The Negotiator

The United States' voice in Sudan seeks peace through pragmatism.

Charles R. Snyder looks permanently unruffled. Not unengaged. Just conditioned. He can tell you, "I've been there, done that," and truly mean it. But given where he has been lately, you'd forgive him if he threw up his hands and screamed.

Snyder is the State Department's senior representative on Sudan and the lead on negotiations to end the 20-year-old civil war there. The strife might have escaped headlines in the United States if it hadn't blazed amid genocide in the Darfur region, where government-backed militias, known as the Janjaweed, have indiscriminately raped, tortured and murdered thousands of civilians.

The Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed at a January ceremony Snyder attended with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and the former United Nations ambassador, John Danforth. It was an achievement, but only a beginning. The accord creates steps toward democratic rule and power-sharing. But everything hinges on pacifying Darfur.

The accord is vital to U.S. credibility in Africa, Snyder says. And despite the outward display of calm, he takes it personally. "This is my baby," he says. Snyder came to the State Department in 1984, assigned to the African Affairs Bureau. He was a military officer then and went to work on independence talks in Namibia. He retired from the military and has focused ever since on the conflicts and the needs of African nations.

Having a foot in two worlds-military and diplomatic-has shaped Snyder's negotiating skills, he says. He can translate the language of both sides, which so often must play together but don't always succeed.

But Snyder's basic steadiness likely comes from some reservoir deeper than professional experience. He seems fundamentally built for the delicate dance of negotiation, which is timed to the rhythm of victory and failure, punctuated by the occasional opportunity to alter the course of human events and more often than not ends in frustration. "I'm a pragmatist and a realist, who every once in a while lets his optimism overwhelm his pragmatism," Snyder says.

Negotiations in Sudan followed customary steps. Snyder watched the parties edge up to the brink, only to back away from a settlement: "They walked to the pond but did not drink," he says. The deal they finally signed wasn't much different from what had been on the table months earlier, he adds. And now, Snyder says, as always happens, chaos might come with implementation.

Ghosts are chasing the United States in Africa, and Snyder knows this. In 1994, the government sat virtually immobile while ethnic cleansing in Rwanda claimed nearly a million lives. U.S. officials were rebuked for not interceding. More than a decade later, the United States had to act as if Darfur was the biggest humanitarian crisis around, Snyder says.

But the killing continues and in April, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick visited Sudan to pressure the government-which says it is working toward peace-to work harder. Regarding calls for the United Sates to go further in Darfur, Snyder says the State Department has led the way on the peace accord. But then, the nature of a government bureaucracy, he says pragmatically, is that "You're never going to satisfy everyone."

Snyder was trained in the military to see a problem as something you take on until the system makes its next move. "Do the good that the day will allow," he says. Today, the day might allow the United States to further intervene in African crises. Of President Bush's world view, Snyder says, "Idealism is an underlying thesis." In that sense, the Sudan accord is a microcosm of a larger quest for "the just peace," Snyder says. "It's the right thing to do."