Sudan’s Darfur crisis tests continent’s resolve
By Laurie Goering, The Chigaco Tribune
Nov 6, 2004 — For centuries, nomads and farmers in Sudan’s western Darfur region have used a simple system for balancing wrongs: A sorghum field ruined by wandering cattle might be compensated with a cow or two; a damaged well might cost a donkey.
Figuring out repayment for the most recent wrongs committed by pastoralist militiamen–farmers executed, girls raped, children burned alive in their homes–will prove harder.
Izzadin Abdul-Rasoul Mohammed cannot envision any apology, any act of revenge, any compensation capable of redressing such violations. But one must be found, he said, or the brutal conflict in Darfur will turn into a perpetual spiral of ethnic hatred and revenge killings.
“There is no way to feel anger or grief. We have only to think how to get out of this,” said Mohammed, a Darfur rebel whose family of farmers from the ethnic Fur group, which gave Darfur their name, has lived in the region for generations.
Finding ways to ease–rather than escalate–conflicts is one of Africa’s greatest challenges. The continent has made dramatic strides toward peace in some of its most intractable war zones, from Congo to Angola to southern Sudan. But crises simmer in many countries, from Ivory Coast to Burundi, and new ones regularly crop up.
As Africa, at the start of a new century, struggles to make itself a success, resolving conflicts is at the top of its agenda. To find answers, the continent’s leaders are sorting through deeply rooted cultural traditions, colonial-era legacies and the new demands of a globalized world, searching for African solutions to Africa’s problems.
Nowhere is that struggle more evident than in Darfur, Africa’s newest hot spot. The ugly conflict has turned into a test not just of the region’s ancient conflict-resolution structures and of the United Nations’ promise to end ethnic-fueled violence after Rwanda’s genocide, but of the will of Africa’s leaders, through the African Union, to police their problems.
If African leaders can find a way to resolve the Darfur conflict, the success will rebuild flagging faith in the effectiveness of the African Union and lay the groundwork for greater peace, prosperity and investment in the continent. If they fail, a hard-fought, U.S.-backed deal to end two decades of fighting between the Khartoum government and rebels in southern Sudan could collapse, new conflicts could arise in eastern and northern Sudan, and Darfur could descend into prolonged ethnic hatred, experts warn.
Before the current fighting, “life [in Darfur] was regulated in a very sophisticated way,” with differences between farmers and Arab livestock herders quickly resolved through traditional means, said Ghazi Salahuddin Atabani, an adviser to President Omar el-Bashir and Khartoum’s longtime point man on peace negotiations with southern rebels. But “now both sides are very bitter,” he said. The conflict, which began over land and power, has become “a conflict between ethnic groups themselves.”
Centuries-old system
In Darfur, at the edge of the Sahara, black African farmers and predominantly Arab cattle and camel herders resolved disputes for centuries according to ancient agreements enforced by tribal leaders.
In the dry season, when grazing ran out along the fringes of the desert, Arab herders began moving their animals south into Darfur’s greener farm country–but only after sending a messenger ahead to ask permission and warn farmers that the herds were on their way. Farmers, in turn, relayed information to the herders about where their animals would be allowed to graze.
The annual migration, timed to coincide with the end of the harvest, benefited both sides. The pastoralists got needed fodder for their animals, which provided manure that farmers needed to fertilize their fields. If cattle accidentally damaged crops, herders paid compensation, often in the form of a few animals, to the farmer.
“Historically, conflicts in Darfur were resolved in five minutes,” said Ghazi Suleiman, a human-rights lawyer and leading opposition figure in Sudan. “That’s how things have worked since the 17th Century.”
That began to change in the 1980s, as western Sudan and neighboring Chad began suffering increasingly serious and prolonged droughts. Pastoralists, unable to find water and grazing in the desert, began herding their animals into farm areas earlier and earlier, causing more crop damage and disputes. Herders from neighboring Chad also began arriving without asking the farmers’ permission.
Guns, for the first time, began trickling into the region from Chad, engaged in a civil war and a conflict with Libya. Arguments turned into shootouts, and people who once had been good neighbors began killing each other. For the first time, Arab pastoralists and black farmers saw each other as the enemy.
“Ethnic brotherhood became paramount, and the conflict was seen by all as an ethnic strife,” Mohamed Suliman of the Institute for African Alternatives wrote in a 1997 paper. By the turn of the century, new ethnic divisions constituted “a formidable social force” in Darfur.
That smoldering ethnic anger underpins much of the current conflict in Darfur. Farmers, upset that Sudan’s Arab-led government had done little to help them or foster development in the region, last year launched a rebel movement aimed at taking power or at least winning concessions from Khartoum. Arab pastoralists, called on by the government to help put down the rebellion, eagerly responded not just by attacking rebels but by burning farm villages, executing farmers and seizing land and livestock.
The attacks, besides leaving thousands dead and more than a million homeless, have turned growing ethnic animosity into deep tribal hatred.
“We didn’t used to know there were Arabs and Africans here,” said Yasim, a rebel organizer who did not want his last name used. “Now there needs to be reconciliation.”
Resolving the crisis
The UN Security Council, concerned about preventing a Rwandan-style genocide in Darfur, has repeatedly warned Sudan’s government to disarm the Janjaweed militiamen in Darfur or face international sanctions. The council, however, has failed to follow through on its threats because Sudan has made at least some progress toward the demands and the council fears any effort to impose sanctions would be vetoed.
Instead, major responsibility for solving the crisis in Darfur has fallen to the African Union, a largely untested successor to the defunct and discredited Organization of African Unity.
The African Union, unlike its predecessor, has the power to intervene militarily in the affairs of its more than 50 member states, and Darfur is proving its first test case. The organization has successfully pressured Khartoum to allow cease-fire observers and soldiers to protect them into Darfur. It also has launched peace talks in Nigeria between the Darfur rebels and Sudan’s government.
Progress, however, has been slow. The peace talks, started in August, have largely stalled. Sudan’s government has resisted efforts to send several thousand African peacekeeping troops to the region.
A negotiated cease-fire, in place for months, has been widely violated, with the government complaining of continued rebel attacks and the rebels pointing to ongoing government bombing raids and Janjaweed killings and rapes in Darfur.
How the conflict might be resolved, or whether it simply will drag along, with the death toll mounting, remains to be seen. In a meeting in October in Libya’s capital of Tripoli, Sudan’s government, backed by Chad, Egypt, Libya and Nigeria, insisted it would ignore any effort by the UN Security Council or Western countries to impose sanctions. The African Union, it said, was the right forum to solve the problem.
The African Union, however, has not yet found the will to send troops to Darfur over the objections of Sudan’s government. The union is setting up its own UN-style security council and human-rights court, aimed at creating a “more proactive, comprehensive and robust framework” for solving Africa’s problems, according to African Union officials. But those bodies will not be fully functional for years.
For now, ethnic distrust in Darfur intensifies, turning former good neighbors into enemies as passionate with hatred as Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsis. As Africa takes its time in resolving the crisis, it may be laying the seeds not only for more deaths in Darfur but also for future genocides, analysts warn.
Addressing underlying hatred
“Without a comprehensive solution to the protracted conflict that also restores the economic and social fabric of the region … the spreading malaise of ethnic hostility will continue to grow,” Suliman warned back in 1997. “In its wake, efforts at conflict resolution will be hampered, and the palpable presence of ethnic hostility will indeed constitute a concrete and tangible cause of future violent confrontations.”
Sudan analysts say that remains true today. Finding a solution to Darfur’s crisis, they say, must start with addressing the region’s new, underlying hatreds–the same hatreds that have driven conflicts from Rwanda to Nigeria.
“The internal fabric of Darfur is torn, and forgiveness and reconciliation is needed to heal relations,” said Hassan Makki Muhammad-Ahmad, an Islamic studies professor at Africa International University in Khartoum. He is not particularly optimistic that will come soon.
“If you can imagine Africa without crisis, you can imagine Sudan without crisis,” he said. “Sudan is a small Africa.”