veiled4allah: further thoughts on Darfur

I've been continuing to read about the situation in Darfur. It's really quite astonishing the claims that various groups are making, to justify this or that position. The best overview of the crisis that I've seen is The Darfur Conflict: Crimes Against Humanity in Sudan by the Crimes of War Project.

To the best of my understanding, the situation is this. There's been a long-standing low-level conflict between tribes in Darfur who consider themselves to be ethnically Arab, who are generally nomadic, and tribes who consider themselves to be ethnically African, who are generally pastoral. Some of the commentary makes a big deal out of the fact that the two groups are both black-skinned Sunni Muslims who appear the same to outsiders. The point is, the groups do consider themselves to be ethnically distinct from each other (for a background on the development of these identities, see Ethnicity from Perception to Cause of Violent Conflicts) , and have been taking sides against each other on this basis. Do we imagine that if we in the West decree that they should consider themselves to be the same ethnic group, that this will magically resolve things? How stupid.

In any case, the African tribes have also been engaged in conflict against the central Sudanese government. As noted in Ideas on the Background of the Present Conflict in Darfur (PDF), the region was independent of the rest of Sudan until 1916 and has been fighting against the Sudanese government for most of the time since then. There are several armed rebel groups in Darfur. One of these, the Justice and Equality Movement, has ties to Hassan al-Turabi, an Islamist who founded the National Islamic Front party that took power in Khartoum in 1989 but has since fallen out with the NIF. Thus, some people argue, Darfur is hardly an innocent victim.

All of this may be true, but it's beside the point. The current crisis results from the Sudanese government using the Janjaweed militias (armed groups from the Arab tribes) to attack civilians. The Crimes of War site explains:

Incapable of controlling the situation because it had few troops (and many were made up of Westerners [Western Sudanese] who refused to fight their brothers) the government used three types of tactics to try to curb guerilla activities: * Extensive use of airpower. Mil Mi-24 combat helicopters engaged in indiscriminate bombing and machine-gunning of civilians while Antonov An-12 transports were used to drop makeshift bombs on villages and IDP concentrations.

* Recruitment of large numbers of “Arab” militiamen called “Janjaweed”, mounted on camels or horseback. These were at times recruited in neighboring Chad and were motivated by a mixture of cultural/racial prejudice and the lure of looting. They mercilessly engaged in the massacre of civilians.

* Destruction of the means of livelihood of the population. Wells were filled, cattle were killed and foodstuff stores were destroyed. This caused massive displacement of civilians who either fled to what they hoped were “secure” areas of the province or to Chad.

The government's hope was that the civilians would be terrorized into submission and that the civilian pool on which the guerillas depended for their political and logistical sustenance would dry up.

The crisis that people want to stop is the displacement and killing of civilians. There have been tens of thousands killed and at least a million displaced. While people stand around arguing over whether the Arabs and Africans in Darfur should really consider themselves to be different ethnic groups, or which side's armed groups are worse, there is a humanitarian catastrophe going on. Can we at least agree to help the refugees in Darfur while we try to figure out how to end the larger conflicts that lay behind this?