Darfur Gale Student Resources in Context, 2010 Darfur is a province in western Sudan, Africa's largest country, located in the northeast corner of the continent. Beginning in 2003, conflicts between rebel groups and government-backed militias led to as many as two hundred thousand deaths, and the dislocation of over two million refugees, in what many call the single worst humanitarian crisis in Africa's history. Many of the atrocities committed by these militias have led to international condemnation and accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing and have contributed to further conflict across Sudan's western border with Chad. History and Geography Darfur, in Arabic, means "Land of the Blacks," and is believed to have been governed by Egyptian kings as far back as the thirteenth century. In the 1870s, the region was given provincial status by Egyptian authorities and was incorporated into Sudan in 1916. Sudan achieved its own independence from British colonial rule in 1956. For most of the twentieth century, the country's political and economic power has been concentrated in the northern and eastern provinces surrounding its capital, Khartoum, while western and southern provinces remained underdeveloped. The region of Darfur is made up of three states: North Darfur, West Darfur, and South Darfur. Together, they cover an area of almost 170,000 miles (about the size of France). The western region of Sudan is mostly arid plains, with the Marrah Mountains rising to almost 10,000 feet near the center of the region. Rains in the mountains and southern regions permit some agriculture, while the arid north is used mainly for herding camels, goats, and sheep. Like the rest of Sudan, Darfur's population in the north is mostly Arab, while western and southern Darfur contain a mix of Arab and African citizens. The African (black) population is dominated by the ethnic Fur, and further comprised of Beja, Zaghawa, and Nubian peoples. Most of Darfur's Arabs are nomadic herders, while the majority of Africans are sedentary agriculturalists. Virtually all Darfuris are Muslim. Origins of Conflict Ethnic tensions between the nomadic Arab herders and sedentary African farmers have long been simmering in the region since the mid-twentieth century. Severe drought in the 1970s and 1980s brought these tensions to a head, and armed conflict began to erupt between the two groups, though such conflicts remained sporadic and were often settled quickly through tribal negotiations. By the late 1990s, however, the Arab-dominated Sudanese government had taken steps to further weaken the political and economic rights of ethnic Africans in western Sudan by dividing Darfur into three distinct provinces, granting the majority of land and political power to Arab tribes in the region, leaving the agriculturalist tribes to the south defenseless against the onslaught of nomadic herders. In 1996, government-sponsored Arab militias began an assault on non-Arab Masalit tribal villages, imprisoned several Masalit elders, and forced more than one hundred thousand to flee their homes. War in Darfur By 2000, two government opposition groups had formed in Darfur—the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), which accused the government of oppression and violence against non-Arabs in Darfur and western Sudan. In 2003, the two organizations conducted armed assaults on government installations in the northern capital of Al- Fashir, killing hundreds of government soldiers. For the first few months of the ensuing war, rebel armies expanded their hold on the region, winning the majority of their engagements with government troops. The Sudanese government responded to the rebel assault by arming its tribal allies and setting them against civilian Fur and Masalit tribes, along with any other ethnic groups suspected of supporting the rebels. The government's new paramilitary, known as the Janjaweed (loosely, "demons on horseback"; also, Janjawid or Jingaweit), was made up mostly of people from the nomadic Abbala and Baggara tribes. Attacks by Janjaweed were directed mainly at civilian targets and included actions such as mass murder, rape, and torture, as well as burning hundreds of villages to the ground. Observers would later report that these attacks were often followed by military air strikes using helicopter gunships operated by the Sudanese military. In the first year of the conflict, tens of thousands were killed; left utterly defenseless against the well- armed paramilitary, hundreds of thousands had no choice but to flee to refugee camps in neighboring Chad. On several occasions, the Janjaweed pursued their victims across the border and engaged Chadian government forces along the way. In 2004, the Chadian government attempted to broker a cease-fire between the SLA, JEM, and government forces, but this did nothing to stop the violence. Further incursions into Chad by Sudanese government forces soon forced the Chad government to declare hostilities toward Sudan. The violence in Darfur continued in spite of a 2006 peace accord between a faction of the SLA and the Sudanese government. Later that same year, international aid organizations began pulling their staff out of the country due to security concerns. The Sudanese army was reported to have begun aerial strikes against civilian targets, and hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees were cut off from food and medical supplies. In 2004, the World Health Organization and other aid groups noted that many more were dying of disease and starvation. In 2005, the UN estimated that as many as ten thousand people were dying each month; by 2008, an estimated three hundred thousand Darfuri had perished, and more than two million had been displaced by the violence, though the accuracy of these figures remains unconfirmed. Response The United States, Britain, and European Union were among the first to respond to the situation by declaring the conflict genocide against tribal Africans by Arab militias, comparing these events to the recent ethnic conflict in Rwanda. In the summer of 2006, UN secretary general Kofi Annan recommended the deployment of UN peacekeepers into Darfur. The Sudanese government rejected the offer, calling any incursion by UN forces an act of aggression. An African Union peacekeeping force had already been deployed to the region but was ineffective at stemming the violence. In 2008, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), based at The Hague, Netherlands, recommended that Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, be indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide associated with the conflict in Darfur. The UN, however, stopped short of declaring the actions in Darfur genocide, citing a lack of evidence regarding intent to destroy any particular ethnic or racial group. In 2009, the ICC indicted al-Bashir on seven counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, excluding the crime of genocide. Meanwhile, efforts at establishing a peaceful end to the violence in Darfur has been hampered by the ongoing internal conflict among rebel groups. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2015 Gale, Cengage Learning. Source Citation "Darfur." Gale Student Resources in Context. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Student Resources in Context. Web. 8 June 2015. 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