Peace mission or plot to destabilise Sudanese rebels?
If regional analysts and Sudanese rebels are to be believed, then a peacekeeping force proposed by Libya and Sudan for mutiny-prone Central African Republic (CAR) is just a cover to further Khartoum’s military and political interests.
The idea, from Khartoum’s perspective, is for the Sudanese military to try and retake a strategic province it lost to the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1990, and Libya to try to influence developments in CAR, rebel sources and security analysts told AFRICANEWS. They expressed wonder that Khartoum was very keen to put out fires in CAR, while its own backyard was smouldering and the African Union had shot down any ideas for a military option in CAR.
“Khartoum has no business in Central African Republic other than to attack us from there,” Samson Kwaje, SPLA spokesman, told AFRICANEWS. “We have our own internal problems. Why should we be concerned in removing the speck in Bangui’s eye when we have a log in our eye?” posed Kwaje, who firmly stated that Khartoum was preparing for an offensive during the current dry season that started in November and is expected to last up to May. The dry season makes it easier to ferry troops and heavy artillery and is one time when military engagements in the country’s civil war intensify.
Fiona Lortan, a security analyst formerly with the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies (ISS) (ISS), expressed similar sentiments, saying that Khartoum was only in CAR to follow its own military agenda and also to support Libya, which in recent months has been trying to influence political developments both in Sudan and CAR. “I am not sure what the strategic interest of Sudan in CAR would be, but this way they are doing Libya a favour,” she told AFRICANEWS. “But it [deployment] also provides Sudan with the opportunity of attacking SPLA from the west,” she added.
That is the same position taken by Peter Adwok Nyaba, the Sudanese author of the award-winning book, Politics of Liberation in Southern Sudan: An Insiders View. In an interview with AFRICANEWS, he said the CAR mission was loaded with ulterior motives. “Tripoli or Khartoum cannot be trusted to guarantee peace in Central African Republic,” he said. “Libya is siding with one of the warring parties in that country while Sudan has its own mess back at home.”
Like Kwaje and Lortan, Adwok argues that Khartoum sees the CAR expedition as the perfect cover to ambush SPLA positions in Western Bahr el Ghazal and Western Equatoria regions, which border CAR to the southwest and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the south. Efforts to get comments from the Sudanese and Libyan missions in Nairobi have been fruitless.
Adwok compares the current situation to a 1998 decision by Khartoum to send troops to DRC after a civil war broke out in August of that year. Sudanese President Omar el Bashir dispatched troops to DRC, claiming he was concerned about that country’s stability. It turned out that these troops were out to try to rout the SPLA from Western Equatoria province that borders DRC, said Adwok. “Sudan wasn’t interested in Kabila. Instead it was seeking bases in north-eastern Congo from where to attack the SPLA,” he said, pointing out that Khartoum was not even part of the regional coalition that had brought the regime of the late Congolese President Laurent Kabila to power in the first place.
Khartoum cast its eyes on CAR on December 4, when it organised a regional meeting on the crisis there under the auspices of the Libya funded, 16-member Community of Sahelian and Saharan Countries (COMESSA). COMESSA recommended a peace force and a reconciliation committee. The African Union promptly rejected any troop deployment and instead backed the creation of a reconciliation committee just like another regional body, the Economic and Monetary Community of Central African States, which CAR belongs to had requested. The latter had convened at the same time in Libreville, Gabon where the CAR issue was discussed. Fearing a spillage across the border, the Libreville gathering also formed a reconciliation committee under Gabonese President Omar Bongo. But so far nothing has come out of this committee, emboldening Libya and Sudan in their quest to send troops whose number and date of deployment haven’t been determined.
It is also not known who will fund the expedition that will also involve troops from Mali and Burkina Faso, two countries that, like Libya, share no common border with CAR. In the past, however, Mali and Burkina Faso have benefited a lot from Muammar Gaddaffi’s cash-and-carry diplomacy in which he paid their arrears to the moribund Organisation of African Unity (OAU) last year. COMESSA has designated Gaddaffi as its Permanent Peace Mediator and speculation is rife that Libya will pick up the bill, not just as part of the strategy to secure the position of embattled CAR President Felix Ange Patasse, but also keep a tight leash on the regional body.
But that will not soothe Patasse’s foes, who have pointed out that Libya already has 100 elite troops protecting Patasse as members of his Presidential Guard. These don’t include another 200 troops that Libya has sent as an advance team of peacekeepers. According to the Sudan News Agency (SUNA), Sudan has so far sent an advance team of 50 soldiers, who arrived on February 16 with hundreds more expected once the rehabilitation of a former French military base in the northern outskirts of the capital, Bangui, is complete.
Against such background, Kwaje has called on the UN Security Council not to bless the peace mission. “The African Union is opposed to the so-called peace mission,” he said. “The UN shouldn’t bless it as its motives are sinister.” Two weeks ago, Libya convened in Tripoli a meeting of the African Unity’s Central Organ to try to woo the continental body to rubber-stamp a military engagement in CAR. However, the Union reiterated its opposition even as Libya arm-twisted some member countries that it had helped clear their arrears. A compromise reached was that the Union agreed to ask the UN Security Council whether it could sanction the deployment of troops. It is not yet known whether the Union has approached the UN, but few expect the global body to give one.
Five years ago, the UN sent peacekeepers to CAR, where they maintained stability until they left in 1998. Now the army mutinies and coup attempts, a permanent feature in the country for much of the 1990s, are back. The latest violence in the former French colony erupted last November when President Patasse sacked and attempted to arrest the chief of the Army, Francois Bozize who had been linked with a coup attempt six months earlier. Bozize fled to neighbouring Chad and has refused to return home despite a pardon after reports indicated he would be court-martialled should he return.
The SPLA has reason to be concerned about the goings-on in CAR. Between October and November of last year, Khartoum recaptured the strategic towns of Raga and Daem Zubeir located 200km from the CAR border, putting it in a position to threaten the agriculturally rich Western Equatoria plus also control trade in the area. The expansive Western Equatoria, captured by the SPLA in 1990, has since then become an important logistical base to launch operations in neighbouring Bahr el Ghazal. Church and relief workers said that government forces could only have recaptured Daem Zubeir from CAR since the SPLA controls the surrounding areas. Lortan points that the SPLA was able to overrun Raga last June by sneaking troops from Western Equatoria into CAR before launching an offensive from there. There were reports that Ugandan troops travelled alongside the SPLA units.
Western Equatoria also borders to the north another SPLA-controlled area, Warab province, located 300 km southwest of the oilfields. Control of the two provinces means that the SPLA can threaten the oilfields that it has declared legitimate military targets. “The GOS (Government of Sudan) may be hoping that, by fighting in Western Equatoria and Western Bahr el Ghazal, they could thereby forestall an attack in Upper Nile, around the oil fields. This is their biggest worry, especially since [SPLA leader John] Garang and [Riak] Machar seem to have reconciled,” said Lortan. When the group captured Raga and Daem Zubeir in June last year, observers stated that the oilfields were in danger, as they could now be attacked from two sides: Western Bahr el Ghazal, and Western Equatoria.
Western Equatoria can also seized from the DRC but on condition that Congolese rebels who control that area are routed out first. Most of northeast DRC, all the way from the Ugandan border, half of the border with CAR up to Kisangani, is controlled by the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) rebel group led by Pierre Bemba who enjoys patronage from Uganda, the CAR, and the SPLA. The possibility of soliciting Congolese support could partly explain a lightening visit to Khartoum on February 18 by Congolese President Joseph Kabila during which Bashir reiterated the need for stability in the Great Lakes.