Darfur, two more views
Post
20/12/06, Peter Boehm, Darfur: Genocide without borders, (Source).
02/10/06, Gwynne Dyer, No Genocide in Darfur, (Source).
20/12/06, Peter Boehm, Darfur: Genocide without borders, (Back).
As anarchy spreads, rampaging militias bring death and carnage to refugees in neighbouring Chad. An exclusive dispatch.
The village is still smouldering. A girl combs through the remains of a burnt-down hut with her bare hands, trying to salvage knife blades and rakes that were not consumed by the fire. Two women, with tears in their eyes, have broken down in front of a pile of ash, wailing violently.
A band of youths is patrolling the ruins near Koukou-Angarana, bows and arrows slung over their shoulders, boomerangs and knives at the ready. But their decision to form a self-defence group has come too late. The Arab horsemen who swept through the village on their bloody rampage have long since vanished.
It is a tragically familiar scene in Darfur, the province of western Sudan where more than 200,000 people have been killed and at least two million brutally forced from their homes - a genocide unleashed and sustained by the Islamist government in Khartoum - but this man-made inferno now sweeping across the plains is taking place across the Sudanese border in Chad. The pattern is identical to events in Darfur, where the well-armed Arab raiders allied to the Sudanese government set villages ablaze, rape the women, and leave a trail of dead black Africans in their wake. Just as in Darfur, the Sudanese government is being accused of being behind the violence in Chad, an accusation which is rejected by Khartoum.
Mahamat Abdurasset surveys the steaming rubble of Aradipe, a remote Chadian village close to the Sudanese border. His village was attacked by a force of 500 Arab militiamen. "We knew most of them. They are from this village," said Mr Abdurasset, the leader of the self-defence group, pointing to a cluster of huts right next to Aradipe.
About 90,000 Chadians have fled their villages to find shelter in nearby towns, with many of them arriving in camps already crowded with 232,000 refugees who fled the violence in Darfur.
The wave of ethnic cleansing began in eastern Chad at the end of last month. But the most recent attacks around the small town of Koukou-Angarana have raised the stakes. For the first time, the Arab militia have targeted camps for refugees and internally displaced people. And for the first time the Chadian army, which until last week was engaged in a campaign against several rebel groups in the Abeche region, 250 miles north of here, took on the militia.
In the latest violence yesterday, the houses of local aid workers living in Koukou-Angarana were burnt down.
Over the weekend, several villages around Koukou-Angarana, and the outskirts of the town, were raided. The Chadian Communications Minister, Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, said 40 people were killed in the raids on the settlements of Aradipe and Habile. He said eight Chadian soldiers had their eyes gouged out and one civilian was burnt to death. The claims of mutilations could not be independently verified. The United Nations refugee agency said that during heavy fighting around Habile, 22 villagers and internally displaced Chadians were killed, and 93 homes were burnt.
According to Mr Abdurasset, whose village is four miles east of Koukou-Angarana, two columns of Arabs made their first attack on Aradipe on Friday morning. "They were armed with automatic rifles and bazookas and rode on horses and camels," he said. "Some of them were in Sudanese uniforms. They shot at everything that moved, and then drove our cattle away."
On Friday evening, he said, the Arabs evacuated their women and children and packed up their belongings from the neighbouring village, which, a day later, stood untouched and eerily quiet. The next morning, the Arabs attacked Aradipe again and burnt it down.
Most of the villagers had fled on Friday to the Goz Amer refugee camp, which already houses more than 18,000 Darfur refugees. The camp was attacked and partially burnt. Eight Sudanese were killed, said Chadian officials.
"We had very good relations with the Arabs in the nearby village. There were even a few inter-marriages," Mr Abdurasset said, as other young men nodded in agreement. "The trouble started at the end of November, when the Arabs prevented us from going to our fields and threatened attacks on our village."
As he spoke, thick white plumes of smoke were billowing on the horizon. Mr Abdurasset said the smoke was rising from the next village, five miles away. "We have reports that is being attacked right now," he said.
Koukou-Angarana has taken in 8,000 displaced Chadians in recent weeks. At army headquarters in the town, Bourdami Abdurahman, the mayor, echoed his government's accusation that the Sudanese government wants to annex eastern Chad. "The Sudanese government has forged a coalition of 21 Chadian ethnic groups who consider themselves Arabs. Khartoum wants to transform Chad into a fundamentalist Islamic country," he said.
The Communications Minister, said yesterday that the Chadian army took four prisoners, while the mayor said that soldiers had captured new weapons from the militia. They say this bolsters their claim that the Sudanese government is arming the Janjaweed militia and the Chadian rebels, who are fighting to end the 16-year rule of President Idriss Déby. Chadian officials, however, have produced no proof of their claims. So the Arab militia remain strangely faceless, since the attackers carry their injured from the battlefield and retrieve their dead in the night.
The village is still smouldering. A girl combs through the remains of a burnt-down hut with her bare hands, trying to salvage knife blades and rakes that were not consumed by the fire. Two women, with tears in their eyes, have broken down in front of a pile of ash, wailing violently.
A band of youths is patrolling the ruins near Koukou-Angarana, bows and arrows slung over their shoulders, boomerangs and knives at the ready. But their decision to form a self-defence group has come too late. The Arab horsemen who swept through the village on their bloody rampage have long since vanished.
It is a tragically familiar scene in Darfur, the province of western Sudan where more than 200,000 people have been killed and at least two million brutally forced from their homes - a genocide unleashed and sustained by the Islamist government in Khartoum - but this man-made inferno now sweeping across the plains is taking place across the Sudanese border in Chad. The pattern is identical to events in Darfur, where the well-armed Arab raiders allied to the Sudanese government set villages ablaze, rape the women, and leave a trail of dead black Africans in their wake. Just as in Darfur, the Sudanese government is being accused of being behind the violence in Chad, an accusation which is rejected by Khartoum.
Mahamat Abdurasset surveys the steaming rubble of Aradipe, a remote Chadian village close to the Sudanese border. His village was attacked by a force of 500 Arab militiamen. "We knew most of them. They are from this village," said Mr Abdurasset, the leader of the self-defence group, pointing to a cluster of huts right next to Aradipe.
About 90,000 Chadians have fled their villages to find shelter in nearby towns, with many of them arriving in camps already crowded with 232,000 refugees who fled the violence in Darfur.
The wave of ethnic cleansing began in eastern Chad at the end of last month. But the most recent attacks around the small town of Koukou-Angarana have raised the stakes. For the first time, the Arab militia have targeted camps for refugees and internally displaced people. And for the first time the Chadian army, which until last week was engaged in a campaign against several rebel groups in the Abeche region, 250 miles north of here, took on the militia.
In the latest violence yesterday, the houses of local aid workers living in Koukou-Angarana were burnt down.
Over the weekend, several villages around Koukou-Angarana, and the outskirts of the town, were raided. The Chadian Communications Minister, Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, said 40 people were killed in the raids on the settlements of Aradipe and Habile. He said eight Chadian soldiers had their eyes gouged out and one civilian was burnt to death. The claims of mutilations could not be independently verified. The United Nations refugee agency said that during heavy fighting around Habile, 22 villagers and internally displaced Chadians were killed, and 93 homes were burnt.
According to Mr Abdurasset, whose village is four miles east of Koukou-Angarana, two columns of Arabs made their first attack on Aradipe on Friday morning. "They were armed with automatic rifles and bazookas and rode on horses and camels," he said. "Some of them were in Sudanese uniforms. They shot at everything that moved, and then drove our cattle away."
On Friday evening, he said, the Arabs evacuated their women and children and packed up their belongings from the neighbouring village, which, a day later, stood untouched and eerily quiet. The next morning, the Arabs attacked Aradipe again and burnt it down.
Most of the villagers had fled on Friday to the Goz Amer refugee camp, which already houses more than 18,000 Darfur refugees. The camp was attacked and partially burnt. Eight Sudanese were killed, said Chadian officials.
"We had very good relations with the Arabs in the nearby village. There were even a few inter-marriages," Mr Abdurasset said, as other young men nodded in agreement. "The trouble started at the end of November, when the Arabs prevented us from going to our fields and threatened attacks on our village."
As he spoke, thick white plumes of smoke were billowing on the horizon. Mr Abdurasset said the smoke was rising from the next village, five miles away. "We have reports that is being attacked right now," he said.
Koukou-Angarana has taken in 8,000 displaced Chadians in recent weeks. At army headquarters in the town, Bourdami Abdurahman, the mayor, echoed his government's accusation that the Sudanese government wants to annex eastern Chad. "The Sudanese government has forged a coalition of 21 Chadian ethnic groups who consider themselves Arabs. Khartoum wants to transform Chad into a fundamentalist Islamic country," he said.
The Communications Minister, said yesterday that the Chadian army took four prisoners, while the mayor said that soldiers had captured new weapons from the militia. They say this bolsters their claim that the Sudanese government is arming the Janjaweed militia and the Chadian rebels, who are fighting to end the 16-year rule of President Idriss Déby. Chadian officials, however, have produced no proof of their claims. So the Arab militia remain strangely faceless, since the attackers carry their injured from the battlefield and retrieve their dead in the night.
02/10/06, Gwynne Dyer, No Genocide in Darfur, (Back).
On one issue, at least, George Bush and George Clooney are in perfect accord: what is happening in Darfur is a genocide, and Something Must Be Done. But it isn't a genocide, and Nothing Will Be Done.
"What you'll hear is, well, the government of Sudan must invite the United Nations in for us to act," said President George W. Bush in mid-September. "Well, there are other alternatives, like passing a UN resolution saying we're coming in with a UN force in order to save lives." But for all Bush's tough talk, he wasn't really ready to fight his way into Darfur, so the actual UN resolution says that Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir must approve the force. "Philanthropic imperialism" has a dwindling constituency in Washington.
Actor George Clooney is still up for it, though. If the proposed force of 20,000 UN troops was not in Darfur by the end of September, he told the United Nations Security Council three weeks ago, the scene will be set for "the first genocide of the 21st century." There would be no point in sending UN troops later: "You will simply need men with shovels and bleached linen and headstones." As if the UN could actually come up with 20,000 troops to send, and would authorise them to fight their way into Sudan against Bashir's will.
The end-of-September deadline for putting a 20,000-strong force of United Nations troops into Darfur, including large numbers of soldiers drawn from NATO countries, was always a fantasy. The deadline has passed without any softening of the Sudanese government's total rejection of the plan, and no Western troops are heading for Sudan any time soon. Instead, the existing force of 7,000 troops from African Union countries that tries to protect the refugee camps, under-equipped and poorly supplied though it is, will stay at least until the end of the year.
This is the best available outcome, and may even save some tens of thousands of lives -- especially if the Western countries now give that African Union force the money, fuel, night-flying helicopters and other resources it needs to do the job. It will continue to be grim in Darfur, but at least the West has avoided a military intervention in Africa that would have made the Somalia debacle in 1992-93 look like a success story.
Darfur, the western region of Sudan, is as big as France, but it has only six million people. They are all black Africans and all Muslims, but some were Arabised long ago, while other groups, notably the Zaghawa and the Fur, have retained their original African languages and ethnic identities. (Darfur means "home of the Fur".) Resources are scarce, and the various groups are often in conflict over them.
Nevertheless, Darfur remained relatively quiet during the dreadful war (two million dead in the past twenty years) between the African ethnic groups of southern Sudan, where most people are Christians or animists, and the Muslims of the Arabised north who dominated Sudan's government, army and economy. It was the peace settlement between north and south in 2003 that triggered the revolt in Darfur.
That peace deal gave the southern rebels a share in the central government, a half-share of the oil revenues now pouring in from wells that are mostly located in "southern" territory, and the right to a referendum on independence from Sudan in six years' time. So some leaders of the Zaghawa and the Fur decided to emulate the southerners: launch a revolt in Darfur, and try to cut a similar deal with Khartoum in return for ending it.
The regime in Khartoum used the same tactic that it had employed extensively in the war in the south: it armed and paid Arabised groups (the Janjaweed militia) to fight the rebels. And just as in the south, the bulk of the victims were innocent civilians. A great many people died, and almost half the population fled to refugee camps that sprang up inside Darfur and across the frontier in Chad.
International aid agencies try to care for the refugees and the African Union sent a 7,000-strong force to protect them, but none of the foreigners took sides in the fighting. At peace talks in Abuja last May Khartoum offered the rebels posts in the provincial government and a share of oil revenues, and one rebel group, Minni Minawi's Sudan Liberation Army, accepted the deal. However, two rival groups didn't -- and even the SLA split, with breakaway factions joining the rejectionists to form the National Redemption Front.
In July fighting resumed, with Minnawi's SLA now cooperating with government troops and the Janjaweed against the remaining rebels. What is needed is not outside military intervention against either side, but a return to the peace table. Alex de Waal, an advisor to the African Union mediation team at the talks, reckons that another $100 million on the table would probably have persuaded most of the rebel hold-outs to accept the deal.
Darfur is not another Rwanda, another Cambodia, another Holocaust in the making, as the "Never Again" slogans of protesters in the West suggest. It is a cruel war of a kind lamentably common in Africa, and the most useful thing non-Africans can do is to support the African Union's mediators and its troops on the ground.
(Back)
02/10/06, Gwynne Dyer, No Genocide in Darfur, (Source).
20/12/06, Peter Boehm, Darfur: Genocide without borders, (Back).
As anarchy spreads, rampaging militias bring death and carnage to refugees in neighbouring Chad. An exclusive dispatch.
The village is still smouldering. A girl combs through the remains of a burnt-down hut with her bare hands, trying to salvage knife blades and rakes that were not consumed by the fire. Two women, with tears in their eyes, have broken down in front of a pile of ash, wailing violently.
A band of youths is patrolling the ruins near Koukou-Angarana, bows and arrows slung over their shoulders, boomerangs and knives at the ready. But their decision to form a self-defence group has come too late. The Arab horsemen who swept through the village on their bloody rampage have long since vanished.
It is a tragically familiar scene in Darfur, the province of western Sudan where more than 200,000 people have been killed and at least two million brutally forced from their homes - a genocide unleashed and sustained by the Islamist government in Khartoum - but this man-made inferno now sweeping across the plains is taking place across the Sudanese border in Chad. The pattern is identical to events in Darfur, where the well-armed Arab raiders allied to the Sudanese government set villages ablaze, rape the women, and leave a trail of dead black Africans in their wake. Just as in Darfur, the Sudanese government is being accused of being behind the violence in Chad, an accusation which is rejected by Khartoum.
Mahamat Abdurasset surveys the steaming rubble of Aradipe, a remote Chadian village close to the Sudanese border. His village was attacked by a force of 500 Arab militiamen. "We knew most of them. They are from this village," said Mr Abdurasset, the leader of the self-defence group, pointing to a cluster of huts right next to Aradipe.
About 90,000 Chadians have fled their villages to find shelter in nearby towns, with many of them arriving in camps already crowded with 232,000 refugees who fled the violence in Darfur.
The wave of ethnic cleansing began in eastern Chad at the end of last month. But the most recent attacks around the small town of Koukou-Angarana have raised the stakes. For the first time, the Arab militia have targeted camps for refugees and internally displaced people. And for the first time the Chadian army, which until last week was engaged in a campaign against several rebel groups in the Abeche region, 250 miles north of here, took on the militia.
In the latest violence yesterday, the houses of local aid workers living in Koukou-Angarana were burnt down.
Over the weekend, several villages around Koukou-Angarana, and the outskirts of the town, were raided. The Chadian Communications Minister, Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, said 40 people were killed in the raids on the settlements of Aradipe and Habile. He said eight Chadian soldiers had their eyes gouged out and one civilian was burnt to death. The claims of mutilations could not be independently verified. The United Nations refugee agency said that during heavy fighting around Habile, 22 villagers and internally displaced Chadians were killed, and 93 homes were burnt.
According to Mr Abdurasset, whose village is four miles east of Koukou-Angarana, two columns of Arabs made their first attack on Aradipe on Friday morning. "They were armed with automatic rifles and bazookas and rode on horses and camels," he said. "Some of them were in Sudanese uniforms. They shot at everything that moved, and then drove our cattle away."
On Friday evening, he said, the Arabs evacuated their women and children and packed up their belongings from the neighbouring village, which, a day later, stood untouched and eerily quiet. The next morning, the Arabs attacked Aradipe again and burnt it down.
Most of the villagers had fled on Friday to the Goz Amer refugee camp, which already houses more than 18,000 Darfur refugees. The camp was attacked and partially burnt. Eight Sudanese were killed, said Chadian officials.
"We had very good relations with the Arabs in the nearby village. There were even a few inter-marriages," Mr Abdurasset said, as other young men nodded in agreement. "The trouble started at the end of November, when the Arabs prevented us from going to our fields and threatened attacks on our village."
As he spoke, thick white plumes of smoke were billowing on the horizon. Mr Abdurasset said the smoke was rising from the next village, five miles away. "We have reports that is being attacked right now," he said.
Koukou-Angarana has taken in 8,000 displaced Chadians in recent weeks. At army headquarters in the town, Bourdami Abdurahman, the mayor, echoed his government's accusation that the Sudanese government wants to annex eastern Chad. "The Sudanese government has forged a coalition of 21 Chadian ethnic groups who consider themselves Arabs. Khartoum wants to transform Chad into a fundamentalist Islamic country," he said.
The Communications Minister, said yesterday that the Chadian army took four prisoners, while the mayor said that soldiers had captured new weapons from the militia. They say this bolsters their claim that the Sudanese government is arming the Janjaweed militia and the Chadian rebels, who are fighting to end the 16-year rule of President Idriss Déby. Chadian officials, however, have produced no proof of their claims. So the Arab militia remain strangely faceless, since the attackers carry their injured from the battlefield and retrieve their dead in the night.
The village is still smouldering. A girl combs through the remains of a burnt-down hut with her bare hands, trying to salvage knife blades and rakes that were not consumed by the fire. Two women, with tears in their eyes, have broken down in front of a pile of ash, wailing violently.
A band of youths is patrolling the ruins near Koukou-Angarana, bows and arrows slung over their shoulders, boomerangs and knives at the ready. But their decision to form a self-defence group has come too late. The Arab horsemen who swept through the village on their bloody rampage have long since vanished.
It is a tragically familiar scene in Darfur, the province of western Sudan where more than 200,000 people have been killed and at least two million brutally forced from their homes - a genocide unleashed and sustained by the Islamist government in Khartoum - but this man-made inferno now sweeping across the plains is taking place across the Sudanese border in Chad. The pattern is identical to events in Darfur, where the well-armed Arab raiders allied to the Sudanese government set villages ablaze, rape the women, and leave a trail of dead black Africans in their wake. Just as in Darfur, the Sudanese government is being accused of being behind the violence in Chad, an accusation which is rejected by Khartoum.
Mahamat Abdurasset surveys the steaming rubble of Aradipe, a remote Chadian village close to the Sudanese border. His village was attacked by a force of 500 Arab militiamen. "We knew most of them. They are from this village," said Mr Abdurasset, the leader of the self-defence group, pointing to a cluster of huts right next to Aradipe.
About 90,000 Chadians have fled their villages to find shelter in nearby towns, with many of them arriving in camps already crowded with 232,000 refugees who fled the violence in Darfur.
The wave of ethnic cleansing began in eastern Chad at the end of last month. But the most recent attacks around the small town of Koukou-Angarana have raised the stakes. For the first time, the Arab militia have targeted camps for refugees and internally displaced people. And for the first time the Chadian army, which until last week was engaged in a campaign against several rebel groups in the Abeche region, 250 miles north of here, took on the militia.
In the latest violence yesterday, the houses of local aid workers living in Koukou-Angarana were burnt down.
Over the weekend, several villages around Koukou-Angarana, and the outskirts of the town, were raided. The Chadian Communications Minister, Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, said 40 people were killed in the raids on the settlements of Aradipe and Habile. He said eight Chadian soldiers had their eyes gouged out and one civilian was burnt to death. The claims of mutilations could not be independently verified. The United Nations refugee agency said that during heavy fighting around Habile, 22 villagers and internally displaced Chadians were killed, and 93 homes were burnt.
According to Mr Abdurasset, whose village is four miles east of Koukou-Angarana, two columns of Arabs made their first attack on Aradipe on Friday morning. "They were armed with automatic rifles and bazookas and rode on horses and camels," he said. "Some of them were in Sudanese uniforms. They shot at everything that moved, and then drove our cattle away."
On Friday evening, he said, the Arabs evacuated their women and children and packed up their belongings from the neighbouring village, which, a day later, stood untouched and eerily quiet. The next morning, the Arabs attacked Aradipe again and burnt it down.
Most of the villagers had fled on Friday to the Goz Amer refugee camp, which already houses more than 18,000 Darfur refugees. The camp was attacked and partially burnt. Eight Sudanese were killed, said Chadian officials.
"We had very good relations with the Arabs in the nearby village. There were even a few inter-marriages," Mr Abdurasset said, as other young men nodded in agreement. "The trouble started at the end of November, when the Arabs prevented us from going to our fields and threatened attacks on our village."
As he spoke, thick white plumes of smoke were billowing on the horizon. Mr Abdurasset said the smoke was rising from the next village, five miles away. "We have reports that is being attacked right now," he said.
Koukou-Angarana has taken in 8,000 displaced Chadians in recent weeks. At army headquarters in the town, Bourdami Abdurahman, the mayor, echoed his government's accusation that the Sudanese government wants to annex eastern Chad. "The Sudanese government has forged a coalition of 21 Chadian ethnic groups who consider themselves Arabs. Khartoum wants to transform Chad into a fundamentalist Islamic country," he said.
The Communications Minister, said yesterday that the Chadian army took four prisoners, while the mayor said that soldiers had captured new weapons from the militia. They say this bolsters their claim that the Sudanese government is arming the Janjaweed militia and the Chadian rebels, who are fighting to end the 16-year rule of President Idriss Déby. Chadian officials, however, have produced no proof of their claims. So the Arab militia remain strangely faceless, since the attackers carry their injured from the battlefield and retrieve their dead in the night.
02/10/06, Gwynne Dyer, No Genocide in Darfur, (Back).
On one issue, at least, George Bush and George Clooney are in perfect accord: what is happening in Darfur is a genocide, and Something Must Be Done. But it isn't a genocide, and Nothing Will Be Done.
"What you'll hear is, well, the government of Sudan must invite the United Nations in for us to act," said President George W. Bush in mid-September. "Well, there are other alternatives, like passing a UN resolution saying we're coming in with a UN force in order to save lives." But for all Bush's tough talk, he wasn't really ready to fight his way into Darfur, so the actual UN resolution says that Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir must approve the force. "Philanthropic imperialism" has a dwindling constituency in Washington.
Actor George Clooney is still up for it, though. If the proposed force of 20,000 UN troops was not in Darfur by the end of September, he told the United Nations Security Council three weeks ago, the scene will be set for "the first genocide of the 21st century." There would be no point in sending UN troops later: "You will simply need men with shovels and bleached linen and headstones." As if the UN could actually come up with 20,000 troops to send, and would authorise them to fight their way into Sudan against Bashir's will.
The end-of-September deadline for putting a 20,000-strong force of United Nations troops into Darfur, including large numbers of soldiers drawn from NATO countries, was always a fantasy. The deadline has passed without any softening of the Sudanese government's total rejection of the plan, and no Western troops are heading for Sudan any time soon. Instead, the existing force of 7,000 troops from African Union countries that tries to protect the refugee camps, under-equipped and poorly supplied though it is, will stay at least until the end of the year.
This is the best available outcome, and may even save some tens of thousands of lives -- especially if the Western countries now give that African Union force the money, fuel, night-flying helicopters and other resources it needs to do the job. It will continue to be grim in Darfur, but at least the West has avoided a military intervention in Africa that would have made the Somalia debacle in 1992-93 look like a success story.
Darfur, the western region of Sudan, is as big as France, but it has only six million people. They are all black Africans and all Muslims, but some were Arabised long ago, while other groups, notably the Zaghawa and the Fur, have retained their original African languages and ethnic identities. (Darfur means "home of the Fur".) Resources are scarce, and the various groups are often in conflict over them.
Nevertheless, Darfur remained relatively quiet during the dreadful war (two million dead in the past twenty years) between the African ethnic groups of southern Sudan, where most people are Christians or animists, and the Muslims of the Arabised north who dominated Sudan's government, army and economy. It was the peace settlement between north and south in 2003 that triggered the revolt in Darfur.
That peace deal gave the southern rebels a share in the central government, a half-share of the oil revenues now pouring in from wells that are mostly located in "southern" territory, and the right to a referendum on independence from Sudan in six years' time. So some leaders of the Zaghawa and the Fur decided to emulate the southerners: launch a revolt in Darfur, and try to cut a similar deal with Khartoum in return for ending it.
The regime in Khartoum used the same tactic that it had employed extensively in the war in the south: it armed and paid Arabised groups (the Janjaweed militia) to fight the rebels. And just as in the south, the bulk of the victims were innocent civilians. A great many people died, and almost half the population fled to refugee camps that sprang up inside Darfur and across the frontier in Chad.
International aid agencies try to care for the refugees and the African Union sent a 7,000-strong force to protect them, but none of the foreigners took sides in the fighting. At peace talks in Abuja last May Khartoum offered the rebels posts in the provincial government and a share of oil revenues, and one rebel group, Minni Minawi's Sudan Liberation Army, accepted the deal. However, two rival groups didn't -- and even the SLA split, with breakaway factions joining the rejectionists to form the National Redemption Front.
In July fighting resumed, with Minnawi's SLA now cooperating with government troops and the Janjaweed against the remaining rebels. What is needed is not outside military intervention against either side, but a return to the peace table. Alex de Waal, an advisor to the African Union mediation team at the talks, reckons that another $100 million on the table would probably have persuaded most of the rebel hold-outs to accept the deal.
Darfur is not another Rwanda, another Cambodia, another Holocaust in the making, as the "Never Again" slogans of protesters in the West suggest. It is a cruel war of a kind lamentably common in Africa, and the most useful thing non-Africans can do is to support the African Union's mediators and its troops on the ground.
(Back)
Home