Oct 5, 2003
It is not over until it’s over. But after half a century of a more or less continual civil war of extraordinary brutality which pitted the largely Arab-Islamist nothern Sudan against the hristian/Animist Black African, the Dogs of War seem finally to have had their bellyful.
A few days ago, the SPLM/A leader John Garang and the Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha appended their signatures to a peace accord brokered in the Kenyan town of Naivasha.
Both men have since addressed mammoth crowds in their respective regional capitals, to proclaim the dawn of a new era.
No more war. No more war-dead, estimated to number some three, possibly four million. No more internal slave trade. No more refugees scattered all over the world.
Africa’s largest country - geographically speaking - has magically ended a seemingly intractable conflict.
It is a pattern that is depressingly familiar. Twenty or thirty years of senseless carnage; the plunder and misuse of what meagre resources the colonial powers could not steal; and the complete destruction of the infrastructure which imperial powers left behind.
Finally, because the Cold War has come to an end and the erstwhile godfathers have become preoccupied with rebuilding their own economies; or because some unnamed Big Brother sees no more value in fighting its war by proxy; the combatants, weary and utterly drained, accept to sit in the air-conditioned offices of some foreign city to talk peace.
Remember Mozambique, Angola, Biafra, Namibia, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Congo-turned-Zaire-turned-Congo, or this forgotten Polisario conflict in Western Sahara? Remember Sierra Leone, Liberia and lately Ivory coast?
Not all of them have ended. The Algerian and Chadian wars simmer on, as does the “Luweero Triangle “—turned “Acholateso Triangle” bush war.
How can Garang and Ali Osman Taha do this to us? If this glorious war comes to an end what will happen to such mercenaries as Beverly Barnared, Anthony Deval, Rolf Steiner and Alexander Gay who made their fortunes in Biafra, the Congo and Southern Sudan?
Not to mention the great Carlos “ the Jackal” who is cooling his heels in a French jail after being betrayed and captured in - you guessed it - the Sudan?
If you deprive the Dogs of War of their playgrounds, what guarantees are there that they will not team up with other terrorists to crash commercial airliners into skyscrapers?
Isn’t it so much better for them to plant landmines in sparsely populated Africa?
I understand some treaty or the other has outlawed the manufacture of landmines. But the already existing ones, not all of which have been destroyed, must be put to good use somewhere.
And if the Sudanese war ends, what will happen to all those arms manufacturers and their dealers?
How will the so-called blood diamonds find their way to the bank vaults of civilised countries?
Do these Sudanese want to precipitate an economic recession whose consequences are too dreadful to contemplate?
All right, enough of cynicism. In Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the rebel leaders used to maim and rape - with the same savage intensity that has obtained in northern Uganda for the last 18 years.
Some of these leaders were as insane as Joseph Kony.
How is it that those various conflicts have been resolved - for the time being at any rate - not through military conquest, but via negotiated settlements?
Now that we don’t have to support the SPLA, the Sudanese government has no excuse for supporting the LRA - if indeed they have been doing so. Why don’t we go to Naivasha while the conference seats are still warm?
© 2003 The Monitor Publications
