The US government is considering whether to upgrade the disaster in Sudan’s Darfur province – identified by the UN and aid agencies as the world’s most serious humanitarian crisis – to one of genocide. This apparent exercise in semantics seems self-indulgent when it is already known that some 1.3 million Darfur people have been driven from their homes by Sudan government-backed militias; that countless tens of thousands have died; and that further mass deaths from starvation and disease loom.
But given the tortured way diplomacy works, a decision to declare genocide in Darfur would have huge strategic and humanitarian implications. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is pushing the internal discussions on upgrading the disaster, said: “I’m not prepared to say what is the correct legal term for what is happening. All I know is there are at least a million people desperately in need, and many of them will die if we can’t get the international community mobilised and if we can’t get the Sudanese to co-operate with the international community. And it won’t make a whole lot of difference after the fact [to Darfur’s people] what you’ve called it.”
A decade ago, US President Bill Clinton, unnerved by a handful of grisly deaths of American soldiers in Somalia, declined to classify as genocide events in Rwanda, thus enabling him to enforce a scaling down of a UN peacekeeping force just as the mass killings of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus began. Clinton in due course apologised, years too late, for his bad judgement.
Similar reluctance to use tough diplomatic language hamstrung Dutch UN peacekeeping troops who were unable to prevent mass executions of Muslims by Serbian forces in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
US officials have so far used the term ethnic cleansing to describe the apparent attempt by Sudan’s Arab Islamist government to drive out black Africans in Darfur – a region the size of Britain – to make way for Arab tribes. A declaration of genocide would impose huge legal and moral pressure on Washington and other powers to take drastic action against Sudan, Africa’s biggest country, with vast newly discovered oil reserves and formerly the home of Osama bin Laden.
There is reluctance by all powers to utter the word genocide because most, including the US, are signatories to the UN Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which requires drastic responses by the signatories. The UN treaty describes genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
To humanitarian and aid agencies, and to most informed people who have followed events, the treaty language describes precisely what is happening in that remote region of the Sudan on the margins of the Sahara Desert. This newspaper reported two months ago that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was warning that an international force might be needed to prevent Rwanda-style genocide. The risk of genocide remains frighteningly real, Annan said.
Darfur is a little-known region of Africa and its peoples have not been party to protracted negotiations to end Sudan’s 50-year civil war between the Arabs of the north and the animist and Christian African peoples of the far south near the borders of Uganda and Kenya.
The pattern of the separate war in Darfur is, however, now becoming clear. It is focused on the Jebel Marra, an 8000 square mile mountain area rising to more than 10,000 feet in the central belt of the region, which no aid agencies or journalists have been able to reach during the current crisis.
The Jebel Marra massif, with well-watered volcanic soils and lush valleys dotted with waterfalls, has for centuries been the home of the black African Fur tribe (Darfur translates literally as abode of the Fur). The Fur, and other smaller black African clans, were converted to Sunni Islam in the 17th-century and a sultanate was established.
The British, who ruled the Sudan from 1898 until 1956, initially recognised the autonomy of the Darfur sultanate. But the last Sultan, Ali Dinar, made a fatal strategic error in 1916 when he allied himself with Britain’s World War One enemy, the Ottoman Turks. The British colonial administration in Khartoum expelled the sultan and incorporated Darfur into Sudan.
Darfur, far from the centre of power and accessible overland only by shifting tracks through the savannah and desert, was low on development priorities for British colonialists and the Arab regime that took power at independence nearly half a century ago. After Darfur’s incorporation into Sudan, the sedentary black African Fur farmers and nomadic Arab camel and cattle herders on the plains girding the Jebel Marra rubbed along together uneasily for several decades.
Occasional skirmishes were settled through negotiations and Africans and Arabs exchanged goods and services. There was never large-scale war, and Britain administered the whole of Darfur, its peoples and its once immense herds of game with only a handful of colonial civil servants.
The Jebel Marra and the Fur have become targets for the Sudan government for two interconnected reasons. First, severe drought, desertification and over-population on Darfur’s plains have put the nomadic Arab groups under severe stress. An attempt by Khartoum to push Arab tribes into Fur mountain territory in the 1980s led to clashes in which 2500 Fur and 500 Arabs died.
Last year, a Fur-led resistance movement, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), launched a feeble uprising in response to government repression.
Khartoum responded by arming an Arab militia more than 20,000-strong with light weapons and rocket launchers and unleashing them against Fur and other African villages. The militias, named the Janjaweed, or “men on horseback”, are backed by Sudan Air Force helicopter gunships and Antonov-12 bombers.
It is clear now that Khartoum’s aim is to flush all the Fur out of the fertile mountains and resettle the area with nomadic plains Arabs who traditionally feel superior to the settled Fur, whom they refer to as tukul (“kitchen dwellers”) and zurug (roughly, “niggers”). Khartoum’s motives in the Jebel Marra are racist and ecological. The plains can no longer sustain the Arab population and the Fur, who share Sunni Islam with Sudan’s Arabs, are ethnically expendable in pursuit of Arab survival and supremacy.
The full extent of the slaughter of the Fur will not be known for many months. No one has reported from within the Jebel Marra, and with heavy rain beginning this month there is little hope of access from the outside for several months. Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times’s special correspondent on the Chad-Sudan border, has described the campaign by the Khartoum government and the Janjaweed against the Fur as “The most vicious ethnic cleansing you’ve never heard of … Sudan’s leaders should not be able to get away with mass murder just because they are shrewd enough to choose victims who inhabit a poor region without airports, electricity or paved roads.”
Second, ethnic cleansing in the Jebel Marra gels with peace talks in Kenya between Khartoum and southern African rebels to end their half-century conflict. The internationally brokered deal, if it can be pulled off, will lead to sharing between north and south of newly discovered oil riches and an opportunity for the south to hold a secession referendum in six years time.
The stakes are huge, says Chester Crocker, former US secretary of state for Africa and now Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University. Millions of lives have been lost in Sudan’s intractable conflict. Negotiating peace in Sudan has required years of intense work. Making it stick will be even more demanding.
In the rough and cynical negotiating between north and south, Khartoum is trying to claim – in advance of probable southern secession in 2010 or 2011 – three oil-rich and fertile areas in central Sudan populated by black Africans, notably the Nuba Mountains. In the land-grab between northern Arabs and southern Africans that is part of the negotiation, the black Fur Africans have become one of the expendable pieces on the chess board. The Fur may now only be saved if the US and its allies declare genocide in the Jebel Marra with all the serious implications for strong and concerted action against Khartoum that may imply. Otherwise, it may be the end for the Fur and their centuries-old way of life.
http://www.sundayherald.com/42700
