Mars 2022. Yet another attack shakes the Sudanese state of Western Darfur, on the border with Chad. For the second time since the coup of October 25, the Jebel Moon, mountains rich in gold, are stormed. The local residents accuse the rapid support forces of the number two of the Sovereignty Council, General Dagalo, known as “Hemeti”.
Fathia Mohammed, the president of the Nomadic Women’s Organization of Western Darfur, attributes these repeated deadly assaults to the peace agreement signed on October 3, 2020 in Juba. “The rebels who signed it want to show the government in Khartoum that they exist. But they haven’t gotten anything since. Neither disarmament nor their integration into the army took place. They do not receive a salary and still have nothing to feed their children and their parents. They steal to survive,” she explains.
This pact officially sealed the reconciliation between thirteen rebel groups and the transitional government which succeeded dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted in April 2019. At the time, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, evoked “the beginning of a new era for the people of Sudan” and “historic paths to peace”. Two years later, few still believe in the future of this treaty. He even seems to have facilitated the putsch which interrupted the democratic transition while clashes are increasing in Darfur and some of the inhabitants of the east of the country are threatening to secede.
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Buy Warlords
“This peace agreement has been distorted. It has many problems both in form and in substance,” summarizes Al-Baqir Al-Afif. For the founder of the Kace think tank on conflicts and human rights, this text was doomed to failure. In question, the stranglehold of the military, who shared the head of state with civilians in the aftermath of the revolution of December 2018.
“The government delegation that arrived at the negotiating table was made up of members of the old regime and not supporters of the revolution. They laid down their conditions and then let the veterans for peace, who are in reality warlords, submit their wish list,” explains Al-Baqir Al-Afif.
The latter have, among other things, demanded quotas in government bodies and 750 million dollars annually for ten years to implement the agreement. “It was unrealistic, continues the researcher. The military knew well that the state was on the verge of bankruptcy and failed to pay them this money. On the other hand, they succeeded in putting these warlords in the pocket. »
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A joint force at a standstill
Most of the signatories indeed supported the putsch. Suleiman Arko Minnawi, nicknamed “Minni Minnawi”, is one of them. Thanks to the Juba pact, the post of governor of Darfur, which brings together the five states of this region almost as vast as France, was created to measure for this ex-rebel leader. “Implementation is very slow,” he admits, from a quaint living room tucked away in a government complex on the edge of the Blue Nile. The fault, according to him, to a lack of will “especially on the part of the government”. But also to the lack of means devoted by the international community. A situation that has deteriorated since the freezing of several billion dollars to condemn the coup.
Accompanied by a large Darfurian delegation, “Minni Minanwi” went to Doha at the end of September to try to obtain additional funds. The key for the Qataris, a carte blanche to invest in agriculture, livestock, mining or even the construction and energy sectors. In the meantime, the governor of Darfur underlines the “small steps” taken since the ratification. Among them, the formation of a joint force of 2,000 men from the former rebel groups. Several sources, however, mention troops at a standstill for lack of resources.
“The Juba Peace Accord is clinically dead. His survival depends on a very good doctor who will only be able to practice once he returns to a democratic transition led by civilians, ”says Yasir Arman. This former adviser to Abdallah Hamdok, Prime Minister until the coup, has just separated from another former rebel group that signed the Juba Treaty. As a pro-democracy activist, he was uncomfortable with the boss’s benevolence towards the putschists. Yasir Arman does not want to see the protocol buried but rather rigorously applied in order to guarantee as a priority the return of refugees and displaced persons, the distribution of land, transitional justice and the reform of the security forces.
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Multiplication of attacks and threat of secession
Non-signatory armed groups pose a more severe diagnosis. “The Juba peace agreement joined the coup and it will fall at the same time, predicts Mohammed Abdelrahman Elnair, spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Movement. This pact has brought neither peace nor stability to Sudan. It only led to power sharing. At the same time, security continues to deteriorate in Darfur and the rest of the country. Horrific killings and human rights violations have increased. »
The Internal Displacement Observatory indeed records a resurgence of violence from 2021 which displaced 442,000 Sudanese, the majority in Darfur. Hundreds of victims have also perished since the theoretical cessation of hostilities. “These attacks target the non-Arab peoples to which the signatories of the treaty belong, because the Arab peoples feel threatened. They fear that the pact will call into question the lands they occupy and want, through these assaults, to show that they still control the region,” analyzes researcher Al-Baqir Al-Afif.
The “historic” text also destabilized the East. A section of the agreement is dedicated to the three eastern states, as well as to the north and center of the country. “The military added these regions to prove that the agreement was not just for Darfur, but for the whole nation. The representatives of these areas are only opportunists who wanted to serve their own interests, without a local base or legitimacy,” sweeps Al-Baqir Al-Afif. On August 28, community representatives from the East inaugurated a committee to prepare the armed struggle for self-determination. They then gave the government three months to cancel the eastern path of the peace agreement or grant them the right to self-determination.
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The international community remains discreet
The treaty signed in Juba under the auspices of South Sudan, Chad and the United Arab Emirates therefore symbolizes a missed opportunity: that of armed groups who fought against the marginalization of peripheral areas against a background of racism under the military-Islamist dictatorship of Al-Bashir then who came up against, during the two years of transition, the refusal of the political elites of Khartoum to share their power. Until their presidents sided with the generals, for personal benefits. “It created a lot of frustration against these ex-rebel leaders within their own communities,” said a Sudanese militarization researcher who requested anonymity.
This protocol also made it possible to repatriate thousands of armed men who had been exiled until then, mainly in Libya. “The disarmament procedure and the commission for internally displaced people mentioned in the agreement were supposed to take care of these combatants and their families. All of this has been neglected and has created new dynamics that are destabilizing Darfur. It is a post-conflict situation that requires a lot of work. The international community has contributed to this failure as well as to that of the transition process in Sudan due to a lack of interest and funding,” concludes this researcher.
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