How could Britain think this shaky peace in Sudan is the model for Darfur?

David Miliband’s admission at the Labour Party conference that mistakes have been made and lessons are to be learned in Iraq could also be applied to Sudan.

Since helping to broker Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which brought the 22-year war in the south to an end in 2005, the UK’s Sudan policy has been detoured into futile attempts to repeat the process in Darfur.

The CPA has been left largely to implement itself, on the assumption that the two former enemies, the National Congress Party and the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM), now yoked together in an unequal partnership, will act in good faith and implement the agreement in full.

But it is now clear that the international guarantors of the CPA, including the UK, have no clear strategy in place should either side try to evade its provisions. Only gradually have they realised that peace in Darfur will be impossible if the CPA fails, and only belatedly are they beginning to give implementation of the CPA a higher priority.

More than two years have now passed since the signing of the CPA, and with a new foreign secretary and new secretary for international development it is time to ask: is the CPA going anywhere? Is it a model for ending the war in Darfur? What lessons can the foreign office learn for future action?

Is the CPA going anywhere?

The Sudan is now in an interim period which will end in 2011 when the southern Sudan exercises its right of self-determination and votes either to remain part of Sudan or become independent. Only at that point will it be possible to say whether the CPA has brought a stable peace to the Sudan, and the question of where the CPA is going can be answered only by judging whether it will lead to a free and fair referendum in 2011.

At this point one can only say that the indications are ambiguous.

On the positive side, there is improved security throughout most parts of southern Sudan, Blue Nile and southern Kordofan. A 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force is in place in those areas. Many of the southern diaspora have returned to take up positions in the civil service and administration, and refugees and the internally displaced are returning to the rural areas. There is a visible improvement to the physical infrastructure in many parts of the south, trans-border commerce is vibrant, and investment is growing.

But the overall structural situation remains precarious. There has been a signal failure to meet deadlines in the fulfilment of critically important aspects of the CPA in the areas of security, borders, the distribution of oil revenues and political partnership.

These have been so serious that the president of the Government of Southern Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayardit, announced at the opening of the Southern Sudan Legislative Assembly on September 10 that he feared the Sudan will ‘likely reverse again to war’.

He has good reason for this bleak assessment. There has yet to be a full implementation of the ceasefire and security protocol. The Sudan Armed Forces missed their deadline to withdraw all their troops from the south. The Joint Integrated Units have yet to be formed and deployed in the areas to be abandoned by both the Sudan Armed Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (Blue Nile, southern Kordofan, Abyei, and the oil fields). State security in Khartoum still maintains former government militias in the south. The UN peacekeeping force has been prevented from monitoring breaches of the ceasefire, and only last month there was a military confrontation between the two armed forces over a former government Arab militia joining the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

There have been other serious failures in implementing the CPA. The National Congress Party in the Government of National Unity has refused outright to implement the Abyei Protocol or participate in any meaningful way in the resolution of the impasse created by that refusal.

There are continuing delays in delineating and demarcating the 1956 north-south boundary, which is a necessary preliminary to carrying out parliamentary and presidential elections in 2009 and the referendum in 2011. There is a continued lack of transparency and accountability in the distribution of oil revenues on which the southern government depends for the running of government and the reconstruction of the south.

The political partnership between the National Congress Party and the SPLM, on which the Government of National Unity is supposed to rest, has not been functioning well. Tensions between the two partners have been growing. SPLM members of the central government at both ministerial and administrative level complain that they are isolated from the real working of government.

Last month the police ransacked three SPLM offices in the capital, ostensibly looking for illegal arms. Twice in the last month rumours were spread in Khartoum that Salva Kiir had died in a plane crash. Mindful of the riots that followed Garang’s death in 2005, merchants closed their shops until Salva Kiir appeared on the national media to deny his demise.

These incidents have been interpreted in the south as deliberate provocations on the part of the National Congress Party and state security to create a breach in the peace that would enable them to abandon the CPA.

The National Congress Party faction led by assistant president Nafie Ali Nafie feels that the CPA has conceded too much to the south, and that southern secession in 2011 is a foregone conclusion which no amount of the north ‘making unity attractive’ will forestall.

Their strategy, it is believed, is to claw back as much in territory and resources as they can, so that the south’s oil fields and other productive areas located along the north-south border will be forcibly retained by Khartoum, whether or not the referendum ever takes place.

What lessons are to be learned?

Clearly, the CPA is not a model to follow in Darfur, but neither is a Darfur peace agreement that further undermines the CPA. Proposals are being considered seriously by some members of the international community that would delay the 2009 elections in order to allow the Darfur parties to participate fully.

This would suit the National Congress Party, but not the SPLM, and could have the knock-on effect of deferring the 2011 referendum. Any such tampering with the referendum will increase the chances of renewed war in the country. Already there are voices in the south urging the southern government to declare independence if Khartoum continues to refuse to abide by the terms of the CPA.

Both the US and the UK have been loud in their declarations that the Sudan will face consequences if it does not make peace in Darfur. But Khartoum sees this as largely empty talk. The US has hobbled itself in Sudan with its own priorities in the war on terror. It has simultaneously denounced Sudan as a sponsor of state terrorism in Darfur and praised it as a useful ally in the war on terror.

Khartoum continues to play on Washington’s fears, knowing from past experience that as long as it plays up to Washington’s strategic interests — as it did during the Cold War — it will be able to get away with murder in its own country. Unfortunately, Britain has colluded with the US in its contacts with the Sudan’s security organs — the same institutions involved in the war in Darfur and undermining the peace in the south.

If Britain is serious about contributing to a stable peace for the whole of Sudan, it must rethink its own priorities. Peace will not take root in the south or spread to Darfur if the search for peace continues to be subordinated to the war on terror — the same policy responsible for so many mistakes in Iraq.

Britain must ask itself, is its security really maintained by allowing Khartoum to continue to wage war against its own citizens? Can any peace agreement in Darfur last if Khartoum is not held to account in implementing the wider peace agreement in the south?

When the SPLM and the Government of Southern Sudan take the lead, as they have now done, in asking regional and international bodies to support their initiatives for implementing the CPA on Abyei (one of the disputed areas), the borders, security and transparency in the distribution of revenues — will the UK repeat the flaccid response of the former Development Secretary Hilary Benn, and merely ask both parties ‘to show restraint’?

Or will it at last take its self-proclaimed role as a guarantor of the CPA seriously and seek new ways to act with regional partners to secure its full implementation?

Douglas H. Johnson is the author of The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars. He was nominated by the UK government to serve as an international expert on the Abyei Boundaries Commission in 2005 and has recently been advising the Government of Southern Sudan on the north-south boundary issue.