CIAO DATE: 08/07

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2006

 

Development and Darfur
Interview with Andrew Natsios

 

Excerpt

On 27 February 2006 the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (GJIA) met with former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Andrew Natsios to reflect on the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, and transformational development. Mr. Natsios served as administrator from May 2001 until January 2006 and has also served as special coordinator for International Disaster Assistance and special humanitarian coordinator for Sudan. From 1989 to 1991 he was director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID. Mr. Natsios is a graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he received a master's degree in public administration. He is currently distinguished professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and advisor on International Development at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

GJIA: We would like to focus on two topics, first the situation in Darfur and second development. As the former head of USAID, how has USAID—as well as other humanitarian organizations—been reacting to the security problems in Darfur?

Andrew Natsios: With respect to the security situation, it has been deteriorating since last October for a variety of reasons. The first is that the rebel movements, the opposition to the national government, are atomizing, breaking down into smaller and smaller subunits. There used to be two principal rebel movements, the SLM [Sudan Liberation Movement] and the JEM [Justice and Equality Movement].  Those are now breaking down into smaller groups. Now, there is some—but not conclusive—evidence that the Sudanese government, the secret police, are using their funds to bribe various leaders of the African tribal community who are leading the rebellion, to break up into smaller groups deliberately to destroy the unity of command of the rebels.

They did the same thing in the south: they armed militias to attack the SPLM [Sudan People’s Liberation Movement] during the conflict there. In fact, there is a book that was written by Sadiq al Mahdi, who was the democratically elected prime minister in the 1980s. He wrote a book that was quite infamous in the early 1980s in which he advocated four strategies to conquer southern Sudan. It appears the current government is using the same strategies in Darfur. The interesting thing is that Sadiq al Mahdi was unseated by a coup in June of 1989, and the government that unseated him is the government that is now in office and that is now prosecuting the war in Darfur; they appear to have taken his blueprint and moved it into Darfur.

The strategies that Sadiq al Mahdi advocated were: One, spread money around to cause chaos in the south; two, arm militias to cause intertribal conflict, which they did very successfully and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths; three, keep the war in the south and avoid letting it go into the north; and four, cause massive population displacements to destroy the tribal culture of the people of the south, which weakens their society and their cohesion.

They appear to be doing all of these things in Darfur as a tactic because they think it worked as a counterinsurgency measure in southern Sudan. The violence will get worse and worse until they stop doing this, but also until there is a peace settlement in Darfur that includes the major tribal leaders of the major ethnic groups—the Fur, the Masalit, and the Zaghawa, and the Arab tribes that form the base of the militias that have been committing some of the worst atrocities (the northern Risigat tribe, for example). The southern Risigat are opposed to the war and refuse to participate, and in fact, sometimes they protect the African farmers from attack by the Janjaweed militia.

So unless the traditional leaders are brought into the peace process, and until they agree to some sort of political settlement, I do not think there is going to be peace in Darfur, no matter how many troops are sent in from the outside. NGOs and aid agencies like USAID and UN agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Program and UNOCHA [UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs] can do a remarkably good job at keeping people alive, and they have done that. But they cannot end the conflict, and we should not put a humanitarian band-aid on what is a political conflict. We should not put a humanitarian band-aid on what amounts to an organized campaign of genocidal violence as a cover for counterinsurgency campaign on the cheap, as Alex de Waal, the scholar, recently said.