Still, President Hu Jintao made time for a meeting Monday with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. The problem is Bashir didn’t show up.

It was not an auspicious start to an already controversial visit. The international criminal court indicted Bashir two years ago. But China’s special envoy on Africa, Liu Guijin, says China doesn’t have to do anything about that. “China is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court, so is not legally obliged to turn Bashir over,” Guijin said.

China prefers a more pragmatic approach. It’s long done business with Sudan – buying its oil, and selling it arms. Bashir has received the money and weaponry to attack both insurgent and civilian populations in Darfur. And that’s resulted in the charges of war crimes.

Bashir dismissed those charges in an interview with the London-based Guardian Media division in April.

“It’s a political issue,” Bashir said, “and there are double standards.” He said it’s a government’s responsibility to fight insurgents. The Sudanese leader claimed his government never fought civilians of Darfur despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

A second conflict, with southern Sudan, went on for 21 years and cost 2 million lives.

A peace accord was signed in 2005 and earlier this year, and southern Sudanese voted for independence in a referendum this year. They were finally granted it on July 9th.

That will affect China, says Stephanie Kleine-Albrandt, Northeast Asia Project Director for the International Crisis Group.

“China’s interests will, I think, be severely affected, given that the majority of the oil fields, I think 85 percent, are located in South Sudan,” Kleine-Albrant said. “Now, the refining and pipelines are still located in the north. But this will have major implications. There hasn’t been an agreement yet on revenue distribution, but the North is going to lose a lot of revenue from oil.”

Kleine-Albrandt says she and researchers at the International Crisis Group have other causes for concern as South Sudan’s independence approaches.

“We’re very worried about the fact that there’s actually no agreement as of the 9th of July as to how really anything with regard to the post-referendum period is going to go forward,” she said. “That’s with regard to freedom of movement, citizenship, resource allocation, let alone the fate of Abaye.”

Abaye is an oil-rich town on the border that both sides claim. Northern Sudanese troops seized Abaye in May, but both sides have agreed to allow Ethiopian peacekeepers in.

“We hope the Chinese will be pressing the North very hard on pulling its troops out, ensuring some kind of viable political solution, ensuring that peacekeepers can remain because Bashir doesn’t want that,” Kleine-Albrandt said. “And to try to put pressure on both sides to come to the table and agree on all of these outstanding issues.”

Kleine-Albrandt gives China credit for having pressured Bashir to accept the peace process and South Sudan’s self-determination. It’s in China’s interests to have a stable Sudan for investment and for the safety of Chinese personnel there.

Toward that end, Chinese envoy Liu Guijin has been shuttling to the North and South of Sudan. Guijin says China has good relations with both sides and that they can help ensure they make good on the peace accord.

The South may be a little wary, since China was, for a time, the main supplier of arms used against the region. But South Sudan, as a new and fragile country, will need all the help it can get.

China will want to reach out, because the South has most of Sudan’s oil. And Bashir will want his own assurances that China, which now buys 60 percent of Sudan’s oil exports, and 70 percent of its other exports, will remain a friend and economic lifeline, no matter what the international pressure.

Darfur refugees in a camp along the Chad-Sudan border in 2007 (Photo: Jeb Sharp)

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by Jeb Sharp

The pace of the Libya intervention has stunned the people of Darfur and the activists who worked so hard to protect them. Back in 2004, the assumption was that if you raised a loud enough outcry, governments would act to stop mass atrocities. In Libya the outcry had barely begun when governments intervened. The difference has not gone unnoticed by Rebecca Hamilton the author of ‘Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide’.

“What Libya has that Darfur never had, still does not have to the present day, and desperately needs, is a unified international commitment to do civilian protection,” said Hamilton.

Hamilton says Libya underscores for her how the battle to protect civilians takes place in the realm of global geo-politics. In this case it was the Arab League’s request to the UN Security Council to enforce a no fly zone and protect civilians that made the difference.

“Without that then you would have had China in particular doing what it did in Darfur–and which is its typical position–which is to threaten to veto anything that looks interventionist,” said Hamilton.

“But with the Arab League specifically requesting to the UN Security Council that they do this, I think that led to China agreeing to abstain and let such a strong civilian protection resolution go through.”

The Arab League was willing to forsake Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a way it was never ready to forsake Sudanese President Omar al Bashir. Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy says a key motivating factor in the Libya intervention was the widespread desire to see Gaddafi fall.

“The Arab League generally has no love for Gaddafi,” said Knights. “Many of the key players have a strong desire to see Gaddafi fall because of prior disagreements and bitter conflicts that they’ve had with him. Likewise the West has long-lasting grudges against Gaddafi whether they be the U.S., the British, the French.”

Even so, it wasn’t a given that the Arab League would sideline Gaddafi, notes Rebecca Hamilton. At the height of the outcry over Darfur, the Arab League stood by Sudanese President Omar al Bashir.

“I think what made the difference is the high-level defections of some of Gaddafi’s closest inner circle,” said Hamilton.

“And that again is something that you have not had in Sudan. Bashir’s inner circle have stayed tight and in support of him. But I think that when Gaddafi’s inner circle started to split it was easier for regional bodies like the Arab League to say, well we can stand beside Libya, whilst isolating Gaddafi.”

But Hamilton says there’s another striking reason things have played out differently in Libya and Darfur.

“If I had to put it in one word, I’d say Iraq,” said Hamilton.

“The problem during the early days in Darfur was that it was really only the U.S. government that was leading the charge for civilian protection, and it was in many ways the worst-placed actor to do so in the context of the recent invasion in Iraq. It just looked like hypocrisy and double standards for the Bush Administration to be talking about human rights in Darfur whilst you had Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and all of the other consequences of Iraq.”

It also made it easy for President Bashir of Sudan to paint any discussion of an international peacekeeping force for Darfur as an American-led attempt to invade yet another Muslim country. But things are different today. Time has passed. There’s a different administration in the White House, and the rest of the world is less cynical about US motives. There is surprising support for the Libya intervention in the Arab World.

But even if there had been similar agreement on Darfur there’s another glaring difference between the two cases, according to Robert Pape of the University of Chicago.

“The main difference between Darfur and Libya is actually the geography,” said Pape.

Pape points out that Libya is close to Europe and right on the coast. That means Gaddafi’s forces are vulnerable to NATO’s sea-based air power. Darfur, by contrast, is in western Sudan, hundreds of miles from the sea, with mountainous terrain and lots of small arms fire. Protecting civilians there is a different proposition.

“As a result, nearly every plan that was serious included significant numbers of ground troops,” said Pape. “The African Union put together the smallest plan for 2000 ground forces, the UN began to look at this and very quickly the number got up to 30,000 ground troops. And once you’re talking about tens of thousands of ground troops going into a very hostile environment, now we begin to balance out the humanitarian goal with the serious risk of life to ourselves.”

The UN Security Council did eventually deploy a peacekeeping force to Darfur, but not before hundreds of thousands of people had died and millions had been displaced. Even now, says Rebecca Hamilton, there’s an urgent need for international pressure for a peace settlement and the enforcement of a ceasefire in Darfur.

Slideshow from 2007 – all photos: Jeb Sharp

Read more:
• ‘Fighting for Darfur’ by Rebecca Hamilton
• ‘Beyond a No-Fly Zone: How to Protect Civilians in Libya’ by Michael Knights
• ‘The New Standard for Humanitarian Intervention’ by Robert Pape

• FAQ: Sudan’s Darfur conflict
• War in Darfur ‘over’ (2009)
• Jeb Sharp’s history podcast: How We Got Here
• Jeb Sharp’s 2007 Darfur coverage
• Follow Jeb Sharp on Twitter

The name Sudan comes from “bilad al sudan”: Arabic for “the land of the blacks.”

So you might expect Sudanese to be comfortable with the color of their skin. But they’re not.

“They are equating black with dullness, so a black person is stupid, automatically a slave,” says southerner Agnes Silver Nyarsuk. She explains that Southern Sudanese consider themselves black, while northerners see themselves as Arabs — and treat blacks as second class.

“For transport, an Arab lady when she enters, the men will stand up and give the place, for an Arab lady, because she’s a woman,” Nyarsuk says. “But a black lady, even if she is old, and she’s shivering, dying, they will not respect because you are automatically a slave.”

The differences between north and south might seem like one of religion but that’s only a secondary conflict. Most northerners are Muslims. And most southerners follow traditional African religions or Christianity.

Sudanese journalist Godfried Victor Bulla has written extensively on race issues. He says even when northerners and southerners are the same religion, perceived racial difference keeps them apart.

Black or Arab?

“An Arab looks at a black southerner, despite the fact that he’s a Muslim, they look at him as inferior,” Bulla says. “Someone, you know you’re nothing. It has never been that a black southerner is a sheik. This attitude grows bigger.”

In South Africa’s Apartheid system of racial division, the white power structure was easy to see. Sudan’s Apartheid isn’t so clear cut. If the president of Sudan, Omar Al Bashir, were to walk down a street in Washington DC, he’d be considered black. But Bulla says not in Sudan.

“Bashir is an Arab, Bashir is not black,” Bulla says. bashir is a chocolate kind of color, it’s a color which is not black totally,” says Victor Bulla.

Retired southern Gen. Joseph Lagu says that what the Sudanese have been fighting is “Arab racism, apartheid in the Sudan.”

He led the first armed resistance against the north in 1963. He says Institutionalized racism is what led southerners to war against their northern neighhors. He blames the 19th century British war hero, Lord Horatio Kitchener, for the racist attitudes held by northern Sudanese even today.

“The racism which the British brought, Kitchener planted it here, divided the people in the in 4 catagories,” says Lagu.

A tiered system of racism

The top category was the white race, represented by Kitchener and the people he brought followed by the Arab Egyptians who made up much of his army.

Category three were the Sudanese working as porters and servants. And at the bottom were black southerners. So it’s logical that the post-independence elite who have ruled the country since 1956 see themselves as Arabs.

“They associated themselves and identified themselves with Arabs, although they are not accepted by the Arabs,” Khartoum-based analyst Albaqir Muhktar says. “But they claim to be Arabs, they are not really Arabs, they are nubians, and indigenous people of Sudan have been Arabized, in a way that that their language become Arabic and religion becomes Islam, that’s all. But their looks remain Africans.”

Mukhtar says Sudanese people have a wide spectrum of skin colors — and concepts of skin color to match.

“And we describe the color of a northerner who is very black, we call him green,” says Mukhtar. “Although two different people, one northerner and one southerner, having the same color, when we describe the southerner we call him black, bluntly. When we describe the northerner, they call him green.”

Mukhtar says that North Sudanese rarely admit there’s such things as racism, so the mentality will likely persist for the foreseeable future. But with South Sudan set to officially declare independence in July, the north will have to deal with southerners as a sovereign country — and not an internal minority.

And that will be key to future stability and relations between the two states.

From Matthew Brunwasser’s ‘Arabs in Sudan’s South’ report.

The idea that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the process of that, might lead to a wider transformation in Sudan was a quite bold idea, a quite admirable idea. The election was intended to play a part in that. Sadly, for multiple reasons, partly to do with disorganization, partly to do with the attitudes of the major signatories to the CPA, the election, sadly, is not going to realize that dream of creating a democratically-transformed and united Sudan. Instead it looks as if it’s just going to be a staging post on the way to Southern secession and to the persistence of fairly authoritarian forms of government, certainly in the North and possibly in the South as well. Sadly that’s a great missed opportunity. I feel almost certain that more could have been done. The election could have been better organized. More pressure could have been put on the partners on both North and South to create a more level playing field, to create a better possibility for democratic transformation. So overall my feeling is this is an opportunity lost, sadly.

BBC Coverage

Elections in Sudan: Learning from Experience

• ‘What is the What’ book info
• The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation
• Sudan: a nation divided

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP:  Two men, one from the U-S and one from Sudan, crossed paths six years ago.

Their lives remain intertwined to this day.  The American is Dave Eggers.  He was already a successful writer, whose books included one called “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”  The Sudanese man is Valentino Achak Deng.  He had led a heartbreaking life of staggering sorrow.  Valentino had escaped his home village of Marial Bai in war-torn southern Sudan.  Eggers turned Valentino’s life-story into an only slightly fictionalized biography, called “What Is the What.”  Now, three years later, proceeds from the novel have gone back to Marial Bai to build a school.  It’s gratifying for both the author, Dave Eggers, and his subject, Valentino Achak Deng.  For all they’ve been through though, both men say they’ll never forget that first time they met.

VALENTINO ACHAK DENG:  Dave, you know, is this just cool guy, doesn’t talk too much, but we are just about a writer meeting a student and then they write a book, it would not have been possible.  We would have had to go through a lot of trust issues and we had trouble.  We took risks, actually.  Dave took risks, and went to Marial Bai with me when I reunited with my family.  And I was at Dave’s wedding, my first American wedding to attend.  You could imagine that.  Dave brought me to his life, and he also came to my life.

SHARP:  Dave Eggers?

DAVE EGGERS:  A lot of it has to do with Valentino, you know, and his bravery in sharing his story.  It wasn’t easy to get at some of the more difficult parts of the story and a lot of parts of it that weren’t easy to remember or to recount or to get published.  But his courage in revealing all of that was important, you know.

SHARP:  And now an awful lot has happened in Sudan in recent years.   I mean, there’s everything that happened in the years encompassed by the book, but even since then, the war that destroyed your village and caused your flight with the Lost Boys ended in 2005 with a peace agreement between north and south Sudan.  So southern Sudan where you’re from, Valentino, is supposed to be emerging from a crisis. You’ve used the proceeds from the book to start a foundation that’s built a school back in your home village.  Is this indeed a time of renewal and hope in southern Sudan?

DENG:  This is the time for me where people need to go back and help.  We went back to Marial Bai and realized that many multilateral organization and even the new autonomous government of southern Sudan was paying so much attention to primary education.  For example, in the area where we’ve built a second school now, this is going to be the only functioning secondary school the region has ever had.

SHARP: Dave Eggers, you’ve visited the new school in Marial Bai.  It opened this year.  What strikes you about it?

EGGERS:  The first thing that strikes me is that Valentino, with the help of one staff member here in the US, pretty much built this school on his own, with the help of the community there in Marial Bai. And it’s flabbergasting to a lot of organizations that have been trying to build similar facilities in southern Sudan, and Valentino did it in about a year, and it’s a 14 building complex with cafeteria and a library and ten classrooms and pretty soon, ideally, there’ll be a dormitory for girls and there’s about 100 students there right now, and a waiting list of almost 1,000 to go to this school.

SHARP:  What’s the secret? What’s different?

EGGERS:  It took a man that had lived in Ethiopia and Kenya and the US, but had grown up and knew the Marial Bai community and knew how to get things done there.  Besides just being an incredible scholar, he’s a guy that knows how to negotiate the price of bricks and mortar and things like that.

DENG:  The other idea is, I wanted to invest in the community, so we bought bricks from the local brick makers and hoping that that money will go to the local economy.  Now I could see shops in Marial Bai that came as a result of the bricks business.  Another thing is that we just inspire the youth. For example, when we started, it was just the rainy season and people had to carry bag of cements on their back.  People had to carry everything we needed to the construction site.

SHARP:  This all sounds so good and positive and the economy’s being rebuilt, even as the school project’s getting off the ground. Can you convey the feeling there after so many years of war, especially when there’s often a feeling that the peace isn’t that stable?

DENG:  There is still a concern that if the regions return to war, or if this pocket of insecurity in many parts of south Sudan spread all over, then it will be tough for us, because we have students who come from different part of the country.  But I have lived in Sudan for almost a year now, and I haven’t seen people advocating to go back to war.

SHARP:  Dave Eggers?

EGGERS:  It’s essential that we have to be optimistic and you have to give the young people the hope.  You know, there’s a generation or two that grew up without schools.

SHARP:  You’re both translators in a way.  You’re trying to bring continually the story of Sudan to people here in the United States.  And I’m curious how you’ve come to think about that, how you break through the sense of something being far away and out of sight and out of mind.  How do you get people to care about suffering far away?

DENG:  First I believe that all people have so much in common than they are able to realize. We are all the same.  It’s just about how do we get to hear about things?

SHARP:  Dave Eggers?

EGGERS:  Well, I think it was important, and it’s important for a lot of stories like this and in parts of the world that the US and Western world doesn’t know that much about.  I think most of the time, it’s best to tell that story through one person’s eyes and to be able to connect with their elemental humanity and our commonalities and say, “Well, that boy could have been me.”

SHARP:  Valentino, I can’t resist asking you one more question. I heard you got on an airplane recently and sat next to a woman who was reading the book, “What is the What.”

DENG:  We sat at the airport together and she was reading the book.  I could not resist the temptation after 30 minutes of seeing her reading and sometimes laughing.  And then I said, “Hey, that’s my story you’re reading.”  She said, “What?”  I said, “I am Valentino” and she could not accept that.  At that point, I had to show her my passport, and wow, it was a drama.

SHARP:  Valentino Achak Deng runs a foundation that builds schools in southern Sudan.  Dave Eggers is the author of several books, including “Zeitoun” and most recently “The Wild Things.”  Thank you both so much.

EGGERS:  Thank you.

DENG:  You’re welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

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.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.