ALEX DE WAALOPINIONS

killed each month in local conflicts. A UN force of26,000 with a limited protection mandate (it is allowed to use force to protect civilians) is only now on its way and will be operational early next year. The accepted script is: blame world leaders’ lack of political will for their failure to stand up to Khartoum’s evil designs. There is an alternative view and it is this. Darfur is a typical, complex African civil war and can be resolved, given the right political alignments and good diplomacy, with a peace agreement that can allow in a peacekeeping force. Negotiations to end the war are messy and involve unsavoury compromises with leaders who have blood on their hands. But the R2P has ruled out these least-bad options in favour ofa fantastical ideal. Since the Darfur crisis erupted, international attention has focused overwhelmingly on the dispatch of military forces rather than peace negotiations. Every seasoned official in the UN department of peacekeeping operations and every British or American diplomat who had been involved in the successful negotiations to end Sudan’s separate northsouth war advised against this reprioritisation. At the critical juncture of the Darfur peace talks in March 2006, the ICG published a report, “To Save Dar

fur,” which had seven times as much space devoted to UN troops as to the peace process. The key Sudan policymakers in Washington DC and New York report that their time was divided in about the same ratio. Peacemaking was driven by the needs ofpeacekeeping, not vice versa. Unsurprisingly, both failed. Ironically, Sudan had already accepted international troops, from the African Union, in 2004. More progressive than

Once the AU soldiers realised the world saw them as second best, their morale plummeted

the UN charter, the AU’s Constitutive Act contains the principle of intervention in the case of humanitarian emergency or gross human rights abuses. The AU’s first force commander in Darfur interpreted his mandate creatively—he was far more energetic than his UN counterpart stationed to keep the peace in the nextdoor region ofKordofan. But the Darfur campaign insisted on the UN. In reality, a UN force will at best be a bigger version of the AU force, with many of the same African soldiers. It’s called “re-hatting”in the business: Bush, Blair and thousands

ofprotesters in New York’s Central park on the world’s first “Day for Darfur”on 17th September 2006 were campaigning to get Nigerian and Senegalese troops to change green AU helmets for blue UN ones. Already suffering from logistics and corruption problems, once the AU soldiers realised the world regarded them as second best, their morale plummeted. Today the AU operation is almost at a standstill—the need for the UN became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Darfur’s rebel leaders are a disorganised bunch whose miscalculations, political recklessness and opportunistic alliances have impeded the search for solutions. Abdel Wahid al-Nur, founding chairman ofthe largest group, the Sudan Liberation Movement, is a political ingéénue, catapulted into the international spotlight and flattered by his instant celebrity status. Uniquely among liberation front leaders, he put international intervention at the top of his political agenda. In the final session of the peace talks in May 2006, Abdel Wahid demanded that the US provide guarantees “like in Bosnia.”He wanted an intervention and wouldn’t sign without one. I was there, and my heart sank as I realised that international Darfur activists were not only refusing to make the case for the

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