At the beginning of August the AU and UN special envoys for the Darfur peace process, Salim Ahmed Salim and Jan Eliasson, will convene a meeting of Darfur rebel leaders in Arusha. The meeting is one of the components of the Joint AU-UN Roadmap for the Darfur Political Process, which aims to revive negotiations between the Sudanese government and the Darfur rebels. Is the Roadmap more likely to bear fruit than the Abuja talks that preceded it? Have any lessons been learnt or might the same mistakes be made?

In 2006 the AU-led peace talks in Abuja culminated in the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) that was signed by the government and one of the rebel groups but rejected by the other groups. The agreement was divisive and unpopular in Darfur, exacerbating a protracted conflict that has left over two hundred thousand people dead and roughly two million displaced.

The glaring problem with the Roadmap is its unrealistic timeframe: in May and June there will be consultations with the Sudanese parties and Darfurian civil society, the development of a negotiation strategy and efforts to unify the divided rebel movements; June and July will be devoted to finalising the consultations and preparations for negotiations; and the final phase in August will entail a “brief and intensive negotiation session”.

This four-month timeframe has already slipped because it is completely out of sync with the dynamics of the conflict. Many formidable hurdles have to be overcome before substantive negotiations can begin, let alone be concluded with a settlement that enjoys popular support in Darfur.

For example, there is no consensus among the Sudanese government and the rebels on the agenda for negotiations and on who should participate in the talks. Nor is there consensus on whether the DPA should be revised in part, renegotiated entirely or thrown out the window. There is little common ground on the causes of the rebellion and the most appropriate remedies, and the parties’ mutual hatred and mistrust make the search for common ground a tortuous endeavour.

Complicating matters further, the rebels are even more fragmented than they were in 2006. The Abuja talks were wracked by antagonism between the three participating rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the two factions of the Sudan Liberation Movement. Today there are at least twelve groups, many of which claim to represent the same constituencies and few of which have proven support in Darfur. The leader with the most support, Abdul Wahid al Nur, is an erratic and indecisive negotiator. Regrettably, he has refused to attend the forthcoming AU-UN meeting in Arusha.

The violence in western Sudan poses another serious impediment. The Roadmap correctly highlights the need to consult Darfurian civil society, tribal leaders, internally displaced people, refugees and women’s groups, but this will be extremely difficult in conditions of chronic insecurity.

To add to the envoys’ woes, the AU and UN are not viewed favourably by all the parties to the conflict. The government in Khartoum is hostile to the UN while some of the rebel groups resent the AU because of its association with the DPA and because its peacekeeping force has failed to protect civilians in Darfur.

The AU and UN are painfully aware of all these obstacles. The logic of their tight timeframe is that it conveys the seriousness of the international community and the need for the Sudanese parties to move rapidly to a negotiated settlement. Given the dire situation in Darfur, the message is one of impatience and urgency.

The logic is appealing but the Abuja talks showed that it is ill-conceived and counter-productive. These talks were characterised by a steady stream of unrealistic deadlines emanating from the AU, the UN and foreign donors. Intended to put pressure on Khartoum and the rebels, the deadlines were ignored by them and succeeded only in pressurising the mediators who were obliged to heed the stipulations of their funders and masters.

This had several negative effects. First, the ever looming short-term deadlines inhibited a programmatic effort by the mediators to build momentum gradually over time and led instead to an ad hoc approach that proceeded in fits and starts. The deadline diplomacy was too simplistic to constitute a viable strategy and too rigid to allow the mediators to develop a smart strategy.

Second, the tight deadlines made it impossible for the mediators and negotiators to communicate with the people of Darfur and with important groups that were not represented at the talks. Darfurian civil society had no opportunity to shape the draft DPA and could not conceivably have acquired a sense of ownership of it.

Third, the haste induced by the deadlines precluded effective mediation. A mediator’s job is to help adversaries overcome their enmity, build their confidence in negotiations and facilitate dialogue, bargaining and collaborative problem-solving. The deadline diplomacy caused the AU mediators to neglect these tasks in favour of writing an accord that sought to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable positions of the parties. The result was that the DPA was owned by the mediators and not the parties.

In all civil wars the humanitarian need for a quick accord is indisputable. But there is never a quick fix. These conflicts have multiple, complex and intractable causes, and the difficulty of resolution is heightened immeasurably by the protagonists’ mutual hatred and suspicion. There is no point in rushing negotiations and forcing the parties to sign an agreement to which they are not committed. As happened in Abuja, they will simply leave the signing ceremony and continue fighting.

Sustainable peace requires a negotiated settlement that sufficiently meets the interests and needs of parties and citizens, sufficiently addresses the causes of the conflict, and rests on the parties’ willingness to implement agreements in a co-operative fashion. This will not be obtained through a “brief and intensive negotiation session”. A rushed process will only reproduce the errors of Abuja.

This is not to say that the international community and special envoys should stand by idly while people are being slaughtered in Darfur. If a conflict is not ripe for resolution, then the challenge is precisely to find ways to ripen it. In addition, it is absolutely imperative that African countries and foreign powers boost the AU peacekeeping force in Darfur until UN military support finally arrives.

The special envoys should not be driven by spurious deadlines, which are meant to signal seriousness but convey the opposite when they are missed and then reset without any repercussions. Instead, the envoys should be guided by a comprehensive mediation plan that reflects the realities of the conflict. They should be based in Sudan and should engage constantly in dialogue with the government and the rebels. These discussions can themselves be a useful form of indirect negotiations, preferable to big conferences where the delegates lambaste their opponents and make pious speeches about peace.

For peacemakers working on intractable conflicts, the greatest challenge is persistence and the greatest bravery, as Eliasson himself put it many years ago, is patience.

* Laurie Nathan, research fellow at the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town, was a member of the AU mediation team for Darfur in 2006. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times (South Africa) on 8 July.

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In 1992 the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was established as a regional organisation with a mandate to promote economic integration, poverty alleviation, peace, security and the evolution of common political values and institutions.

There were great expectations that the demise of apartheid and the Cold War would usher in a period of sustained stability and development at national and regional levels. Yet over the following decade SADC region remained wracked by a high level of conflict that included civil wars in the DRC and Angola, as well as violence and state repression in other countries.

SADC was largely ineffectual in these situations, distinguished less by its peacemaking efforts than by its fractious internal quarrels. The formation of SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security - a common security forum whose stipulated functions include the prevention and resolution of conflict - was itself bedevilled by acrimonious disputes among member states over a ten-year period. In this commentary I address three questions: what accounts for the difficulty in establishing the Organ? What are the reasons for SADC's poor record of peacemaking? And why was the analysis and prognosis of many academics and activists so flawed in the early 1990s?

Many analysts attribute the difficulty in establishing the Organ to disagreements over its status and structure or to competition and animosity between South Africa and Zimbabwe. These diagnoses are superficial and incomplete.

Three more substantial problems have prevented SADC from creating an effective security forum. First and most importantly, there is an absence of common values among member states. There are two key lines of division: between democratic and authoritarian tendencies in the domestic policies of states, and between pacific and militarist orientations in their foreign policies.

As in the case of Europe, a viable regional organisation with a political and security mandate can institutionalise the common values of its members, develop common policies and contribute to peace and stability. However, the viability of such organisations depends in the first instance on the existence of common values.

In the absence of sufficient normative congruence, states are unable to resolve or transcend their major disputes, achieve cohesion and act with common purpose in crisis situations. In the realm of political governance, there are many de jure democracies whose executives are intolerant of dissent, hardly accountable to parliament and insufficiently committed to respect for human rights and the rule of law.

According to Jonathan Moyo prior to becoming Zimbabwe's Minister of Information, “the assertion that the majority of African governments are now democratic… has no empirical basis. It is true that multiparty elections are now common in Africa but this truth does not describe a fundamental development. The change is strategic, not substantive. …Just look at Zambia and Malawi since the fall of Kenneth Kaunda and the late Kamuzu Banda. Zimbabwe is following suit with reckless abandon”.

In 1993 SADC's Framework and Strategy document, prepared by the SADC Secretariat, called for the forging of common political values based on democratic norms, the creation of a “non-militaristic security order” and the establishment of mechanisms for conflict avoidance, management and resolution.

The document highlighted the need to address non-military sources of conflict and threats to human security, such as underdevelopment and abuse of human rights. The proposed strategies and mechanisms included a forum for mediation and arbitration; the ratification by states of key principles of international law; a non-aggression treaty and non-offensive defence doctrines; democratic civil-military relations; and reductions in military force levels and spending.

Many states did not support this anti-militarist agenda, however. Progress towards establishing a security forum was delayed over the next seven years by antagonistic and recriminatory debates around the Organ's status and structure as manifestations of underlying political and strategic differences among member states.

The second reason for the difficulty in operationalising the Organ lies in the reluctance of SADC states to surrender a measure of sovereignty to a security body that encompasses binding rules and decision-making in the sphere of high politics and the possibility of interference in domestic affairs. This reluctance derives from the political weakness of states and the absence of common values, mutual trust and a shared vision of the security body.

Third, Southern Africa is characterised by small economies, underdevelopment and weak administrative capacity, which undermine the efficiency and effectiveness of all the SADC's multilateral forums and programmes. Ten years after its formation, SADC estimated that only twenty per cent of its 470 projects met the criteria for properly integrated regional projects, the rest being essentially national projects.

In addition to its inability to prevent violent conflict, SADC does not have a record of successful peacemaking. In many intra-state conflicts it has refrained from critical comment and diplomatic engagement, treating violence and crises in governance as purely domestic affairs.

In the case of state repression and abrogation of the rule of law in Zimbabwe, on the other hand, SADC has repeatedly expressed solidarity with the government.

There are several reasons for these responses. First, SADC states are keen to avoid adversarial relations that might jeopardise regional trade and functional co-operation. Second, governments that are not fully democratic are naturally unwilling to speak out against neighbouring countries that engage in undemocratic practices. Third, Southern African states are determined to maintain a posture of unity and solidarity.

Forged in the heat of the struggles against colonialism and apartheid, this posture militates against public criticism of each other. The imperative of solidarity is greatest when foreign powers raise concerns that are perceived or can be portrayed as reflecting a 'neo-colonial' agenda. Solidarity of this kind enhances regime security at the expense of human security, masks rather than transcends the substantive disputes between states, and does not constitute a foundation for a common security forum.

Fourth, SADC's poor record of peacemaking is due to the impasse around the Organ. The absence of an agreed set of norms, strategies and procedures for addressing high-intensity conflict has contributed to collective inertia, divergent and parochial approaches by individual states, ill-conceived interventions of doubtful legality, and a confused mixture of peacemaking and peace enforcement.

Most of these problems were evident in SADC's response to the crises in Lesotho and the DRC in 1998. The dispute between member states around the DRC crisis crippled the Organ and gave rise to the notion of “two SADCs”, with two camps pursuing contradictory pacific and militarist strategies.

In the early and mid-1990s a number of academics and activists were involved in efforts to establish a common security forum and were optimistic about its prospects. What mistakes did we make? The reasons might offer insights into future activities and policy recommendations.

First, we based our models of common security on the European experience without analysing adequately the nature of our own region and of its states in particular. We were strong on ideas and norms but weak on analysis. Second, we relied too much on the compelling need for a common security body and paid too little attention to the requirements for its success. Third, we overestimated the durability of the political bonds forged during the liberation struggles and underestimated the significance of the political differences between states.

Many analysts continue to make this mistake, arguing that the Organ breakdown can be overcome by states forging a political consensus on human security, democracy and respect for human rights. If states do not support these norms and values at the national level, however, they will not support them at the regional level. Regional policy on security is a product of national policies on security.

Fourth, we were preoccupied (as many analysts still are) with the architecture of security arrangements when the critical issues in fact lie elsewhere: structure follows strategy; strategy follows objectives; objectives are shaped as much by values as by interests; and the Organ breakdown has occurred at the level of foundational values.

In general, we overstated what was possible at the regional level and understated what was required at the national level. Where democracy and human security do not exist, they are most likely to be attained through broad-based popular struggles.

* Laurie Nathan is a Visiting Fellow at the Crisis States Programme, London School of Economics.

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