Negating ethnicity abuses in DarFur is equally accountable
By Mahgoub El-Tigani
On 20 July 2004, the military intelligence arrested six men and three children, from the Zaghawa tribe, from Shi’airea town, Southern Darfur state. They were arrested from their houses and taken to military intelligence custody in Shi’airea and detained for two days then transferred to the military prison in Nyala. No reasons were given for their arrest but it is believed that they were arrested due to their ethnicity. No official charges were brought against them (SOAT: 25 August, 2004).
Ethnicity is all it takes to arrest the non-Arab Zagawa people by the Sudan Government military intelligence, without official charge. This occurred regardless of the Security Council’s possible sanctions versus the government. The Sudan Government is squarely responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the non-Arab people of DarFur. Despite this racist attitude, which is a major factor why Sudanese regions revolt one after another against the central government, several writers wrongfully reduce the Crisis to only “tribal feuds or scarcity of natural resources.”
Yes, the hazards of human geography are there, as they existed in all world deserts, from Australia to the African Sahara. But the Crisis is not a slot geographical machine; opened and locked by a bunch of weeds or showers of rain. The Crisis is political. It is state-made. It mirrors the mal-administration, authority abuse, and economic greed of the governing elite against the powerless Africans of DarFur. Above all, the Crisis indicates the deep disrespect of human dignity by the NIF fundamentalist ideology of Arab supremacy.
This is a real governance evil since it allows an ethnically identifiable Arab who is physically describable as an African Black Sudanese to annihilate his other African Black Sudanese, rape his girl, kill her family, and misappropriate their property in cold blood for almost two consecutive years without stoppage,. In all these atrocities, the culprit was strongly supported and protected by the Khartoum Arab Muslim coup-imposed government that never stopped encoding its own people. There is not a single reason, therefore, to exempt the government officials who collaborated with the Janjaweed in all these atrocities from criminal responsibility.
A Sudanese comprehensive political solution, more than any development announcement or regional mediation, is the best decisive tool to end the Crisis. A political solution means equal recognition of the human dignity of the negotiating groups and the people they represent. That is why many observers noticed the Naivasha Agreements were clearly expressive of the yearning of the non-Arab Sudanese peoples to enjoy in political reality full equalitarian relations with the Sudan central government’s ethnically identifiable Arab ruling elite.
The democratic horizon of DarFur, Eastern Sudan, and the Nile provinces (whose population is relatively composed of non-Arab Sudanese ethnicities) would also emulate the image of the next South Sudan Government. Eventually, the DarFur rebels will not disarm themselves until the permanent and just peace is attainable. That is why the Eastern Sudan warring groups line up behind the NDA to enjoy direct comprehensive negotiations concerning Eastern Sudan. If Khartoum insists on disarming the DarFur rebels, the East (Beja, Fatah, and the Free Lions) will opt for additional armament.
Ethnicity is a leading factor of the Crisis in Sudan because the NIF government committed the killing mistake of imposing partisan politics in the region: empowering the small Arab population of the region to the relegation of the large non-Arab population to a second class citizenship status. The same mistake was militarily pursued by the Khartoum succeeding governments for decades against the South. It is wasteful to claim, after all this guilt, that ethnic cleansing (legally speaking a core form of genocide) was not systematically pursued by the State-Janjaweed attacks of the DarFur non-Arab Sudanese.
And who is an Arab? Is he a Sudanese with distinct physical features? This is not always true, although there are cases of the sort in different regions of the North, as is equally evident in neighboring nations. The issue in question is mainly pertinent to the cultural characteristics that distinguish people from one another: the language, customs, mores, folklore, religious rituals, etc.
By this definition, there are definitely different ethnicities in DarFur. This fact is largely recognized in the other regions of Sudan. Ethnicity, nonetheless, was never an issue of any blatant hate or state criminality before the recent massive abuses of power by the NIF ruling regime: first in the South where the government pitied many ethnic groups against each other generating huge losses and casualties; and then in DarFur with unprecedented grievous consequences.
The DarFur ethnic groups identify themselves as Sudanese with non-Arab ethnicities (language, cultural heritage, etc.) or Sudanese with Arab ethnicity. All these ethnic groups exercised inter-marriages. But again, the marriages or the social alliances never obliterated the popular Arab – non-Arab identifications of the DarFur society since very old times.
As primordial ties, the DarFurian ethnic distinctions carried with them a conflict of primordial ties that colored the pastoral disputes with a special flavor of adjustability: the least government is the best government. With this philosophy, the DarFurian Arab and non-Arab Sudanese African were often able to apply a local mechanism of tribal reconciliations with the least intervention of government authorities.
“The government is reserved for development, although that never happened,” is people say. More than any other government, however, the NIF is held accountable for the partisan authoritative meddling that bombarded the DarFurian ethno-administrative zones with civil war.
As anticipated by many specialists on the region, especially the DarFur intellectuals (see the Sudanese Human Rights Quarterly Special Issue on DarFur, 1999), continuous harassment of the non-Arab ethnicities by state authorities culminated in the Arab Janjaweed ethnic cleansing attacks on the farmers of DarFur with aggressive military, intelligence, and demagogical support of the Khartoum government. The most recent assault of the Zagawa families by the government’s military intelligence was “due to their ethnicity,” reports SOAT.
The Arab-oriented central government’s biased policies vis-à-vis the DarFur non-Arab African Sudanese is a major source of the problem. Equally important, the writers who negate the ethnic component of the Crisis are squarely responsible for the guilt of irresponsibly falsifying or obliterating the painful realities; thus escalating the impact of racism in the DarFur scourge.
*Member of Sudanese Writers’ Union (in exile) and the president of Sudan Human Rights Organization Cairo-Branch.