Spring 2013 marked a decade of violent conflict and agony in Darfur, Sudan.\u00a0 Although the conflict has faded from the headlines, it continues, producing many refugees, internally-displaced persons, unused farmland, and political unrest.\u00a0 The joint African Union-United Nations force has not been able to produce peace.\u00a0 Peacekeeping forces need a peace to keep, and during the decade, there have been lulls in fighting, but no peace to keep.<\/p>\n
The Darfur conflict of western Sudan is a textbook example of how programmed escalation of violence can go out of control. Neither the insurgencies nor the government-backed forces have been able to carry out good faith negotiations or deal with the fundamental issue of how to get pastoralists and settled agriculturalists to live together in a relatively cooperative way.<\/p>\n
Darfur (the home of the Fur) was always marginal to the politics of modern Sudan and to the two phases of the North-South civil war which took place from 1954-1972 and from 1982-2005, ultimately leading to the creation of a separate State, South Sudan.\u00a0 Darfur, about the size of France, had been an independent Sultanate loosely related to the Ottoman Empire.\u00a0 It was on a major trade route from West Africa to Egypt and so populations from what is now northern Nigeria, Niger, Mali and Chad joined the older ethnic groups of the area: the Fur, Masalit, the Zaghawa, and the Birgit.\u00a0 Nomads from Libya also moved south into Darfur.\u00a0 As the population density was low, a style of life with mutual interaction between pastoral herdsmen and settled agriculturalists with some livestock developed. Increasingly, however, there was ever-greater competition for water and forage made scarce by environmental degradation and the spread of the desert.<\/p>\n
France and England left Darfur as a buffer zone between the French colonial holdings \u2014 what is now Chad \u2014 and the Anglo-Egyptian controlled Sudan.\u00a0 French-English rivalry in West Africa had nearly led earlier to a war, and so a desert buffer was of more use than its low agricultural and livestock production would provide to either European colonial power.\u00a0 It was only in 1916 during the First World War when French-English colonial rivalry paled in front of the common German enemy that the English annexed Darfur to the Sudan without asking anyone in Darfur or Sudan if such a \u2018marriage\u2019 was desirable.<\/p>\n
Thus Darfur continued its existence as an environmentally fragile area of Sudan.\u00a0 It was marginal in economics but was largely self-sufficient.\u00a0 Once Sudan was granted its independence in 1956, Darfur became politically as well as economically marginal.\u00a0 Darfur\u2019s people have received less education, less healthcare, less development assistance, and fewer government posts than any other region.\u00a0 Southerners were given government and administrative posts in the hope of diminishing the violent North-South divide.\u00a0 There was no such incentive to \u2018share the wealth\u2019 with Darfur.\u00a0 Its political weight was even lessened when Darfur in a 1995 \u2018administrative reform\u2019 was divided into three provinces: Northern Darfur, Western Darfur, and Southern Darfur.\u00a0 Some areas that were historically part of Darfur were added to Northern and Western Bahr El-Ghazal.\u00a0 The division of Darfur did not lead to better local government or to additional services from the central government.\u00a0 It must be added that Darfur\u2019s political leadership had a special skill in supporting national political leaders just as the national leaders were about to lose power \u2014 first Al Sadig al Mahdi and then Hassan al-Turabi.<\/p>\n
In 2000, Darfur\u2019s political leadership had met to draw up a Black Book <\/i>which detailed the region\u2019s systematic under-representation in national government since independence. The Black Book <\/i>marked the start of a rapprochement between the Islamist and the more secular radicals of Darfur which took form three years later with the rise of the more secular Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Islamist-leaning Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). However, at the level of the central government, the Black Book <\/i>led to no steps to increase the political and economic position of Darfur.\u00a0 This lack of reaction convinced some in Darfur that only violent action would bring recognition and compromise as the North-South civil war had done.<\/p>\n
The two Darfur groups, SLA and JEM, started to structure themselves, gather weapons and men. The idea was to strike in a spectacular way which would lead the government to take notice and to start power and wealth-sharing negotiations.\u00a0 Not having read the \u201cLittle Red Book\u201d of Mao, they did not envisage a long drawn out conflict of the countryside against the towns of Darfur.<\/p>\n
By February 2003, the two groups were prepared to act, and in one night attacked and destroyed many of Sudan\u2019s military planes based at El Fasher.\u00a0 The Sudan military lost in one night more planes than it had in 20 years of war against the South.<\/p>\n
However, the central government\u2019s \u2018security elite\u2019 \u2014 battle hardened from its fight against the South starting in 1982, and knowing that the regular army was over-extended and tired of fighting\u2014 decided to use against the Darfur insurgents techniques which had been used with some success against the South: to arm and to give free reign to militias and other irregular forces.\u00a0 Thus the government armed and directed existing armed groups in Darfur \u2014 popular defense forces and existing tribal militias.\u00a0 The government also started putting together a fluid and shadowy group, now called the Janjaweed (\u201cthe evildoers on horseback\u201d). \u00a0To the extent that the make up of the Janjaweed is known, it seems to be a collection of bandits, of Chadians who had used Darfur as a safe haven for the long-lasting insurgencies in Chad, some from Libya\u2019s Islamic Forces which had once been under the control of the Libyan government but left wandering when Libyan policy changed.<\/p>\n
The Sudanese central government gave these groups guns, uniforms, equipment and indications where to attack but no regular pay. Thus these militias had to pay themselves by looting homes, crops, livestock, by taking slaves and raping women and girls.\u00a0 Village after village was destroyed on the pretext that some in the village supported either the SLA or the JEM; crops were burned, water wells filled with sand.\u00a0 As many people as possible fled to Chad or to areas thought safer within Darfur.<\/p>\n
Darfur represents a classic case of how violence gets out of control and goes beyond the aims for which it was first used.\u00a0 For the moment, it is difficult to see how violence can be reduced. \u00a0There have been some negotiations held outside Sudan, but possible approaches have not been put into practice.\u00a0 There have been splits within both the SLA and the JEM, mostly on tribal lines, making negotiations all the more difficult.\u00a0 Elections were held in Sudan in April 2010, but the new Parliament has provided no new leadership in general and done nothing of value on Darfur issues.<\/p>\n
The conflict and fighting grind on.\u00a0 On behalf of the Association of World Citizens, I have proposed within the United Nations that post-conflict planning be started now. However, the \u201cpost\u201d aspect seems so unlikely that little specific planning has been done.\u00a0 The creation of a separate South Sudan state, continuing tensions between North and South Sudan, and ethnic conflicts within South Sudan have captured most international energy. Marking 10 years of conflict is a reminder that the conflict continues, but there is nothing to celebrate.<\/p>\n
___________________________<\/p>\n
Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spring 2013 marked a decade of violent conflict and agony in Darfur, Sudan. Although the conflict has faded from the headlines, it continues, producing many refugees, internally-displaced persons, unused farmland, and political unrest. It is a classic case of how violence gets out of control and goes beyond the aims for which it was first used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}