The War in Darfur

Internally displaced persons' camp (Photo credit:  

Darfur: an experiment in African peacekeeping 

The War in Darfur^[13][14] was a 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 non-ArabSudanese in favor of Sudanese Arabs. It is also known as the Darfur Genocide.

One side of the conflict was composed mainly of the official Sudanese military and police, and the Janjaweed, a Sudanese militia group recruited mostly from theArabized indigenous Africans and few Arab Bedouin of the northern Rizeigat; the majority of other Arab groups in Darfur remain uninvolved in the conflict.^[15] 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.^[16][17]

There are various estimates on the number of human casualties which range up 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 and is regarded by many as a genocide.

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.^[18] 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.^[19]

Origins of the conflict

The conflict's origin goes back to land disputes between semi-nomadic livestock herders and those who practice sedentary agriculture.^[20]

Since the population of Darfur is predominantly Muslim, the conflict may not be only about race or religion, but about resources as the nomadic tribes facing drought are going after the territory of sedentary farmers.^[21]

 Arab Apartheid Allegation

In the beginning of 1991, non-Arabs of the Zaghawa people of Sudan complained that they were victims of an intensifying Arab apartheid campaign.^[22] Sudanese Arabs, who control the government, are widely referred to as practising apartheid against Sudan's non-Arab citizens.^[23] The government is accused of "deftly manipulat(ing) Arab solidarity" to carry out policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing against non-Arabs in Darfur.^[23]

American University economist George Ayittey accuses the Arab government of Sudan of practicing racist acts against black citizens.^[24] According to Ayittey, "In Sudan... the Arabs monopolized power and excluded blacks – Arab apartheid."^[25] Many African commentators join Ayittey in accusing Sudan of practising Arab apartheid.^{[26][27][28][29][30]}

Boston Globe columnist Fred Jacoby has accused Sudan of practicing apartheid against Christians in what is now South Sudan "where tens of thousands of black Africans in the country's southern region, most of them Christians or animists, have been abducted and sold into slavery by Arab militias backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum."^[31][32]

Alan Dershowitz has pointed to Sudan as an example of a government that "actually deserve(s)" the appellation "apartheid."^[33] Other distinguished people who have accused the regime in Sudan of practising "apartheid" against non-Arabs include former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler.^[34]

The usage of the terms "Arab" and "Black" has been opposed, because all parties involved in the Darfur conflict—whether they are referred to as ‘Arab’ (particularly Baggara/Janjaweed) or as ‘African,’ are equally indigenous. The Janjaweed group recruited mostly from the Arabized indigenous Africans/Baggara and few Arab Bedouin of the northern Rizeigat; while the majority of Arab groups in Darfur remain uninvolved in the conflict.^[15]

  Beginning of the conflict

The beginning point of the conflict in the Darfur region is typically said to be 26 February 2003, when a group calling itself the Darfur Liberation Front (DLF) publicly claimed credit for an attack on Golo, the headquarters ofJebel Marra District. Even prior to this attack, however, a conflict had erupted in Darfur, as rebels had already attacked police stations, army outposts and military convoys, and the government had engaged in a massive air and land assault on the rebel stronghold in the Marrah Mountains. The rebels' first military action was a successful attack on an army garrison on the mountain on 25 February 2002 and the Sudanese government had been aware of a unified rebel movement since an attack on the Golo police station in June 2002. Chroniclers Julie Flint and Alex de Waal state that the beginning of the rebellion is better dated to 21 July 2001, when a group ofZaghawa and Fur met in Abu Gamra and swore oaths on the Qur'an to work together to defend against government-sponsored attacks on their villages.^[35] It should be noted that nearly all of the residents of Darfur are Muslim, including the Janjaweed, as well as the government leaders in Khartoum.^[36]

On 25 March 2003, the rebels seized the garrison town of Tine along the Chadian border, seizing large quantities of supplies and arms. Despite a threat by President Omar al-Bashir to "unleash" the army, the military had little in reserve. The army was already deployed both to the south, where the Second Sudanese Civil War was drawing to an end, and to the east, where terrorists sponsored by Eritrea were threatening a newly constructed pipeline from the central oilfields to Port Sudan. The rebel guerilla tactic of hit-and-run raids to speed across the semi-desert region proved almost impossible for the army, untrained in desert operations, to counter. However, its aerial bombardment of rebel positions on the mountain was devastating.^[37]

At 5:30 am on 25 April 2003, a joint Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) force in 33 Toyota Land Cruisers entered al-Fashir and attacked the sleeping garrison. In the next four hours, four Antonov bombers and helicopter gunships (according to the government; seven according to the rebels) were destroyed on the ground, 75 soldiers, pilots and technicians were killed and 32 were captured, including the commander of the air base, a Major General. The success of the raid was unprecedented in Sudan; in the 20 years of the war in the south, the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) had never carried out such an operation.^[38]

The al-Fashir raid was a turning point both militarily and psychologically. The armed forces had been humiliated by the al-Fashir raid and the government was faced with a difficult strategic situation. The incompetent armed forces would clearly need to be retrained and redeployed to fight this new kind of war and there were well-founded concerns about the loyalty of the many Darfurian non-commissioned officers and soldiers in the army. Responsibility for prosecuting the war was given to Sudanese military intelligence. Nevertheless, in the middle months of 2003, the rebels won 34 of 38 engagements. In May, the SLA destroyed a battalion at Kutum, killing 500 and taking 300 prisoners; and in mid-July, 250 were killed in a second attack on Tine. The SLA began to infiltrate farther east, threatening to extend the war into Kordofan.

However, at this point the government changed its strategy. Given that the army was being consistently defeated, the war effort depended on three elements: military intelligence, the air force, and the Janjaweed, armedBaggara herders whom the government had begun directing in suppression of a Masalit uprising in 1986–1999. The Janjaweed were put at the center of the new counter-insurgency strategy. Though the government consistently denied supporting the Janjaweed, military resources were poured into Darfur and the Janjaweed were outfitted as a paramilitary force, complete with communication equipment and some artillery. The military planners were doubtlessly aware of the probable consequences of such a strategy: similar methods undertaken in the Nuba Mountains and around the southern oil fields during the 1990s had resulted in massive human rights violations and forced displacements.^[39]

The better-armed Janjaweed quickly gained the upper hand. By the spring of 2004, several thousand people – mostly from the non-Arab population – had been killed and as many as a million more had been driven from their homes, causing a major humanitarian crisis in the region. The crisis took on an international dimension when over 100,000 refugees poured into neighbouring Chad, pursued by Janjaweed militiamen, who clashed with Chadian government forces along the border. More than 70 militiamen and 10 Chadian soldiers were killed in one gun battle in April. A United Nations observer team reported that non-Arab villages were singled out while Arab villages were left untouched:

Tsim Al Bashir has sought the assistance of numerous non western countries after the West imposed sanctions against him, he said- "From the first day, our policy was clear: To look eastward, toward China, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and even Korea and Japan, even if the Western influence upon some [of these] countries is strong. We believe that the Chinese expansion was natural because it filled the space left by Western governments, the United States, and international funding agencies. The success of the Sudanese experiment in dealing with China without political conditions or pressures encouraged other African countries to look toward China."^[192]

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."^[161]

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."^[193] 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 Trustdirector, 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."^[194]

Human Rights First claimed that over 90% of the light weapons currently being imported by Sudan and used in the conflict are from China;^[195] 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.^[196] 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.^{[197][198][199]} 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.^[200] Accusations of the supply of weapons from China, violating the UN arms embargo, continue to arise.^[201]

Amnesty International slammed Russia for breaking the UN arms embargo on Darfur, Russians sold weapons like Mi-24 helicopters, Antonov 26 planes, Russian weapons sales to Sudan totaled 21 million dollars. It was reported these weapons were used to slaughter Darfur civilians. The report said Russia "cannot have been unaware of reports of serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law by the Sudanese security forces, But they have nevertheless continued to allow military equipment to be sent to Sudan." Russia was reported to "have been or should have been aware, several types of military equipment, including aircraft, have been deployed by the Sudanese armed forces for direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks in Darfur". The Russian planes were disguised as UN Planes which violate the Geneva Conventions. The Janjaweed also used Russian small arms to murder and loot, these Russian weapons spread into neighboring Chad. In 2005 helicopters from Russia were sold to Sudan for 7 million pounds sterling. Photos show Russian helicopters in Darfur.^{[202][203][204]}

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."^[205] However, experts say the Darfur region is unlikely to hold significant oil reserves.^[206] 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."^[198]

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.^[207] There were also calls for boycotts from actor and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow, Genocide Intervention Network Representative Ronan Farrow,^[208] author and Sudan scholar Eric Reeves^[209] and the Washington Post editorial board.^[210][211] Sudan divestment efforts have also concentrated on PetroChina, 

the national petroleum company with extensive investments in Sudan.^[212]

In May 2009 the Mandate Darfur was canceled because the "Sudanese government is obstructing the safe passage of Darfurian delegates from Sudan."^[213] The Mandate was a conference that would have brought together 300 representatives from different regions of the civil society of Darfur.^[213] The conference planned was to be held in Addis Ababa sometime in early May.