Sudan parties sign Darfur ceasefire

Al-Bashir, right, arrived in Qatar on Monday to sign the deal, which the Gulf state has brokered [AFP]

Sudan's largest opposition group has signed a peace deal with the government that could end the conflict in Darfur.

Preliminary documents setting out the terms of the deal, signed in Qatar on Tuesday, appeared to offer government positions for the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem).

The documents were the first concrete sign that Khartoum is prepared to share power with the group.

Zeina Awad, Al Jazeera's correspondent, reporting from Doha, said that while the positions could be part of the deal, Jem could also emerge as an opposition group.

"There is some form of a political deal being discussed," she said.

"But the larger point is that Jem looks like its repositioning itself in Sudanese politics to become an important political player - either in the government or perhaps as a leading opposition group."

'More negotiations'

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The conflict in Darfur, which has pitched ethnic African tribesmen against the Arab-dominated Khartoum government, has raged far the last seven years.

in depth

Timeline: The ICC and Sudan Timeline: Darfur crisis Profile: Omar al-Bashir Riz Khan: Ignoring Sudan? Riz Khan: Sudan's interlocking crises Inside Story: Sliding back into civil war The role of the ICC Drought and conflict in South Sudan Who are Sudan's Jem rebels?

While numerous ceasefires agreements in the past have been short-lived, analysts say that the forthcoming elections in Sudan and increased international pressure could give this initiative a better chance of survival.

But officials warned a March 15 deadline for a final peace deal was overly ambitious.

"After the agreement is signed, the rest will come through more negotiations," said Adrees Mahmoud, a Europe-based Jem representative, who was in Qatar for the signing.

El Sadig el-Faqih, a former adviser to Sudan's president, who was also in Qatar, told Al Jazeera the move was a "framework to start discussing the details" and a peace deal could only go ahead when all parties were involved.

"It is essential for all parties to be part of it and I think the mediators are working diligently to realise this fact ... it is important to include everybody," he said.

"It is a framework, it is not the final peace agreement yet."

Darfur's other main armed group, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), is refusing to talk to the government, demanding an end to all violence before negotiations begin.

'Significant move'

The year-old Doha negotations have seen the dozens of smaller anti-government factions coalesce into two main groups to unify their demands.

Those groups have been irked by the separate ceasefire with Jem, but Sudan's government insisted it is committed to an inclusive peace deal.

"We believe that Darfur can't be solved bilaterally. We hope we can negotiate with the other groups to reach a final and comprehensive agreement," Amin Hassan Omar, the government official leading the negotiations, said.

The US has hailed the ceasefire deal as a "significant move" towards formal negotiations.

"The agreed ceasefire between the government of Sudan and Jem is an important first step toward reducing violence in Darfur," Philip Crowley, the US state department spokesman, said in a statement.

US officials will attend the signing, as will UN and Arab representatives and Idriss Deby, the president of Chad.

Controversial guest

Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's president, arrived in Qatar on Monday to formally sign the deal with Jem.

He has been charged with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur by the International Criminal Court (ICC), but Qatar is not a member of the ICC and has no legal obligation to arrest him.

The conflict in Darfur has ebbed over the last year and the peace deal has been bolstered by improved relations between Sudan and Chad, which have often accused each other of supporting armed groups in each others' territories.

The peace agreement is being signed in the run-up to Sudan's first multiparty elections in 24 years.

Jem, whose leader Khalil Ibrahim was a Sudan government minister before he joined the Darfur uprising, is already pressing the government to postpone the elections so that it can take part in the vote, set for April.

Darfur's seven-year conflict has claimed some 300,000 lives - both from the fighting, as well as famine and disease - and left 2.7 million refugees, according to UN figures.

Sudan puts the death toll at 10,000.

Bridging Cultures in Doha

By GARY WASSERMAN

On the first day of my American-government course I often play a little trick on the students. I throw one of them out of class.

Admittedly this is not among my kinder acts as a teacher. It comes from posing the questions of what is politics and where does it take place. Usually most of the class identifies politics with the actions of government rather than a process of influence involving power and authority in any number of social settings, including the classroom. So some unsuspecting student answers that, no, politics doesn't go on in this class. In response the teacher feigns anger and asks him or her to leave. The plan is to stop the student at the door, ask why he (or she) is obeying, and encourage a more energetic discussion of authority and politics at a university. Or at least that was the idea.

Two years ago, in my second semester of teaching at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar, I attempted to stage this performance in a class of mostly Arab students. When done in the United States there is a range of responses, from surprise to smirks to quiet calculations of how soon they could transfer out of this wack job's class. But that day, in the wealthy Persian Gulf emirate, I saw looks of pain and horror on the faces in class. By ordering a student out of class I had stepped over a strict line of courtesy and pride. I had also stumbled over these students' elevated respect for teachers. Their discomfort at my disapproval was a reminder that I was in a different culture with a tradition of esteem for teachers.

That was at least one mistake I never repeated.

Let me say upfront that I like teaching in Doha. My students are generally bright, attentive, and fairly hard-working, with a diversity of backgrounds. (How many American universities have a handful of students in every class who have actually experienced wars from Bosnia to Beirut?) Despite an appearance of uniformity, my students are no more monolithic in their political views than those at the average politically correct liberal East Coast college. A professor's academic freedom is not questioned. Even on the no-go topic of Israel, we had a debate last fall on the power of the Israeli lobby in America, which seemed, to their teacher at least, to provoke a range of student views.

In a discussion of teaching in a foreign culture, the temptation is to stress the contrasts, to elevate the exotic to a prominence not deserved. In fact, most of what passes for my daily acts of education are similar to what any American college professor would recognize. And the young men and women in class are also easily recognizable. Some are bright, some aren't; some work hard, some don't. They have the customary range of abilities and interests and identities. Many are mature and motivated, others are occupying space, just fulfilling a family's expectations.

Having been admitted to a well-known American university requiring English fluency, these are privileged students, tomorrow's leaders of the Middle East. Today this gives them the appearance of "global teenagers" plugged into current films, phrases, and fashions, as separate from their boomer teacher as their American peers are. And the student-teacher relationship is not one where either side necessarily reveals vital truths to the other. The few hours a week of our encounters are constrained by grades, ambitions, and honest confusion. Differing goals and self-images seldom encourage candid communications, whatever the cultural similarities or differences.

This leads to the recurring question among the faculty about what exactly we, and our students, are doing here. For me, after a career in Washington spent organizing and lobbying, analyzing and writing about politics, Doha represented a welcome chance to get back to teaching at Georgetown, my alma mater. With our kids out of the house, if not quite out of school, and a wife willing to travel, the move made some sense.

More general motives are usually adapted from the old British imperial credo of God, Gold, and Glory to suit the more secular goals of liberal scholars. Promoting interest in intellectual inquiry, in religious tolerance, and in an openness for dissent and debate all while making a comfortable living in an interesting foreign setting takes in a good deal of ground. For the students the debate was summed up by one social-science colleague, an American, who thought the students' Western loyalties were only an inch deep while their Muslim and Arab traditions composed their deeper roots. Another colleague, a Muslim, thought the religious and ethnic traditions were the surface parts while the Western cultural and consumption patterns were the more profound. I have no idea.

On the most apparent visual level, these students are not Americans. The Qatari boys wear long white robes, the thobe, while the girls cover their hair and wear the black abaya. Other students usually dress in the Western uniform of jeans, with many of the Muslim women at least covering their heads. Dress reflects custom and may or may not indicate a religious bent. The students vary in their devotion. A number go to daily prayers; most take the month of Ramadan seriously enough to show the strain of fasting during the daylight hours, while feasting at night. Perhaps because of the dress, the halls of the campus reflect a certain restraint, even dignity, not found in American academe.

Faculty members have complaints, and what professor doesn't? Structure is often expected, and therefore needed, in the classroom. If attendance isn't enforced, absence and tardiness become problems. Work habits, or the lack of them, are blamed on a privileged background. Of course spoiled kids are not exactly unknown in the higher reaches of American private education. Despite being widely traveled, many of the students show a surprising lack of curiosity about foreign lands, people, and culture.

The Qataris who make up almost half of our 140 students live at home. (The rest of the students are mostly from the Middle East and South Asia.) The Qataris' family lives are private matters not shared with the foreign faculty. Perhaps because families are so central, students tend to compartmentalize their education, restricting how much of their day they wish it to occupy. Not much socializing goes on between faculty members and students or, in general, between expats and locals. Faculty members live fairly close to the Education City campus that Georgetown shares with five other American universities teaching disciplines ranging from business (Carnegie Mellon) to medicine (Cornell). Foreigners live in their guarded compounds, and Qataris live with their families. (In between, the majority of the population, workers from South Asia, live in sparsely furnished all-male dormitories, walled off from both the foreign professionals and local citizens they serve.)

Attempts to scale these barriers even with typical American campus activities have only slowly been accepted. Recently some Georgetown students started a club that sponsored after-hours meals for informal chats between students and faculty members. One evening last fall, the group, called Brain Food, brought takeout food to my house to talk about the presidential election. Of the dozen students who showed up, none were Qatari.

That is not to say that within the classroom there aren't wide-ranging discussions with students who are smart, funny, articulate, and diverse. This diversity embraces women. Education is firmly co-ed, unlike most local schools and colleges run by more traditional local authorities in the Gulf. More than half of Georgetown's student body is female, and they are smart and motivated. They join in class debates and appear willing, even eager, to argue their points of view with male classmates. However they may be treated in the rest of society, and whatever ideas Westerners arrive with concerning the issue of women under Islam, these college women expect to be treated as equals, and on the campus they seem to be. If they are intimidated by men or a male-dominated culture and religion, I haven't noticed.

Many of the teachers here have ties to the people, culture, and religion of the region. Understandably their sympathies lie in the region, but the danger to teaching quality lies in constructing a self-selecting faculty that is narrower, ideologically and politically, than would exist on a more diverse American campus. Some teachers are at the end or the beginning of their careers, and an overseas posting for a few years is viewed as a short-term boost to their plans for the future. The salary supplement for teaching overseas is a clear incentive, and, when combined with free housing, rent received from a home back in the States as well as other perks can double one's salary in the United States. Alas, expenses are also higher in the Gulf. Chances for travel — always by air to elsewhere — are not only abundant but also necessary in a small desert country where the temperature hits 120 degrees in the summer.

Whatever the motives for being in Doha, family issues are always present. Single people have to handle the isolation of a small city in an unfamiliar culture that frowns on alcohol and displays of affection between the sexes. (No holding hands in public.) Married couples have problems with spouses who frequently have difficulty getting a job, keeping busy, or finding friends. Families with children have to find places for them in private schools, which can be both limited and expensive. But, as the phrase goes, if you have a problem money can solve, you don't have a problem. With the availability of inexpensive housekeeping and child care, stipends for education, as well as large houses and SUV's, expats can overcome most of the challenges. And most seem to stay longer than they planned to when they arrived.

Our mandate is to reproduce the same standards and content that exist at Georgetown's main campus in Washington. In our case that means granting a B.S. in foreign service — educating students in international politics for careers in world affairs. Academic freedom may not be up for debate, but what we are doing and whether we're succeeding certainly is, among a faculty that may overthink and overrate the university's mission. Is the education appropriate? Are we as a foreign faculty missionizing or mirroring a conflicted region? How relevant are we to students in blending their traditional values with modernizing habits of the heart? Both the questions and answers overflow with ambivalence.

The worse part of teaching in Qatar may actually occur before arrival: in the worried expectations of friends and family when they first hear of your pending departure. Arabs have a bad press in America, and that can lead to sincere concerns about physical security and intolerance. While generalizations about an admittedly volatile region should be minimized, the surprises in being here for three years are almost all on the positive side. And for a faculty that includes priests, Jews, and other nonconformists, the response has been welcoming and, assuming a degree of discretion, accepting. People of this region seem to want what we have to offer and are willing to put up with the eccentric baggage that Westerners inevitably bring with them. It's not a bad deal for either side, so far.

Gary Wasserman is a professor of government at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar, teaching international relations and American government.

Academics in the Persian Gulf

By ANDREW MILLS

Universities in the region offer jobs and money — but would you want to live there?

The job market on North American campuses may be heading for the deep freeze, but hundreds of positions are opening up in the Persian Gulf as American universities scramble to set down roots in those petrodollar-rich states. The combination of money and opportunity on offer may seem hard to resist.

But academics who trade the rich intellectual environment of America's college towns for the oil-soaked hinterlands of Arabia often perplex their friends, who wonder what kind of life their departing colleagues are in for.

The longstanding reputation of the sand-swept countries leading this academic boom — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — is that life there is mind-numbingly boring. That the strict observance of Islam, the relative isolation from the rest of the world, and the 110-degree heat that descends for six months a year have somehow stunted intellectual life.

Will the promising American academic who accepts a three-year contract there return home with a flush savings account but an atrophied brain and a derailed career? Or could there possibly be an intellectually satisfying life to lead out there?

That's what I came to Qatar — once described by the Lonely Planet travel guide as "the dullest place on earth" — to find out.

***

In 2002, when Virginia Commonwealth University was recruiting administrators for a branch campus it was establishing in Qatar, the first question Valerie Jeremijenko asked her superiors in Richmond seems absurd to her today: "Do you hire women?"

"I knew nothing," she says. "But I was intrigued with this idea of Qatar."

Qatar's rulers had realized that the economy of their tiny emirate was too dependent on its seemingly bottomless oil and gas wells. The push was on to diversify the economy and develop the skills of the sparse population.

So they drew on their oil-and-gas wealth and started paying for American universities to establish campuses on a tract of desert at the edge of the capital here — a development that became known as Education City. Cornell University signed on to build a medical school, and VCU to open an arts-and-design program. Since then Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Northwestern Universities have joined. Others are expected still.

And so the intriguing possibility of Qatar arose just as Jeremijenko and her two young daughters were ready to make a fresh start in a new place. "It was time for me to leave America and to leave the man I was married to," the native Australian says, sitting in the office she now occupies as assistant dean of student affairs at Virginia Commonwealth's campus in Qatar.

"Two weeks later, we got on a plane with a suitcase each."

Most faculty members at Education City say Doha appeals because it is the academics' equivalent of an adventure; they see a rare opportunity to be part of something entirely new, for which they can be the ones laying foundations.

"Where else is there such political will to support research and scholarship, to bring about a culture of inquiry?" says Mehran Kamrava, who left his post as chair of the political-science department at California State University at Northridge in June 2007 to direct the Center for International and Regional Studies on Georgetown's branch campus here.

Matthew Tinkcom, who is visiting this year from the graduate program in communication, culture, and technology on Georgetown's main campus, agrees: "Universities don't have many opportunities to rethink themselves. So I wanted to see this thing as early as I could."

The risks of joining what is essentially a start-up — even a very well endowed one — are obvious, and many American academics don't come unless they have posts to return to if things don't work out in Doha. Tinkcom's tenured position, for example, is waiting for him back in Washington.

But for Jeremijenko, this was the opportunity her family needed. Where else could she start life as a single mother with the kind of salary and benefits that allowed her to provide things like horseback riding and gymnastics to her girls?

"I could give my kids more than I could ever imagine in the States or Australia," she says.

But as she quickly realized, Qatar could often be a lonely and isolating place.

Women in Qatar enjoy equal rights with men and, unlike in neighboring Saudi Arabia, are not required by law to cover their hair. In universities they make up some 70 percent of the students, and female faculty members hold a number of leadership positions.

Still, Qatari society hasn't always been this female-friendly, and as one of only a few Western single mothers in the country, Jeremijenko knows she occasionally stands out.

"We are vulnerable and, in terms of reputation, there are standards of behavior that my kids and I have to uphold," she says. "You just have to be very aware of your behavior and how you are perceived."

What's more, at first Jeremijenko felt she could never escape her colleagues, who lived alongside her in an occasionally suffocating housing compound at Education City. When she did venture out, she had little interest in the rugby-watching, beer-swilling expatriate social scene dominated by young, single oil executives.

"The options were kind of limited in terms of what I wanted to do," says Jeremijenko, who especially missed a place to practice her longtime passion, yoga. She wondered how long she and the girls would last.

"It was so insular," she says. "And insular can become so toxic."

Tinkcom understands what she is talking about. "One of the strangest things is the bubble, the way that educated Westerners who are brought here to do very sophisticated forms of work live inside a virtual globalized world," he says. His social circle in Doha is limited to other employees of Education City. "I've discovered that it's really hard not to be inside that bubble."

Today, like Doha itself, Education City is sprouting from the desert as a sleek cluster of futuristic buildings.

And as just about everyone acknowledges, Qatar is transforming itself into an interesting place to live. "It's still a small village, of course," says Daniel R. Alonso, dean emeritus of Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. "But did you know we just inaugurated the Qatar Symphony Orchestra?"

The money-is-no-object attitude allowed Qatar to recruit 100 classical musicians from around the world and relocate them to Doha. It lured the 91-year-old architect I.M. Pei out of retirement to design the spectacular Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in December. It persuaded Robert De Niro to establish an offshoot of the Tribeca Film Festival here.

It has also allowed for a taste of the kind of over-the-top excess that Qatar's flashier, more reckless neighbor, Dubai, has become famous for. This year, for example, will be the official opening of the Pearl-Qatar, a $2.5-billion artificial island loaded with luxury villas and five-star hotels. The Villagio, a faux Venetian shopping mall, is already open, complete with gondolas that ferry customers along a series of canals.

Qatar can no longer be declared boring.

Cambridge, Mass., it is not, but Education City administrators say the growing international hype about Qatar is making it easier to attract the most elusive of academic recruits: faculty members who meet the high standards demanded by the home campus but are willing to move to Qatar.

Nowhere is this a bigger task than at Weill Cornell where, over the next few years, administrators must recruit 18 principal researchers and about 100 postdoctoral students and technicians to staff the laboratories of its ambitious biomedical-research program. What's more, over the next five years, the school must hire 200 clinicians and 50 researchers for the Sidra Medical and Research Center, its teaching hospital, which has an $8-billion endowment.

Sitting at a small, boardroom-style table in his plush office — thick carpet, leather sofa, giant plasma-screen television — Alonso pretends that I'm the kind of medical academic he needs to recruit and gives me his best shot.

"Well, first off, here's the funding to continue your research," he says. Qatar's government has devoted 2.8 percent of its gross domestic product, about $1.9-billion, to scientific research, so there is no talk of cutbacks, caps on funds, or downsizing. "Bring the whole lab. Bring your postdoc fellows. You like your researchers, bring them, too."

He offers the kind of research equipment found at only a few top medical schools in the United States, like a next-generation gene-sequencing platform in the genomics laboratory.

And if I'm worried about feeling disconnected from other colleagues in my field — after all, Doha is 7,000 miles from New York City — the university will pay for me to attend two academic conferences a year, anywhere in the world, no questions asked.

If I want to go to still other conferences, he adds, we can discuss that, too.

What about my family?

Bring them, of course, says Alonso, describing the Education City package that most academics get: furnished house, car, private-school fees for the kids, and a bundle of cash every year for the whole family to travel back to the States.

"You can use that money for whatever you want," he says. "Heck, go on vacation to Australia."

Then he lowers his voice and looks at me over the top of his round glasses, as if he's a bit embarrassed to make his next offering: "And of course, there is the foreign-service benefit."

The foreign-service benefit?

"Yes. A 25-percent bonus on top of your base salary," he says, breaking into a grin and nodding slowly. "Are you beginning to get the picture?"

I am. But I'm still not convinced this is the kind of place that will stimulate my brain.

On a Monday evening in November, I sit nervously in the atrium of Virginia Commonwealth University's campus here, waiting for somebody to swoop in and shut down the provocative slide show that Chris Jordan is giving.

The show, called "Running the Numbers," is a series of images the Seattle photographer has arranged to depict aspects of American excess. At first the images are innocuous enough: A million plastic cups, the amount used on U.S. airline flights every six hours. Two million plastic beverage bottles, the amount used in the United States every five minutes. Paper grocery bags, 1.14 million of them, the amount used every hour.

Then Jordan flips to an image of 32,000 naked Barbie dolls arranged to portray two giant naked breasts, nipples erect. This image, he says, depicts the number of breast augmentations performed in the United States each month.

I cringe, waiting for the lights to abruptly flick on and Jordan's microphone to be cut.

But he continues, flipping to an image portraying 28,000 barrels of oil: the amount the United States consumes every two minutes.

"These are our unconscious habits, and the results to our environment are catastrophic," Jordan says to the 200 or so people who have assembled in the atrium. "When we become aware of them, then we have a choice that we weren't aware of previously."

"I feel like an alcoholic who has woken up to my alcoholism," he says.

Surely this falls beyond the bounds of what is acceptable here in conservative Qatar, I think. Sexual openness and alcohol are considered among the biggest taboos, and oil is the lifeblood that has made just about everything in Qatar — including Education City — possible. (Academics joke that Education City is financed by the proceeds from a single oil well. It's called, of course, the well of knowledge.)

But no. Like all distinguished speakers who make the rounds of Education City, Jordan expresses his ideas as freely and critically as if he were on any American campus.

"Contrary to the dumbest stereotypes, there is a culture of critical thought, engagement, and dialogue here," says Georgetown's Tinkcom, who specializes in film studies and queer theory.

"In the courses I have taught, when the topic of gender difference — and I include queer theory and same-sex sexuality — has come up, I haven't avoided it, and my students here have been receptive to it," he explains in an e-mail message. "I don't detect any avoidance of discussions about gender — or, for that matter, any more curiosity, than I would with students on main campus."

Among faculty members, too, academic life on the campuses of Education City unfolds much the way it does at home, without censorship, with vibrant discussions, and with equal participation from men and women.

The faculty at Weill Cornell, for example, is to hold a conference this spring at which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars will discuss the ethics of the embryonic-stem-cell research that is planned to take place in the Qatar campus's biomedical laboratories. And Georgetown's Center for International and Regional Studies isn't afraid to tackle some of the region's thorniest issues. It has staged symposia, screened documentaries, and welcomed speakers on issues including militant Islam, human trafficking, and Iraqi refugees.

"At a purely intellectual level, there is an incredible amount to explore here," says Kamrava, the center's director. "It's an intellectually exciting place to be. So much is happening."

The center has even received a research grant to study what many academics say is the most troubling issue about life in the Persian Gulf: the abuse of migrant workers and lax enforcement of labor laws.

"I don't want you to think that my emotions are directing our scholarship, because they're not," says Kamrava. "But the treatment of migrant laborers here is something that troubles me at a deeply human level."

He and Tinkcom acknowledge that there's little they can do about it on a personal level, other than treat workers with the same respect they accord everyone. They are buoyed by the fact that the construction of Georgetown's building here will be the first at Education City that proceeds according to international safety standards.

The treatment of workers has become a big issue at New York University, which is building a branch campus in Abu Dhabi that is scheduled to open next year. Thousands of faculty and staff members and students in New York have signed a petition demanding the administration ensure that fair labor practices are followed in the construction and maintenance of the new campus. What's more, the NYU branch of the American Association of University Professors is working with Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, to draft a code of conduct for labor practices on the Abu Dhabi campus.

Education City is among only a few outposts in the Persian Gulf region where the standards of academic freedom and inquiry expected of Western-style higher education apply. But that is changing. All eyes will be on the opening of NYU's Abu Dhabi campus, which aspires to offer the same liberal-arts experience the university provides back home. Even Saudi Arabia — probably the region's least progressive country when it comes to democracy, women's rights, and cultural and religious freedoms — is about to begin its own experiment with Western-style academic freedom at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which is set to open in September. Endowed with a whopping $10-billion, it is the world's sixth-wealthiest university and has already poached dozens of professors from American campuses.

If Qatar's neighbors hope to pull off their equally ambitious plans for higher education, they must follow Education City's example and create the kind of conditions that allow Western-trained academics to go on living vibrant intellectual lives both inside and outside the classroom.

Matthew Tinkcom is considering extending his stay in Doha. And almost seven years after Valerie Jeremijenko arrived, she says moving here was the best thing she ever did. Having taught yoga classes at the Sheraton Hotel, she and a partner opened their own yoga studio, which now attracts more than 500 students a week. Jeremijenko has made connections in the expatriate community beyond Education City and no longer feels isolated here.

"I don't plan ever to leave," she says. "They'll have to force me out, because if you're smart about it, this is the best place to be."

Andrew Mills is a correspondent for The Chronicle, based in Beirut, Lebanon.