Nelson Mandela’s group of ”elders” warned of signs of deep and growing division in Sudan as they ended their first official mission to the country, a visit marred by violence and confrontations with security forces.
”We heard the tale of two countries,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu told reporters at a press conference at the close of the trip.
Fellow elder and former United States president Jimmy Carter said the team had found huge differences of opinion between Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party and its political partners in semi-autonomous southern Sudan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement.
Both sides signed a peace deal — known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) — in 2005, bringing an end to Africa’s longest civil war. According to the agreement, national elections will be held in 2009 and a referendum on the South’s possible secession in 2011. But there has been an increasingly tense standoff between the signatories over their mutual border and the possession of key oil fields.
Carter warned: ”This is of great concern … If the Comprehensive Peace Agreement falls apart, nothing that is done in Darfur will alleviate the suffering of the people there.”
Tutu and Carter spent three days walking under the boiling sun with human rights campaigner Graca Machel and veteran United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to ”meet and touch” displaced Sudanese, tribal chiefs, aid workers and political leaders from the national government and the country’s South.
The team of veteran leaders also added their voices to an international chorus calling for a ceasefire in Sudan’s strife-torn Western Darfur region ahead of planned peace talks in Libya on October 27.
”Every woman we spoke to, the first thing they said to us was ‘we need security’,” said Machel. ”People are feeling more and more at siege.”
The elders hinted that they were planning to use their influence now to push more countries into committing troops and equipment for a planned 26 000 strong force of peacekeepers for Darfur.
At the end of their visit the team had little to show in terms of hard concessions won from Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir.
Carter said Bashir had agreed to let international groups, including his own Carter Centre, into Sudan to monitor national elections. Earlier claims that Bashir had promised the elders he would triple compensation to Darfuris turned out to be a misunderstanding.
”We don’t think that we will be able to effect change,” said Tutu.
”But we do have access. President Carter can pick up the phone and if he says he wants to talk to 10 Downing Street, they are not likely to turn him down.”
But Tutu’s team won over Sudan’s battle-weary development workers and refugees with its sheer star power and straight-talking assessments of the many crises facing the people of Sudan.
The elders arrived during an explosion of violence in Darfur. The evening before they flew into Khartoum on September 30, a group of armed men stormed an African Union military base manned mainly by Nigerians in the south-eastern town of Haskanita. Ten peacekeepers were killed and another 10 badly wounded. Splinter rebel groups were blamed for the attack but key insurgency leaders denied ordering it.
During a visit to a nearby AU military base, Tutu expressed his frustration at the ”disgraceful” under-equipping of the 7 000 AU peacekeepers already deployed in Darfur — and the delays in deploying the UN force.
Tutu used what he later described as ”very un-elder-like language” to urge world governments to step up support: ”I am making a call to people of good will … for goodness sake tell your governments to get off their butts.”
During the visit the elders had their own confrontations with security forces. Carter got caught up in a brief shouting match with a local security chief who tried to stop him visiting a tribal leader in the northern town of Kebkabiya and Machel had to order Sudanese security to move away while she discussed rape with women’s groups.
A handful of displaced Darfuris managed to dodge past security teams long enough to slip hand-written Arabic accounts of rape incidents into the pockets of British tycoon Richard Branson, one of the founders of the elders group.
The brief visit ended almost as violently as it began. Eight people were killed in a shootout between former Darfur rebels and government forces in the southern town of Nyala late on Tuesday — just six hours before the group arrived in the town.
By the end it was Tutu who managed to find a positive perspective on the troubled mission.
”I was very deeply touched by the dignity of the people who lived in the camps … I want to salute them and the humanitarian workers. Thank you for letting us feel a little more proud to be human.”