DARFUR DYING IN DARFUR by Samantha Power, The New Yorker, August 30,

2004.

Darfur is about the size of Texas. It was an autonomous sultanate until 1916 when it was conquered by Britain and incorporated in Sudan.

It is high desert in the north and lush grasslands in the south. It is populated by ninety tribes and countless sub-tribes.

It has six million people and practically all of them are muslim. There have been many decades of intermarriage, and almost everyone has dark skin and they look more African than Arab.

Even though there has been much ethnic-mixing, the population is now dividing more between Arabs and Africans. The Africans are referred to derogatorily as zurga or

“blacks.”

The Arab people tend to be nomadic – they herd camels in North Darfur and cattle in the south. The Africans generally farm, but certain groups like the Zaghawa “sometimes maintain farms but also sweep south with their herds during the harvest season.”

Competition between the tribes, economically, has always been fierce, but they are usually resolved by tribal leaders and those decisions have been respected by the govt. in the capital Khartoum.

1 In the 1980’s competition for the land intensified. There was a drought, and the Sahara desert in the north was moving south and transforming arable soil into desert.

Some African farmers were using tractors and other mechanized equipment and their ambitions grew. Arab herders in North Darful began to resent the seasonal forays of

Zaghawa herdsmen into Arab-occupied grazing areas. And, the African farmers grew hostile toward the camel-riding Arab nomads from the north that “increasingly trampled their farmland as they roamed in search of pasture.” P 61

Arabs from the countries to the west, Niger, Chad, Mauritania, and Mali began moving into the region. The African farmers who once celebrated the annual return of Arab nomads, whose animals had fertilized their farmland and helped carry harvest to market, began to interfere with their migration.

The govt. leaders in Khartoum ignored these tensions. The govt. had previously weakened the tribal-administration system in favor of state institutions that had little legitimacy in Darfur.

The three largest African tribes in the area are the Fur – and, Darfur means “land of the

Fur.” - the two largest tribes are the Zaghawa and the Masaaleit.

2 Between1987 and 1989 serious battles broke out between Fur farmers and Arab camel herders. 2500 Fur were killed, forty thousand cattle were lost, and four hundred villages were burned. Five hundred Arabs died, and hundreds of their tents were burned.

A local inter-tribal conference was held in 1989, buts its recommendations for compensation and punishment went largely unheeded, leaving outstanding grievances that exploded fourteen years later.

April 25, 2003 the Sudanese Liberation Army with 260 men, forty Toyota Land Cruisers, four trucks and small arms fire took over a vital military outpost in El Fasher, in central

Darfur. The raid lasted several hours and 100 Sudanese soldiers were killed, five airplanes and two helicopter gunships were destroyed (Sudan has fewer than 100 attack aircraft), and the rebels seized six trucks and nineteen Land Cruisers and emptied several warehouses that were filled with weapons. They would have made off with five tanks, but could not find the keys. The rebels lost only nine men and they captured the head of the Sudanese Air Force who they released 45 days later.

The rebels believed that the Sudanese govt. was ignoring Darfur – providing little or no road building or repair, and little construction of schools, hospitals, or communications facilities in Darfur. And the Africans in Darfur felt that the govt. awarded all of the top posts in the region to the Arabs, even though they were considered to be a minority there.

The rebels believed that they could only get the government’s attention by taking up arms and getting the world’s attention.

3 The Sudanese Liberation Army’s manifesto invited Arabs and Africans to join in protesting Khartoum’s “policies of marginalization, racial discrimination, exclusion, exploitation, and divisiveness.” The group’s objective was “to create a united democratic

Sudan on a new basis of equality, complete restructuring and devolution of power, even development, cultural and political pluralism and moral and material prosperity for all

Sudanese.” All regions should have significant autonomy and work together under the banner of “Sudanism” – a shared identity for Arabs, Africans, Christians, and Muslims.

The Sudanese govt. responded by using its Air Force to bomb from the sky and Arab tribesmen, armed by the government, to launch raids on the ground. Because a majority of the Sudanese Army’s rank and file soldiers came from Darfur, the govt. could not rely upon them to take up arms against their neighbors and kin. So, the govt. relied on the local Arab militias instead.

As of August, 2004 Arab militiamen, janjaweed, had joined up with the Sudanese Air force and Army, killing as many as 50,000 Darfurians (more like 70,000 today) and destroying nearly 400 villages, and many women and girls have been raped. More than a million and a half people have fled from their homes. (2 million today). Fifty refugee camps have been established in Chad and a hundred and fifty unofficial sites in Sudan.

Sudan is the largest nation in Africa. It won its independence from Britain in 1956 and has pretty much been involved in civil war ever since. The central conflict between

4 Muslim govt forces in the North and rebels in the South, began in 1955, abated in 1972, and resumed in 1983. Some two million people have died, and many of them have been

Christians. This has been deeply troubling to American evangelical Christians. Franklin

Graham, Billy Graham’s son, has led an effort to raise money for the victims.

In the 1990’s the Clinton admin. imposed sanctions against the Sudanese govt. Sudan became a haven for terrorists and Osama bin Laden settled there in 1991. Many U.S. lawmakers traveled to Sudan including Bill Frist, then Senate Majority Leader, who made several trips there serving as a volunteer doctor in Southern Sudan. In 1996

Clinton withdrew the U.S. Ambassador from Khartoum and pressured Sudan to expel

Osama bin Laden who then moved to Afghanistan. After Al Qaeda attacked the

American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and during the Monica Lewinsky scandal,

Clinton ordered a Tomahawk-missile strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory that was suspected of producing chemical weapons.

President Bush in Sept. 2001 appointed John Danforth as special envoy to Sudan. Bush in the 2000 campaign often told people that if they wanted to understand him and his values they needed to understand Midland, Texas where Bush grew up. Midland has several

Christian congregations that have sister congregations in Sudan. In Nov. 2001 Midland hosted an evangelical Christian event – The International Day for the Persecuted Church.

Many Midland churches passed out leaflets on Sudan and devoted part of their Sunday services to the civil war and the slave trade there. Six Sudanese refugees spent the weekend in Midland and shared their stories. Midland’s churches raised money for

5 Sudanese school, and local religious and civic leaders petitioned the White House and wrote letters to the government in Khartoum. In 2002 13 Sudanese exiles were invited to visit Midland during its annual Christmas Music Festival and they were paired with local youths to construct two portable “Sudanese Villages.” The American evangelical community’s intense interest in Sudan put considerable pressure on Danforth and the rest of the U.S. govt. to do something.

The Bush administration was also aware that Sudan’s oil reserves yield two billion dollars in annual revenue; just a small fraction of the oil has been tapped. The oil was discovered by Chevron in the 1970’s, but has been exported only since 1999. These reserves were being exploited by Canada, China, and Sweden and were off limits to U.S. companies because of a 1997 exec. order barring U.S. oil companies from operating in

Sudan.

After 9/11 Sudan wanted to end U.S. sanctions and to court U.S. oil investors, and avoid being added to the administration’s target list for terrorists. The southern rebels also say that they withstood little chance of dislodging the govt. and were ready to negotiate.

Peace talks moved forward. The President, Omar al-Bashir, “provisionally agreed to share about half the oil revenues with the South, and to permit Christians in the North to escape punishments dictated by Sharia –traditional Islamic law. Bashir even offered to give the South the right to secede from Sudan six years from the signing date, if irreconcilable divisions remained. At this same time Darfur was in turmoil. Their leaders had been excluded from the peace talks, and they rose up and demanded political

6 reform and economic assistance to their region. Then Bashir’s regime started the bombing and Jangaweed campaign against the rebels in Darfur.

In June, 2,004, Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virgina, and Sam Brownback, a

Republican Senator from Kansas, visited Darfur and came back with grim refugee testimonies and video-tape footage of torched villages. In July, Congress passed a resolution describing the killings in Sudan as “genocide.” – the first time that Congress had described an ongoing massacre in such terms. Bush’s evangelical base offered full backing. Franklin Graham called the White House and told one of Bush’s aides that “Just because you’ve signed a peace deal with the South doesn’t mean you can wash your hands of Darfur.” P 68

In August, 51 evangelical Christian leaders, representing forty-five thousand churches called on President Bush to consider sending troops to Darfur to stop the “genocide.” For many African-American leaders the targeting of Darfurians on the basis of ethnicity had rekindled memories of apartheid.

On July 13th, 2004 Charles Rangel, New York City Congressman, with fifty protesters sang “We Shall Overcome” in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington and they were arrested. Other protesters arrested in July included Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream fame.

In the end Americans contributed 192.4 million in relief aid, pressed for multilateral UN.

Denunciations and dispatched Sec. of State Colin Powell to Darfur.

7 The United Nations appointed a commission to investigate the violence in Darfur and reported that it had found a pattern of mass killings and forced displacement of civilians.

It did not constitute genocide, but the actions represented crimes of similar gravity that should be sent to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. The 176 page report said that “International offenses such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide.”

The Bush admin. has pushed for action against Sudan’s govt. saying that its involvement in a campaign of violence against black African villagers amounted to genocide. But the

Bush administration does not want the atrocities referred to the ICC. It has opposed the tribunal from its inception on grounds that the court could bring politically motivated actions against American personnel abroad. The administration proposes that the Darfur charges be sent to a new tribunal to be run jointly by the African Union and the UN and to be based at the war crimes court in Arusha, Tanzania (Rwanda war crimes)

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