The Darfur Conflict is an ongoing guerrilla conflict or civil war centered on the Darfur region of Sudan. It began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) groups in Darfur took up arms, accusing the Sudanese government of oppressing or committing genocide against non-arabized Sudanese in favor of Sudanese Arabs. One side of the conflict is composed mainly of the official Sudanese military and police, and the Janjaweed, a Sudanese militia group recruited mostly from the Arab Abbala tribes of the northern Rizeigat region in Sudan; these tribes are mainly camel-herding nomads. The other combatants are made up of rebel groups, notably the SLM/A and the JEM, recruited primarily from the non-Arab Muslim Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit ethnic groups. Although the Sudanese government publicly denies that it supports the Janjaweed, it has been providing financial assistance and weapons to the militia and has been organizing joint attacks targeting civilians.
There are various estimates on the number of human casualties, ranging from under twenty thousand to several hundred thousand dead, from either direct combat or starvation and disease inflicted by the conflict. There have also been mass displacements and coercive migrations, forcing millions into refugee camps or over the border and creating a large humanitarian crisis.
The Sudanese government and the JEM signed a ceasefire agreement in February, 2010, with a tentative agreement to pursue further peace. The JEM has the most to gain from the talks, and could see semi-autonomy much like South Sudan. However, talks have been disrupted by accusations that the Sudanese army launched raids and air strikes against a village, violating the February agreement. The JEM, the largest rebel group in Darfur, has said they will boycott further negotiations.
In Darfur, over 5 million people have been affected by the genocide.
AU: African Union
DLF: Darfur Liberation Front
The North/South divide
The Sudan conflict is typically characterized as between the predominantly Arab/Muslim North and the non-Arab/Muslim "African" South.Dr Deng (Sudanese known journalist) explains that Northerners' identification with Arabism, "is the result of a process in which races and religions were ranked, with Arabs and Muslims respected as free, superior and a race of slave masters, while Negroes and heathens were viewed as legitimate targets of slavery, if they were not in fact already slaves." From a conference on North-South relations: "Northern intellectuals look at Southerners as 'tribes-men', while they refer to the Northerners as 'people'. Even those Northerners who are considered to be leftist think in the same way!" The government has built anti-Dinka militias to fight the war by proxy. To persuade Arab Sudanese to join militias, the old Sudanese ideas of racial cleavage between the north and the south were deployed. Southerners were characterized as abid [slaves]. The prosecutor at Omar al-Bashir's trial, being accused of genocide, charged the Arab-led government with a genocidal strategy against Darfur's black African ethnic groups.
The New York Times (15 May 2004) said that many of the racist attitudes traditionally directed toward slaves have been redirected to the sedentary Arab racist ideology plays an important part of the genocide, the sharp distinctions between Arabs and Africans in the racially mixed Darfur region had not been drawn (as much) until the ideology of pan-Arabism that came out of the Libya made itself felt. Some of the nomadic sheiks of the region came to see themselves as the avatars of Arabism, the authentic representatives of their Bedouin origins. They foisted a racial label on a farming people whose way of life they simultaneously disdained and felt threatened by. Blacks in Sudan are seen as inferior to the Arabs , the racism, racial sentiments against non-Arabs have been used & manipulated by the central government. The Christian Science Monitor asserts that racism is at root of Sudan's Darfur crisis, that reluctance to call it genocide perpetuates hypocrisy in Afro-Arab relations, "Arab militias is the racist, fundamentalist, and undemocratic Sudanese state" those who call themselves Arabs point to Arab ancestors who arrived as traders both before and after the arrival of Islam, and who gradually converted local Sudanese to the Islamic faith. president Nimeiry of Sudan, said in 1969: "Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of Black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission." this genocide has been described as an example of Arab racism at its worst.
The Arab Gathering, a shadowy Nazi type brotherhood deeply embedded in the Bashir regime, preaches a doctrine of Arab supremacy and a Sudan "cleansed" of non-Arabs. Der Spiegel wrote that the Sudanese regime uses tribal conflicts and Arab racism.
Janjaweed
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| A mounted Black Janjaweed militiaman |
The Janjaweed, colloquial expression for "a man on a horse" is the militia armed by the Sudanese government, are pastoral Arab tribesmen. The Janjaweed themselves are an African/Black people who have been Arabized .
In 2005 report on Sudan's Human Rights Practices : "The government continued to support the largely Arab nomad janjaweed militia."and that Darfurians were "threatened with death, and subjected to racial epithets during attacks.", the attackers "call non-Arab Africans abid or slave, and zurga, which means Black, but is used as a racial slur.", there were reports (The Guardian 20 Jul, 2004) of Arab women singers complicit in rape, "While African women in Darfur were being raped by the Janjaweed militiamen.
Criticism
Various sources have claimed it is a war waged by Muslim Arabs against Christian and Animist black Africans. However, this distinction is not always true as many of the victims of the atrocities in Darfur were also Muslim (albeit not Arab). The conflict's origin goes back to land disputes between semi-nomadic livestock herders and those who practice sedentary agriculture. Others opposed the usage of the term Arab and Black because all parties involved in the Darfur conflict—whether they are referred to as ‘Arab’ or as ‘African,’ are equally indigenous and equally Black. 'Arab' in the Sudanese context is different from Arab in the American context.
The actual conflict is not only about race or religion, but about resources as the nomadic tribes facing drought are going after the territory of sedentary farmers.
International response
International response to the Darfur conflict
International attention to the Darfur conflict largely began with reports by the advocacy organizations Amnesty International in July 2003 and the International Crisis Group in December 2003. However, widespread media coverage did not start until the outgoing United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, called Darfur the "world's greatest humanitarian crisis" in March 2004. Organizations such as STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, later under the umbrella of Genocide Intervention Network, and the Save Darfur Coalition emerged and became particularly active in the areas of engaging the United States Congress and President on the issue and pushing for divestment nationwide, initially launched by Adam Sterling under the auspice of the Sudan Divestment Task Force. Particularly strong advocates have additionally included: New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Sudan scholar Eric Reeves, Enough Project founder John Prendergast, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power, photographers Ryan Spencer Reed, former Marine Brian Steidle, actress Mia Farrow and her son Ronan Farrow, Olympian Joey Cheek, actress Angelina Jolie, actors George Clooney, and Don Cheadle, actor Jonah Hill, actress Salma Hayek, Save Darfur Coalition's David Rubenstein, Slovenian humanitarian Tomo Kriznar, and all of those involved with the Genocide Intervention Network. A movement advocating for humanitarian intervention has emerged in several countries.
]United Nations
International Criminal Court
In March 2005, the Security Council formally referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, taking into account the report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, but without mentioning any specific crimes. Two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution.
In April 2007, the Judges of the ICC issued arrest warrants against the former Minister of State for the Interior, Ahmed Haroun, and a Janjaweed leader, Ali Kushayb, for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Sudan Government said that the ICC had no jurisdiction to try Sudanese citizens and that it would not hand the two men over to authorities in the Hague.
On 14 July 2008, the Prosecutor filed ten charges of war crimes against Sudan's incumbent President Omar al-Bashir, three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder. The Prosecutor has claimed that Mr. al-Bashir "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity. Leaders from three Darfur tribes are suing ICC prosecutor Luis-Moreno Ocampo for libel, defamation, and igniting hatred and tribalism.
After an arrest warrant was issued for the Sudanese president in March 2009, the Prosecutor appealed to have the genocide charges added. However, the Pre-Trial Chamber found that there was no reasonable ground to support the contention that he had a specific intent to commit genocide (dolus specialis), which is an intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group. The definition adopted by the Pre-Trial Chamber is the definition of the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute, and some ICTY cases. On February 3, 2010 the Appeals Chamber of the ICC found that the Pre-Trial Chamber had applied "an erroneous standard of proof when evaluating the evidence submitted by the Prosecutor" and that the Prosecutor's application for a warrant of arrest on the genocide charges should be sent back to the Pre-Trial Chamber to review based on the correct legal standard. In July, 2010, Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir was finally charged by Hague for orchestrating Darfur genocide, three counts of genocide in Darfur by the International Criminal Court.
Mr. al-Bashir is now the first incumbent head of state charged with crimes in the Rome Statute. Bashir has rejected the charges and said, "Whoever has visited Darfur, met officials and discovered their ethnicities and tribes ... will know that all of these things are lies."
It is expected that al-Bashir will not face trial in The Hague until he is apprehended in a nation which accepts the ICC's jurisdiction, as Sudan is not a state party to the Rome Statute which it signed but didn't ratify. Payam Akhavan, a professor of international law at McGill University in Montreal and a former war crimes prosecutor, says although he may not go to trial, "He will effectively be in prison within the Sudan itself...Al-Bashir now is not going to be able to leave the Sudan without facing arrest." The Prosecutor has publicly warned that authorities could arrest the President if he enters international airspace. The Sudanese government has announced the Presidential plane will be accompanied by jet fighters. However, the Arab League has announced its solidarity with al-Bashir. Since the warrant, he has visited Qatar and Egypt. Both countries have refused to arrest him. The African Union also condemned the arrest warrant.
Some analysts think that the ICC indictment is counterproductive and harms the peace process. Only days after the ICC indictment, al-Bashir expelled 13 international aid organizations from Darfur and disbanded three domestic aid organizations. In the aftermath of the expulsions, conditions in the displaced camps deteriorated, and women were particularly affected. Darfur rebels who were in a peace process with the Sudanese government declared there is no need to engage in a peace agreement because the ICC recognized the Sudanese president as a criminal. Previous ICC indictments, such as the arrest warrants of the LRA leadership in the ongoing war at northern Uganda, were also accused of harming peace processes by criminalizing one side of a war. Some believe that the arrest warrant against al-Bashir will hinder the efforts to establish peace in Darfur, and will undermine any effort to boost stability in Sudan.
Criticism of international response
The Save Darfur Coalition advocacy group coordinated a large rally in New York in April 2006
Gérard Prunier, a scholar specializing in African conflicts, argued that the world's most powerful countries have largely limited themselves in expressing concerns and demand for the United Nations to take action in solving the genocide in Darfur. The UN, lacking both the funding and military support of the wealthy countries, has left the African Union to deploy a token force (AMIS) without a mandate to protect civilians. In the lack of foreign political will to address the political and economic structures that underlie the conflict, the international community has defined the Darfur conflict in humanitarian assistance terms and debated the label of "genocide."
On 16 October 2006, Minority Rights Group (MRG) published a critical report, challenging that the UN and the great powers could have prevented the deepening crisis in Darfur and that few lessons appear to have been drawn from their ineptitude during the Rwandan Genocide. MRG's executive director, Mark Lattimer, stated that: "this level of crisis, the killings, rape and displacement could have been foreseen and avoided ... Darfur would just not be in this situation had the UN systems got its act together after Rwanda: their action was too little too late."On 20 October, 120 genocide survivors of The Holocaust, and the Cambodian and Rwandan Genocides, backed by six aid agencies, submitted an open letter to the European Union, calling on them to do more to end the atrocities in Darfur, with a UN peacekeeping force as "the only viable option." Aegis Trust director, James Smith, stated that while "the African Union has worked very well in Darfur and done what it could, the rest of the world hasn't supported those efforts the way it should have done with sufficient funds and sufficient equipment."
Human Rights First claimed that over 90% of the light weapons currently being imported by Sudan and used in the conflict are from China; however, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)'s "Arms Transfers Data for 2007", in 2003–2007, Sudan received 87 per cent of its major conventional weapons from Russia and 8 per cent from China. Human rights advocates and opponents of the Sudanese government portray China's role in providing weapons and aircraft as a cynical attempt to obtain oil just as colonial powers once supplied African chieftains with the military means to maintain control as they extracted natural resources. According to China's critics, China has offered Sudan support threatening to use its veto on the U.N. Security Council to protect Khartoum from sanctions and has been able to water down every resolution on Darfur in order to protect its interests in Sudan. Accusations of the supply of weapons from China, violating the UN arms embargo, continue to arise.
The U.S.-funded Civilian Protection Monitoring Team, which investigates attacks in southern Sudan concluded that "as the Government of Sudan sought to clear the way for oil exploration and to create a cordon sanitaire around the oil fields, vast tracts of the Western Upper Nile Region in southern Sudan became the focus of extensive military operations." However, experts say the Darfur region is unlikely to hold significant oil reserves. Sarah Wykes, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, an NGO that campaigns for better natural resource governance, says: "Sudan has purchased about $100m in arms from China and has used these weapons against civilians in Darfur."
In March 2007, threats of boycotting the Olympic games came from French presidential candidate François Bayrou, in an effort to stop China's support to the Sudanese government in the war. There were also calls for boycotts from actor and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow, Genocide Intervention Network Representative Ronan Farrow, author and Sudan scholar Eric Reeves and the Washington Post editorial board. Sudan divestment efforts have also concentrated on PetroChina, the national petroleum company with extensive investments in Sudan.
On the opposite side of the issue, publicity given to the Darfur conflict has been criticized in some segments of the Arab media as exaggerated. For example, there have been statements such as: the "lobby to save Darfur ... is just the Israel lobby nicknamed", and by raising the issue of Darfur, the Israeli lobby is trying "to divert attention from Israel's crimes, or the catastrophe of the war in Iraq", and that Western attention to the Darfur crisis is "a cover for what is really being planned and carried out by the Western forces of hegemony and control in our Arab world." Others also argue that "there is no ethnic cleansing being perpetrated" in Darfur, only "great instability" and "clashes between the Sudanese government, rebel movements and the Janjaweed."
Additionally, a growing number of scholars in the academic community have been critical of the international response and the activist community. Columbia Professor, Mahmood Mamdani has written the book, Saviors and Survivors, which accuses the Save Darfur Coalition of exacerbating the situation in Darfur, focusing inaccurately on race and violence, rather than the systemic causes of the conflict. Marc Gustafson, of Oxford University, has argued that casualty rates have been inflated, and serious changes in the conflict's scope, size and nature have been ignored since 2004. Harvard professor, Alex de Waal has also been critical of the activist campaigns, claiming that activists have ignored the root causes of the conflict and are out of touch with the changes that have occurred in Darfur.
In 2007, in a response to allegations that the conflict is between Arabs and Blacks, in front of an African American audience, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir replied:
Talk of Arabs killing Blacks is a lie, the government of Sudan is a government of Blacks, with all different ethnic backgrounds. We’re all Africans. We’re all Black.
Eight people including U.S. Representatives James McGovern, John Lewis, Donna Edwards, Lynn Woolsey and Keith Ellison were arrested for civil disobedience in April 2009 when they spoke at the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C. to raise awareness of genocide.
In May 2009 the Mandate Darfur was canceled because the "Sudanese government is obstructing the safe passage of Darfurian delegates from Sudan." The Mandate was a conference that would have brought together 300 representatives from different regions of the civil society of Darfur. The conference was planned to be held in Addis Ababa in early May.
The UN military commander, General Martin Luther Agwai, has declared that the genocide in Darfur is over. He claims there are still small incidents such as, "Banditry, localised issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that." Agwai said these comments a week before he was scheduled to leave Darfur.
On Sept. 10, 2009, a number of Darfur activists came forward in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, saying that reported figures had been deliberately inflated, including evidence used by the ICC. They recanted their previous numbers and made the disclosure in the interest of peace and reconciliation, and in hopes that the ICC would withdraw their warrant. However, SLM/A representatives dispute the claim and legitimacy of these activists.
Mortality figures
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| A mother with her sick baby at Abu Shouk IDP camp in North Darfur |
Sudanese authorities claim a death toll of roughly 19,500 civilians while certain non-governmental organizations, such as the Coalition for International Justice, claim that over 400,000 people have been killed.
In September 2004, the World Health Organization estimated there had been 50,000 deaths in Darfur since the beginning of the conflict, an 18-month period, mostly due to starvation. An updated estimate the following month put the number of deaths for the 6-month period from March to October 2004 due to starvation and disease at 70,000; These figures were criticized, because they only considered short periods and did not include deaths from violence. A more recent British Parliamentary Report has estimated that over 300,000 people have died, and others have estimated even more.
In March 2005, the UN's Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland estimated that 10,000 were dying each month excluding deaths due to ethnic violence. An estimated 2.7 million people had at that time been displaced from their homes, mostly seeking refuge in camps in Darfur's major towns. Two hundred thousand had fled to neighboring Chad. Reports of violent deaths compiled by the UN indicate between 6,000 and 7,000 fatalities from 2004 to 2007.
In May 2005, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) of the School of Public Health of the Université catholique de Louvain in Brussels, Belgium published an analysis of mortality in Darfur. Their estimate stated that from September 2003 to January 2005, between 98,000 and 181,000 persons had died in Darfur, including from 63,000 to 146,000 excess deaths.
On 28 April 2006, Dr. Eric Reeves argued that "extant data, in aggregate, strongly suggest that total excess mortality in Darfur, over the course of more than three years of deadly conflict, now significantly exceeds 450,000," but this has not been independently verified.
The UN disclosed on 22 April 2008 that it might have underestimated the Darfur death toll by nearly 50%.
In July 2009, the Christian Science Monitor published an op-ed stating that many of the published mortality rates have been misleading because they include a large number of people who have died of disease and malnutrition, as well as those who have died from direct violence. Therefore, when activist groups make statements indicating that "four hundred thousand people have been killed," they are misleading the public.
In January 2010, The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters published an article in a special issue of The Lancet. The article, entitled Patterns of mortality rates in Darfur Conflict, estimated, with 95% confidence, that the excess number of deaths is between 178,258 and 461,520 (the mean being 298,271), with 80% of these due to diseases.[92] 51 International peacekeepers have been killed in Darfur.[citation needed] An accurate picture of the state of the crisis in Darfur has been increasingly difficult to garner with former aid workers reporting that their remaining colleagues are "self-censoring" for fear of being expelled, and an Oct. 2010 crackdown by the Sudanese government on Radio Dabanga, the remaining uncensored Darfuri media outlet.
Ongoing violence
Civil war in Chad (2005–present), Central African Republic Bush War, and 2010 South Darfur clash
Violence in Darfur spread over the border to eastern Chad, but not as far as the capital N'Djamena, and the Central African Republic. In Chad, notably, the Janjaweed were accused of incursions and attacks. Hundreds of aid workers in Chad have already been evacuated due to increased tension between rebel groups and military forces. Meanwhile, the Janjaweed have ventured deep into Chad to conduct assaults, resulting in the fleeing of nearly 100,000 Chadians.
Peace efforts
Efforts to end the war and resort to peace talks have been made, including by the U.S. government.
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