The mediators gathered in a conference room, and called in Minnawi and Abdul Wahid, one after the other, Zoellick and Obasanjo working them over. Frazer, who had accompanied Zoellick to the talks, had visited Abdul Wahid in his hotel room earlier that day. The rebel leader had been putting on his tie, getting ready to sign the peace agreement. "He was so happy," Frazer recalls. The deal, she felt, had been in many ways written for Abdul Wahid — it even guaranteed him a powerful job, as head of the government's proposed Darfur Authority, with broad powers to rebuild the region. When the details had been announced, Abdul Wahid had practically floated out of the room.But now, talking with Zoellick and Obasanjo in the palace, the rebel leader refused to sign. He had spent hours scouring the details of the land settlements, he announced, and it wasn't enough.
"Now come, my boy," Obasanjo said. "You haven't fought a war like I have, and won a war as I have done." If Abdul Wahid wanted to be a great leader of his people, Obasanjo said, he needed to sign.
Abdul Wahid refused to budge. It was a betrayal of his people, he said. He would be killed if he signed.
Frazer later came to believe that someone — maybe the Eritreans or the Libyans, both of whom had been backing the rebels — had gotten to Abdul Wahid. "He felt like his life was being threatened," she says. "He was begging for understanding, and we were twisting his arm."
Minnawi had begun the day conflicted about the deal
(Pastorius note: he was conflicted about a deal he was signing which had been brokered by the UN and negotiated with Abdul Wahid),
but throughout the session he seemed to be wearing down. He looked uncomfortable in his suit, and to the assembled diplomats he seemed much smaller than the occasion, intimidated by the power in the room. "If you don't sign," Zoellick (UN guy) told Minnawi, "we'll drop you. We'll drop you like a rock."
All night, the diplomats pressed Minnawi, pushing him to name any concessions he wanted. Eventually, near dawn, the rebel leader asked Obasanjo for time to consult his commanders in the field.
"When are you going to be back?" Obasanjo demanded.
"Soon," Minnawi said.
"What do you mean by 'soon'?" the Nigerian asked. "Christ said he would be back soon, and that was 2,000 years ago."
"Soon," Minnawi promised.
As the diplomats recessed, word began to spread that Minnawi's brother had been killed in a janjaweed raid.
Back in Washington, with the possibility of intervention in Darfur slipping away, Jendayi Frazer renewed her push for military options. The effort seemed quixotic at best: Few believed the Americans, immersed in two theaters of war, would deploy to a third. But Frazer believed that President Bush, who took home a memo on Sudan each Friday, was seriously considering military action. "It was his inclination, absolutely," she says. Then, in November 2006, the administration's new envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, made the mistake of mentioning to reporters that the White House was considering a "Plan B" in case diplomacy failed. The blowback was fierce. European allies were furious, and Bashir warned that sending U.S. troops to Sudan would only serve to attract terrorists and broaden the global jihad. Bush quietly shelved the idea of military action.