John Prendergast on Getting Policy in Sudan Right

As the Obama administration finishes its Sudan policy review, what are the stakes?

The stakes in Sudan today are enormous. We have a legacy of war that has led to 2 and a half million freshly dug graves over the last 20 years in Darfur and in the south. The south is heading back toward war. In Darfur almost 3 million people remain the camps with a daily risk of rape or aid cutoffs, targeted directly as a result of their ethnicity, their ethnic backgrounds. So if the Obama administration doesn't get its policy right, it guarantees, in my view, a return to full-scale national war in Sudan.

What are the flaws in the administration's current policy?

The Obama administration's policy in Sudan is going in the wrong direction. We have in Darfur a peace process that has stumbled along for the last few years resulting in no substantial progress toward peace, and the Obama administration just wants to provide more support to that failed process. That isn't going to work. In the north-south context, there already is a peace agreement, we just have to have it implemented. We need to see consequences for nonimplementation. Instead, the Obama administration is focusing on renegotiating the implementation of the existing elements of that peace deal. That's a recipe for a certain return to war. So in both cases, the Darfur process and the north-south peace process, we're going in the wrong direction and it has to be fixed quickly or else the people of Sudan are going to face very, very serious repercussions from this.

What key policy changes are activists proposing?

Activists think that the Obama administration ought to change its policy. Frankly, we think that in Darfur, the United States ought to get directly, front and center involved in negotiating the peace deal between the Darfurian factions and the Government of Sudan. We think that a peace proposal needs to be laid down quickly that addresses the fundamental core issues that have caused the war there and the context of the genocide. And in southern Sudan, we think the United States ought to lead an international coalition that imposes consequences for the nonimplementation of particular provisions of this peace deal, the existing north and south peace deal.

What U.S. officials are most important in getting Sudan policy right?

There are three officials in the U.S. government that are most important in making sure that U.S. policy is going to be correct here in Sudan. It's three people who were candidates last year for president, three people who were senators last year. That's Clinton, Biden, and Obama. All three have talked tough about Sudan, all three have made significant promises over the course of the last five years about what they would do to get tough with the Sudanese regime. And all three, now, are faced with the decision in the coming weeks about what U.S. policy ought to be. We hope that they live up to the promises. We hope they live up to the tough rhetoric that we've heard from them over the last few years. We have an opportunity to end the war in Sudan, these cycles of conflict in Sudan. We need to grab that. We need to seize that opportunity now.