The government of Sudan and the biggest Darfur rebel faction signed a peace deal Friday, declaring an end to three years of bloody conflict that has left tens of thousands of people dead and 2 million homeless.
The agreement was signed in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, by Sudan’s top negotiator and the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army. However, two other rebel groups — a rival faction of the SLA and the smaller Justice and Equality Movement — refused to sign the peace accord, adding to doubts about whether it would actually end the violence in Darfur.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo hailed the deal but sounded a note of caution.
“Unless the right spirit, unless the right attitude and right disposition is there, this document isn’t worth the paper it is signed on,” he said at his presidential compound, news services reported. “The spirit that led to the signing should continue to guide the implementation.”
The Sudanese government and the SLA said they were signing the agreement to end years of suffering in Darfur despite reservations over power sharing and security.
Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who has spent three days and nights shuttling between the parties in talks held in Abuja, announced the accord. The two smaller rebel groups balked at signing the deal despite intensive pressure from Zoellick and other foreign officials who had gathered for the final push.
More than 180,000 people have died from the fighting or disease and malnutrition during the conflict, which broke out in early 2003 when two African rebel groups attacked police stations and military outposts in their fight against the Arab-dominated central government.
The United Nations and human-rights groups accuse the Arab-led central government of supporting militiamen called the janjaweed to crush the rebellion. About 2,000 villages have been destroyed in Darfur, which is an area the size of France.
U.S. officials believe an accord is essential to persuade Khartoum to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force that would include logistical assistance from NATO. The African Union currently has a 7,000-person force with a limited mandate that many experts say has been ineffective.
Sudan and the rebel groups have broken many agreements during two years of peace negotiations. But U.S. officials believe reaching an agreement with the largest group, headed by Minni Minnawi, is key to achieving a lasting accord.
As negotiations stretched into the wee hours, past a deadline extended to midnight Thursday, Obasanjo confronted the rebel leaders and told them they should accept the agreement crafted by Zoellick or miss a historic opportunity. Minnawi accepted while the others walked out of the talks, with one of the groups appearing to splinter.
In the past year, Zoellick has become the administration’s point man on Sudan, making four trips to Khartoum and the Darfur region to press the two sides to reach an agreement. He also has shepherded efforts to implement another peace deal, signed last year, that ended a 20-year conflict between Khartoum, which is Arab and Muslim, and the southern part of the country, which is largely animist and Christian.
Three deadlines for a peace deal had passed since Sunday, and the final agreement is an amended version of a draft document produced earlier in the week by the African Union, which mediated the talks. It calls for a cease-fire, disarming of the janjaweed militias, the integration of thousands of rebel fighters into Sudan’s armed forces and a force to protect civilians.
Political provisions included guarantees that rebel factions will have the majority in Darfur’s three state legislatures. But the rebels did not get the national vice presidency they had sought.
The other factions were holding out over demands for a vice president’s spot as opposed to a top presidential adviser from Darfur and concerns that security and compensation for war victims were not guaranteed.
The peace deal comes at a key moment in the history of the Darfur conflict, which is growing more chaotic, spawning more than 12 rebel groups on the lawless border between Chad and Sudan along with banditry and a flood of weapons and fighters displacing civilians in Chad and in the Central African Republic.
The mayhem has spread into Chad, where 60,000 Chadians have been forced from their homes by incursions by the janjaweed–a word roughly meaning “armed men on horseback”–along with several thousand in the Central African Republic.
Last week, the UN World Food Program announced that it had received only 32 percent of its appeal for $746 million for its operations in Sudan and that food rations to the camps would be cut by half.
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“It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be very tough to implement. But at least there is a prospect of getting somewhere,” said Alex de Waal, an adviser to the African Union mediation on the conflict in Darfur in a telephone interview from Abuja. “Even the donors are getting sick of Darfur because there hasn’t been any progress. Now there is, and already we’ve seen some of the major donors say they would be interested in helping if there was a peace deal.”
The deal would include an idea to create a “Darfur-Darfur Dialogue and Reconciliation” to be held within 60 days, in which representatives of every group in the region would meet to try to resolve grievances over rapes, the looting of animals and the grabbing of land, de Waal said.
By midmorning Friday, just hours after the peace deal, the charred, tattered remains of burned huts at the camp called Old al-Jeer Sureaf dotted the once-crammed tent city of about 5,000 people.
Fifteen people had been seriously injured, 10 community leaders were under arrest, and children were lost in the chaos.
“When will Darfur end?” asked the heavily bruised Zenab Abdulla Rahaman, 26, as she sat staring numbly at the floor inside the clinic run by the International Medical Corps, an American aid group. “Will Darfur ever find peace?”
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The toll
The unrest in Sudan’s Darfur region has taken a terrible toll since its start in early 2003:
180,000
Estimated deaths
2 million
Estimated refugees