Activists on the Human Catastrophe in Darfur Have a Lot of Questions

Explaining the Crisis in Darfur: Background and Context

Prepared by Michael Kevane for UnderstandingSudan.org

version: March 11, 2006

Activists on the human catastrophe in Darfur have a lot of questions.Is this a genocide?How should the catastrophe be ended?What is the connection between Darfur and the civil war in southern Sudan?Because of difficulties in answering these questions, many activists have a hard time making a convincing intellectual case for action in Darfur.They especially recognize the sharp contrast between activism for Darfur and activism to end apartheid in South Africa in the late 1980s.In that case, there was a clear goal: ending apartheid and implementation of full civil liberties for the black population of South Africa.Practically any tactic was acceptable: sanctions, divestment, civil disobedience, and even violent resistance or support of violent resistance.The leaders of the African National Congress were men and women of integrity, and their goals were clear.In the Darfur case, it is much harder to know and trust leaders in Sudan and Darfur, and hard to know what they want.Indeed, it isn’t always clear that the rebel leaders in Darfur know what they want.

So what is an activist to do?I believe that the right thing to do is to make sure that activists know the basic, correct narrative of what happened and is happening in Darfur, in the context of broader events in Sudan.Once the narrative is mastered, then a few goals become clear.Once the goals are clear, then activists can have proper debates about what tactics will lead to those goals.So the agenda for an activist is narrative, goals, and tactics.In this short essay I describe the background and context that form the narrative for understanding what is happening in Darfur.

February 2003 is when the low-level violence that had characterized Darfur for decades exploded onto the world stage.Darfur is an ethnic mosaic, with many different ethnic groups.The larger groups are the Fur, the Masalit, the Zaghawa, the Baggara, the Rizeigat, the Zeyadiyya, and others.These groups are all subdivided; the Rizeigat include a cattle herding section in the south, and a camel-herding section, the Abbala sub-section, in the north.The Abbala are themselves divided into two clans, the Mahamid and the Mahariyya.One sub-clan in the Mahamid is the Um Jalul, whose sheikh is Musa Hilal, widely regarded as a key figure in organizing the violence that began in earnest in 2003.There is and has been intermarriage.People in Darfur can and do claim multiple identities.Some groups, often locally called Arabs, trace their lineages back to the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula.Other groups, called zunji or zurga by the Arab groups, trace their lineages back to local groups.Every person in Darfur who is honest with himself or herself will admit that every person in Darfur can trace their lineage through both groups.There is no one in Darfur who is 100%.Politicians and traditional leaders in Darfur, as elsewhere, often have an interest in mobilizing people on ethnic lines.They tell their followers that the other group is getting more resources than they are.Over the years, ethnic groups in Darfur seem to wax and wane in terms of how well their leaders are able to mobilize them into violence.Many young men in Darfur went to fight for the government side in the long civil war in southern Sudan.Others went to Libya, others have fought in Chad’s long civil war.So militarization of Darfur has been a fact of life for several decades.Every year until 2003 brought dozens of clashes, but also brought attempts by leaders to work out resolutions of those clashes.The military government of northern Sudan increasingly turned to a small number of ethnic groups in Darfur, those that identified them most keenly as Arabs, and suppressed, through arbitrary detention and harassment, leaders of the Fur and Zaghawa ethnic group who sought greater regional autonomy and greater development resources for the region.Leaders of these groups, as well as political leaders who fell out of the military government in the late 1990s, formed two rebel groups, the JEM and the SLA, and these groups attacked the military in earnest in 2003.In retaliation, the government armed the Arab groups it had been favoring, and these groups, in coordination and many times under the direction of the Sudanese armed forces, launched all-out war against civilian populations identified as potentially sympathetic to the rebel groups.The result, as every Darfur activist knows, has been hundreds of thousands killed, and up to three million persons displaced from their village homes and forced to live in camps where they are entirely dependent on international assistance.The government of Sudan has done little to nothing to resolve the insecurity in Darfur, and peace talks dragging on in Abuja, Nigeriahave not been successful.

It is very important to understand that the targeting of civilians by proxy militias was the favorite tactic of the northern government in their long civil war against rebels in southern Sudan.That tactic and war was very similar to Darfur, and only 8 years ago in the province of Bahr al Ghazal proxy militias and government manipulation of international relief led to a famine where hundreds of thousands of people died, especially children.So for the government of northern Sudan there is nothing new or different in Darfur.

The southern rebels, the SPLA, signed a peace agreement with the northern military regime on January 9, 2005.The CPA calls for power-sharing- the northern military gets 52% of power, the south 28%, and other groups 30%.It calls for elections in 2008.it calls for wealth sharing, where the $4 billion a year of oil revenues will be split half half between north and south.And it calls for a referendum in 2011 where the south can vote to become independent.No one doubts that the south will indeed vote to become independent.The oil of Sudan is located in the south.There will be hard bargaining between north and south over what happens to the oil with an independent southern Sudan.The military regime in the north will try to disrupt the electoral process.

This countdown to the referendum in 2011 is one reason why the rebels in Darfur have difficulties articulating a clear statement of what they want.It is impossible to write down who the implementing parties of a peace treaty will be, between Darfur rebels and the Khartoum government, since that regime may not exist in 2011.So that is why there is a lot of foot-dragging.A political resolution to the Darfur crisis necessarily has implications for the conduct of the interim period until 2011.Neither the military regime nor the SPLA quite know their strength, but all parties know that the rebels are now no longer able to score a significant military victory against the regime.So we have a stalemate, where political leaders prefer the status quo of displacement and international aid, because they cannot predict of manage the dynamics of a peace settlement.