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Origins of the Darfur Crisis of 2003-04
Alex de Waal
When I lived in Darfur, the region was at peace. Barely a month after I left, more than one thousand displaced Dinka were murdered in ed Da‘ien, marking the beginning of Darfur’s current era of bloodshed. In retrospect, the ability I had to travel the entire length and breadth of the region, with minimal security worries and no travel permit required, was a luxury that no subsequent researcher or aid worker has had. By 1987, political processes were in motion that led ultimately to the outbreak of war in 2003 and its escalation into genocidal massacre and displacement. It is deeply sad that Darfur should not only be a textbook study of famine, but of genocide as well.
Throughout Famine that Kills there are hints of coming violence. The discussion of the strained relations between the Fur farmers of Nankose and the nearby pastoralists (p. 52), and the disputes associated with moving herds through the settled areas of Goz Dango (pp. 155-6) are examples. But perhaps the most significant clue lies in Sheikh Hilal Musa’s comments on the disturbed moral geography of Darfur consequent on drought (p. 87). It was in long discussions with the ageing nazir of the Jalul Rizeigat at Aamo near Fata Borno in November 1985, that I became aware of how the changing ecology of Darfur also profoundly disturbed the moral order of society. Sheikh Hilal upbraided me for not speaking Arabic like an Englishman (colonial officers were trained in classical Arab), served sweet tea on a silver platter, presented me with a giraffe-tail fly whisk, and told me the world was coming to an end.
The entire text of Famine that Kills contains not a single reference to ‘Africans’, whether ‘black’ or ‘indigenous.’ The terminology and the concepts that underlie it were simply not in use. Identities were complex and overlapping. Individuals and groups could shift from one category to another. For example the Gimir people appear to have become ‘Arabs’ in the last two decades. In short, Darfur showed a characteristic ‘Sudanic’ pattern of permeable ethnic boundaries. Racism existed, evident in the reciprocal insults of Arab and Fur at Nankose when arguing over pastures. But Darfur’s Arab-African dichotomy is an ideological construct that has emerged very recently, largely as a result of events outside the region. Arab supremacism in Darfur was born in 1987 along with the region’s ‘Arab Alliance,’ which owes more to Khartoum and Libya than to any realities in Darfur. This in turn led Fur and Masalit militants to adopt the label ‘African’, emphasizing a common political identity with Southerners and the Nuba. This simplistic dichotomization was encouraged by foreign commentators’ casual use of the same terminology to interpret Sudan’s civil war.
But neither must we create an idealized harmonious past for Darfur. Just as the point of historical reference for 1984-5 was the julu famine of seventy years earlier, there are obvious historical parallels for today in the ‘turmoil and bloodshed’ that marked the decades after 1874. Amid the struggles for resource and state power of those years we can identify millenarian and racist ideology. By the same token, what we know about the nature and scale of the atrocities committed today may give us insight into the unrecorded human experience of war, massacre, pillage and rape a century ago.
How did the conflict and massacres of 2003-04 originate? There is little writing in English on this issue worthy of note (for an exception, see International Crisis Group 2004). Let me briefly examine the roles of land, settlement of disputes, national politics, and ideology.
Land rights are key to understanding Darfur and the conflicts therein. One important set of issues surrounds communal land jurisdiction, notably the question of the still-uncertain legal status of the concept of a tribal dar, hakura, or homeland. In his overview of Sudan’s land laws, Saeed el Mahdi noted cautiously that tribes have become ‘almost the owners of their homelands’ (1979, p. 2, emphasis added; see also Rünger 1987). Let us note the anomalous situation of several pastoral groups that were not awarded dars by the colonial authorities. While the large Baggara groups of southern Darfur were all awarded de facto jurisdiction over substantial tracts of territory, smaller and more itinerant groups were either given more limited dars (Beni Hussein, Zayadiya) or none at all (Salamat and the three branches of the northern Rizeigat, namely Jalul, Mahariya and Ereigat). These latter groups were inevitably more dependent on the stability of the ‘moral geography’ of Darfur. When land was plentiful, this was rarely problematic, but the rapid using-up of free cultivable land and the degradation of the range meant that land disputes became more common and more bloody in the 1980s. Recall Sheikh Hilal’s interpretation of the ecological changes in moral and cosmic terms. Perhaps it is no coincidence that his son Musa is the leader of the Janjawiid militia, and that the northern Rizeigat are the backbone of this force.
The maintenance of law and order and the resolution of disputes are two of the most basic functions of government. Neither has been consistently performed in Darfur since the 1980s. President Nimeiri’s creation of a Darfur regional government in 1980, and his failure to provide it with resources, meant that local administration went into a steep decline from which it has not recovered. In the mid-1980s, the two big development projects in the region (Western Savanna Development Corporation and Jebel Marra Rural Development Project) and Save the Children Fund, which was handling food aid distributions on behalf of USAID, had larger budgets, more vehicles, and greater capacity to operate in rural areas than the government. If the police wanted to conduct an operation against brigands, they needed to commandeer agency vehicles and fuel. The governor was no longer able to cover the costs of lengthy or well-attended inter-tribal conferences.
As a result, law enforcement collapsed almost entirely, and the authorities compensated for the rarity of apprehending bandits with the savagery of the punishments they meted out. Communities acquired guns to deter armed robbers. Herders, having more valuable and more mobile capital stock, armed themselves more. Without mediation, disputes escalated. When inter-communal conferences were convened, government did not have the capacity to implement the decisions reached. The division of Darfur into three states and the revival of the Council of Native Administration, both in 1994-5, did nothing to address the basic problem of empty local coffers. On the contrary, assigning amarat (‘principalities’—the new form of dars) on an ethnic basis became simply a charter for militarized ethnicity and its corollary, ethnic cleansing.
Darfur has managed well in the past with a light hand of administration. Manipulation by successive governments in Khartoum led to war. The first conflict was sparked in 1987 when the Libya-Chad war overflowed into Sudan. For some years, Libya had hosted exiles from Sahelian Arab groups that ranged from the Sudanese Ansar (followers of the Mahdi, in exile opposed to the Nimeiri government) to Tuareg rebels from Mali. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi armed and trained them and recruited many into an ‘Islamic Legion,’ which served as a spearhead for his war in Chad. He nursed the dream of an ‘Arab belt’ across the entire Sahel. After 1986, through Gaddafi’s partnership with Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi, Libyan-backed militia used Darfur as a rear base, and flooded Darfur with automatic weapons, advertised the impotence of local government, and brought an ideology of Arab supremacism. In response, the Fur organized village defence groups. It became a Darfurian civil war. Belatedly, in May 1989, popular pressure compelled al Mahdi to convene a peace conference in el Fasher.
Brigadier Omer al Bashir launched his coup d’etat while this conference was in session. At first, many Darfurians welcomed the coup, hoping that a military government would show the resolve to ensure security in the region. But political polarization was well in train, exemplified by the defection of a leading Fur Islamist, Daud Bolad, to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), whose leader Dr John Garang was seeking an alliance of all of Sudan’s marginalized ‘African’ peoples. In 1991, Bolad led an ill-fated military expedition into the region, aiming to ignite an insurrection among the Fur. Bolad was captured by the military governor of Darfur, Tayeb Ibrahim ‘Sikha’—his nickname meaning ‘iron bar’, for his skill at wielding that instrument at student demonstrations, when he was bodyguard to none other than Bolad. Helped by his capture of Bolad’s notebooks, Ibrahim quietly and ruthlessly rounded up the rebellion’s supporters. The Beni Halba militia, known as fursan (cavalry), which had fought the SPLA unit, were rewarded with the provocative renaming of their district capital Idd al Fursan (it was formerly Idd al Ghanam). But Ibrahim also reached out to Darfur’s non-Arabs, seeking to neutralize the Darfurian critique of their continuing marginalization in Khartoum politics. He praised their piety and stressed that citizenship was founded on Islamic faith, not race. It was an expedient stratagem, which reflected the wider ambition of Sudan’s Islamist leader, Hassan al Turabi, to broaden the base of the Islamic movement from the riverain Arab elites to non-Arab Moslems.
The project of militant Islam in Sudan reached its peak in the mid-1990s. Thereafter, weakened by internal contradictions and regional antagonism, it began to implode (de Waal and Abdel Salam 2004). The movement split in 1999, when President Bashir dismissed Turabi from his position as Speaker of the National Assembly and later arrested him. Many of the leaders and most younger cadres followed Turabi into opposition. This split had several ramifications. One was that henceforth, the government’s Islamism was rhetorical and defensive: it had abandoned its ambitions at social transformation. Another was that the division took on a regional or ethnic dimension. Most of the ‘westerners’ (from Darfur and Kordofan) went into opposition, while most of the riverain Arabs (and security officers) stayed in government. Shortly afterwards, Islamist ‘westerners’ produced the ‘Black Book’, which detailed how successive governments had marginalized Darfur and Kordofan. Some Islamists formed the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) to fight in Darfur, and others supported it more or less openly. One dimension to the Darfur war is a civil war among the Islamists. The intimacy of this conflict among former comrades militates against its easy resolution.
Meanwhile, conditions were ripe for Darfur’s radical secularists to revive the resistance movement that had aborted in 1991. The backbone of this is lawyers, schoolteachers and community leaders, from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, who formed the Darfur Liberation Front. After beginning military operations in early 2003 they renamed themselves the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army, in a deliberate echo of the SPLA. The Islamist and radical secularists found themselves in an improbable coalition. The SLA quickly showed military panache and capacity, attacking (among other targets) el Fasher airport and destroying military aircraft.
The Sudanese state is weak, but for short periods of time it can unleash formidable destructive forces. For a decade, the Islamist alliance shielded Darfurians from the historic processes of violent depredation of the Sudanese peripheries by the Sudanese state, and when that shield was lifted, war and massacre duly followed. Was this assault driven by a powerful and explicit ideology (cf. Kuper 1981)? For its 1992 Kordofan jihad, the government had sought an elaborate fatwa to justify their onslaught. Other genocidal episodes in the Sudanese civil war, including the militia raids into Bahr el Ghazal in the late 1980s and the clearing of the oilfields of western Upper Nile during 1998-2002, had only the thinnest ideological veneer. No Islamist legitimation has been attempted for the Darfur campaign—not least because the JEM has better Moslem credentials than the government forces, which have further spoiled their record by desecrating mosques. The latent ‘ideology’ of ‘Sudanization’, namely the spread of specific social and cultural values, economic and political relations, associated with the riverain core of the Sudanese state, is at work, in tandem with the Arab supremacism of the Janjawiid leadership. However, the conjunction of these specific forms of Arabization is surely too weak an explanation for the viciousness of today’s assault.
The Sudan government’s military strategy is the principal reason for the massacre and displacement. Following a twenty-year-old practice, it has fought a low-budget counter-insurgency, using self-financing militias and the cheap weapons of scorched earth and famine. Local components contributing to the growth of militias include economic deprivation and failure to resolve disputes (de Waal 1994b), but the most important factor is the strategy adopted by security agencies, notably military intelligence. Recurrent untrammeled violence by paramilitaries has been a particularly horrible feature of the war. More Sudanese citizens have died from hunger and disease than by massacre and assassination. In pursuing the militia strategy, the security cabal has often acted beyond the purview of the legislature and executive, and even in opposition to senior officers of the regular army. The security-militia nexus has thrived amid the division and irresolution of different ruling cliques and institutions. It has regularly sought to delay or derail peace negotiations with the SPLA. Arguably, it is the very core of the Sudanese state.
In this context, it is unsurprising that when the SLA and JEM insurrection intensified in 2003, the security cabal should seek out a local militia to arm and support. Candidates were available including the Beni Halba fursan and other armed nomads. The result was the janjawiid. The motives are power, pride, greed and the sheer habit of taking counter-insurgency to its annihilatory extreme.
Is it genocide? Here we encounter problems of definitional bluntness, similar to those encountered when asking what counts as famine. In contrast to the rich conceptual history of ‘famine’, the term ‘genocide’ is a neologism barely sixty years old, whose coinage was coincident with its legal definition in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Because it is a crime, the diagnosis of ‘genocide’ hinges on the perpetrators’ intent. Its lay usage is identified with the extreme and paradigmatic case, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. What is happening in Darfur is not Genocide (capitalized) in this sense of the absolute extermination of a population. It does however fit the definition contained in the Genocide Convention, which is much broader and encompasses systematic campaigns against ethnic groups with the intention of eliminating them in part or whole. This (uncapitalized) ‘genocide’ is a legal term of art, and there is no a priori reason why it should straightforwardly correspond to lived experience or ethnographic complexity. Despite the caveats outlined above, Darfur’s ethnic groups are readily identifiable (e.g. by native language). Moreover, genocidaires invariably seek to obliterate any ethnic complexities and indeterminacies with a simplistic labeling of their target group, exactly as is occurring now. The violence is far in excess of what would be considered proportionate for counter-insurgency purposes, including the deliberate killing, raping and starving of civilians, and the destruction of their livelihoods. Genocidal intent can be shown.
When genocide is diagnosed we must respond. Leaving aside the question of military intervention, we should note that an effective response to Darfur’s crisis will be complicated, comprehensive and long. Moreover, in the spirit of Famine that Kills, we should attend to the understandings of genocide and its cognates by the people of Darfur (victims, perpetrators and bystanders), and take these concepts and viewpoints into account, rather than privileging an external viewpoint, however legally expert that may be. Let me conclude with just one preliminary observation on the challenge of an ethnographically-literate response to genocide in Sudan. Outsiders should be humble in the face of the lived experience of surviving genocide. The people of the Nuba Mountains, forgotten by the world, withstood the genocidal assaults of 1988-92 entirely through their own efforts (African Rights 1995). It would have been preferable for them not to have been tested to such limits. But, given that these remarkable people have faced oblivion and survived, scholars, activists and practitioners need to learn from their demonstrated expertise. The people of Darfur have shown comparable resilience in surviving famine: let us hope they have the same skills when faced with genocidal massacre.
Alex de Waal
Addis Ababa, July 2004
Excerpted, with author’s permission, from: Alex de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, 1984-1985, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.