By Andrew S. Natsios
Sunday, February 24, 2008

In May 2005, while serving as President Bush's special envoy to Sudan, I visited Mornei, a displaced persons camp in western Darfur that now houses some 70,000 people beneath makeshift plastic shelters. I had come to meet with the local tribal leaders, hear their stories and assess the effectiveness of the humanitarian aid effort. Instead, I witnessed an outbreak of violence that lingers in my memory as I try to think about how the United States can help ease Darfur's misery.

As I talked with the adults, a group of young children gathered around us. Kneeling down, I asked these innocent victims of war to tell me what they had been through. They were soon in tears, whispering of terrible atrocities, of terrifying horsemen with rifles, of the killing of their fathers and brothers, of assaults on their mothers and sisters, of their escapes from the burning villages they had once called home.

A Sudanese official standing nearby was soon fuming, enraged and embarrassed by the stories of the appalling abuses that his government had committed. He demanded that the children shut up. That infuriated the tribal leaders, who yelled at the official to let the children speak. A fight broke out, and from beneath the camp leader's traditional robes, I saw the flash of emerging knives. Some of the camp residents grabbed stones and began chasing the official. The hapless Sudanese agent rushed toward me, hoping for protection, but he tripped and fell. The mob of his countrymen threw themselves upon him, hurling stones and lunging with their blades.

I was horrified. If the official were killed, I quickly realized, the Sudanese internal security services would be back that night to arrest and execute any camp leaders they could find. So I waded into the throng to push the angry Darfurians away. Members of my staff pulled the bloodied, battered official to safety, got him stitched up and whisked him with us out of the area. Because U.S. officials are so popular in Darfur, I guessed that we'd get away with it. (The United States is so widely admired in the camps that some parents have named their newborn sons George Bush, honoring his administration's decision to call the atrocities in Darfur genocide and to organize the international aid effort there.)

These camps, home to about 2.5 million people, sprang up in 2003, when many of Darfur's tribes rebelled for the third time in two decades against the Sudanese central government, an Arab-dominated regime that has repressed, neglected and marginalized Sudan's ethnic Africans for years. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's commanders responded by launching a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and counterinsurgency warfare in Sudan's western region. The Sudanese military and its allies, the horsemen of the Janjaweed militia, rampaged through the region, massacring young men who might join the insurgency, raping thousands of women to humiliate their fathers and husbands, and burning down 2,700 villages. Sudanese soldiers dragged nearly 2,000 noblemen from the Masalit tribe out of their villages and executed them.

That day in the camp, I came face to face with something often lost in the well-meaning debate over Darfur: the seething undercurrent of rage that could explode at any moment among the survivors of Khartoum's atrocities, who have been crammed into squalid displacement camps with no work, no leadership and no hope. Time weighs heavily on people with such awful memories, particularly when they have little else to do but nurse their fury.

At the time of my visit, I was in charge of a humanitarian aid program to care for and feed these people (with U.S. spending in fiscal 2006 and 2007 totaling $936 million) that my old organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development, had pulled together with U.N. humanitarian agencies, the Red Cross and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). If we hadn't supported the camps, most of the people in them would have died. That was nearly four years ago. These people are still in the camps today.

Anyone serious about saving Darfur knows that the situation on the ground is still anarchy. I remain convinced that only an international coalition can deal with the crisis. In November 2006, representatives from 30 countries met in Ethiopia, under the auspices of the United Nations and the African Union. We decided to expand an outgunned existing African Union force of 7,000 troops into a more robust international force of 26,000 U.N. and AU troops. We also agreed that we needed a negotiated peace agreement between the Darfurian rebels and the Sudanese government; without it, the outside troops would have no peace to keep. We tried to negotiate such a pact (known as the Darfur Peace Agreement) earlier that year, but only one rebel leader, Minni Minawi, signed it.

The rebels' divisions still worry me, even as the expanded peacekeeping force arrives. Last October, in Libya, we tried to kick-start peace talks between the rebels and the Sudanese government. But few of the rebel leaders attended, all offering different excuses. Some believed that they could beat Khartoum's forces and allies on the battlefield; others knew that their factional infighting had put them in a weak bargaining position.

That suits Khartoum fine. The Bashir regime has consistently tried to break the rebel movement into smaller groups that would prove easier to defeat. Meanwhile, Sudan's neighbors have been arming some rebel splinter groups, deepening Darfur's factionalism. The two original rebel movements have now fractured into more than 20, and the infighting and intrigue among them have become major impediments to peace.

Unfortunately, some Westerners have made the rebels into heroes even as they have (quite properly) cast the Sudanese government as the villains. Khartoum and its Janjaweed proxies have perpetrated hideous atrocities against innocent civilians, of course, but most of the rebels have strayed from the purer, defensive motives they had when they started the uprising. Some have even mutated into warlords -- looting relief agencies' trucks, kidnapping aid workers, attacking and killing AU peacekeepers. A few rebel leaders (such as Darfur's former governor, Ahmed Diraige) remain committed to peace and the public good, but too many others have become politically ambitious job-seekers. The rebels' bad behavior is making the Sudanese government, which is responsible for the crisis, look better every day.

Don't take it from me; just ask the Darfurians I met in the camps and elsewhere, who are also becoming angry at those who claim to fight in their name. During the peace talks last year in Libya, where I led the U.S. delegation, one of our young diplomats pulled me aside to tell me that an inspiring group of Darfurians wanted to meet with me. The next morning, I sat down with 15 leaders of Darfurian women's groups, traditional tribes, NGOs and democratic political parties. They told me they worried that the rebels were making increasingly extreme demands at the negotiating table, which would only prolong the war. The leaders of Darfur's civil society believe that too many men with guns are trying to hammer out a peace. They're right.

The United Nations and the African Union, encouragingly, are now trying to create "civil society councils" to represent the residents of the camps at the peace talks. But the Sudanese regime, feeling predictably edgy about new leaders with deep roots in their communities, is disrupting the selection process. And some rebels also dislike the idea of councils that they can't control; I've been told that one rebel leader -- Abdul Wahid al-Nur, who has been living safely in Paris for nearly two years -- has threatened through his henchmen in the camps to kill anyone who volunteers to serve on the councils.

Reaching a deal won't be easy, but the path ahead is clear: The United States, with other concerned countries, must insist that the councils in the camps be selected without interference, that civil-society delegations to the peace talks be increased in size and authority, that Darfur's Arab tribes get seats at the table, and that Sudan's neighbors stop arming rebel warlords. The longer Darfur languishes without a peace agreement, the greater the risk of more explosions in the camps like the one I witnessed and the less the chances that the incoming peacekeeping troops can succeed. Darfur's people need help, and they can wait no longer.

as.natsios@gmail.com

Andrew S. Natsios was the Bush administration's special envoy to Darfur from October 2006 to December 2007. He is now a professor in the practice of diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.