What will 'peace' in Sudan really mean?

Sudan has a history of peace agreements that do not hold, from its long civil war between the Muslim north and Christian south to the current conflict in Darfur between Arab Muslims and non-Arab Muslims.  Treaties have been signed and treaties have been broken so forgive me if I don’t seem too hopeful about the current peace deal that could be signed soon by the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the two main rebel groups in Darfur.  We’ve seen it all before and yet we continue to see killing, raping, intimidation, and terror in Darfur.

Darfur has been in turmoil for over three years—resulting in an estimated 200,000 dead and millions more displaced from their homes—so any movement toward peace has to be seen as a positive thing.  Yet, when you look at this attempt at a peace accord in the context of other recent attempts at peace in Sudan it is hard not to be skeptical.  It is also hard not to want stronger condemnation from the West and a stronger African Union to deal with such things.

There has been a lot of comparison made between the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the current situation in Darfur today. While some of those comparisons are certainly apt, others don’t hold water.  While the common excuse from the West at the time of the Rwandan genocide was that it simply happened too fast—800,000 people murdered in only 100 days—that same excuse cannot conveniently be used for Darfur today.  Three years of killing, raping, and terror are quite a different set of circumstances.

What is clear in Sudan is that the government in Khartoum has the upper hand over any rebel movement in Darfur whether there is a peace accord or not.  Through military might, available resources, and, perhaps most importantly, pure apathy from the rest of the world.  Despite the any peace accord the government, in a sense, will win.

The Sudanese government will win because, in so many ways, nothing will have changed.  The West will have proven, once again, that it is unable to take a strong stance against an African government, even if that government is sponsoring the killing and terror of millions of innocent civilians.  I’m certain that the government in Khartoum must be marveling at its ability to pull one over on the rest of the world—to conduct terror and genocide in full view of the rest of the world for three years without much more than a harsh word or two backed by a woefully inadequate African Union ‘peacekeeping’ force.

The Sudanese government must be shocked at how long it’s been able to get away with this gruesome scheme but, until the rest of the world proves that it has the stomach to take real action against these situations in Africa things will only get worse.