Khartoum’s retaliation lays waste to Darfur
By William Wallis
LONDON, June 4, 2004 (Financial Times) — When President Omar Hassan al-Bashir declared last year that he would be “letting loose” the army in the western Darfur region of Sudan, his rebel adversaries hit back hard.
In an attack on the army garrison town of El Fasher a year ago, the newly named Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) destroyed four helicopter gunships, two Antonov aircraft and, according to government officials, killed about 75 government soldiers. They then withdrew, having captured an airforce commander and a store of weapons.
It was a humiliation for the Arab-led government in Khartoum.
A year later and the three provinces of Darfur lie in ruins. With them have died some of the hopes that Sudan was finally making peace with itself after nearly 50 years of intermittent civil war.
Coming from a Muslim region that supplies the majority of rank and file soldiers in the Sudanese army, there is little doubt that the Darfur rebellion has rattled Khartoum as the last 21 years of civil war in the south of the country never did.
Rebels in the south, with whom the government signed the basis of a peace agreement last week, are Christian and animist. They have often struggled to gain reliable political allies in the predominately Muslim north.
The Darfur rebels are Muslims, however. Their emergence – at a time of frustration with the small ruling clique that holds power in Khartoum – has the potential to embolden other dissident groups across the north, as well as to split the army and ruling party, say analysts in Khartoum.
But the danger they represent may only partly explain the ferocity of the military and militia response to the rebellion in Darfur.
Drawing on the support of camel and horse-borne Arab militia known as Janjaweed, the government’s counter-offensive has drawn accusations from the United Nations of “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes”.
Thousands of villages of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes from which the SLA rebels have recruited have been systematically burnt. Crops have been ruined and livestock stolen. In much of Darfur it is hard to find an African village standing.
The immediate survival of a tough and self-sufficient population accustomed to enduring on the fringes of the desert now depends on international relief agencies. According to the latest UN estimates, nearly 2m people will need food assistance in the next year.
More alarming for the longer term has been the destruction of the social and economic fabric of a vast region of Africa. Drought and desertification has set nomadic cattle, camel herders and sedentary farmers against each other in ever tighter competition for scarce water and pasture.
Reaching from the heart of the Sahara desert to the edge of the equatorial jungle, straddling African and Arab cultures, rubbing Christianity, traditional African religious beliefs and Islam against each other, Sudan has hosted some of the continent’s most protracted conflicts.
But few Sudanese remember a more devastating sequence of events as those that have taken place in Darfur over the past year.
Officially, members of government deny all links with the Janjaweed. But on the ground the alliance between the militias and security forces is clear, as are the militias’ role in the counter- insurgency. This has seen the systematic destruction of villages and terrorising of their populations now herded together in towns and displaced camps under tight control.
When President Bashir visited the town of Nyala in southern Darfur two weeks ago, Janjaweed militiamen were among those who paraded in front of him.
Politicians in Khartoum and Darfur believe there are several agendas at work within the ranks of government and security forces.
The desire to crush the Darfur rebellion, before pressure built for new concessions on top of those awarded to the south, was one.
Another emanates from an extremist group among top regime officials. They have harboured expansionary aims for the Arab tribes in the west of the country since the mid-1980s, under a secretive group known as the “Arab Gathering”.
According to political and traditional sources in Darfur and Khartoum, including an influential member of the ruling party, this group has encouraged nomadic Arabs from neighbouring Chad and further afield to join in the attacks, in return for land.
Many Arab tribes in Darfur have not gone along with the violence, but they are less well armed.
Vast herds of camel and cattle are now roaming across farmland in the southern stretches of Darfur, where there is still grass at the end of the dry season.
Whatever the agenda, says a Sudanese rights activist in Khartoum who follows Darfur in detail, the tactics have backfired. “The effects of ethnic cleansing have left the rebel forces intact. In fact they [the rebels] are now saying they have more recruits than they can arm.”
Meanwhile international pressure is bearing down on Khartoum to rein in the Janjaweed responsible for widely publicised atrocities.
There is also anxiety among “establishment” northern Sudanese that the government may be irreversibly polarising northern Sudan along racial lines by explicitly taking sides in a conflict in which Arab militias are targeting Africans.
By doing so, says the disaffected member of the ruling party, they have underscored what many southern and Christian Sudanese had always feared: that the real agenda in Khartoum was racial and cultural – more than religious – and was to impose Arab culture on Africans