Darfur: Four years and counting…

By Eric Reeves, The Washington Post

February 25, 2004 — In the remote Darfur region of western Sudan, a human disaster is
accelerating amid uncontrolled violence. The United Nations’
undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs has called it probably
“the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe.” Doctors Without Borders
has observed “catastrophic mortality rates.” And yet, so far as most of
the world is concerned, it isn’t even happening.

There have been what Amnesty International calls “horrifying military
attacks against civilians” throughout Darfur by the Sudanese government
and its militias. The government has sent bombers to attack undefended
villages, refugee camps and water wells. The United Nations estimates
that 1 million people have been displaced by war and that more than 3
million are affected by armed conflict.

Yet Darfur has remained practically a non-story in international news
media. One big reason is the fact that the central government in
Khartoum, the National Islamic Front, has allowed no news reporters into
the region and has severely restricted humanitarian access, thus
preventing observation by aid workers. The war in Darfur is not directly
related to Khartoum’s 20-year war against the people of southern Sudan.
Even so, military pressure from the Darfur insurgency that began a year
ago has been instrumental in forcing the regime to commit to peace talks
with the south.

But there are now signs that these talks have been viewed by Khartoum
only as a way to buy time to crush the insurgency in Darfur, which
emerged, inevitably, from many years of abuse and neglect. Despite
efforts by the regime to stop it, a widening stream of information is
reaching the international community, from tens of thousands of refugees
fleeing to Chad (which shares a long border with western Sudan), and
according to accounts from within Darfur. Amnesty International has led
the way in reporting on Darfur; one of its recent releases speaks
authoritatively of countless savage attacks on civilians by Khartoum’s
regular army, including its crude Antonov bombers, and by its Arab
militia allies, called “Janjaweed.”

An especially disturbing feature of these attacks is the clear and
intensifying racial animus. This has been reported by Amnesty
International, the International Crisis Group and various U.N.
spokesmen. The words “ethnic cleansing” have been used by U.N. officials
and diplomats. This term, which gained currency during the breakup of
Yugoslavia, is another description for genocide. But whatever they are
called, the terrible realities in Darfur require that we attend to the
ways in which people are being destroyed because of who they are,
racially and ethnically — “as such,” to cite the key phrase from the
1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide.

Darfur is home to racially and ethnically distinct tribal groups.
Although virtually all are Muslim, generalizations are hard to make. But
the Fur, Zaghawa, Masseleit, and other peoples are accurately described
as “African,” both in a racial sense and in terms of agricultural
practice and use of non-Arabic languages. Darfur also has a large
population of nomadic Arab tribal groups, and from these Khartoum has
drawn its savage “warriors on horseback” — the Janjaweed — who are
most responsible for attacks on villages and civilians.

The racial animus is clear from scores of chillingly similar interviews
with refugees reaching Chad. A young African man who had lost many
family members in an attack heard the gunmen say, “You blacks, we’re
going to exterminate you.” Speaking of these relentless attacks, an
African tribal leader told the U.N. news service, “I believe this is an
elimination of the black race.” A refugee reported these words as coming
from his attackers: “You are opponents to the regime, we must crush you.
As you are black, you are like slaves. Then the entire Darfur region
will be in the hands of the Arabs.” An African tribalthat, “The Arabs and the government forces . . . said they wanted to
conquer the whole territory and that the blacks did not have a right to
remain in the region.”

There can be no reasonable skepticism about Khartoum’s use of these
militias to “destroy, in whole or in part, ethnic or racial groups” —
in short, to commit genocide. Khartoum has so far refused to rein in its
Arab militias; has refused to enter into meaningful peace talks with the
insurgency groups; and, most disturbingly, has refused to grant
unrestricted humanitarian access. The international community has been
slow to react to Darfur’s catastrophe and has yet to move with
sufficient urgency and commitment. A credible peace forum must be
rapidly created. Immediate plans for humanitarian intervention should
begin. The alternative is to allow tens of thousands of civilians to die
in the weeks and months ahead in what will be continuing genocidal
destruction.