Peter Verney
At last, the catastrophe in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, a quarter of whose 6 million people are now displaced by war and whose lives are at serious risk as the rainy season begins, has gained international attention.
For well over a year, with all eyes on talks to end the civil war in the oil-rich south between Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), the long-simmering conflict in Darfur has been at a boil. After Darfuri militants announced their rebellion in February 2003, the government embarked upon a scorched-earth campaign.
Deploying bombers, helicopter gunships, "People's Defence Force" paramilitaries and regular armed forces, the Khartoum regime also encouraged raids by an estimated 20,000 janjaweed militia. These irregulars have now been linked directly to Sudan's security services by documents publicised on July 20 by Human Rights Watch. The scorched-earth campaign produced the greatest single exodus of refugees in the world in 2003, and is sustaining the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today.
Estimates of the human cost in Darfur vary greatly. But even the most conservative tallies state that at least 10,000 villagers are dead, with the expectation, voiced by Andrew Natsios of the US Agency for International Development, that 350,000 more people could die even if adequate humanitarian aid arrives. In addition, there are perhaps 1.2 million internally displaced persons and upwards of 200,000 refugees in Chad as a result of the war.
Resources and race
Darfur, a region the size of France, was an independent sultanate until 1916. It stretches from desert in the north to savannah in the south, interrupted midway by the Jebel Marra volcanic plateau, which boasts more rainfall and more fertile soil than the other areas. The region's people include farmers growing sorghum, millet, groundnuts and tomatoes, who are mostly of black African origin and outlook, and nomadic pastoralists (raising camels in the north and cattle further south) who mostly regard themselves as ethnic Arabs. Since the 1970s, climate change has accelerated desertification, adding pressure on northerners to move southward. The tribes who now supply fighters to the janjaweed were once known as the murahilin (migrants).
Conflicts in Darfur between settled farmers and nomads migrating in search of water and pastures have been commonplace for centuries, but traditionally solutions were reached by negotiation. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, these conflicts intensified, aggravated by drought and the Khartoum government's policy of selectively arming Arab pastoralists while removing the weapons of the farming peoples, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. Because livestock is Darfur's main export, the pastoralists have more influence in this region than in places where Khartoum favours settled communities.
Though originating in resource competition, the war is now heavily overlaid by race. Rape as a weapon of deracination, increasingly widespread in Darfur, has been accompanied by racist verbal abuse of the "African" women victims.
Ethnic identities, once somewhat fluid, have hardened as the regime promotes its favoured groups. Pastoralists and farmers have a long history of economic interdependence, as well as intermarriage. Now the ethnic lines are drawn more sharply. For over a decade, two dozen tribes, "Arabised" by the regime's conscious encouragement of that identity, have been engaged in what they call a "war on the blacks".
Darfur's people are all Muslim, but the settled communities have cultural practises that reflect their African roots. These practises, such as beer-brewing, have been branded "anti-Islam" by Khartoum. So too have the Darfuris' relatively more egalitarian gender relations. Darfur has long been a reservoir of cheap male labour for the agricultural and industrial projects of central Sudan, and the major source of lower-ranking soldiers in the army.
In response to their peripheral status, Darfuris have called for greater autonomy from the central government. But successive governments in Khartoum have played the ethnic card as one tactic for dividing their multiple opponents on the periphery.
Starting with the elected government of Sadiq al Mahdi, which lasted from 1986-1989, Khartoum has armed proxy "Arab" militias as a low-cost way to fight not just the SPLA, but also a number of "African" Sudanese outside the south, such as the Nuba in southern Kordofan.
The National Islamic Front, which seized power in a 1989 military coup, made political inroads into Darfur by promising to end the marginalisation and exploitation that had been the region's lot. After the coup, the Islamist regime attempted to recruit the Fur and other non-Arab tribespeople before deciding to continue arming groups of Arabised people in Darfur, mainly to keep on fighting the southerners but also to break the remaining political opposition in the region.
From early on, these regime tactics had dire consequences, including the reemergence of slavery linked with the freedom given to the Arabised tribal militia to seize human "war booty" in their raids on southern villages. Throughout the 1990s, there were reports of armed militias — the now notorious janjaweed — raiding villages of "African" tribes in Darfur, causing thousands of people to cross the border into Chad.
The current government has exacerbated matters by assigning land ownership to Arab occupiers of properties whose original owners have been killed or driven away by the janjaweed.
Rebellious region
Since 2001, Darfur has been governed under central government decree, with special courts to try people suspected of illegal possession or smuggling of weapons, murder and armed robbery. The security forces have misused these powers for arbitrary and indefinite detention. Anyone suspected of criticising the government can be and often is arrested without charge for months.
These factors led to the formation of two resistance movements, the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the smaller Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The former, born out of an earlier Darfur Liberation Front, is secular, while the latter seems to be led by, if not composed of, Darfuri Islamists disillusioned by the continuing lack of a fair deal from the regime. JEM members are believed to have authored a survey of inequality of distribution of Sudan's wealth, known as the "Black Book," which was published in 1999.
In the late winter of 2003, frustrated at the exclusion of Darfur from the US-sponsored negotiations between Khartoum and the SPLA, the two movements took up arms. The regime responded by unleashing the janjaweed, as well as its own forces, on the whole of the rebellious region.
For months, Khartoum claimed that the militias were outside its control. Eyewitnesses have long reported, however, that government helicopters are involved in supplying militias and that security and military chiefs are directing their activities.
Stalemate
As with the war in southern Sudan, Darfur's human-made disaster is the result of high-level planning by the Sudanese authorities. The Sudanese security apparatus is the real source of power in the country, and is notorious for its role in setting massacres in train. Now its fingerprints are on the Darfur operation.
Several ceasefires have been announced and promptly breached by the government, and peace negotiations — moved from neighbouring Chad to Ethiopia in July — have gotten nowhere.
The regime protests that there is no famine and that they have curtailed the militias' rampages — claims both roundly denounced as prevarications by UN officials on the ground in Sudan. On July 20, the government announced that it would repatriate thousands of Darfuri displaced persons to their villages, where they could fall victim to more janjaweed raids.
US, British and UN officials have so far avoided labelling Khartoum's ethnic cleansing campaign as "genocide" for fear of triggering their obligations under international treaties.
In early July, US secretary of state Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Sudan. The Khartoum regime promised then to disarm the janjaweed, resume talks with the rebels, protect the refugees and allow relief workers and human rights organisations access to Darfur.
Khartoum also agreed that 60 African Union officials, protected by 270 AU soldiers, be allowed into Darfur to monitor a ceasefire signed between the rebels and Khartoum in April.
A US draft resolution tabled at the Security Council in early July — which the US did not push to be voted on — diverted blame from Khartoum, "welcoming the commitment by the government of Sudan to investigate the atrocities and prosecute those responsible". The resolution proposed a travel ban on janjaweed commanders and an "arms embargo" on the Darfur region. Such an embargo would have little effect on the janjaweed's arms supplies from Khartoum, but would block any arms shipments to the Darfur rebels from outside countries.
On July 22, Annan said that "the Sudanese government doesn't have forever" to rein in the janjaweed, but declined to set an "artificial deadline" for Khartoum to comply with his demands. But if the regime in Khartoum gets away with politically motivated massacre on the staggering scale of Darfur, what value will there be in its promises over southern Sudan?
The US tabled a "stronger" draft UN resolution on July 22. As well as retaining the elements of the first motion, the resolution warned that unspecified measures would be imposed on the Sudanese government if it did not abide by its promise within 30 days of the passage of the resolution.
On July 23, the rebel JEM's general coordinator Abu Bakr Hamid al Nur told Reuters that janjaweed attacks are continuing. He called for an expanded African Union peace force to be sent to Darfur to end Khartoum's attacks. "[The AU] cannot do their job fairly, because the number is very small and they haven't the facilities to monitor because it is a very wide area. For that reason, we ask the international community to come as a witness for what is happening in Sudan."
[Peter Verney is editor of the London-based Sudan Update. Abridged from the Middle East Research and Information Project's Middle East Report Online. Visit <http://www.merip.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 28, 2004.
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