Sudan 15 years of ‘ethnic cleansing’
By Laurie Goering, the Chicago Tribune
May 2, 2004 — The refugees tell the same horrifying stories: Men by the dozen forced to their knees and executed, young girls raped and branded, children abducted, families burned alive in their huts by marauding Arab horsemen.
United Nations officials charge that the government of Sudan, with the assistance of Arab militias, is carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against black African Sudanese in the country’s western Darfur region.
What’s most remarkable about the atrocities in Sudan, however, is that they’ve been going on for more than 15 years–and that it has taken commemorations of the 10th anniversary of Rwanda’s genocide to bring them to the world’s attention.
“Everyone is looking around, saying, ‘Never again,’ and this [Sudan conflict] is just flapping in their face,” said John Prendergast,CQ a special Africa adviser to the Washington-based International Crisis Group.CQ The reality, he said, is that in war-torn Sudan, ethnic slaughter “is nothing new.”
The latest conflict in Darfur began more than a year ago, when black farmers launched a rebellion, demanding more regional autonomy and economic benefits from the Khartoum government. After initial efforts to put down the uprising failed, the government armed local Arab militiamen, human-rights groups say.
Since then, the militias, backed by government bombing and helicopter reconnaissance, have driven a million people from their homes and tried to ensure that they cannot return by burning houses, destroying crops and wells and confiscating livestock.
Most of those displaced–about 900,000–have fled to nearby Sudanese cities, seeking aid, human-rights groups say. About 100,000 have crossed over the desert border with Chad on the backs of donkeys. Thousands reportedly have died, and many more are expected to as the government resists efforts to bring humanitarian aid to western Sudan.
“They have accomplished a large part of what they wanted to do,” Prendergast said of the Sudanese government, which has insisted it has had no role in the attacks. “They have cleared out a million or more. They will get away with what they can get away with.”
The world has been slow to respond to the latest bloodshed, in part because Sudan is supposed to be a country on the verge of peace. After a 21-year civil war between the government and rebels in southern Sudan, the two sides are close to signing a much-acclaimed peace accord that would give the south greater autonomy and a share of the northern government’s oil wealth.
PEACE EFFORTS
Accusing the government of atrocities in Darfur, some experts fear, could hurt the internationally brokered peace efforts with the south.
“Most of the international community has been very concerned with ensuring the north-south talks don’t fall apart,” said Georgette Gagnon, deputy Africa director for Human Rights Watch. As a result, “they have been tiptoeing around this Darfur problem to some extent.”
But the government’s effort to hang onto power by clearing away potential rivals and rebellions is nothing new, Sudan analysts say. Starting in the late 1980s, rulers in Khartoum, with the help of local militias, began clearing the Dinka population from the Bahr al-Ghazal area of southwest Sudan, allowing slave raiding, among other human-rights violations.
SEIZING LAND
The Nuba Mountains area in central Sudan was next, in the early 1990s, as militias burned huts and carried out executions to seize prime agricultural land. In the late 1990s, residents of the upper Nile oil fields also were removed, enabling the government to start pumping oil.
In each case, the attacks had political and economic benefits for the Khartoum government, clearing away enemies and opening up areas with economic potential. In each case, too, the Arab-run government attacked black Sudanese–but in Darfur, and perhaps other regions, political survival may have been as much a motive as racial animosity.
“This is a government staying in power by whatever means necessary–and the means are more extreme than any other place on the continent since Rwanda in 1994,” Prendergast said.
The conflict in Darfur, at the edge of the rapidly expanding Sahara, is different from earlier battles in that it pits the Muslim government in Khartoum against black Muslims, rather than the black Christian or animist groups it has faced in the south.
FARMERS VESUS HERDERS
The dry Darfur region has suffered amid longstanding disputes between black farmers and nomadic Arab herders over access to land and water. But the real driving force behind the government’s brutal crackdown, analysts believe, is the Darfur rebels’ ties with Hassan Turabi, a jailed Islamic leader from Darfur who has called for an uprising against the Khartoum government.
Turabi, a former ally of President Omar el-Bashir’s regime, has been repeatedly jailed on coup-plotting charges, and the government is clearly worried.
“Some observers say the Darfur insurgency is a real threat to the government in Khartoum,” Gagnon said. But, “in any event, the putting down of rebel insurgency absolutely cannot involve widespread attacks against civilians,” as has been the case in Darfur, she argued. “That’s in violation of international law, and it’s a crime against humanity.”
The Darfur rebel groups–the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement–are supposed to begin peace talks with the Sudanese government in Chad, but the rebels have objected to the location, saying the Chad government is too closely allied to Khartoum.
STRUGGLE TO LIVE
Meanwhile, about a million newly homeless people in Darfur and across the border in Chad face a struggle for survival in coming months as the Sudanese government resists giving humanitarian groups full access to the area.
Andrew Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, warned last week that if international aid groups cannot get food, medicine and shelter to Darfur’s refugees by the end of June, when the region’s rainy season begins and transport becomes difficult, “we are going to face a catastrophic situation by fall.”
Darfur’s planting season begins in about a month, and if refugees aren’t returned to their land to begin sowing crops, famine is likely in the region, Gagnon said.
“That’s why this is urgent,” she said. “We need the situation on the ground reversed now.”