Fwd: [sudans-john-ashworth] Sanctions and regime survival in Sudan

[Elisabeth Janaina]

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From: "John Ashworth" <ashwor...@gmail.com>
Date: 19 Jan 2017 16:20
Subject: [sudans-john-ashworth] Sanctions and regime survival in Sudan
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Bashir and the Americans: sanctions and regime survival in Sudan

Aly Verjee - January 19, 2017

With sanctions, as in politics, it is only a slight exaggeration to
say, paraphrasing Gladstone, that timing is everything. Altering U.S.
policy on Sudan now, and not six months or a year or five ago, is more
about Obama’s impending departure from office than due to any dramatic
difference or reform in the Sudanese regime. The regime continues to
prioritize the security state over effective governance and service
delivery, attack legitimate political opposition and expression,
systematically and indiscriminately use the tools of repression, and
more (see, for example:Continuing judicial harassment of 5 defenders
from TRACKs and the Director of ZORD; Silencing Women Rights
Defenders)

None of these are new patterns, nor has Khartoum been discreet enough
to avoid further incidents in recent weeks. Mudawi Ibrahim, one of
Sudan’s best known human rights activists, was detained in Khartoum on
December 7. Human rights lawyer Tasneem Ahmed Taha was detained in El
Fasher on December 26. Access to Jebel Marra and many parts of the
Nuba Mountains remains extremely limited.

But it does not follow that comprehensive U.S. sanctions are a
solution to these or Sudan’s many other problems, or that progress on
all of these fronts should have been a precondition to the initial
easing of sanctions. The blunt force of the policy of the last twenty
years has clearly harmed ordinary civilians, including civilian
opponents of the regime. The easing of personal communications
equipment sanctions by the U.S. government in February 2015 was
recognition, in part, that Sudanese civil society, and ordinary
civilians, suffered much more than any Sudanese government elite in
being prevented from using modern technology.

There is not much to suggest that U.S. sanctions have compelled those
ruling Sudan to consistently moderate their behaviour over the last
twenty odd years. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets
Control noted in a 2009 report: ‘assigning causality between the
threat or imposition of economic sanctions and regime-level behavioral
changes is fraught with peril,’ while going on to argue, through a few
rather unconvincing examples, ‘that U.S. sanctions against Sudan have
applied constructive pressure that has affected key Sudanese
officials’ decision-making calculi.’ Affected, perhaps, but to what
extent? Even Treasury’s own statement announcing the easing of
sanctions this month seemed to unwittingly accept this
ineffectiveness: ‘our sanctions were intended to pressure the
Government of Sudan to change the way it treats its people.’ Intent
does not equate to results.

Herein lies the problem with both critics and proponents of this
policy shift: sanctions – their imposition and their removal – are not
a strategy; they are merely tools, in service of a strategy. And the
alternative strategy remains sorely lacking.

The policy and strategy of the United States in Sudan has struggled to
be effective ever since the logic provided by the CPA was removed and
South Sudan’s independence assured. Neither the Doha Document for
Peace in Darfur (DDPD) nor the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement (ESPA)
were comparatively transformational; neither agreement any longer
provides a viable path for resolving the conflicts and grievances for
which they were intended, but officially, there are no alternatives.
Elsewhere, the grinding war in the Nuba Mountains has no end in sight;
Abyei is destined to be an indefinitely frozen conflict; the national
dialogue process was mostly a sham, another false dawn for more
inclusive and peaceful politics beyond Khartoum and Omdurman.

To return to timing: Omar al-Bashir is about to see off his fourth
American president.

Bashir came to power six months after George H. W. Bush took office in
1989. Khartoum’s decision to back Saddam Hussein against Kuwait in the
1990-91 Gulf War ensured relations with the United States would remain
frosty for years, particularly compared to those Jaafar Nimeiri
enjoyed with Carter and Reagan. (While in office, Nimeiri made six
visits to the U.S.)

In constructing Sudan’s golden age of terrorism, Bashir and Hassan
al-Turabi themselves determined Washington’s interest in Khartoum: to
constrain the ambitions of a hostile, pariah state. From terrorism to
the years of civil war, first in the South, the Nuba Mountains and
Blue Nile, and later in Darfur and Eastern Sudan, there was little
prospect of a broad rehabilitation of relations during either the
Clinton or George W. Bush administrations.

The Obama administration began during the second half of the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA)’s implementation. From 2010, for
the first time in years, there was a meaningful possibility of
normalization of relations with Sudan, should Khartoum not impede the
process of self-determination of Southern Sudanese. Khartoum did not
sabotage the referendum, recognized the result and South Sudan’s
consequent independence. But the hoped-for normalization did not
occur. Speaking in November 2011, Sudanese government spokesman Rabie
Abdel Atti told the New York Times: ‘they [the U.S.] promised us a lot
of things; nothing actually implemented. It’s unfair.’

As Khartoum sees it, the Obama administration’s January 13 order
beginning to set aside the long-imposed sanctions regime is, in part,
making good on the overdue promise of 2011, notwithstanding the five
different benchmarks the State Department now cites. This is a
broader, more historical grievance for Khartoum, a touchstone in its
attempts to find new respectability both regionally and
internationally.

Moves to change policy in the twilight days of any American
administration are likely to be seen with suspicion by those about to
assume power. The overture to Sudan may well be destined to be short
lived, and seen with the same derision Donald Trump and Congressional
Republicans have expressed towards other final gambits (allowing the
UN Security Council to pass a resolution condemning Israel; ending the
‘wet-foot, dry-foot’ policy for Cuban migrants; creatingnew national
monuments placing millions of acres of land off limits to
development;permanently banning new off-shore drilling in large areas
of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans) of the outgoing White House.

In any event, American companies are hardly likely to rush to invest
in Sudan. It is not a big market, the cost of doing business is high,
the impediments to market entry many, repatriating profits difficult,
and Sudan’s continuing designation as a state sponsor of terrorism,
though there is little evidence of such international adventurism
today, will hardly be an attraction to corporations wary of running
afoul of Treasury department regulations.

Examination of the claim that ‘sustained progress’ has been made
towards the new, but far from comprehensive U.S. benchmarks is tenuous
at best. None of the benchmarks concern the much needed root and
branch reform of the state, and while U.S. sanctions policy may have
not been fit for purpose, the benchmarks should have been chosen more
judiciously with respect to domestic reform – only two of the five
benchmarks, on humanitarian access and military operations, concern
Sudan’s internal situation.

Requiring progress on every file is too much to ask, but requiring
progress on more domestic fronts would have been prudent. Mere hope
that Khartoum is on the path of real reform is not enough. Thinking
that six months is a period sufficient to judge that there has been
‘sustained progress’ in a regime that has endured, survived and
prospered for so many years, through multiple American
administrations, is naïve; a further six months is time insufficient
to determine that the regime has changed for good.

An idea of what conditions more sufficient and transformative might
resemble can be found in the parallels proponents of the Obama
administration’s decision on Sudan cite: Iran, Cuba and Myanmar, all
places it was argued that policies no longer fit for purpose should be
abandoned.

First, it is hard, if not impossible, to conceive that rapprochement
with Cuba would have happened if Fidel Castro was still in power, nor
in Iran if hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still president.

In Cuba, Raúl Castro, has pursued an extensive reform agenda, what
academics Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Jorge Pérez-López described as ‘the
most comprehensive ever undertaken,’ including significant steps to
liberalize the economy and allow greater economic opportunity for
ordinary Cubans, allowing citizens to leave the country without exit
visas, and publicly renouncing past policies as mistakes.

In Iran, the conditions to enter the process of normalization were
much more specific, directly and independently quantifiable, backed by
a broad consensus of world powers, and aimed to support a genuine
domestic reformer, Hassan Rouhani, only in office since 2013.

In Myanmar, the military junta took unprecedented steps to open
political space, allowing free elections and the National League for
Democracy to take a leading role in governing the country, under the
leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi.  U.S. sanctions were only fully lifted
after free elections and Suu Kyi’s assumption of office, after Myanmar
had demonstrated years of sustained commitment to political reform.

All three countries remain flawed and deeply problematic (see the
moral failure of Myanmar’s leadership to prevent the persecution of
the Rohingya tarnishing whatever achievements have been made), but all
three countries provide some evidence that genuine reform and change
will be more than fleeting.

Now consider Sudan: no leadership transition in Sudan is imminent.
Power remains held within a very small circle; the NCP is structurally
unchanged, and the military and security services still call the
shots. Elections in 2015 were not credible. And so any restructuring
of U.S. policy needs to be sufficiently cautious of such realities.

Critically, and unlike in Iran, Cuba and Myanmar, the Obama
administration has not left itself enough time to either articulate
nor implement a full political strategy that leads to a complete
overhaul of the bilateral relationship and a reformed Sudan, in which
the easing of sanctions is but one component. The merits of the
approaches to Tehran, Havana and Yangon can be vociferously debated,
but broader strategies exist. By contrast, Sudan’s future remains
terribly bleak for many of its people, and these moves from Washington
do not change that reality.

In some ways, the hard realism of Syria provides a better parallel
with Sudan’s current context. Hafez al-Assad built a regime that
endures. His son and successor as president, Bashar al-Assad, although
inept, has seen off a multi-faceted and sustained armed opposition,
even if he presided over the destruction of much of the country.
Today, his authority is consolidated. The continuation of his regime
provides the most immediate constraint on the expansion of the Islamic
State. There will be no imminent vacancy for the position of Syria’s
dictator. In Syria, the position of the United States has evolved from
formally calling for regime change to acceptance that al-Assad is not
going anywhere.

Bashir and the NCP have not been felled by the rebels of Darfur and
Kordofan and Blue Nile, nor by the civilian political opposition, nor
by a mass movement of disgruntled citizens, nor by the International
Criminal Court. He has survived every challenge. It is most likely
that he will remain in power, until he decides to leave, is
incapacitated due to illness, or dies. The regime he built will, like
that of the Assads, outlast him, even if the edifice of state
constructed bears little resemblance to the plans of architects of
1989. Compared to almost every year since then, as judged from Berlin,
Brussels, London or Washington, Khartoum now enjoys a good score card
for international relations. Europe has outsourced its immorality in
addressing the inconvenience of migration from eastern Africa. Sudan
is toeing the regional line in the South Sudan conflict. It has not
repeated its mistake of crossing the Gulf countries, this time in
Yemen, and has been largely constructive in the case of Libya.

Life if you are a Sudanese citizen who does not identify with the NCP
is mostly measured by domestic progress, not by Sudan’s regional or
international relations or cooperation on migration or
counter-terrorism. The discontent many ordinary Sudanese feel at the
inadequacies of their government will continue.  The journey to
lasting peace in Sudan, and genuine political reform, remains
aspirational; it will not be made on Obama’s watch.

https://thoughtsonthesudans.wordpress.com/2017/01/19/bashir-and-the-americans-sanctions-and-regime-survival-in-sudan/

END
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