View from Nairobi

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The New York Sun

NAIROBI – This dusty, traffic clogged Kenyan city south of Sudan seems an unlikely place to move the United Nations Security Council wholesale, with Secretary-General Annan, hundreds of diplomats, aides, and press in tow. But the American ambassador to the U.N., John Danforth, who is President Bush’s hand-picked envoy on Sudan, decided on a grand gesture, to jump-start stalled peace talks to end Khartoum’s brutal 21-year civil war against the non-Muslim African and Christian population of southern Sudan.


The U.N. session here will be only the fourth time since 1952 that the U.N.’s chief decision-making body has met outside of New York. Meetings get under way today for a two-day session at the biggest U.N. facility in Africa, known as Gigiri, on the outskirts of Nairobi.


There is no small irony in the council being in Africa at this time, as violent ethnic and political wars ravage the entire continent, from Congo to the Ivory Coast to Darfur. How the U.N. and America handle this so-called extraordinary session on Sudan will either send a message of encouragement to Africa’s people – or send the clear message to the continent’s dictators and ethnic demagogues that they can get away with murder.


With the recent attention paid to Khartoum’s ethnic cleansing campaign in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, which has caused 70,000 deaths and displaced 1.6 million, it may be hard to recall that the government spent the past two decades terrorizing and enslaving the non-Muslim African population of southern Sudan. That war killed 2 million people and sought to impose Khartoum’s version of harsh Islamic rule across Sudan.


“Janjaweed,” a word describing Arab nomad militias mounted on horses and camels who, armed and supported by the Sudanese government and army, burned out, raped, and displaced the black population across Dafur, has now entered the popular lexicon. But the world would have been less surprised if it had focused attention earlier on Khartoum’s strategy of arming, training and supporting brutal ethnic militias to attack civilian populations in the south.


The people of Sudan desperately want and deserve peace. “My country, Sudan, has been a catalog of nightmares,” said Napolean Adok, a former Sudanese child soldier I met in Nairobi. America, with President Bush’s personal imprimatur, has worked hard to make peace a reality. But both America and the U.N. profoundly underestimated Khartoum’s diplomatic perfidy, and the people of Darfur have paid for this miscalculation with their lives.


Even as the government of Sudan sat at the negotiating table with America and other international mediators for two and a half years, Khartoum was planning and executing an ethnic pogrom against the civilians of Darfur. Every agreement, undertaking, and cease-fire so far negotiated with Sudan has proven worse than worthless.


In November 2003, a major push was made to get Khartoum to sign the so-called Naivasha (after the resort area outside of Nairobi where the negotiations have taken place) peace accords. Concerns then about the role of the government in violence in Darfur were soft-pedaled to get a deal in the south. Khartoum stalled, no deal was signed, and taking a message that the international community would look the other way, the killing campaign in Darfur began in earnest.


In April 2004, the government of Sudan agreed to a cease-fire with rebels in Darfur. The killing by Sudan government forces and their proxy Janjaweed militias did not cease. Instead, the cease-fire bought Khartoum more time to continue the killing and consolidate its ethnic cleansing. In July, the U.N. Security Council issued an ultimatum for Khartoum to disband and disarm the Janjaweed by August 31 or face stiff sanctions. August 31 came and went, and so did the U.N.’s resolve.


Human Rights Watch has reported how, when told by the U.N. to disband and disarm the Janjaweed or face sanctions, the government of Sudan simply gave them different uniforms and inducted the militia members into the police, army, and “security” forces that now often guard the displaced camps. Terrified victims of rape recognized rapists among their state-sanctioned “guardians.”


And just this month, as the U.N. prepared for its landmark session here, Sudanese police and security forces brazenly raided and overran camps where the burned-out families of Darfur have tried to rebuild their lives. Now, as the U.N. meets in Nairobi under the banner of “We Really Mean Business This Time,” Khartoum’s work to ethnically cleanse rural Darfur of its African people is nearly done. They subsist in camps vulnerable to attack or slowly starve if they are away from humanitarian assistance.


Sudan may have once again hoodwinked the U.N. and Mr. Danforth. All signs are that no peace agreement will be signed in Nairobi. Instead, Khartoum will buy yet more time by agreeing to some sort of “timetable.”


Moreover, just two months after America declared Khartoum was responsible for a genocide carried out by Arab Janjaweed militias against Darfur’s black civilians, the U.N. is reportedly dangling a massive package of international debt relief and reconstruction funds to keep Sudan’s leaders at the Naivasha negotiating table. The likely north-south peace deal will include no provisions for prosecutions. And despite the flouting of multiple U.N. resolutions, it appears Khartoum will once again escape censure for Sudan’s killing fields in the south and west both.


What message should Africa’s poor and poorly governed take from this series of events?


Certainly that looking to the U.N. Security Council for salvation means a long wait. Also that dictatorships stick together – China, greedy for Sudan’s oil, has been Khartoum’s reliable veto on the Security Council to ensure the U.N.’s threatened punitive sanctions will never be carried out.


But from Kenya, where many Sudanese refugees now live and where much of the humanitarian community trying to save lives in Sudan is based, there are a few reasons for optimism. Nairobi’s recent political history includes a wretched human rights record, political repression, and spectacular corruption under longtime dictator Daniel Arap Moi. But Kenya is now free of Moi and one taxi driver told me joyfully that Kenyans would throw stones at Moi if they saw him in the street. Today, Kenya has a multiparty democracy and Africa’s first female Nobel Prize winner, Wangari Maathai.


Maybe if the U.N. Security Council spent more time in places like Nairobi and Sudan’s grim displaced persons camps, rather than the posh salons of Manhattan’s Upper East Side of New York, they would pay more heed to Africa’s people than to its leaders.



Ms. Worden is the media director of Human Rights Watch.


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