Laments about the ‘politicisation’ of humanitarian assistance are not uncommon; they are to be heard from the great and the good among the administrators and governing bodies of those who finance assistance. NGOs, particularly those whose cultural heritage is of confessional origins and which have about them the odour of philanthropy, that most oppressive of good intentions, are especially prone to them.1 In this note, we will argue that not fully to understand, or to take into account, the political objectives of assistance, the politics of the causes of any given emergency and the political objectives of those who are afflicted by it, is simultaneously to reduce the effectiveness of humanitarian intervention, and to confirm the victimisation of those for whom assistance is intended. The argument will be made in the context of the crises in Sudan.
Sudan's population of 34.9 million (2003) is ethnically among the world's most diverse; common estimates suggest that it is home to between five and six hundred ethnic groups. In the case of Darfur, Prunier remarks that it has ‘a minimum of 36 to a maximum of 150 “tribes“’.2 About 38 per cent of Sudan's population are ethnically Arabs and most of them live in the north.3 Although poverty is widespread and acute, the discovery and exploitation of oil means that it is not in the UNDP's table of countries of ‘low human development’; in the UNDP's indicators, it is ranked 141 in a list of 177 states. What is surprising about Sudan is that, despite fifty years of civil war, it has survived as a state, unlike Somalia which is no longer mentioned in the UNDP league tables and with which its history has so many parallels.
Humanitarian approaches
Here it is necessary to enter a caveat: the politics of humanitarian assistance itself is, at most, a sub-set of politics in general. It is possible, though probably futile, to concentrate exclusively on internal politics in the delivery of assistance – the endless quarrel over the relationship between multi-lateral and bilateral implementation springs to mind as an example of one of the most prominent instances of such politics; it is organisationally important, but the disagreement is often chiefly a matter of ego and cash. The present authors' position is that humanitarian assistance is an increasingly important part of international politics and that the situation in Sudan is a major instance of that umbilical connection. To make this point, they feel obliged to summarise cognate matters, even though such summaries may seem to be exercises in the obvious. The first of these is to draw attention to two, radically different, accounts of the nature and objectives of humanitarian action; both are political in practice and effect – the politics of each are simply different.
One is sometimes referred to as the ‘Wilsonian’ account (after Woodrow Wilson) of humanitarian assistance, the other as the ‘Dunantist’ account (after Jean Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross).4 Very roughly, Woodrow Wilson saw such assistance as a necessary part of foreign policy, Dunant saw it as necessarily separate from such policies and as a matter of human justice. The first is essentially statist and depends on the view that the fundamentally protective structure for people is a functioning state; both assistance and all other negotiation are seen, at least in part, as principally matters of the interests of the assisting state and, unless the policies of the recipient state in interfere with those interests, it does not qualify the nature of that state. Woodrow Wilson's bloody ‘assistance’ for the people of Haiti is an extreme example of assistance with the political objective of advancing the interests of the ‘donor’ state.5 The objective of the Dunantist position is the relief of suffering for all those who need it and for whom it can reach, regardless of affiliation and, for that objective, its organisations (the Red Cross and Red Crescent groups) have formulated their famous principles (neutrality, impartiality independence). They rarely compromise those principles in securing humanitarian access and their only judgement on the policies of the state in which they provide assistance has to do with that access. If their principles are threatened by external intervention, that is the refusal by any power to allow Red Cross/Red Crescent delegates freely to aid everyone at issue, then the organisation does not act at all and depends, instead, on its reputation and the effect of its withdrawal on public, or world, opinion to bring about compliance.
The distinction between the two approaches to assistance can be blurred, since the language of the Red Cross/Crescent movement (impartiality, neutrality and independence) has been adapted for use by many donor states whose position is that assistance is to do with, if not dictated by, foreign policy.6 ‘Politics’ is not the term of abuse that so many commentators make it. Oxford defines the word variously as ‘The science and art of government’ and ‘The political principles, convictions, opinions, or sympathies of a person or party’; it is clear that, if those fairly obvious definitions are accepted, then both Wilsonian and Dunantist positions are political.7 But the politics differ because the starting points differ. Whatever work the Red Cross/Crescent organisations may do to assist beyond the immediate relief of suffering, it is incorporated into that immediate objective and goes towards its sustainability. Assistance as foreign policy has, as the present authors hope to show in this account of assistance in Sudan, objectives which can, in the broader sense, be more to do with polity than with the alleviation of suffering. It is not completely to overstate the case to suggest that, in the Wilsonian world, polity determines both the form and the location of humanitarian assistance.
The cogency of our argument, as it relates the Sudan, cannot be established without a brief consideration of the historical/political circumstance that led to international intervention.
A rough guide to Sudan's post-colonial history
Khatoum & the south
Sudan declared its independence from Britain on 1 January 1956. In the preparation of this event, the apparatus of government was increasingly concentrated in Khartoum at the expense of representation and influence from either the south or the west of the country. The nascent government had made early promises of a federal state, in which all the twenty-six states would be on equal terms, but they were swiftly abandoned.8 Five months before the declaration, the first civil war between Khartoum and south Sudan began; commonly known as the ‘Anya-Nya’ war, it arose from a reluctance of southerners to submit to a northern government heavily weighted in the direction of the major Islamic political party, the Umma – an Islamicist and Islamicising party; that war was to last for seventeen years.9 For the greater part of that period, Anya Nya controlled the rural areas in the south, but Khartoum occupied the major towns.10 An estimated 500,000 people died and ‘several hundred thousand … hid in the forests or escaped to refugee camps in neighbouring countries.’11 In 1972, the war ended with an agreement in which the south would exercise regional autonomy – in effect, it amounted to the establishment of the originally envisaged federal state.
The next significant unrest in Sudan came in 1979 and was largely unrelated either to ethnic or to religious differences. War, drought and escalating oil prices had been high among the causes of a rapidly increasing national debt and the government (led by Jaafar al-Nimeiry) turned to the IMF for help; the privations consequent on adopting the structural adjustment policies demanded by that institution were visited, as usual, on the very poor and, not unreasonably, they protested.12 One interesting side effect of the arrangement with the IMF was the response of the Islamicising tendency; it saw the Fund's financial structures as flouting the provisions of shari'a against financial interest and aleatory contracts, its pressure on Nimeiry to conform to an Islamic agenda increased.13
Since the foundation of the independent state, Sudan's successive governments have teetered between fragile democracy, oligarchy and dictatorship; many of them, particularly the more authoritarian, have been enmired in corruption. Except for the occasional coup d'état, governments of each of the three kinds were elected, but the single consistent principle adopted by all of them was the retention of power in the hands of northern, Khartoum centred interests. The first independent government, and several subsequent governments, were dominated by the Umma. In 1983, during Nimeiry's reign, that party pushed the government into introducing shari'a in all the states, including the largely non-Islamic south. Despite the 1972 agreement, it became clear that Khartoum had no intention of fulfilling its promise of regional autonomy for the south – a position which hardened in 1978, when oil was discovered in area around the town of Bentiu in the southern state of Wahda (in the following year, oil was also discovered in Southern Darfur – a point to which we shall return). Since politics had failed the south and since the imposition of shari'awas widely resented, its leaders turned to insurrection; a southern political group, the Sudanese Popular Liberation Movement (SPLM), led by John Garang, created a guerilla force which became the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
Elections were held in 1986, but the renewed civil war meant that they were not held in south Sudan. A northern coalition government survived for three years when, in June 1989, it was toppled by General Omar Hassan al-Beshir, who has remained in power to this day. In 1991, Beshir once again enforced shari'a, but only in the north; it would not be unreasonable to see this limitation as his recognition that, eventually, he would be compelled to deal with the SPLM as an entity, rather than as an insurgent party simply to be defeated. In 1993, the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD) facilitated negotiations for peace which finally came to fruition in 2005 (the outcome is discussed below).14 As in the first civil war and, indeed, in all other wars, the chief victims of Sudan's second civil war were civilians. In it, untold numbers died or were displaced; estimates vary from the CIA's relatively modest ‘tens of thousands of deaths and nearly two million displaced’ to Wikipedia's view that ‘Roughly 1.9 million civilians were killed … and more than 4 million have been forced to flee their homes’.15
There are many reasons why, in recent years, international attention to the problems in Sudan was principally focused on the wars between north and south. Among them was the dismal story of a disintegrated Somalia, that most collapsed of ‘failed states’; not surprisingly, other proximate African states made substantial efforts to prevent the same thing happening in Sudan, not the least because such precedents are contagious. Motives were, inevitably, mixed: geopolitical issues, particularly since the opening of the Bentiu oil-fields and China's dominant position in purchasing their product, ran alongside humanitarian imperatives. One major consequence of this concentration of attention was a general failure fully to recognise the eruption of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Since international diplomacy was involved in preventing the separation of south Sudan from the north, and since the slaughter in Darfur, which erupted in 2000, was largely backed by the Khartoum government, it is not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that the donor states were reluctant to put pressure on Khartoum for fear of muddying the waters for a possible north-south rapprochement.
Khartoum & Darfur
In the mass media, the conflict in Darfur is frequently presented as one between pastoralist Arabs and black African settled farmers. It is unquestionable that the traditional negotiations between pastoralists and settled agriculturists, which, no matter how uneasy, only occasionally erupted into violence have broken down in the wake of recurrent and catastrophic Sahelian droughts; but the Arab/black African categorisation of the overall conflict does not bear examination. Over the centuries, both in south Sudan and in Darfur since its incorporation into Sudan, ‘Arab’ increasingly became a cultural rather than an ethnic description, but was used differently depending on the region, ethnic origin and occupation of the user.16 It was an affirmation of belief among Muslims, whatever their colour or ethnic origin, but it was also a term of opprobrium when used to describe those enforcing Khartoum's periodic religious campaigns. The consequence is that there is a sizeable population of black ‘Arabs’ who are Muslims, they are matched by a significant number of ethnically mixed people, including Arabs, who are neither Muslim nor pastoralist. Another distinction must also be borne in mind: it is between the ‘Baggara’ tribes to be found in Southern Darfur and Kordofan, whose members are pastoralists and the Zaghawa who are largely settled farmers; yet again, it would be unwise to see these as ethnic categories, since both of them include a wide range of ethnic or tribal groups. The point here is to counter the tendency of the media to simplify the conflict by suggesting that it is between two opposed ‘tribes’, or between Arabs and black Africans.
From 1916 until Sudan's independence, Darfur had been completely neglected by the colonial administration; independence changed little and Darfur was left to its own devices with almost no support from Khartoum. The region was remote, agricultural or pastoralist and, until the 1970s, without much in the way of economic enticement. For a long period, it was enmired in the complex political stratagems of Sudan, Libya and Chad, even to the point when, for a brief period, Libya and Sudan jointly considered uniting Darfur with the Libyan province of Al Kufrah.17 A number of other disparate factors, which occurred at different stages of the relationship between Khartoum and Darfur, not all of them connected one to another, began to alter matters: among them the droughts to which we have already referred: in 1979, oil had been discovered in Southern Darfur and more was also suspected in Western Darfur; but the major conditioning factor was the absolute economic and social neglect of Darfur by Khartoum. Neglect added to the difficulties produced by successive droughts and all the factors, taken together led to substantial protest to which Khartoum responded by increasingly violent repression.
Darfur, like all other provinces, had a provincial parliament which, for a brief period in the 1980s, was led by a remarkable figure, the provincial governor Ahmed Ibrahim Diraige, who, in 1963 had founded the Darfur Development Front (DDF) and subsequently, as governor, did his utmost to create an even-handed parliament in which all the principal religious, secular and ethnic groups could unite. The province also had representatives in the Sudanese government and there were many Darfuri, including intellectuals and politicians as well as migrant workers, to be found in Khartoum where they formed an intermittently effective opposition. The influence of Diraige and the DDF on them was considerable, but his major legacy appeared in the years 2001–2, when the Darfuri Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and its armed wing, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) emerged.18 The SLM/A was the successor of the Darfur Liberation Front, a secessionist movement formed during confrontations with ‘Arab’ militias (Janjaweed) in the late 1980s; collectively the SLM/A was, and still is, dedicated to Diraige's objectives – the creation of a secular, multi-cultural and democratic state within a federal and ‘united democratic Sudan’; the Movement also campaigned for an equitable distribution of resources and for greater Provincial autonomy.19 It hardly needs to be said that such a movement would, if successful, constitute a serious threat to the oligarchs in Khartoum. A second movement, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), formed by factions within the SLM, by exiled dissidents and by Islamic fundamentalists, appeared shortly after the SLM/A became active. There is some evidence that it was backed by Chad and it began its public existence by claiming credit for one of the early attacks launched by the SLA, a claim it soon withdrew. Its campaigns have not been on the scale of those fought by the SLA and, from time to time, it has been attacked by the larger, secular movement. Nonetheless, it has created havoc in some areas, particularly along the border with Chad. An even smaller Islamicising group broke away from the SLM, formed a militia and subsequently refused, alongside the JEM, to agree to the settlement in the recent peace talks – rapine would seem to be its principal objective.
A force which certainly has particularly to be reckoned with is the Janjaweed; which first appeared in 1998.20 It was a militia recruited from pastoralists and is armed and supported by the Khartoum government. Its early forays were minor compared with its resurgence in 2003. The Government of Sudan had determined that a military response to the SLA and, to a lesser degree, to the JEM, was necessary; but its armed forces were still heavily engaged in south Sudan and were also involved in occasional low-level conflict with Eritrea and Egypt.21 So the Government supplemented its military presence by formalising its relations with the Janjaweed which effectively became its ‘special forces’. Financed by the Government, exceptionally brutal and supported by airforce bombers, it became, and continues to be, one of the greatest causes of massive slaughter and displacement. Darfur has become a ‘complex’ humanitarian emergency as great as that in south Sudan.22
The details of the acute emergency in Darfur, continuing despite the soi-disant peace agreement, are well known. Rates of death and displacement and the numbers of people ‘affected’ by violence are the conventional measures of the degree of suffering in an emergency, but accurate figures are hard to come by. This is partly because many, and varying, parts of Darfur are rendered inaccessible by violence and reports from the traumatised displaced are unlikely to be specific. The Emergency Relief Coordinator estimated that, in the eighteen months prior to April 2005, 180,000 people had died from hunger and disease. In April 2005, the Coalition for International Justice estimated that, since February 2003, 140,000 had died violently and that the total excess deaths were in the order of 400,000.23 By October 2004, the number of displaced people within Darfur was estimated at 1.6 million and, at the same time, there were 200,000 refugees in Chad.24 Those who were ‘conflict affected’ (principally people who had not been displaced) amounted, by September 2004, to 2.2 million. By August 2005 the ‘affected population’, living in 338 locations, wasrecorded at 3,381,646.25
Accompanying the direct violence was the loss of assets caused not just by displacement, but also by marauding asset strippers; by failing production, both agricultural and pastoral; by collapsing markets; by the inaccessibility of resources (water and land) and the difficulty of getting remittances from migrant workers – central to fragile rural survival – to those who relied on them. The direct consequences of violence, common to all such emergencies, were exacerbated by extensive droughts; famine was, and is, inevitable.26 We have objected to the tendency of some elements in the media to reduce the conflict to one of tribal war, or a war between pastoralists and settled farmers, but in the struggle to survive in the face of drought and in the absence of outside assistance, ‘negotiation’ about water and land-use has become violent. The international response to the emergency as a whole, to which we shall return in a comment on the political manoeuvres at issue, was both late and vapid and still appears not to be meeting the need.27
At present, there is a laudable attempt by some international organisations (the most comprehensive account is to be found in the ALNAP Annual Review, 2005), to concentrate on plans for the restoration of livelihoods in Darfur. It is part of a change in direction for humanitarian thinking, which is moving from concentrating principally on saving lives to ways in which those saved lives can continue – salvation from death in an emergency, which results in subsequent death by inanition because livelihoods have been destroyed, is not to be contemplated. The problem is real, but thinking about it and response to it seems to be limited. Drought, violence and consequent famine (with some support from HIV/AIDS) have combined to do two things: massive long-term displacement jeopardises title to land; drought and a failure to cultivate, or to use, land in earlier sustainable patterns leads to severe environmental damage; the latter to a point where the ‘restoration’ of livelihoods is frequently impracticable.
These are not problems peculiar to Darfur or to the rest of Sudan – from similar, or from other, causes they appear throughout the continent and particularly in the Greater Horn of Africa. The principal consequence is an extremely rapid urbanisation and the dispersal of IDPs, a situation which became very obvious in an evaluation of assistance for IDPs in Somalia.28 Environmental degradation, combined with increasingly uncertain weather patterns, will mean the continued growth of an already substantial phenomenon. This does not undermine the need, where possible, to pay attention to the restoration of livelihoods, but it does mean that an entirely different analysis and, perhaps, a different mode of support must attempted. It will be one which must recognise that, for a substantial proportion of the population, the ancient rural patterns and modes of reproduction are no longer viable.
The biggest influence on some future resolution of the disaster in Darfur is the discovery of oil; an event which brings in other massive forces. Production has been underway for some time in south Sudan, but, because of the levels of violence, it has been slow to start in Darfur. It is common knowledge that, so far, southern production has largely been contracted by China; the US, because it maintains sanctions on Sudan, is in some difficulty, but would dearly like to oust China from its position, but the sanctions make it illegal for a citizen of the US to invest in Sudan. This led to a mildly ludicrous story in which a ‘Briton’ purchased substantial exploration rights in Darfur's oil: his name is Freidhelm Erond who, until the purchase became a possibility, had been a citizen of the US. His swift adoption of British nationality and a consequent passport solved the problem.29 What seems certain is that the scramble for what are thought to be Sudan's substantial deposits of oil have affected, and will continue to affect events. It is reasonable to see the considerable increase in violence against the Darfuri, since Khartoum's agreement with the south, as directed towards preventing any possible future agreement in Darfur from alienating control of the oilfields: it is also, by means of massive displacement, a way of ensuring that local interests do not interfere with that control.
These brief and very truncated histories of the rise of the emergencies in south Sudan and Darfur are a necessary preamble to considering the politics of international humanitarian assistance in both regions. There were four principal warring parties: the Government of Sudan, the SPLM/A, the SLA and the JEM; at intervals, many others were drawn in, though, with a few exceptions, not as direct combatants.30 In 2005, the African Union sent a small peace-keeping force to Darfur, which the UN is proposing to replace towards the end of 2006.31 But, in general, international responses to Darfur's emergency have treated it as if it is a phenomenon distinct from the emergencies in south Sudan and Nuba. This has partly been a result of chronology, but principally is a victory for the Sudanese Government, which has consistently tried to mask its attempts at social (and, therefore, economic) control and engineering. It is the present authors' contention that the half century of bloody engagement can only be understood as events in a single, widespread campaign, assisted by devastating drought and famine.
Resolution?
Support for the talks, in the Kenyan resort of Naivasha, between Khartoum and the SPLM/A, was a political act and, effectively, part of humanitarian assistance, even though such support probably came from budgets other than humanitarian aid in the various foreign ministries. They ended, in January 2005, in the agreement to the ‘Naivasha Protocols’. It is an agreement riddled with inequities: the war-criminals of Khartoum are not to be held to account; Khartoum agreed to withdraw a substantial part, but not all, of its forces from the south over a period of two and a half years, but the entire SPLM/A forces were to be removed from the north within eight months. The greatest inequity was the determination of the international negotiators to prevent the agreement from encompassing Darfur – this from fear that to demand it would result in the absolute collapse of the talks.32 The Protocols include the establishment of a southern democratic regional government and the beginning of a national programme of democratisation; the south was to be given a share in national power through a system designed to introduce parity in major cabinet posts; a share in oil revenues would accrue to the new southern government. Following the subsequent, and still unexplained, death of the southern leader, John Garang, only one of these commitments (the establishment of a regional government) has been met. Minor ministries in central government – Animal Resources, Transport and Wildlife and Tourism – have appointees from the south, but no senior ministry has a southern appointee.33 One major commitment in the agreement has not been honoured by either government – that women's rights should be recognised and accepted – neither has been prepared to deal with customary law and tradition which allow women very few rights. Not very surprisingly, southern organisations are reporting growing demands for complete independence.34 The Protocols allow for a referendum on southern independence, but it is not expected until 2011 and Egypt is determined that independence shall not take place.
Talks designed to resolve the conflict in Darfur were begun in Abuja early in 2004 and which, with the exception of the JEM and the small break-away group from the SLA who both rejected the agreement, were declared successful on 10 May 2006. A central issue in the agreement was that Khartoum would disarm and restrain the Janjaweed; at the time of writing, no evidence of such action has come to light and even the cautious bi-weekly situation reports from the UN suggest that little has changed. The International Crisis Group has remarked that the ceasefire is ‘in tatters’ and that an even greater threat is the possibility that conflict in Chad will spill over the border into Darfur; Chad has already declared itself to be in a ‘state of belligerence’ with Sudan and has tried to establish ties with Darfuri rebels.
Before we pull the elements together, other factors should be borne in mind: one is a general observation about sovereignty, the other is specific to Sudan. State sovereignty has repeatedly been offered as the reason why internally displaced people have remained beyond the reach of international aid. The post-1945 world order is founded on the principle of sovereign states which enjoy formal legal equality, regardless of differences in power and wealth (Article 2.1 of the UN Charter). But sovereignty is not just a protection for the state against coercion by other states; it is also the means of locating responsibility for the protection of people and property and for the exercise of governance in a territory within each state. Yet most discussions of sovereignty take place in the context of, and concentrate on, internal displacement and the problem of sovereign states which block access to IDPs. What can be overlooked is that weakened or lost sovereignty (the latter is the ‘failed state’) and, hence, the absence of a controlling authority, can equally be a source of danger. The corollary of sovereignty is non-intervention in the internal affairs of another state. Only self-defence or grave threats to international peace can justify a breach of national sovereignty. There are intimate connections between state sovereignty, the responsibility of the state for the welfare of its people under law and the legitimacy of the state. Sovereignty cannot easily be taken away but it can be thrown away.
The insurgent opposition in south Sudan was, and the various oppositions in Darfur are, a threat to sovereignty. But they are fighting in a situation in which no previous undertaking, given by Khartoum to the south, has been honoured and the lack of real progress in a little over a year after the Naivasha Protocols were agreed, does not inspire confidence that anything will change. The present authors believe that international politicians are terrified by the prospect of people re-arranging their own national borders – they see it as a consummation devoutly to be abhorred. The policies of both the United Nations and the African Union are committed to protecting the territories of existing states, at least in Africa.35 Two disasters were apparent from 2000 to 2005, in south Sudan and in Darfur, when increasing volumes of humanitarian assistance were pumped into Sudan and talks in Naivasha were proceeding; indeed the point at which the two Darfuri opposition groups launched their military campaigns virtually coincided with the beginning of that period. The difficult assumption in the positions adopted by the various participants in the Naivasha negotiations is that a failed state is a worse condition than preserving a murderous, racist and rapacious oligarchy, which, together with its predecessors, has consistently resisted any devolution of government – the present authors think that there is, at least, a question to be addressed. Sudan takes its present geographical shape as much from a series of colonial adventures as from its ancient history. Opposition to Khartoum, both in Darfur and in the south, is principally formed by secular and well organised forces with, at least, some determination to achieve a democratic society, and the wars have overlapped to a degree which renders absurd the determination to see them as separate issues. If the north cannot be democratised and, therefore, remains hostile to a democratic federal state, then precisely for the enfranchisement of the people, there is a case for supporting the independence, severally or collectively, of either or both of the two oppressed regions.
The question is raised to illustrate a point, rather than to advocate independence. Interests more powerful than the Government of National Unity (a recent soubriquet adopted by the Government of Sudan) and the Government of Southern Sudan will determine the issue. Sudan's total external debt stands at US$26 billion and would certainly qualify for debt relief under the enhanced HIPC procedure; but the debt includes arrears in payments to the World Bank's International Development Association amounting to US$354 million. The Bank has recently opened an office in Sudan but, at the time of writing, it is refusing to provide new funds until the arrears have been paid, though, in a joint press release from the Bank, the UN and the IMF, dated 10 March 2006, it offered encouragement to donor states who have yet to fulfil their promised funding for post war recovery.36 The occasion of the release was the first meeting, which took place in Paris, of a new body called the ‘Sudan Consortium’, at which about twelve representatives of the two Sudanese Governments and ‘130 partners from the international community … including eight ministers of international development’ were present.37 In a masterly misuse of understatement, the authors of the release remark that ‘It was agreed that the situation on the ground in Darfur remains critical and has created a sense of crisis’.
The circumspect dealings by the international financial institutions (IFI) are, of course, based on a specific model of development – the incorporation of Sudan into the ‘globalised’ economy which, it hopes, will lead the country out of poverty; a hope based on the risible proposition that some ill-defined phenomenon, usually referred to as ‘the market’, can solve all problems: a sub-set of that message is that the forces largely responsible for impoverishment are the best equipped and the most likely to introduce a general, if polymorphic, enrichment. That, in itself, is a profoundly political position which is open to a very wide debate which belongs elsewhere.38 At the centre of the campaign to incorporate Sudan into this questionable ‘world market’ lies the matter of oil. If Sudan's reserves prove to be substantial, and the degree of interest shown both by China and by the US suggest that they may be, then powers greater than the IFIs will bear on the country: with the extremely dubious exception of some of the wealthy middle-eastern oil producing countries, there is no instance of oil production improving the living standards of the Third World poor; not the least because oil-corporations find bribery a simpler and cheaper means of furthering their ends.
Humanitarian assistance for Sudan
During the famine of 1988–9, the UN (UNICEF was its agency for the purpose) established a programme of relief called ‘Operation Lifeline Sudan’ (OLS) which worked, in part, out of Khartoum, but principally from its logistical base in Lokichokio, a small Kenyan town near the border with Sudan. UNICEF's mandate was to address the problems in all the areas of conflict in Sudan, but, in practice, it was confined to working in the south. At the time of its operation, Khartoum was also waging a savage war in the Nuba mountains in Southern Kordofan and, although it is just north of the informal border between north and south Sudan, the SPLA was active in the region. The Nuba people were attacked on their own account, but also because of the presence of the SPLA. The OLS was prohibited by the Government of Sudan from bringing assistance to the Nuba except in areas under government control and, for fear of a ban on its activities, OLS at no point either challenged the Government, or made any attempt to assist without permission. In 1992, considerable restrictions were also imposed on OLS activity in ‘garrison towns and peace camps’.39 It is obvious that such prohibitions endanger the humanitarian principles of independence and impartiality; de Waal and Ajawin suggest that political compromise seriously limited both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of the UN operation.
That limitation is, of course, an inevitable consequence of the UN's structure and powers. Article 2 of its Charter sets out the principles on which it can act and the first of these is that ‘The Organisation is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members’ – a principle which is jealously guarded and, oxymoronically, constantly breached by the permanent members of the Security Council. When UN agencies provide humanitarian assistance for sovereign states, the only compulsion available to them is the threat of withdrawal if they are inhibited in giving that assistance to the people who actually need it. If the UN negotiates an agreement to operate with a state which is concerned only to enforce specific conditions on its citizens, regardless of culture or need, then compromise is inevitable. It is necessary only to recall the UN's dismal performance in Rwanda.40
From the beginning of the OLS to the end of the civil war in the south, the funds for humanitarian assistance and the ways in which they were used, the diplomacy of the donor and of the IGAD nations have all been directed towards the preservation of a united state. We have suggested that their motives were a mix of support for the Egyptian position and a belief that since Khartoum would accept no less, then such an agreement would be the only means of ending a devastating emergency. It might also prevent a possible collapse of Sudan into the position of a ‘failed state’. Simultaneously, it was also necessary to pretend that the massive slaughter and displacement in Darfur were either not happening or were a completely separate issue from that of the south; a position which, in effect, gave carte blanche to the Sudanese Government.
International pressure, sometimes concerted, from states with diplomatic representation in offending countries has been known to have some effect, at least for a short period. In the case of Sudan, for example, The Netherlands, in 1992, led a protest mounted by a number of embassies in Khartoum, against the Government's campaign of bombing Nuba villages. This was followed by a resolution against the bombing from the US Congress and these gestures did, marginally, increase humanitarian access, but little else changed.41 It is worth recalling that recent newspaper reports have remarked that events in Darfur are threatening to replicate the Rwandan monstrosity – history has yet to relate whether or not the Darfuri will be as comprehensively abandoned by the rest of the world as were the Rwandans. Concerted international pressure in opposition to tyrannical behaviour by a member state of the UN is relatively rare, more common is unilateral action which is sometimes passed off as ‘negotiation’. Negotiation can, of course, include military operations: Clausewitz's famous cliché springs to mind and the most recent dubious examples of negotiated assistance may be seen in the Bush/Blair ‘salvation’ of the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship and in the same duo's ‘liberation’ of Afghanistan.42
Co-operation between states, particularly wealthy western states, in providing humanitarian assistance for those afflicted by emergencies is fairly common. For the purposes of this note, the present authors are dealing with ‘complex’ emergencies, but much of what is said of them is true also of ‘natural’ disasters. Co-operation is hedged about by substantial political issues; the most obvious one is the relationship between donor governments and their domestic constituencies, the taxpayer must always be borne in mind. Diplomatic negotiation with the state in which the emergency is occurring is necessary and, quite frequently, continuous; relations with the UN (both the General Assembly and the Security Council) have to be kept in mind. But underlying this is a major political division embedded in the ‘humanitarian imperative’, which insists that all assistance should be impartial and neutral – an adoption from the Red Cross/Red Crescent (ICRC) position to which we have already referred; but both adjectives are dependent on what is being examined and how it is classified. This is not an argument against the validity of the qualifications, merely an observation about their limitations.
Donor governments are often quite open about their policies, but they are frequently fragmented and even contradictory; some clarity emerges if we look at what the donors do, rather than at what they say. In the case of Sudan, two issues must be considered – we must first look at the nature of the assistance (Table 1) and then at specific people for whom it was provided. In recent years, humanitarian assistance for Sudan has increased substantially, the reasons are varied: the increase in the scale of the emergency created by the war in south Sudan, despite the presence of OLS, was one; another was probably the growing tension caused by Egypt's fear thatan independent south might result in interference with the flow of the Nile.43 During the period 2000–2004, international donors allocated US$1,155,250,114 through the UN Interagency Consolidated Appeal for the Sudan Assistance Programme (ASAP). The Principal donors were the United States, the European Commission (including ECHO), the United Kingdom, Japan and The Netherlands. Most of those funds were used for food aid (66 per cent of the total – see Table 1), but because transport communications are so poor throughout Sudan, a large part of that 66 per cent was absorbed by the costs of delivery. Food aid is the largest sector plauged by transport problems, but not the only one – a good example of parallel problems may be seen in the situation in Wau prior to the Naivasha agreement. Wau was a garrison town in south Sudan controlled by Khartoum, but completely surrounded by territory under the control of the SPLM/A; the only access or egress was by air. Much of the population had fled at different stages of the wars and few resources or human skills were available. One implementing NGO, whose vehicles had suffered from the war-damaged roads in the enclave and who could find no skilled help in the town, was compelled to pay for the air transport of vehicle parts on an air system which limited packages to 25 kilograms – the costs were necessary, but absurdly high.
| Sector | Total contributions 2000–2004 (US$) | Percentage of total contributions |
|---|---|---|
| Food | 768,909,471 | 66.56 |
| Co-ordination & support services | 85,216,452 | 7.38 |
| Multi-sector44 | 81,339,787 | 7.04 |
| Health | 61,132,334 | 5.29 |
| Water & sanitation | 31,402,158 | 2.72 |
| Protection / HR / Rule of Law | 28,382,704 | 2.46 |
| Not yet specified | 25,515,785 | 2.21 |
| Agriculture | 17,808,326 | 1.54 |
| Security | 13,630,187 | 1.18 |
| Economic recovery & infrastructure | 12,134,685 | 1.05 |
| Mine action | 10,732,851 | 0.93 |
| Education | 10,541,427 | 0.91 |
| Family shelter & non-food items | 8,503,947 | 0.74 |
| Total | 1,155,250,114 | 100 |
| Source: The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. March. 2005. |
A number of crude distinctions are made in humanitarian assistance, they apply in both natural and complex disasters; since the emergency in Sudan is complex, we shall use the expressions for the latter. The period of active conflict, widespread destruction and continued displacement is usually referred to as an ‘acute emergency’; it can be succeeded by a period in which nothing much has been resolved, people remain in many forms of need, displacement almost becomes permanent and the absence of political solutions means that there is a constant danger of acute intervals – this period is generally referred to as a ‘chronic emergency’. It is assumed that, at some point, a resolution of the conflict, or conflicts, will be found and the transition from chronic emergency to development can begin.45 These distinctions are far more definitive in theory than they usually are in practice, but they follow from the initial radical distinction, held in the minds of donors and of many people and organisations in the industry, between disaster and development. We introduce them here because they bear on the interpretation of the data presented in Table 1.
Differences between the allocations of funds listed are largely differences of classification, what matters is recognising the pattern of support. Food aid, water and sanitation, health-care (general), security and family shelter are all sectors necessary in acute emergencies, in emergencies which have become chronic and in the transition period in which a return to whatever counts as normality is taking place; the remaining sectors are appropriate only in the chronic and transitional stages. Since it is not possible to isolate expenditure on the four essential sectors for an acute emergency from the expenditure for the same sectors in the post-acute phases, it follows that the greater part of funds for all sectors were devoted to the reestablishment of ‘normality’ – a prime example of a political end for assistance.
It should be borne in mind that international attention to Darfur was late in occurring. Most of the observations in this note have had greater application to events in the south than to Darfur or, indeed, to Chad.46 Evaluations of assistance for displaced and refugee Darfuri have repeatedly found that assistance was ‘too little and too late’.47 The violence was such that implementing agencies and organisations could operate only in certain secure areas, and that security was, and is, only relative, but even in such areas there were far too few implementing bodies.48 What has become known as the ‘CNN effect’ came into play, television coverage of the horrors, which sparked memories of Rwanda, was almost certainly an element in getting the donor states to pay some attention to Darfur. Unfortunately, the common pattern of large promises, but poor delivery became the norm: substantial sums were promised by wealthy governments for assistance in Darfur, but few of them were fulfilled. For example, while the present authors were in Northern Darfur, the WFP in both El Fasher and Kebkabya, was compelled to halve its already minimal food distributions for lack of promised funds. Such promises are a matter of domestic politics; a cynic might suggest that the failure to fulfil them is a sop to those taxpayers who are less sympathetic to the world's distressed. The net result is that the warnings uttered by the UN's Under-Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, multiply – and are still largely ignored.
Conclusion
In summary, a number of political strands are apparent. International humanitarian assistance for Sudan has two objectives: the first is to save and secure lives; the second, which conditions the first, is to support the unity of the state and thus to avoid the chaos of the kind exemplified by Somalia. An uncertain peace exists between Khartoum and the south, but a war continues in Darfur; both regions have large secular movements intent on a federal state and Khartoum's long history of opposing such an end means that a peaceful solution is by no means certain – added to this is the gravely uncertain situation in Chad.49 Oil has ensured that powerful and wealthy nations, together with the international institutions which they largely control, have become increasingly interested in the future of Sudan. There are several other strands, not least, for example, the use of religion to enforce cultural and political conformity, including all forms of discrimination against women. That discrimination is a matter of power in which the distinction between religion and politics simply vanishes.50
One under-researched issue in humanitarian assistance is that of the socio-political impact of implementing agencies and organisations in the acute stage of an emergency.51 Most attention is given to the quality and reliability of ‘inputs’ and, some minimal recognition of indigenous social and cultural structures apart,implementers concentrate on their own responsibility in immediate relief. To their credit, many of them take great care not to offend susceptibilities and, where possible, they employ indigenous workers, but, unlike developmental activity, extreme circumstances seem to call for managerial responses rather than cooperation. The theory and practice of management are both formed by culture and politics and differ widely between societies, most particularly between industrialised societies and societies in which the modes of production are wholly rural (and ancient). The most obvious consequence of this is that control over survival itself is seen to lie in the hands of others who have only a cursory recognition of social, as opposed to individual, trauma. At the beginning of this note, the present authors also referred to the ‘political objectives’ of the afflicted. These are inevitably conditioned by political, military and climatic events, but the survivors, particularly the displaced and refugees, will become more and more aware of the limitations on what is possible as the acute stage of the emergency continues. Given that the affected populations are so large and that, in some form or another, their effect on indigenous politics will be considerable, further examination would seem to be called for.
It is possible separately to describe each of these strands, including humanitarian assistance, but it is not possible to disentangle them and any attempt to do so would make little sense. The present authors would contend that a failure to understand assistance as a political phenomenon is to fail to understand both the predicament in which people affected by disaster are placed and the reality of their communal and individual political importance. That failure commonly translates into the reduction of people to the status of ‘victim’ and their consequent infantilisation by many otherwise well-meaning interventions. A final note may be worth making: governments in many countries wealthy enough to produce intervening organisations take great care to ensure that they do not engage politically; should they do so charity laws are invoked and they loose their tax exemptions – a simple, if crude, device to ensure political conformity.