Lamamra.. Grinning During Tumultuous Situations

As I see it

By Adil El Baz

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Nobody could tell the exact mission of Ramtane Lamamra, the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General Antoine Guterres, to the Sudan. Is he a replacement for the ill-reputed Volker Perthes but with the same mandate and whose mission was aborted? Is he a UN mediator in the Sudan, like the many UN envoys to Libya? Is he to coordinate international efforts under the banner of the United Nations. And then who is Lamamra in the first place?
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He is an Algerian politician. He was involved in many mediations aimed to resolve numerous conflicts on the African continent. He previously served as Secretary-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in his country, as well as a United Nations Envoy to Liberia, 2003 – 2007. In the diplomatic field, he worked as Algeria’s ambassador to the United Nations, 1993-1996, until he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, September 11th, 2013 in Algeria.
Diplomats who worked with him say that Lamamra uses “smile diplomacy” and does not make many statements or dialogues, a common feature of Algerian diplomacy, which gives him the characteristic of exemplary discipline and excellence in performing his job and diplomatic responsibility. But now what will a smile serve under such cloudy circumstances?
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I looked up for the tasks assigned for Lamamra, but I could not find any task he was assigned other than that he is the envoy of the Secretary-General to Sudan. What is his job? Unknown. I reviewed the biographies of former United Nations envoys to find out what were the tasks to which they were usually assigned. I come to find that they were usually assigned dossiers related to diplomatic crises and conflicts. Their role is often that of mediator in these crises. I counted more than ten international envoys and saw what they did with the tasks they were assigned, and amazing they were!!!!! With the exception of couple of them such as Cyrus Vance, the envoy who was appointed during the Bosnia and Herzegovina crisis, they all failed, most of them resigned, others were replaced midway, some rejected by the countries to which they were nominated, and others were bought by countries with money and influence to serve their agenda. Let us give some examples… So, his excellency the Secretary General’s envoy in Libya, whom the UAE used to impose its agenda and failed, but it rewarded him at the end of his service and invited him to its soil, and he is now residing there enjoying a comfortable life (may God protect our envoy). Mr. Sergio Vieira, the Secretary-General’s envoy to Iraq 2005, was killed. On May 22, 2019, Horst Köhler gave up his position as United Nations envoy to Western Sahara.
And the last envoy to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is Bulgarian Nikolai Mladenov, who was appointed in February 2015. He resigned. Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, 7 UN envoys took up the job: Jordanian Abdul Ilah al-Khatib, UK Ian Martin, Lebanese Tariq Mitri, Spanish Bernardino Leon, and German Martin Kobler, in addition to the Lebanese Ghassan Salama. In April 2011, the United Nations appointed the British as one of the envoys, Jamal Benomar of Moroccan origin was an international envoy to Yemen, carrying the mission of mediating between the regime of the late President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The two envoys who succeeded in their mission for various reasons were Mr. Philip Habib, whose efforts led to the signing of an agreement between Egyptians and Israelis. He would not have succeeded without American influence, and he was an American national of Lebanese origin, and the second was the UN envoy Cyrus Vance (an American) in achieving peace in Bosnia, through the Dayton Agreement. In November 1995, he succeeded because there was a consensus from four major countries in the Security Council on the settlement, and this was not the case in the missions of other UN envoys.

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I tried to find out the reasons that led to the failure of all these envoys, as their failure had become a phenomenon that deserves an analysis. I found that these envoys had no connection to the dossiers to which they were assigned, and had hardly heard of the deep problems they were about to deal with, just like our envoy now, Lamamra. I doubt that he knows the complexities of the Sudanese situation in the north, east and west, the conflicts between internal political forces, and the thorny issues that require him to know them in order to propose appropriate solutions. And when he realizes these hidden things, either the war has ended or the mission has become impossible for him, or Sudan will have been a thing of the past, scattered in the four winds.!. In general, Lamamra began to find his way through meetings with political actors and with the country’s leadership, and is now proceeding to listen to others, and that is a long journey. He does not know how much time he needs to thoroughly review the dossiers of the Sudanese crisis, and then he works to submit proposals as for the ways to address the crisis.
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The second reason behind the failure of the UN envoys is that the United Nations itself lacks the tools and the required capabilities to have leverage over the conflicting parties, a matter that weakens the role of the envoys in carrying out their missions.
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The third reason is the haste of the UN in appointing its envoys, which in most cases, is ill-timed. It is done before the conditions are ripe for resolving complex issues, circumstances that helped ignite the wars and the crisis as the case with the appointment of Lamamra now. He comes during these circumstances as envoy for the Sudan following the failure of a full-fledged UN mission (UNITAMS), with a budget and with the mandate to take action based on a UN Security Council Resolution. What could he do alone in such worse circumstances??
This time about, the fighting is at its peak and each party is confirming it was going to win the war, and there is no near future looming in the horizon, the only functioning forum was the Jeddah platform that has been shut down, followed by opening of the malfunctioning IGAD forum. This last one also is on its way to be shut down after the Sudan has declined to an invitation to take part in the I GAD summit set for January 18th. Amid all these initiatives and interventions from neighbouring countries and African organizations, how could Lamamra maneuver, what is the new that he will bring in, even he were so genius as to understand and absorb all the complexities related to the Sudanese circumstances within one or two months?
The United Nations is now busy with very complex regional and international conflicts: in Asia facing the crisis between Taiwan, China and America, and America itself is about to find itself in a and all out war due to the repercussions of the Gaza war and the Houthi attacks on commercial ships and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, then Africa itself immediately after coming out of the Tigray conflict, it entered the Sudan conflict, and now it is about to enter into the hell of a war between Somalia and Ethiopia against the background of the crisis of the Somaliland Agreement with Ethiopia’s ques for sea port. In short, all the internal circumstances in Sudan and African and Asian regions do not help Special Envoy Lamamra in the success of his already unknown mission, and it is strange that some see him as a means for riding towards new dispensations.