This summary of the Conflict in Darfur is a direct excert from the Brookings Institute report on the current situation and effectiveness of the African Union in Darfur.
The conflict in Darfur is complex and a full analysis lies outside the scope of this study. Nevertheless, to understand the challenges facing the AU’s peacekeepers, some basic elements of the history and the people of Darfur should be kept in mind.
The notion of race and ethnicity is a relatively new phenomenon in Darfur. There has been much mixing over the centuries, with internal migration and intermarriage between Arabs and Africans quite common. “Individuals, even whole groups, can shed one label and acquire another.”5 This echoes other recent ethnic identity conflicts in Rwanda and the Balkans where groups co-existed for decades and people “changed” identity easily and frequently, until politicians stepped in and “froze” ethnic identities to exploit their racially or ethnically-based ideologies.
It was only in the 1980s when severe droughts struck Darfur that ethnic identity and racial classifications started to harden. Previously, nomadic herders and pastoral farmers had a mutually beneficial relationship; through trade, pasturage rights and access to water, they regulated their dealings so that each side benefited. Farmers had their fields naturally fertilized and could buy animals for meat, while herders could graze their animals, obtain water and trade for goods otherwise unobtainable. A traditional dispute resolution process was accepted and followed to regulate the inevitable disagreements. While not perfect or paradise, the different groups in Darfur largely got along.
Darfur became part of Sudan only in 1916. As the most recent addition to what became the independent country of Sudan in 1956, it was traditionally neglected by the central government. Precious little was spent in Darfur by any of Sudan’s governments since independence. Schools, roads, medical facilities, industry — Darfur lacks all. Historically Darfur has been under-represented in every branch and level of government.6 The famous “Black Book” released by disenchanted Darfurians in 2000 documents the dominance of Sudan’s northern tribes in government and senior military posts for the past 50 years. Officials from Darfur barely register in the Black Book; even southerners are more numerous.
When conflicts erupted between farmers and herders/nomads in the mid-1980s following drought and famine, there were few government services to ease the consequences of the struggle over diminishing resources. Tensions built over the next few years as a harsh and strict Islamist regime took power in Khartoum in 1989, led by Omar al-Bashir. Weapons flowed into Darfur as both sides sought to protect their assets (herds, livestock, crops, water holes) because the government was incapable of providing protection. Meanwhile right next door to Darfur, Libya’s leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was backing efforts by various Arab groups across the Sahel, but especially in neighboring Chad, to create an “Arab Belt.”7 Not only guns were imported to Darfur, but also an increasingly racist ideology of Arab supremacy. “Janjaweed leaders are among those said to have been trained in Libya.”
This new ideology, fuelled by weapons and ever diminishing resources due to ongoing drought, injected a new racial/ethnic dimension, one where “Arab” and “African” assumed a new, mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic meaning. As Alex de Waal notes: “Darfur’s complex identities have been radically and traumatically simplified, creating a polarized ‘Arab versus African’ dichotomy that is historically bogus, but disturbingly powerful.” He argues that the US’ calling the government’s actions “genocide” by Arabs against Africans, as well as the use of the labels by journalists, humanitarian workers and outside politicians, has only encouraged this dichotomy which leaders of both communities have turned to their own advantage, further cementing the divide.
The combination of historical neglect, increasing polarization and continuing struggle over land, water and grazing routes, helps explain the attack by rebels from the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) on the El Fasher airport in North Darfur in April 2003 which launched the current and most deadly phase of this conflict. 10 “Unrelenting poverty has been transformed into violence by misgovernment and imported racisms.”11 In addition, rebels in Darfur saw that the Naivasha Peace Agreement of 2002 ending the 20-year war in the South threatened to marginalize Darfur even further. All the focus would shift to the power-sharing agreement between North and South and dividing the new oil wealth between them. The rebels saw that violence had “worked” in the South and they were determined that Darfur get its share of the new oil money flowing into Khartoum’s coffers. The government panicked because it knew its army could not immediately handle this new front while many of its soldiers were still deployed in the volatile South.
Violence escalated when the Bashir government decided to arm the Janjaweed and other government allied tribes. Two reasons explain this decision. First, the Sudanese government has frequently resorted to using proxies to help fight its battles, especially in the South and in the Nuba mountains where militias, armed and supported by the military, fought government opponents.12 Second, many soldiers in the Sudanese military come from Darfur and the government did not trust their loyalty, fearing that if they were asked to fight against family and friends, they would refuse.
Violence continued throughout 2003 and into 2004. As the number of villages burned by the military and the Janjaweed militias grew, the international community belatedly took note. Perhaps it was the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in April 2004 that finally galvanized attention, if not action. In September 2004 Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, called the Sudanese government’s war in Darfur genocide, the first time ever that a US senior government official used the term to characterize another government’s behavior. This obligated the US to take action to stop the genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which the US has ratified.13 The US, however, did no such thing. A few months later the US Congress passed a resolution also branding the conflict genocide.
The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1564 in late 2004 calling for a Commission of Inquiry on Genocide in Sudan. In January 2005 the Commission reported to the Secretary-General and the Council that: “The Government of the Sudan and the Janjaweed are responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law amounting to crimes under international law…Government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur.”14 The Commission of Inquiry said, based on the information it had obtained, that it could not conclude that genocide had occurred, but did not rule out the possibility, pending further investigation.