The Foreign Office has an unspoken strategy: whenever possible, it frames conflict as a humanitarian disaster, not a political problem requiring a political solution. Supporting UN aid efforts is laudable, but it is also easier than devoting diplomatic time and capital confronting deep-seated issues like systemic corruption, the persecution of minorities or the marginalisation of ethnic groups. No wonder so many civil wars defy our efforts to secure a genuine sustainable peace.
The current violence in Sudan is an example of how officials respond to conflict as if it were an earthquake rather than a man-made disaster. Twenty years ago, officials treated the ethnic cleansing in Darfur like a disease rather than a racist expression of the Sudanese regime’s policy to eliminate its Black African civilians. The ideology behind the slaughter in Darfur was never acknowledged, just as Milosevic’s plans for Greater Serbia and the Interahamwe’s genocidal ambitions to erase Rwanda’s Tutsi minority were ignored by diplomats at the time.
Another Foreign Office strategy is to cling to the old, discredited elites when searching for a negotiated settlement. In Sudan, the architects of the violence were seen as the international community’s partners in the search for peace. Over the last two decades, the voices of civilians were largely ignored, while the elite – and the men with guns – made promises they were never asked to keep. No benchmarks were set, and there was no mechanism to deliver consequences for failure to fulfil commitments made to negotiators. It was Bosnia all over again.
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