Darfur tragedy, whether it is genocide or not
By DOMINICK DONALD, The Guardian
Sept 10, 2005 (LONDON) — During 2003, occasional reports emerged in the international media of fighting in Darfur, a huge tract of western Sudan bordering Chad. Over the next year the picture became confused, as – depending on who was doing the talking – a minor rebellion became a tribal spat, or nomads taking on farmers, or Arab-versus-African ethnic cleansing, or genocide.
An outside world that understood political violence in Sudan through the simplistic lens of the unending war between Muslim north and Christian/animist south – a war that seemed to be about to end – had to adjust. And nothing that has emerged since has made that adjustment easy. If Darfuris are Muslim, what is their quarrel with the Islamic government in Khartoum? If they and the janjaweed – “evil horsemen” – driving them from their homes are both black, how can it be Arab versus African? If the Sudanese government is making peace with the south, why would it be risking that by waging war in the west? Above all, is it genocide?
Gerard Prunier has the answers. An ethnographer and renowned Africa analyst, he turns on the evasions of Khartoum the uncompromising eye that dissected Hutu power excuses for the Rwanda genocide a decade ago. He is never an easy read. While his style is fluid, there’s too much brilliant, obscure but pivotal erudition, too much confident summarising, and not enough readiness to compromise for the reader cramming in another five pages on the tube. He isn’t helped by the fact that he is usually offering an incisive user’s manual for a machine most of us have never seen before. But stick with him. For he deploys his fierce logic to a powerful moral purpose. He builds an understanding of a community and a culture in all its complexity to then strip away the convenient truths and confused equivocations that guilty or disinterested politicians use to explain why nothing should be done. Read Darfur and you will be in no doubt at all that the government of Sudan, whatever it says, is responsible for what is happen ing there. The killings are the consequence of a logical, realist’s policy, stemming from a racial/ cultural contempt. You will also wonder whether anything substantive will be done to stop them.
Prunier’s Darfur is a victim of its separateness – not just from Khartoum, but from everywhere else in Sudan. Geographically, culturally and commercially it always looked west, along the Sahel, rather than east to the Nile, north to Egypt, or south to Bahr El Ghazal. Its Islamic practices fused Arab with African, unlike the more ascetic, eschatological Muslim brotherhoods prevalent along the Nile, or the animism or polytheism adhered to in the south. Above all it retained a political and cultural identity apart from the homogenising forces of what became Sudan. The Sultanate of Darfur tottered on, essentially independent, until 1916; the Ottomans never established a foothold there, the Mahdists were resisted and co-opted, while once the British brought it into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, they ruled through paternalistic neglect.
Even when Darfur was key to politicians in an independent Sudan – for instance, as a bedrock of support for the neo-Mahdists who ruled the country for much of its first two decades – it was ignored. Ravaged by the 1985 famine – Khartoum effectively denied it food aid – and proxy battles for Chad, it saw in the new century with a marginal economy and a government which, when it paid attention to Darfur, did so through the medium of militias encouraged to define tribal or cultural groups as the enemy.
As Prunier shows, it is the economics and the militias that lie at the heart of the atrocities in Darfur. The Sudan Liberation Army, recognising that the Naivasha power-sharing peace process between Khartoum and the SPLA/M in the south was going to leave Darfur even further behind, took up arms in 2002. All the government could do was unleash the militias in the hope that it could deal with the problem before southerners arrived in government and vetoed any repression. Now probably half of Darfur’s population has been driven into camps for internally displaced persons (IDP), beyond the reach of international food aid, where malnutrition and disease are carrying them off at the rate of perhaps 8% a year. This suits Khartoum just fine. For while the international community havers about what it cannot see, Khartoum is free to pay lip service to the Naivasha peace process that will ensure regime survival, keep the Americans off its back, and allow the elite to exploit Sudan’s oil.
It is this peace process that ensures the tragedy of Darfur goes on. The UN Security Council has passed powerful-sounding resolutions demanding the Sudanese government behave in Darfur. But it doesn’t have the physical tools to coerce anyone. The African Union force it dispatched there is small, immobile, unsighted and with a weak mandate, and neither the US, UK nor France has the troops to send in its place. Above all, it won’t apply too much pressure on Khartoum for fear of scuppering Naivasha – the deal that will end 50 years of on-and-off fighting, and bring a recalcitrant Sudan back into the embrace of the international community.
Yet Naivasha will almost certainly fail anyway. The Sudanese government probably has no intention of sticking to the Naivasha deal; it has never stuck to its deals before, choosing to obscure non-compliance with sorrowful tales of lack of control and warnings that enforcement will bring in the bogeyman. The process is driven by external actors, and so is hostage to their brief, easily distracted political attention spans. And it will bind the international community to Khartoum as tightly as vice versa – who will be coercing and who will be coerced? The international community believes it can’t pull out of Naivasha in the face of Sudanese non-compliance for fear of losing oil deals, or an Islamic supporter in the war on terror, or of ushering in something worse. In reality it has saddled up a spaniel and sent it over the sticks, ignoring the sturdy point-to-pointer waiting in the wings.
Is what is happening in Darfur genocide? As Prunier points out, in the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention (“deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”), it is – particularly what is happening in the IDP camps. Yet in his superb book on the Rwandan genocide, Prunier argued for a different definition, namely “a coordinated attempt to destroy a racially, religiously, or politically pre-defined group in its entirety”. Why quibble about definitions? After all, they’re irrelevant to Darfuris – their suffering will be the same, whatever tag is used. They’re a concern for the international community alone. But for them, he concludes, the “G” word really matters.
In the west, “things are not seen in their reality but in their capacity to create brand images . . . ‘Genocide’ is big because it carries the Nazi label, which sells well.” Unfortunately what is happening in Darfur doesn’t look like Treblinka. So the international community finds itself fixated on a distraction – a legal genocide, that doesn’t look like a genocide.
Instead it should ignore the “G” word and focus on the key issue. The Sudanese government is responsible for the deaths of perhaps more than 200,000 Darfuris as an instrument of policy. It is weak, profoundly unpopular, and hugely vulnerable. It needs the pretence of Naivasha. It can be coerced. Let’s get on with it.
– Dominick Donald is a senior analyst for Aegis Research and Intelligence, a London political risk consultancy. To order Darfur for pounds 14 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875, or go to Amazon.com.