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Show Page 10 The Ogden Valley news Volume XIV Issue XIX July 15, 2007 A History of Power Politics in Darfur and Southern Sudan By Shanna Francis Note: This is Part III in a three part series. Power Plays Although religion and ethnicity are often deferred to as issues behind the conflict in Darfur and southern Sudan, in reality, it has more to do with power politics—a long running battle between Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bahir and radical Islamic cleric Hassan al-Turabi. Turabi is a charismatic college professor and former speaker of parliament in Sudan. But even before September 11, 2001, he was considered an extremist; he still refers to Osama bin Laden as a hero. Recently, the United Nations and human rights experts have accused Turabi of backing one of Darfur’s key rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), where some of Turabi’s to top former students hold leadership positions. Ghazi Suleiman, a Sudanese human rights lawyer, states, “Darfur is simply the battlefield for a power struggle over Khartoum. That’s why the government hit back so hard; they saw Turabi’s hand, and they want to stay in control of Sudan at any cost.” Also, Sudan’s President Bahir is fighting hard to keep U.N. peacekeepers out of Darfur by accusing western “crusaders” of trying to take over the country. Bahir and his regime are afraid of losing control over the entire region, especially in the south, where southern African rebels are fighting for independence and, economically, a lot is at stake. In addition, an already tenuous situation, where African farmers and Arabic nomads have traditionally had to compete for limited resources in western Sudan’s Darfur region, became especially ripe for armed aggression following a prolonged and severe drought that heightened in 1983. Deadly clashes in the later 1980s and 1990s broke out after several severe dry seasons began to claim the already limited and valuable arable lands for which the two traditional groups—farmers and herders—were already competing. Draught conditions forced the nomads, or herders from the north, to move further south in search of grazing lands for their livestock. This only increased tensions between the two major groups within the country. Relatively distant from general governmental authority, deep-seated traditional customs predominated over state-related legal guidelines, providing even more fuel to an already explosive environment. Meanwhile, the Muslim government in the north was engaged in a civil war with rebels in the Christian/animist south. The Sudanese government funded Darfur’s Arab militias— which came to be known as the “Janjaweed,” or “evil armed horsemen.” This also fanned ArabAfrican tensions in Darfur and transformed a competition for scarce resources into a largescale violent confrontation tinged with serious racial and ethnic overtones. Arabs formed militias, burned African villages, and killed thousands. While in 2003, the Africans formed “self-defense” groups that became Darfur’s first insurgents. When Sudan’s President Omar al-Bahir instructed the state militia to “eliminate the rebellion,” African civilians in villages that were thought to harbor rebels and insurgents were targeted. A report by the U.S. State Department concluded that the Sudanese army forces helped to raze and destroy villages, sometimes even using government aircraft to bomb settlements and villages before ground troops attacked. Eyewitness accounts tell that, not only were male rebels being sought out and murdered, but also the elderly, and women and children. The human rights abuses committed by the state against the civilian population and opposition forces include arbitrary arrests, torture, and summary executions; indiscriminate bombing of civilian sites; denial of freedom of expression, press, and religion; and kidnapping of women and children for use as slave labor or prostitution. In October 2005, a World Health Organization official estimated that 70,000 displaced persons had died in the previous six months from malnutrition and disease directly related to the displacement of Darfurians; this figure does not include violent deaths at the hands of the Janjaweed and government troops. The current crisis in Darfur heightened in February of 2003, just after the government began peace negotiations to resolve the civil war with the south. The loosely aligned SPLM/A and JEM rebels attacked government targets in central Darfur and demanded autonomy. After a ceasefire mediated by Chadian President Idriss Déby between the government and rebel groups fell apart in December 2003, Khartoum used the Janjaweed militias to attack the villages populated by African Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa peoples. The SPLM/A and JEM draw much of their support from these groups. Although these African ethnic groups are mostly Muslim, they practice a form of the religion that is infused with Sufism and animism—a belief in a single supreme god with many lesser gods where animals are worshipped as earthly representatives of certain gods—a practice, as stated earlier, held in contempt by the Arab Islamic leaders. Robert Collins, and expert in African history at the University of Santa Barbara, California states, “The ethnic cleansing in Darfur is a combination of wanting to convert Muslims who are looked on as going astray and driving them off the land.” According to a report by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, almost 2 million Darfurians, or a third of the region’s population, have been internally displaced as a result of the systematic destruction of villages in the region. The latest U.N. figures show that 4 million people in, or from, the Darfur region need emergency aid (World News). Approximately 200,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Chad. It is estimated that 350,000 people have died as a result of violence, disease, and/or starvation. Plays for power and greed also threaten surrounding nations. Chadian General Mahamat Nimir Hamata, who is in charge of Chad’s most affected eastern province, stated, “We risk a conflagration that will consume the entire region. We’ll be another Congo,” where troops from a half dozen nations came and looted mines of diamonds, copper, and cobalt. More than 4 million people died from the regional chaos. While the world’s opinions on the situation in Darfur and whether to label the actions by the Sudanese government an act of genocide may still be in question, many state leaders, at least, recognize that, if not genocide, the conflict is a severe case of ethnic cleansing, or an overreaching and extreme effort by the Sudanese government to quail southern rebels. In July 2004, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution labeling the situation in Darfur as genocide; by September of that year, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also came out and clearly labeled the actions being taken in Darfur as “genocide.” He based his statement on a U.S. government-funded study where 1,136 Darfurian refugees in Chad had been surveyed. Several weeks later, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, George W. Bush termed the events in Darfur as genocide, making him the first U.S. President to conclusively apply the term and invoke the 56 year old Genocide Convention, which was developed after the Holocaust to ensure that “never again” such atrocities of the destruction of a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group be allowed on the world’s stage. The U.S. was the first coun- try in the history of the Genocide Convention to call upon the Security Council to take action under Article VIII. But invoking the convention has made little difference in Darfur, and has shown itself to have little to no bite in trying to stop the large scale and state supported killings in Sudan. The U.N. Security Council did commission further studies and made vague threats to impose economic sanctions against Sudan’s growing oil industry if government leaders from Khartoum did not stop the violence. But a council deadline given Khartoum has had little effect in waylaying the violence, though humanitarian aid has poured into the area given the attention from world media sources. Instead, the statements and recognition by U.S. and U.N. officials seem to have only made matters worse. “Rather than spurring greater international action, that label only seems to have strengthened Sudan’s rebels; providing a false sense of assurance that they need not negotiate with the government in an effort to ease tensions, and that the U.S. will support them, even when they commit their own attacks. Peace talks have broken down seven times, partly because the rebel groups have walked out of negotiations. On the other side, Sudan’s government has used the “genocide” label to market itself throughout the Middle East as another “victim” of America’s anti-Arab and anti-Islamic policies.” Calling out the atrocities as genocide, then doing nothing to address the problem has been deemed as especially counterproductive by groups trying to generate support in the region for action to address the dire political situation. Looking at Darfur in the context of lessons learned from Rwanda, the report recommends ways to end the Darfur crisis and avoid future ones. In the short term, peacekeepers can be deployed to protect camps, as the African Union is offering to do in the Darfur context. The U.N. will have to assume responsibility for the costs of such deployments. Proposals for a large U.N. peacekeeping force to disarm the militia and pacify the region are unrealistic and could lead to further turmoil. Simultaneously, “every effort must be made to re-engage the parties in political negotiations. It may be necessary to broaden the discussions to include representatives of other regions in Sudan and a broader set of political parties because the issues are so fundamental to the future of the Sudanese DARFUR cont. on page 12 |