Life

Oct 27th 2007
From Economist.com

Peace talks get underway


AS THE people of Darfur, the ravaged western region of Sudan, continue to die in droves, their representatives—or at least those who claim to represent them—are set to gather in the town of Sirte in northern Libya on Saturday October 24th to make yet another attempt to persuade the Sudanese government to agree to a ceasefire. Even though the meeting, brokered jointly by the African Union (AU) and the UN, is supposed to be a preliminary session for more detailed talks later, the omens are bleak. The Sudanese government has given no sign that it is ready to stop its forces or its proxies from bludgeoning the Darfuris. And the Darfuris are so divided that it is hard to imagine them creating a coherent front.

The mélange of parties, splinters and acronyms standing for just some of the dozen-odd rebel groups who are sending people to Libya, is a negotiator's nightmare. Some of the expected delegates may have invented their names just to attend the talks—and may, in the words of one observer, represent “just 30 men and a jeep”.

The hotch-potch of rebels has so far failed to agree to any kind of negotiating position from which to parley with the Sudanese government of President Omar al-Bashir. Sudanese government officials will be in Libya to talk about a ceasefire. But only if the rebels sort out their own differences can they hope, at a later date, to talk to Mr Bashir.

Even that might be hard, because several of the groups so far refusing to come are those with the most clout among the Darfuris, particularly the 2.1m-2.5m who, says the Save Darfur Coalition, a leading lobby group based in America, now fester in camps. That figure does not include the 300,000 or so who have fled across the border to Chad and the Central African Republic, and another 1m-plus who have not been counted because they migrate according to the seasons and no one is sure where they are.

The splintering of the opposition is partly a result of the failure to implement a deal signed in Abuja in May last year. Then, as only one rebel group signed up, the other two main ones were left out in the cold and have since broken into ever-smaller factions determined to improve their positions at any future talks through military gains in battle.

The UN and AU envoys who will chair the event under the eye of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, are unlikely to repeat that mistake; better no deal than half a deal that most of the biggest rebel groups have not signed up to. Yet if the rebels could create a front, an agreement would be timely and vital.

After years of wrangling with Sudan's government, the UN has finally persuaded it to accept 20,000 peacekeepers in Darfur. The first units are due to arrive before the end of the year (provided that the UN and the Sudanese government agree to the force's composition, which Mr Bashir insists must be all-African). Their task would be easier if there were an agreed peace to keep. A much smaller AU force, less than 7,000-strong, due to be merged with the UN force, has been struggling to make an endlessly flouted ceasefire stick since 2004. But the AU's force has been battered by attacks from the various rebel and bandit groups that have proliferated, some with the wink of the government. Last month ten Nigerian soldiers serving in the AU force were killed in a rebel attack on their base at Haskanita, bringing AU deaths up to 28 so far.

In the first six months of this year, 160,000 more Darfuris were displaced by the fighting. In the same period, one in every six convoys carrying humanitarian aid to the refugee camps was attacked; assaults on aid workers more than doubled compared with a year ago. The killing and burning of villages by the government-directed Arab janjaweed militias continue. More than 500,000 refugees are now cut off from supplies. And there are ominous reports that the Sudanese government, in what would be ethnic cleansing, is inviting Arab tribesmen from Niger and Chad to occupy the lands vacated by the refugees.

If they have any sense, that should make the rebels put their differences aside. They are not secessionists, like the south Sudanese who want full independence. They want greater autonomy and a bigger share of national wealth (especially from oil). Their demands are eminently negotiable. But if they cannot form a coherent front, Sudan's ruthless government will be happy to leave them in limbo, at the mercy of the murderous janjaweed.

By Chris Giles and Eoin Callan in Washington

Published: October 21 2007 05:50 | Last updated: October 21 2007 05:50

Rodrigo Rato bowed out as managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the weekend with effusive plaudits from world financial leaders in public but sharp criticism of his role and the Fund's relevance from the same people when talking outside official news conferences.

The emerging consensus among rich and poor countries alike was that the reform process of the IMF had moved backwards. Worse, they added that acrimony over the Fund's role in assessing the economic policies of its members, their effects on other countries threatened to create just the disorder in the global economy it is intended to prevent.



”We didn't make any progress this weekend,” said an irritated David Dodge, the Canadian central bank governor, adding that it was a ”pretty big disappointment” and that IMF stakeholders had not ”settled even the principles let alone the details” of institutional reform.

The communiqué from the International Monetary and Financial Committee, the IMF's governing body, put a brave face on the lack of progress in making the Fund more legitimate around the world by increasing the voice given to emerging and developing countries. It said that the new formula for voting shares at the IMF would be most strongly linked to a country's economic weight in the world, but it would also reflect the living standards in different countries and the minimum number of votes given to every IMF member would at least double.

Mr Rato presented this as an achievement, but many other delegations privately agreed with Mr Dodge. Emerging economies are aggrieved that one of the aims of the Fund's medium-term strategy was to increase the legitimacy of the organisation, but the two big decisions of recent months - who would be the new managing director and who would chair the IMFC - were stitched up by European countries behind closed doors.

Senior officials in group of seven countries told the Financial Times that the reform process would have to start again under Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the new IMF managing director who takes office at the start of November.

The IMFC announced it welcomed progress in strengthening surveillance of countries' economic policies and spillovers from one country to another. “The committee looks forward to review the progress and experiences in these areas,” the communiqué stated. But the IMF's new surveillance policies - in particular trying to be an umpire in determining when one country's exchange rate regime is having a detrimental effect on other economies - is also causing acrimony.

China, the country most likely to fall foul of the new procedures, voted against the new surveillance rules and since the rest of the global community, through the IMF, cannot force a country such as China to change its policy, the new rules have only served to heighten tensions.

Morris Goldstein of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that there was a serious risk of widespread conflict between emerging and advanced economies in the years to come. “What you are seeing with China and the US is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

Mr Dodge said: ”This is precisely the time we need the fund's ability and skills to deal with global imbalances,” adding that the breakdown in reform efforts had decreased the ”chance of coming to a common view across the fund's membership” on currency policy.

”The longer the imbalances go on, the greater risk that we will end with a rather messy dénouement,” he said.

The IMFC put a brave face on the dissent that was within its ranks. Rather than concede that problems exist, it repeated the message from Fund officials over the past week that the global economy was still growing strongly, although it will be slowed by the credit squeeze.

The finance ministers and central bank governors who sit on the IMFC agreed that all relevant national and international bodies should study possible improvements for risk management in complex financial products, the accounting of off-balance sheet vehicles in banks, the work of credit ratings agencies and the regulation of liquidity in financial entities.

Unlike the G7 rich countries, they did not quite call for China to let its currency appreciate, although the IMFC repeated its call for “greater exchange rate flexibility in a number of surplus countries”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007