is no evidence that it has any scruples on the matter of how civilians are removed from the camps in the absence of international observation. Again, the IOM and the ICRC—two organizations recently targeted by expulsions of senior officials on the ground—provide the most substantial resources in Darfur for overseeing returns and ensuring that all comply with international humanitarian law.

THE CRISIS IN KALMA CAMP

“Government talk” of “moving the IDPs out of Kalma and dismantling the camp” is precisely what is being threatened implicitly in the “New Strategy,” if one reads with any care. And Abdel Hamid Musa Kasha, governor of South Darfur, has been the regime’s brutally frank spokesperson on the issue (Kalma and Beleil are very close to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur). Two days after Holmes briefed the Security Council, a press release by the Khartoum regime(from its embassy in Washington, DC) declared:

“The governor of south Darfur state, Abdulhamid Musa Kasha, has said that the government is determined to bring Kalma IDP camp under control as from Tuesday [August 24, 2010]. Speaking after talks with UNAMID, Kasha said the government will consider the camp a hostile military base if the government forces faced any resistance within the camp.” (August 25, 2010)

The message to UNAMID is clear: control Kalma completely, and turn that control over to our police, armed forces, and Military Intelligence, or you will be viewed as obstructing security. Indeed, on the same day as the Washington, DC press release, Sudan Vision—the regime’s regular propaganda outlet, but often used to send signals to Western capitals and the UN—went further in expressing Khartoum’s outright hostility to UNAMID:

“South Darfur Governor Dr. Abdul Hamid Musa Kasha accused UNAMID as attempting to escalate Kalma IDPs camp incidents and [of] discouraging the IDPs to implement the steps the government is going to take in the state in dealing with the issue. Kasha during his meeting with UNAMID personnel working in South Darfur State that the government has information about weapons entering the camp; [in addition,] one of the UNAMID elements is discouraging the IDPs not to respond to the government call for transferring the camp into safer area.”

“Kasha declared that the South Darfur government will be permanent in the camp to bring about control and protect the innocent IDPs, affirming that they will not allow for the incidents of Kalma IDPs camp to repeat themselves. He affirmed that he, in his capacity as governor, will make regular visits to the camp.” (Sudan Vision, August 25, 2010; official translation lightly edited for clarity—ER)

The Khartoum police and military forces have never been able to enter Kalma camp, and Governor Kasha is clearly threatening UNAMID as a way to end this state of affairs. His threat comes in the immediate wake of USG Holmes’ insistence that it is “vital that displaced populations are not threatened with violence.” But any entrance by armed elements of the regime will precipitate precisely such violence, as was the case when in August 2008 Khartoum’s forcesattempted a breach of Kalma and killed at least 32 civilians, and wounded many more, before retreating. On August 17, 2010 the Human Rights and Advocacy Network for Democracy (HAND) reportedon a “military build-up and mobilization of government security forces around the major IDP camps,” as well as heavy arming of certain elements within the camps.