Minawi's bandits could spell the death of any peace

Three months after he signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, Minni Arkou Minawi, the most abusive rebel leader in Darfur but the only one to sign the agreement, has become the fourth most senior official in Sudan —Senior Assistant to President Omar el Bashir and head of the Transitional Darfur Regional Authority, the most important institution in Darfur with a first-year budget of more than half-a-billion dollars.

So unpopular is Minawi among Darfurians that the Sudan government hesitated until the last minute to issue the decree appointing him and did not pay for buses to transport the usual rent-a-mob to welcome him to Khartoum on Saturday.

The Khartoum newspaper Sudan Tribune said the government was ‘aware that the appointment of Minawi will not help to convince the other groups to sign the peace agreement’ and that divisions in Minawi’s own faction ‘weakened the authority of its leader’.

It was only after Minawi threatened to take up arms again that the government signed on the dotted line and Minawi flew to Khartoum to be greeted by a few hundred people — most of them protestors.

Despite the lure of power and money, many of those closest to Minawi have deserted him in recent weeks as he ordered his men to fight with the government army and Janjaweed against his former comrades in the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA).

Members of his delegation who criticise his strategy have been ordered out of Khartoum on the pretext of building a political movement across Sudan. (Insiders say more than half have been sent packing — 36 out of 70.) The territory under his control in Darfur continues to shrink.

Amnesty International last week accused Minawi’s men of killing and raping civilians in areas opposed to the peace agreement. The UN’s humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, said the abuses were causing a new wave of displacement. In Fasher, capital of North Darfur state and Minawi’s base since May, Minawi’s troops have been entering displaced camps, threatening civilians and looting.

‘They are becoming bandits in the town,’ a human right activist said this week. ‘They are drunk and drugged and living in the prostitutes area, unfortunately driving the cars of AMIS,’ the African Union Mission in Sudan whose credibility is already low.

Minawi was a 29-year-old elementary school teacher-cum-trader who was unknown, even in his own Zaghawa tribe, when the SLA began to organize in 2001. He had a rudimentary education but no military or political experience. Companions from those days say other Zaghawa treated him dismissively. But Minawi was able to read and write and became secretary to the SLA’s Zaghawa Chief of Staff, Abdalla Abaker. He was entrusted with a satellite phone with which to communicate with the world’s media and early in 2003 accompanied Abaker to southern Sudan to receive weapons from the SPLA.

As government attacks intensified in the area of Jebel Marra, where the SLA had its training camps, the SLA’s Chairman, Abdul Wahid Mohammed al Nur, a member of the Fur tribe, sent the weapons to Dar Zaghawa, the Zaghawa homeland in north Darfur. Many in the SLA believe this decision marked the beginning of a Zaghawa attempt to take over the SLA.

Before leaving Jebel Marra to build a secret airstrip in the far north of Darfur, the Zaghawa collected hundreds of small arms from the Fur, saying they were needed to defend the strip. As military operations began from the north, Fur troops were rotated out of Jebel Marra and never rotated back.

When Abaker was killed by a gunship in January 2004, Minawi was already ‘secretary general’ of the SLA. The post did not exist in the movement, but the difference between ‘secretary’ and ‘secretary general’ is a single word.

After Abaker’s death, Minawi slipped into his shoes: those who supported him had money; the others didn’t. First Zaghawa began assuming disproportionate influence in the SLA, followed by members of Minawi’s own clan, the Ila Digen.

Minawi’s men were unconcerned by the hardening tribal split in the SLA. The southern rebel leader John Garang had used his own small clan to control a divided SPLA, they said. So why not Minni in the SLA?

By 2004, Minawi was controller of the strongest rebel force in Darfur. Critics, opponents and potential rivals were imprisoned and/or killed. His forces spread across nearly half of Darfur, with mobile units penetrating more than 350 miles outside their own borders.

But Dar Zaghawa is the driest, most inhospitable land in Darfur and the Zaghawa, more than any other Darfurians, live in the land of other ethnic groups. The abusive, undisciplined behaviour of Minawi’s forces, and his unrelenting use of force to address every challenger, marginalised the Zaghawa within the multi-ethic mosaic that is Darfur as they had never been marginalised before.

Minawi’s support for the peace agreement guaranteed the opposition of others. His elevation to national power may well be the final nail in its coffin.

Julie Flint is the author, with Alex de Waal, of ‘Darfur — A Short History of a Long War’, published by Zed Books.