The six-year war between forces loyal to Sudan’s government and rebels in Darfur has effectively ended, the UN’s military commander in the region says. The UN says 300,000 people have died in Darfur, but the Sudanese government puts the figure at 10,000. Almost three million people are said to have been displaced by the fighting.
Anchor Jeb Sharp got a reality check from human rights lawyer Rebecca Hamilton who just spent the last month in Sudan. (Photo: Stuart Price/Albany Associates) >>>Rebecca Hamilton’s blog
>>> BBC coverage

>>>Andrew Meldrum of the Global Post on the situation in Darfur

Photojournalist Stuart Price spent 13 months in Dafur >>> click here to see his pictures

Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with human rights lawyer Rebecca Hamilton about news out of Sudan that Darfur is no longer in a state of war. Nigerian General Martin Agwai made the announcement as he ended his tour as head of the joint United Nations-African Union force in the troubled region.

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JEB SHARP: Sudan’s Darfur region is no longer in a state of war. That’s according to the outgoing commander of the international peacekeeping force in the region. Nigerian General Martin Agwai is ending his tour as head of the joint United Nations-African Union force in Darfur. He says there’s only on rebel group in the region still capable of mounting limited military campaigns. General Agwai says that right now the conflict has descended into banditry and very low intensity engagements. His statement is being dismissed by Darfur insurgents though. They say they’re preparing to launch new attacks on Sudanese government troops. Rebecca Hamilton is a human rights lawyer. She’s writing a book about Darfur. She joins us from Nairobi. Rebecca Hamilton you’ve just spent the last month in Sudan. From your perspective is this war over?

REBECCA HAMILTON: I think it’s premature to say that the war is over. I mean it could be that the war is over or it could be that actually what we’re seeing is a lull in fighting simply because it’s the rainy season and as the general himself says, you know at the moment the rebel groups are so fractured that it’s true they’re unlikely to be much of a threat to the government. But imagine after Hurricane Katrina if US officials had come out and said the hurricane has past. We would have been like okay the hurricane has passed but in its wake people have died, people are injured, people are displaced. To me saying the war is over is sort of like saying the hurricane is passed. It may be true but it misses the fact that you have 2.7 million Darfurees who are displaced in these God awful camps still.

SHARP: Did the internally displaced people talk about wanting to go home? Is there a movement for people to go home?

HAMILTON: People want more then anything to go home and they would if they could. But the reality is that the conditions are just not there yet for them to go home. Now it’s interesting because I spent some time speaking with Sudanese government officials in Khartoum and they were very keen to tell me how actually Darfur was very safe and all the IDPs felt safe to go home and there were all these voluntary returns happening. When you actually check it out on the ground in Darfur what they’re talking about is the seasonal returns that happen every year around this time. Which is you send a couple of members of your family to go and try and do some planting that will give you a bit of extra food security in the coming year. But people aren’t taking their whole families home because they simply don’t feel safe.

SHARP: Rebecca Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, was indicted last year for crimes against humanity and he retaliated by expelling aid workers. Have those expulsions had a measurable effect?

HAMILTON: They absolutely have. There were a few very courageous women at one of the camps that I went to. And they sat me down and they were completely determined that I understood what the situation was. And in essence most of the agencies that were expelled were also the ones that were doing protection work. In the women’s lives what it meant was that there would be women’s centers at the camps and it meant that if a woman was raped she would feel comfortable going to tell one of these international agencies what had happened and so she could be administered a rape kit there at the camp. What has happened is that those agencies have been expelled and so the women that I spoke to were telling me now when one of our women is raped we have to report it to UN police. The UN police then accompany her to the Sudanese police. At the Sudanese police station what the women said has been happening is that in their incident report their writing down severe harm rather then rape. The thing that I thought about when these women were telling me this was well this feeds perfectly into President Bashir’s claim that rape simply doesn’t happen in Darfur.

SHARP: Rebecca what’s your overwhelming impression that lingers from the trip?

HAMILTON: I think the one image that sort of summed up the whole international community’s approach to Darfur was at the UNAMID compound in El Fasher ….

SHARP: UNAMID being the UN-African peacekeeping force.

HAMILTON: It’s this you know big compound of shipping containers that now serve as offices in the desert basically. And there’s razor wire around the outside and there are UNAMID soldiers who are standing guard. But despite all that what you have in front of it is a Sudanese police station. That captured it for me. For all of having UNAMID there UNAMID has asked for the Sudanese police to protect them.

SHARP: Rebecca Hamilton is a human rights lawyer. She’s writing a book examining the impact of the Darfur advocacy movement. You can find a link to her blog at our website The World dot org. Thanks so much Rebecca.

HAMILTON: Thank you.

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