إتفاق الدوحة الإطاري (مزالق وسقوف)

Sudan: Peace Deal With Darfur Rebels?
February 23, 2010 | 2058 GMT


IBRAHIM AL-OMARI/AFP/Getty Images
Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Sudanese rebel group Justice and Equality Movement, in Doha on Feb. 17
Summary
The Sudanese government and Darfur’s main rebel group signed a tentative peace agreement after months of negotiations. The likely intention behind the signing of the deal is to help relieve Khartoum’s tensions with Darfur and with Sudan’s western neighbor, Chad, allowing the government to focus its security forces on oil deposits near the border with Southern Sudan.
Analysis
The Sudanese government and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the main rebel group in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, on Feb. 23 signed a framework peace agreement in Doha, Qatar, where peace talks have been under way since 2009.
This marks the second such agreement to be signed by Khartoum and the JEM since Feb. 20, when representatives from each side convened in the Chadian capital of N’Djamena. By forging a deal with just one of the several Darfuri rebel groups, Khartoum is implicitly recognizing the JEM as the most powerful actor in Darfur and, more importantly, is sending a friendly signal to Chad, Sudan’s western neighbor and the JEM’s state sponsor.


The move to neutralize or even co-opt the biggest militant threat in Darfur could benefit Khartoum by allowing the government to redeploy forces from its western region to the more strategic areas along the border with Southern Sudan, home to most of the country’s oil wealth. With national elections coming up in April and a critical referendum on Southern Sudanese independence scheduled for January 2011, Khartoum is doing all it can to deter the south from taking any actions that would result in a fight over maintaining control of Sudan’s oil deposits.
The terms of the framework peace deal with the JEM have not been officially released, but they reportedly include a temporary cease-fire and an agreement to bring JEM members into the Sudanese government and a stipulation that will convert the JEM into an officially recognized party if the framework deal is finalized by March 15. Among the other points in the agreement are a pardon of death sentences levied upon JEM prisoners captured during an attack on Khartoum in May 2008 and a vague clause about “wealth sharing” with Darfuris. Khartoum was clear to point out that since the signed deal is not yet a final agreement, the security arrangements will only be hammered out through further negotiations.
While some Darfuri rebel groups — most notably the Sudan Liberation Army faction led by Abdel Wahid al-Nur — have criticized the deal, as it only recognizes the JEM, others have now expressed a desire to join in negotiations with the Sudanese government as well. But the reason Khartoum is paying the most attention to the JEM has to do with regional geopolitics: Sudan is not as concerned about saving Darfur as it is about neutralizing the threat posed by Chad.
Sudan and Chad have a decades-long history of using proxy forces to attack deep into one another’s territory. The latest phase of this proxy conflict began in 2003, when the situation in Darfur began to heat up. Beginning in late January 2008, a Sudan-backed Chadian rebel group known as the United Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) made an advance across Chad, reaching N’Djamena before being repelled by EU peacekeepers. This was followed by a retaliatory move by the JEM in May 2008, when its forces advanced to Omdurman, a town across the Nile River from Khartoum. More border clashes ensued in June 2008 and have continued periodically since then.
Signs of a thaw between Sudan and Chad appeared last month when Khartoum and N’Djamena normalized relations and announced plans for the establishment of a joint protection force on the border. Preparations currently are under way for the deployment of the joint force, the command of which will rotate every six months between the eastern Chadian town of Abeche and the Sudanese town of El-Geneina in Darfur. Chadian President Idriss Deby made a rare visit to Sudan on Feb. 8 — his first since July 2004 — to meet with Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, and in a very public show of mutual goodwill, the two leaders agreed to end their proxy wars and develop their respective war-torn areas. The fact that Deby was present at the ceremony in Doha on Feb. 23, in which JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim and al Bashir signed the agreement, is both a public recognition of Chad’s control over the rebel group, as well of a signal of warming relations with Sudan.
Chad has not publicly called for any reciprocity from Sudan in reigning in its own proxy force against N’Djamena (which now appears to go by the name of the Union of Resistance Forces [UFR]); but it is likely that Khartoum has given Chad a sufficient security guarantee, as Deby has been adamant that the roughly 3,000 U.N. peacekeepers currently deployed in his country (part of the U.N. Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad, known as MINURCAT) begin to leave when its mandate expires March 15. In the past, Chad has been reliant on the presence of foreign peacekeepers as a buffer against Sudanese aggression, and actively calling for their withdrawal would make little sense unless N’Djamena were confident Sudan did not harbor designs to renew attacks in the near future.