The stake in Darfur

Oct 05, 2004

How can we name the Darfur crisis? The US Congress, and now Secretary of State Colin Powell, claim that genocide has occurred in Darfur

Mahmood mamdani

How can we name the Darfur crisis? The US Congress, and now Secretary of State Colin Powell, claim that genocide has occurred in Darfur. The European Union says not.

The Director of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, Sam Ibok, said on September 13 that Secretary Colin Powell should provide evidence to back up his claim. Is Darfur genocide that has happened and must be punished?

Or, is it genocide that could happen and must be prevented?
I will argue the latter. Sudan is today the site of two contradictory processes. The first is the Naivasha peace process between the SPLA and the Government of Sudan. The second is the armed confrontation between an insurgency and anti-government militias in Darfur.

There is need to link the two. To further the peace process will require demilitarising the conflict in Darfur. The peace process in the south has split both sides to the conflict. Tensions within the ruling circles in Khartoum have fed into the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), and those in SPLA into the SLA.

JEM organised as part of the Hassan Turabi faction of the Islamists. Turabi’s major claim to political success in the last decade, the Darfur Islamists fell out with both sides when the Khartoum coalition — between the army officers led by Bashir and the Islamist political movement under Turabi — split.

The SLA is linked to SPLA, which first tried to expand the southern-based armed movement to Darfur in 1990, but failed. When the present conflict began with the SLA’s successful assault on El Fashar airport on April 25, 2003, its ambitious scale led many to conclude that it was an SPLA beneficiary.

The government in Khartoum is also divided, between those who pushed the peace process, and those who believe too much was conceded in the Naivasha talks. The security cabal in Khartoum responded to the insurgency by state-sponsored violence, which has in turn fed an indiscriminate spread of weaponry. In sum, all those opposed to the peace process in the south have moved to fight in Darfur, even if on opposing sides. The Darfur conflict has many layers; the most recent but most explosive is that it is the continuation of the southern conflict in the west.

For anyone reading the press today, the atrocities in Sudan are synonymous with a demonic presence, the Janjawid, the spearhead of an ‘Arab’ assault on ‘Africans.’ The problem with this public discussion is that the little we know is often misleadingly represented. Let me highlight three facts. First, the militia groups known as the Janjawid reflect a broad African trend. Proxy war spread within the Eastern African region with the formation of Renamo by the Rhodesian and the South African security cabal in the early 1980s. Like the Janjawid, all these combine different degrees of autonomy on the ground with proxy connections above ground.

Second, whether identified as ‘Arab’ or ‘African,’ all parties in the Darfur conflict are equally indigenous and equally black, Muslim and local.

Let us begin with three different meanings of Arab: ethnic, cultural and political. In the ethnic sense, there are few Arabs worth speaking of in Darfur, and a very tiny percentage in Sudan. In the cultural sense, Arab refers to those who have come to speak Arabic as a home language. Most have become Arabs. The fact is that the Arabs of Darfur are both African and Arab, in Africans who speaks Arabic.

In a racialised world, it may be better to think of this population as ‘Arabised’ rather than ‘Arab.’As a political identity, Arab is relatively new to Darfur. Darfur was home to the Mahdist movement whose troops defeated the British and slayed General Gordon a century ago. Darfur then became the base of the party organised around the Sufi order, the Ansar. This party, called the Umma Party, is currently led by the grandson of the Mahdi, Sadiq al-Mahdi.

The major change in the political map of Darfur over the past decade was the growth of the Islamist movement, led by Hassan Turabi. Politically, Darfur became ‘Islamist,’ not ‘Arab.’ Like with Arab, with Islam too, we need to distinguish between cultural and political identity. Historically, political Islam in Sudan has been associated with political parties founded on Sufi orders, mainly the Umma Party based on the Ansar and the Khatamiyya-based DUP.

In sharp contrast to the strongly Sudanese identity of these ‘sectarian’ and ‘traditional’ parties is the militant, modernist and internationalist orientation of the type of political Islam championed by Hassan Turabi and organised as the National Islamic Front (NIF). The contrast between the two is sharp. ‘Traditional’ Islamist parties were mass-based, and often came to power through elections.

The NIF was poles apart. It consciously emulated the Communist Party, both in its predominant urban base and in its methods of organisation which banked on a cadre-based vanguard party taking power in alliance with a faction in the army.

As a political identity, ‘African’ is
even more recent than ‘Arab’ in Darfur. Whereas SPLA’s 1990 incursion into Darfur failed to create an ‘African’ political constituency, the 2003 insurgency has been more successful. Third, both the anti- and pro-government militia have outside sponsors, but cannot be dismissed as external creations.

The government organised local militias in Darfur in 1990, to fight the SPLA in the south and to keep the rebellion from spreading to the west. Neither monolithic nor centrally controlled, many were purged when the Islamists split in 1999. Others were not, like the Berti. In any case, it is wrong to think of the Janjaweed as a single organisation under a unified command.

Does that mean that we cannot hold the Sudan government responsible for the atrocities committed by Janjawid militias that it continues to supply? No, it does not. But while responsible, those who start and feed fires, we must not forget that it may be easier to start a fire than to put it out. The violence in Darfur has been exceptionally cruel. One reason is the initiative has passed from communities to those contending for power. Another is the low value on life placed by the security cabal in Khartoum and by those in the opposition who want power at any cost.

What is the solution?I suggest a three-pronged process in the Sudan. The priority is to complete the Naivasha peace process and change the character of the government in Khartoum. Second is to re-organise the militia under the protective and supervisory umbrella of an African Union policing force, and to stabilise communities in Darfur through a civic conference of both those identified as Arab and African.

Finally, to build on the Naivasha process by bringing into it all those previously excluded. To build confidence among all parties, but particularly those demonised as ‘Arab’, we need to use the same standard for all. To make the point, let us first look at the African region. The UN estimates that some 30,000 to 50,000 people have been killed in Darfur and another 1.4 million or so have been made homeless. The figure for the dead in Congo over the last few years is over 4 million. Many have died at the hands of ethnic Hema or Lendu militias. These are Janjaweed-type militias known to have functioned as proxies for neighboring states.

When the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, flew to Khartoum recently, I was in Kampala.
The comment I heard all around was: Why didn’t he stop here, and Kigali, and Kinshasa? All, including America’s allies in its global ‘war on terror,’ must be subjected to the same standard. Internationally, there is the daunting example of Iraq. It is conservatively estimated that there have been 300,000 ‘excess deaths’ of children under five in Iraq during the UN sanctions. But the sanctions continued.

Today, the U.S. does not even count the number of Iraqi dead, and the UN has made no attempt to estimate them. Iraq is not history. It continues to bleed. Some argue that international alignment on the Darfur crisis is dictated by the political economy of oil. Surely, oil influences both those (such as China) who would like continued access to it and those (such as USA) who covet that access. The more strategic reason may be political. For official America, Darfur is a strategic opportunity to draw Africa into the global ‘war on terror’ by sharply drawing lines that demarcate ‘Arab’ against ‘African’, just as for the crumbling regime in Khartoum this very fact presents a last opportunity to downplay its own responsibilities and call for assistance from those who oppose official America's 'war on terror.' It is this precisely which highlights what is at stake in Darfur.

What should we do? First of all, we the civilians should work against a military solution. We should work against a US intervention, whether direct or by proxy, and however disguised, as humanitarian or whatever. We should work against punitive sanctions. The lesson of Iraq sanctions is that you target individuals, not governments. Sanctions seldom punish their target. Second, we should organise in support of a culture of peace, of a rule of law and of a system of political accountability.

For the African Union, Darfur is both an opportunity and a test. The opportunity is to build on the global concern over a humanitarian disaster in Darfur to set a humanitarian standard that must be observed by all, including America’s allies. And the test is to defend African sovereignty in the face of official America’s global ‘war on terror’.

The writer is Professor of Government and Director of African Studies, Columbia University, USA

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