Trolleys in Darfur

Luggage trolleys at El Fasher airport

Organising some of my old pictures, and I thought I’d treat you to some of my favourites. Particularly as I’m nowhere more interesting than Crouch End at the moment. If you’ve ever wondered what happens to the old baggage trolleys at Heathrow, well they end up at El Fasher airport in Darfur. Presumably there’s been some sort of oversight at the various sanctions committees. Or it’s simply an elabourate joke, given how the trolleys are useful for precisely 10m before the unwary traveller runs out of concrete and gets bogged down in sand.

On The One Hand

 

Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, Darfur 2009

At the weekend, leaders of the Justice and Equality Movement signed a ceasefire agreement with the Sudanese government which could lead to a final settlememt as early as next month. Good news from a part of the world that has had precious little to cheer about. But hang on, haven’t we been here before? Yes we have. Pretty much a year ago to the day…

Sudan’s most active rebel group has signed an agreement which paves the way for broader peace talks aimed at ending the six-year conflict in Darfur. The declaration of intent was sealed a day after the deal was announced between Darfur’s Justice and Equality Movement and the Khartoum government.

A couple of months later, I sat on a woven rug in the desert of North Darfur with Khalil Ibrahim, leader of Jem. We watched an Antonov fly overhead as he explained why his armed group would not be returning to the talks.

“We signed the good intentions agreement to see if the government had good intentions or not. We asked them to release our captured brothers in Khartoum and not execute them,” he said. “The government has refused to release these prisoners.

So is there any reason to be more optimistic this time around? Well, yes and no (always the only sensible matter when it comes to questions Sudanese).

It appears that the question of Jem prisoners captured in the assault on Omdurman two years ago has been resolved, with the government promising to release them.

But more importantly, Jem is running out of hiding places. Last month Sudan and Chad agreed to “normalise” relations, setting up a joint border patrol and halting support for rival rebel movements. If implemented, that means Jem will no longer be able to slip across the border to bases in Chad. I’ve never been sure just how much support Jem received from N’Djamena, but there is no doubt Khalil is under greater pressure now to seek an accommodation.

So the peace talks between Jem and Khartoum have a greater chance, this time around, of producing results. But, given the fragmentation of the rebel movements, and the fact that many people in Darfur are not represented – Janjaweed, Arab tribes who have not taken part in the conflict, other tribes with little time for the rebels – the millions of people living in aid camps face little prospect of a rapid return home.

Reactions to Saving Darfur

I’ve spent the past week taking my book on the road, describing its thesis to various audiences with different levels of interest in Sudan and Africa. It has been fun. I have five years of anecdotes with which to bore people. And the more I have talked about it, the more I have persuaded myself that Darfur, and the way it captured people’s imaginations, has something to offer other, future advocacy campaigns.

Over at Making Sense of Sudan, Alex de Waal is hosting a bit of a debate on the book. So far he, Guy Gabriel and Bec Hamilton have posted their thoughts. I know them all well, so have not been too surprised that the first couple of posts have been very supportive, but Bec has taken issue with the power I believe the Save Darfur Coalition has wielded. I’ll address her points in due course.

But for the time being, I’ll just mention that I’ve been reflecting on the book’s title – Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War. I had rather gone off the subtitle, thinking it a little clumsy. But in the past week, when I have been introducing the book to new audiences, I found that it was a very helpful starting point for discussing the thesis.

The only drawback is that seven years after the conflict flared, the crisis in Darfur is no longer our favourite African war. It’s just another bloody mess.

Amnesty Ireland Event Cancelled

Amnesty Ireland has cancelled the event scheduled for Thursday evening in Dublin. They wanted a second panellist to contradict my assessment of Darfur, but couldn’t find anyone in time. I’m sorry if you were planning to attend but hope you can make it to The Gutter Bookshop on Wednesday at 6pm instead.

Big Pictures and Small Details

Fantastic meeting set up by Arab Media Watch last night to promote my book. Good discussion with Julie Flint, whose grasp of detail in Darfur is frankly terrifying, and Sam Barratt, head of media at Oxfam, who gave a neat overview of some of the challenges facing aid agencies working in awkward places.

A lot of questions came up that get rather short shrift in my book: The role of oil in Darfur (none); The role of China (not always completely negative); and whether Darfur was used as a distraction from the real suffering in Gaza (nope).

It is always tempting to try to view Darfur through the prism of these global forces. To portray Darfur in terms of one of these global narratives. But I don’t see it.

Sudan is a country at constant risk of rupture. It is too big and unwieldy. When rebels from a peripheral area rose against Khartoum, the government unleashed awesome force. Today, the tribes that once tolerated each other view one another with suspicion at best and loathing at worst. Grazing, water and land rights are all issues. Resolving those tensions is the only way to find peace.

Launch Day

Today is launch day. The BBC World Service has me on its website and I gave my first talk about Saving Darfur yesterday to journalism students at City University. That went well, I think. They had some good questions and laughed at the slide of me on a donkey. Last week they had been told that the art of being a foreign correspondent was dying. I told them there were still plenty of opportunities out there. This evening it’s off to Soas for a chat with the BBC’s Adam Mynott, a good friend from our shared Nairobi days.

I have mixed feelings. It won’t be long before I embark on yet another new post. The launch of Saving Darfur means my connection with Sudan – its wonderful people and rich history – is drawing to a close. The next few days will be fun, as I get to talk about my book. But there’ll be a tinge of sadness too.

For now though the biggest dilemma is what am I going to wear? The uniform of a foreign corr is generally jeans and a shirt. But sling on a jacket and you could end looking like Jeremy Clarkson. Not good. Hmmm

An Easy Mistake to Make

This arrives in my inbox, originating from the office of the outgoing UN Special Representative of the Secretary General to Sudan, Ashraf Jehangir… With brains like this at work, you can only wonder why Sudan remains in trouble…

Esteemed Colleagues,

Kindly note the following correction to the transcript of the above sent yesterday afternoon:

The last paragraph in SRSG Qazi’s response to the AFP question should read as follows:

“The most important thing is that the parties remain engaged with each other; that the spirit of Yambio prevails; that they make the necessary compromises to ensure that whatever the final outcome is, it would be compatible with peace. The greatest threat is that if these things don’t happen then of course peace could be put in jeopardy. But I think the people of Sudan have seen the horrors of war previously and I believe that the leadership, both in the north and in the south, are determined to avoid any such scenarios in the future and that is the greatest promise … the greatest reassurance.”

Our transcript sent yesterday erroneously had the word “peace” in place of the correction above in bold.

Our most sincere apologies for the error and regrets for any inconveniences caused.

With the assurances of our highest considerations,

Learn From My Mistakes

The Crilly roadshow has rolled into London for various stuff connected with the launch of my book. It’s going to be a fun experience but also a little odd. As a text journalist the most hi-tech I get tends to be my mobile phone. Today, I’ll be getting to grips with powerpoint ready for a talk tomorrow to journalism students at City University. Another odd experience – it wil be my first time in a college of journalism. I hope I’m not struck down by lightning.

Anyway, the talk I’ll be doing will be based on a blog post I did a while back entitled How to Operate in Sudan. These are my golden rules:

• Always allow about double the time you would normally for pretty much anything
• Always use a trusted fixer and pay them ridiculous sums if it means they will dump their current client for you
• Never assume you will come away with the stories that you originally planned to write. They will mostly fall through, but you will probably get something better anyway
• Don’t expect anyone to answer a coldcall. A text message first goes a long way
• Don’t bear an uncanny resemblance to the previous BBC stringer who got kicked out
• Never attempt sarcasm with the good people from the Humanitarian Aid Commission. Particularly when denying you work for the BBC. Particularly at airports in Darfur. You will find yourself frogmarched off the plane while startled passengers look on (according to a good friend)
• Never, never – not under any circumstances, ever – point out to a government official that Allah probably has better things to do with his time than oversee the scheduling of interviews or production of travel permits (as said friend once did when told for the umpteenth time his travel permit would be ready tomorrow, insh’Allah – God willing). That is poor behaviour on many levels

How Do You Report Rape?

IDPs arriving at Al Salaam camp outside Nyala in 2007.

I like to think of myself as old-school. I didn’t do a fancy journalism course but worked my up through local weekly papers to the regionals and then the nationals. Journalism to me is just about asking questions and writing down the answers. Sure, along the way I did a shorthand course and picked up enough law to get by but the rest isn’t rocket science. I learned as I went along. I made mistakes. With luck I made them once, and remembered enough not to do it again.

That’s fine until you are sitting in an aid camp interviewing a woman who has been raped. How do you raise the subject? Should you name her? What’s informed consent? Is she a victim or a survivor? I probably stumbled my way through several awkward interviews until I began to learn how to handle things sensitively. Not ideal. I could still learn more.

Nick Kristof of The New York Times is learning the hard way too. In a recent column he named a nine-year-old rape victim he met in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The result was a tidal wave of criticism, questioning what sort of criteria were used to justify naming her.

Now Kristof has written a blog post discussing the question, but ultimately justifying his decision

I identified the Congo rape victims by name because I had permission and because I was completely confident that they wouldn’t get in trouble, and because I think that’s the only way to raise the issue on the agenda and stop this kind of sexual predation.

He rightly argues that aid agencies often go too far in trying to protect people who don’t want to be protected. But it is difficult to make that point for a 9-year-old. He also shows his lack of understanding of Africa by suggesting that many people share the same name, making it difficult to trace individuals in his stories from, say, Darfur. Ridiculous. There may be many people with the same name, but simply asking to find the girl who spoke to the white man last week would probably narrow the field.

But his biggest failure was not to follow the policy of The New York Times, in raising the matter with a senior editor…

That’s a policy that makes sense to me; I didn’t consult but should have (and will in the future).

This suggests he acted without thinking and his justification came all rather after the fact.

Anyway, these are difficult areas for journalists. But there are organisations that aim to make a difference. The Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma tries to equip reporters with the skills they need to cover violence – whether interviewing victims of rape, covering natural disasters or spotting the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is something I was never trained to do. And we can all learn a bit more. And for this reason, five per cent of the proceeds from my book Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War will be donated to The Dart Centre Europe.

Reverse Editing Darfur

I met Tusher Mohamed Mahdi in 2007. He was once a Janjaweed commander but had joined the Sudan Liberation Army by the time I met him

It’s 18 months since I decided to write a book. It had been in the idea form for a while. The more time I spent travelling back and forth to Sudan the more I realised that the story wasn’t being told properly. Each time I went to Darfur I stumbled across more inconsistencies in the grand narrative we had come to accept. There were Arabs fighting within the rebel ranks. There were rebels who had quit the movement because of human rights abuses. There were examples of the Khartoum government behaving in a pragmatic and reasonable way.

The more I looked at Darfur’s conflict, the more I realised the story that had developed in 2004 – of Arab Janjaweed unleashed by an evil government on African tribes which backed the rebels – was only a small part of the puzzle.

It was a conversation with Peter Eichstaedt in Bunia, Congo, that convinced me to put it all into a book. We were on our way back from an area close to the border with Southern Sudan where the thuggish Lord’s Resistance Army was up to its old tricks. For him, it was the final stages in writing a book about the LRA. For me it provided proof of how Khartoum’s tentacles spread through neighbouring countries and how International Criminal Court indictments had made a bad situation worse. If he could do it, so could I.

Then I just sat down and wrote a chapter. It was a sort of reverse editing process. I pieced together the stories I had written on a trip into the Jebel Mara and filled in the gaps. I put back in the details in my notebook that weren’t needed in the published stories. They were half conversations or inconvenient points that would have confused the issue in a 600-word news story.

That process eventually took me through 10 chapters and 90,000 words.

All journalists simplify and generalise. It’s what we do to make an issue immediate, relevant and readable. In the case of Darfur though we have failed to respond as the nature of the war changed. My book, Saving Darfur, is published next week and attempts to add back in the complicating factors until a different sort of picture emerges.