Darfur: continuing conflict in Sudan
The library staff of the African Studies Centre Leiden has compiled this web dossier to coincide with a public meeting on ‘Darfur and the international community’ organized on 9 February 2007 by the ASC in cooperation with the Interfaculty Ethnological Student Debating Club WDO. Speakers: Jan Pronk, former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Sudan, and Alex de Waal, Programme Director of the Social Science Research Council in New York and Director of Justice Africa.
The dossier begins with an introduction by Prof. Jan Abbink, ASC researcher, outlining the broad contours of the ongoing conflict in Darfur. This is followed by a selection of titles dealing with Darfur and the wider conflict in Sudan published since 2003 which are available in the ASC library. Each title links directly to the corresponding record in the library’s online catalogue, which provides further details and, in many cases, an abstract. The dossier concludes with a selection of web resources.
Introduction
Bibliography: Darfur-Sudan
Selected web resources
Many more items are available online on web sites and in discussion forums. While largely concerned with current affairs, the number of publications in the public domain is quite substantial, reflecting the urgency of the Darfur problem. Further background information is also available in a previous ASC web dossier on Conflict in Sudan: the case of Darfur, compiled in September 2004.
Introduction
Darfur, a former independent state in western Sudan, has been the scene of acerbic warfare between the Sudanese central government and a number of insurgent movements since February 2003. These groups are demanding rights for the local peoples and more state investment in their marginalized region. At the start of the armed conflict, Darfur, which is the size of France, had a population of about 6 million (virtually all Muslims) but the number is significantly lower today due to mass killings, disease, famine and forced expulsions akin to ethnic cleansing caused by the ‘scorched earth’ military actions of the government troops and local militias. These militias, known as the ‘Janjawiid’, have been largely recruited from Arabized peoples from northern and eastern Darfur. They have also attracted criminals and adventurers from a wider area stretching from Chad to northern Cameroon and the Central African Republic. The war has generated insecurity and caused the wholesale destruction of livelihoods and socio-economic systems in the Darfur region.
According to some observers, the mass violence against the civilian population has led to the deaths of about 300,000 to 350,000 people and to untold cases of abuse, cruelty and oppression. Around 250,000 Darfurians are currently living in refugee camps in Chad, and another 1.8 million internally displaced people are in IDP camps in Sudan itself. International humanitarian relief agencies are having a hard time providing the displaced with food, medical care and other services. The camps are unsafe and are regularly besieged by the Janjawiid and other armed criminal groups, and the international NGO and UN staff are facing regular harassment. The under-funded and under-equipped African Union peacekeeping forces are a mere 7000 strong and, with a weak mandate, they can do very little to improve security and establish stability.
The Darfur problem is probably the worst crisis in Africa at the moment, with international organizations and western governments describing it as genocide. Darfur has demonstrated the international community’s inability to protect civilians from systematic abuse by their own national government and its failure to find a solution that will allow the victims the chance to rebuild their lives. Several rounds of negotiations have been held between the government of Sudan and the different insurgent movements, but as yet to no avail. A persistent pattern is the ill-will, if not bad faith, of the government, as is evident in the continuous breaching of agreements, successive ceasefires and preliminary peace deals – such as the April 2006 ‘Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) signed in Abuja, Nigeria, with one of the three main insurgent movements in Darfur by the Sudanese government and later also by the rebels. The news of another ceasefire deal in December 2006, brokered by US Senator Bill Richardson, was marked shortly afterwards by a bombing campaign on local villages by the Sudanese air force.
Even before the current conflict, Darfur was already the scene of violence when, under the government of the ‘democratically elected’ Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, government-sponsored militia forces attacked the African (i.e. non-Arabic-speaking) populations in southwestern Darfur in 1986-89. In the ten years prior to 2003, other violent incidents were reported as well and before that there had been a traditional pattern of tensions between the more Arabized nomadic populations in Darfur and the region’s sedentary African peoples, such as the Fur, Daju, Tungur, Zaghawa, Berti and Masalit. These agriculturalists had seasonally determined conflicts with the pastoral nomads over the use of water resources, grazing land and agricultural fields, problems that were slowly aggravated over the past fifty year with the drying out of traditional pasture lands and increased population pressure on land. But in contrast to today’s fighting, local people then used established and accepted frameworks for dealing with conflicts and compensation for damage. The Sudanese government has seriously disturbed, if not destroyed, such traditional social mechanisms through its military intervention, its politicization of the ethnic conflict and its seditious and divisive power politics, giving the advantage to its armed allies among the pastoralist Arabized peoples, like the Rizeygat, Abbala, Ta’isha, Humr and others. It should be noted that these peoples are not united, or even equally involved in the violence, and indications are that many of them are now also suffering themselves as a result of the conflict.
The current phase of armed conflict in Darfur began in early 2003 shortly after the Sudanese government and the SPLA rebels in the south of Sudan reached a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) after decades of civil war. The Darfurians – Muslims like the north-central Sudanese – feared marginalization and exclusion from the division of national resources agreed upon in the CPA, and started a revolt by targeting military installations and air fields on 25 February 2003. The government then reacted disproportionately with massive force, aiming to crush potential insurgency in the Muslim western fringes of Sudan in order to prevent a repeat of the scenario in southern Sudan. Darfurians had also been the mainstay of the civil service and the army of Sudan, and were perceived by the Sudanese central elites to be a possible threat to the national integrity of the country. The subsequent four-year war has, however, shown that the ‘national integrity’ of Sudan is a fiction, and that the country is deeply divided and held together mainly by force. The oppressive violence of the Sudanese army and its allied Janjawiid militias has backfired, the war has intensified at tremendous human cost but rebel forces have held their ground and cannot easily be defeated. Some have also become embroiled in human rights abuse. The common people are experiencing unimaginable suffering and no negotiated settlement is in sight. EU and US efforts to intervene persistently meet a wall of refusal erected by the Sudanese government, which feels secure with its new allies (China and Russia, who do not raise the human rights agenda) and is enjoying its recently found oil wealth, which since 1999 has been providing huge financial leverage. The rebels do not seem to be inclined to negotiate or to lay down their arms due to the government record of broken promises, abuse and military force.
The Darfur war has now spread to the Central African Republic and to Chad, provoking an armed revolt by Sudan-backed rebels against the Chadian government. As a last resort, an internationally mediated agreement on Darfur will have to be reached though the UN and/or the AU, but before this happens the tragedy will continue to wreak further havoc on the people and their land.
الرئيسية 
البوابة 
