Beyond opportunities for the SPLM-N to recruit more Darfuri combatants to fight in Darfur or in the Nuba Mountains, questions also remain regarding the future of Darfuri soldiers who have fought with the SPLA on either side of the North–South divide.
In late 2011, UNMISS estimated that the SPLA in South Sudan retained some 10,000 combatants from the North.241 These were mainly from the Nuba Moun-tains and Blue Nile, but also from various Darfur tribes, notably the Masalit.242 Justifying their demands for more representation in the SPLM-N, Darfuri sources in Juba indicate that around 1,500 Darfuris are already in the SPLM-N in the Nuba Mountains.243 They insist that Darfuris represent the third-largest group of combatants in the SPLM-N after the Nuba and those from southern Blue Nile (although each of these three groups contains various and often very disparate ethnic groups). The majority of the SPLM-N’s Darfuris are Masalit, but the movement also includes some Fur and a small number of Zaghawa.244 SPLM-N Nuba sources generally downplay the Darfuri presence among their ranks and claim that the overwhelming majority of their troops are Nuba.245 Yet Abdul Aziz al Hilu himself claims to have several hundred Masalit soldiers—
‘enough to form a battalion’—within his ranks.246
It is unclear whether the reported 1,500 Darfuri members of the SPLM-N include the many Darfuris who have settled in South Kordofan and Blue Nile—
and are no longer considered Darfuri. One such individual is the Fur leader Omar Abderahman ‘Fur’, who is originally from southern Jebel Marra and joined the SPLA as a student in Egypt in 1984. In 2005, after the signing of the CPA, he became the minister of agriculture in South Darfur. Before the 2010 elections he took refuge in Juba and then became an officer in the SPLM-N, fighting in South Kordofan in 2011.247 As one SPLM-N officer puts it: ‘All sol-diers from North Sudan within SPLA have been ordered to join SPLM-N.’248 According to ‘Hamoda’, ‘we in SPLM-N are putting efforts in convincing not only Masalit but also Fur and Arabs in SPLA to join SPLM-N’.249
IV. Conclusion
Ongoing, if localized, violence in Darfur signals the failure of the international community’s efforts to end the Darfur conflict. Neither the peace negotiations under the aegis of the United Nations and African Union mediators—involving only a limited set of interlocutors—nor the UN sanctions regime has succeeded in removing the drivers, perpetrators, instruments, or logistics of violence from Darfur. Meanwhile, as the international community’s attention continues to drift away from Darfur towards the violence in South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and the eastern parts of the North–South border, the Darfur conflict itself continues to evolve internally. The GoS is mobilizing long-standing grievances among non-Arab groups in new ways, particularly in eastern Darfur, and the Darfur conflict is increasingly spilling over into both the new conflict of the Nuba Mountains and the dangerous North–South standoff in the South Darfur–Bahr al Ghazal borderlands.
This report has sought to show three concentric rings of the Darfur conflict:
sfirst, its evolving grounding in disputes over territory and ethnic political dominance, which continue to be manipulated both by local political lead-ership and by SAF’s counter-insurgency strategy;
ssecond, the long-standing connections between Darfur’s rebellion and adja-cent struggles in other parts of Sudan, now being reactivated and enhanced as the North–South confrontation grows; and
sthird, the international channels of material support and supply for the conflict, including Khartoum’s reliable stable of international arms suppliers and the commercial networks within and outside Sudan that support SAF’s logistics and military capacity.
As this report indicates, treating the Darfur conflict in isolation from the rest of Sudan not only makes increasingly little political sense, but also fatally under-mines the UN sanctions regime, the major international instrument intended to mitigate the conflict. The Security Council appears powerless and unwilling
to prevent SAF from continuing to move equipment into Darfur with total impunity. As a result, the Sudanese government has had no serious difficulties in maintaining its forces’ supply chain in Darfur since 2005, despite the fact that they are doing so in manifest violation of the UN embargo. SAF transfers directly contribute to the prolonging of the conflict not only because they are used in military operations against the rebels, but also because they represent a regular and increasingly significant source of weaponry and ammunition for rebel forces themselves.
Tellingly, this pattern of fresh international weapons supplies to SAF serving as a source of supply to all sides, as has been familiar for several years in Darfur, is now being replicated in South Kordofan. This underlines further the futility of the Security Council’s limitation of sanctions to Darfur alone. Meanwhile, both the arms embargo and individual sanctions have failed to change the behav-iour of any of Darfur’s armed actors, governmental or non-governmental.
It may be possible to revive the international community’s commitment to Darfur if violence spills further over its borders into South Kordofan or South Sudan. Yet, even when Darfur was at the very top of the Sudan policy agenda, international efforts to end the conflict or curb its humanitarian impact largely failed. While the local dynamics and regional political environment of Africa’s best-known conflict continue to evolve, its basic tactics and technologies endure.
The most likely future scenario for Darfur is thus ‘more of the same’. The GoS will probably continue an inconclusive war of attrition against divided rebel groups, further drawing from and fuelling Darfur’s patchwork of inter-communal conflicts. The inevitable human consequence will be further dis-placement and suffering for Darfuris, now experiencing their ninth year of unresolved conflict.