History of Darfur conflict

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

Darfur conflict
Irregular combatants in North Darfur. The Arabic text on the bumper says "The Sudan Liberation Army" (SLA).
Date 2003 - Location Darfur Result
Combatants
factions of the SLA Justice & Equality Mvmnt	Janjaweed Government of Sudan Minnawi-faction of the SLA
Commanders
SLA: ? JEM: ?	Janjaweed: ? Sudan: Omar al-Bashir SLA: Minni Minnawi
Casualties
300,000 civilians killed

The Darfur conflict, which has officially been declared a genocide, is an ongoing armed conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, mainly between the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited from the tribes of the Abbala (camel-herding Arabs), and the non-Baggara people (mostly land-tilling tribes) of the region. The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, has provided arms and assistance and has participated in joint attacks with the group, systematically targeting the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit ethnic groups in Darfur. The conflict began in July 2003. Unlike in the Second Sudanese Civil War, which was fought between the primarily Muslim north and Christian and Animist south, in Darfur most of the residents are Muslim, as are the Janjaweed.^[1]

Estimated number of deaths in the conflict have ranged from 50,000 (World Health Organization, September 2004) to 450,000 (Dr. Eric Reeves, 28 April 2006). Most NGOs use 400,000, a figure from the Coalition for International Justice that has since been cited by the United Nations. As many as 2.5 million are thought to have been displaced.^[2] (See Counting deaths section, below)

The mass media has described the conflict as both "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide." The U.S. Government has described it as genocide, although the United Nations has declined to do so. (See List of declarations of genocide in Darfur)

After fighting worsened in July and August 2006, on August 31, 2006, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 1706 which called for a new 20,000-troop UN peacekeeping force to supplant or supplement a poorly funded, ill-equipped 7,000-troop African Union Mission in Sudan peacekeeping force. Sudan strongly objected to the resolution and said that it would see the UN forces in the region as foreign invaders. The next day, the Sudanese military launched a major offensive in the region. (See New proposed UN peacekeeping force)

//

Background

Main article: History of Darfur

The conflict taking place in Darfur has multiple interwoven causes. While rooted in structural inequity between the center of the country around the Nile and the 'peripheral' areas such as Darfur, tensions were exacerbated in the last two decades of the twentieth century by a combination of environmental calamity, political opportunism and regional geopolitics. A point of particular confusion has been the characterization of the conflict as one between 'Arab' and 'African' populations, a dichotomy that one historian describes as "both true and false".^[3]

In the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, the Keira dynasty of the Fur people of the Marrah Mountains established a sultanate with Islam as the state religion. The sultanate was conquered by the Turco-Egyptian force expanding south along the Nile, which was in turn defeated by the Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi. The Mahdist state collapsed under the onslaught of the British force led by Herbert Kitchener, who established an Anglo-Egyptian condominium to rule Sudan. The British allowed Darfur de jure autonomy until 1916 when they invaded and incorporated the region into Sudan.^[4] Within Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the bulk of resources were devoted toward Khartoum and Blue Nile Province, leaving the rest of the country relatively undeveloped.

An internally displaced person camp in Darfur

The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, which had received the bulk of British investment, continued the pattern of economic and political marginalization after independence was achieved in 1956. In the 1968 elections, factionalism within the ruling Umma Party led candidates, notably Sadiq al-Mahdi, to try to split off portions of the Darfuri electorate by blaming the region's underdevelopment on either the Arabs, in the case of appeals to the stationary peoples, or appealing to the Baggara semi-nomads to support their fellow Nile Arabs. This Arab-African dichotomy, which was not an indigenously developed way of perceiving local relations, was exacerbated after Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi became focused on establishing an Arab belt across the Sahel and promulgated an ideology of Arab supremacy.^[5] As a result of a sequence of interactions between Sudan, Libya and Chad from the late 1960s through the 1980s, Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiry established Darfur as a rear base for the rebel force led by Hissène Habré, which was attempting to overthrow the Chadian government and was also anti-Gaddafi.^[6]

In 1983 and 1984, the rains failed and the region was plunged into a famine.^[7] The famine killed an estimated 95,000 Darfuris out of a population of 3.1 million. Nimeiry was overthrown on 5 April 1985 and Sadiq al-Mahdi came out of exile, making a deal with Gaddafi, which he had no intention of honoring, that he would turn over Darfur to Libya if he was supplied with the funds to win the upcoming elections.^[8]

In early 2003, two local rebel groups — the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) — accused the government of oppressing non-Arabs in favor of Arabs. The SLM, which is much larger than the JEM, is generally associated with the Fur and Masalit, as well as the Wagi clan of the Zaghawa, while the JEM is associated with the Kobe clan of Zaghawa. Later that year, leaders of both groups, the Sudanese Government and representatives of the International diplomatic community were brought together in Geneva by the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue to look at ways of addressing the humanitarian crisis. In 2004, the JEM joined the Eastern Front, a group set up in 2004 as an alliance between two eastern tribal rebel groups, the Rashaida tribe's Free Lions and the Beja Congress. The JEM has also been accused of being controlled by Hassan al-Turabi. On January 20, 2006, SLM declared a merger with the Justice and Equality Movement to form the Alliance of Revolutionary Forces of West Sudan. However, in May of that year, the SLM and JEM were again negotiating as separate entities. MJW

History of the conflict, 2003-2006

The starting point of the conflict in the Darfur region is typically said to be 26 February 2003, when a group calling itself the Darfur Liberation Front (DLF) publicly claimed credit for an attack on Golu, the headquarters of Jebel Marra District. Even prior to this attack, however, a conflict had erupted in Darfur, as rebels had already attacked police stations, army outposts and military convoys, and the government had engaged in a massive air and land assault on the rebel stronghold in the Marrah mountains. The rebels' first military action was a successful attack on an army garrison on the mountain on 25 February 2002 and the Sudanese government had been aware of a unified rebel movement since an attack on the Golo police station in June 2002. Chroniclers Julie Flint and Alex de Waal state that the beginning of the rebellion is better dated to 21 July 2001, when a group of Zaghawa and Fur met in Abu Gamra and swore oaths on the Qur'an to work together to defend against government-sponsored attacks on their villages.^[9] It should be noted that nearly all of the residents of Darfur are Muslim, as are the Janjaweed and the government leaders in Khartoum.^[10]

On 25 March, the rebels seized the garrison town of Tine along the Chadian border, seizing large quantities of supplies and arms. Despite a threat by President Omar al-Bashir to "unleash" the army, the military had little in reserve. The army was already deployed both to the south, where the Second Sudanese Civil War was drawing to an end, and the east, where rebels sponsored by Eritrea were threatening the newly constructed pipeline from the central oilfields to Port Sudan. The rebel tactic of hit-and-run raids using Toyota Land Cruisers to speed across the semi-desert region proved almost impossible for the army, untrained in desert operations, to counter. However, its aerial bombardment of rebel positions on the mountain was devastating.^[11]

At 5:30 am on 25 April 2003, a joint SLA-JEM force in 33 Land Cruisers entered al-Fashir and attacked the sleeping garrison. In the next four hours, four Antonov bombers and helicopter gunships, according to the government, (seven according to the rebels) were destroyed on the ground, 75 soldiers, pilots and technicians were killed and 32 were captured, including the commander of the air base, a Major General. The rebels lost nine. The success of the raid was unprecedented in Sudan; in the 20 years of the war in the south, the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army had never carried out such an operation.^[12]

Unleashing the Janjaweed (2003)

Internally displaced persons camp

The al-Fashir raid was a turning point both militarily and psychologically. The armed forces had been humiliated by the al-Fashir raid and the government was faced with a difficult strategic situation. The armed forces would clearly need to be retrained and redeployed to fight this new kind of war and there were well-founded concerns about the loyalty of the many Darfurian non-commissioned officers and soldiers in the army. Responsibility for prosecuting the war was given to Sudanese Military Intelligence. Nevertheless, in the middle months of 2003, the rebels won 34 of 38 engagements. In May, the SLA destroyed a battalion at Kutum, killing 500 and taking 300 prisoners and in mid-July, 250 were killed in a second attack on Tine. The SLA began to infiltrate farther east, threatening to extend the war into Kordofan.

However, at this point the government changed its strategy. Given that the army was being consistently defeated, the war effort depended on three elements: Military Intelligence, the air force, and the Janjaweed, armed Baggara herders whom the government had begun directing in repression of a Masalit uprising in 1996-1999. The Janjaweed were put at the center of the new counter-insurgency strategy. Military resources were poured into Darfur and the Janjaweed were outfitted as a paramilitary force, complete with communication equipment and some artillery. The probable results of such a strategy were clear to the military planners; similar strategies undertaken in the Nuba Mountains and around the southern oil fields during the previous decade had resulted in massive human rights violations and forced displacements.^[13]

The better-armed Janjaweed quickly gained the upper hand. By the spring of 2004, several thousand people — mostly from the non-Arab population — had been killed and as many as a million more had been driven from their homes, causing a major humanitarian crisis in the region. The crisis took on an international dimension when over 100,000 refugees poured into neighbouring Chad, pursued by Janjaweed militiamen, who clashed with Chadian government forces along the border. More than 70 militiamen and 10 Chadian soldiers were killed in one gun battle in April. A United Nations observer team reported that non-Arab villages were singled out while Arab villages were left untouched:

The 23 Fur villages in the Shattaya Administrative Unit have been completely depopulated, looted and burnt to the ground (the team observed several such sites driving through the area for two days). Meanwhile, dotted alongside these charred locations are unharmed, populated and functioning Arab settlements. In some locations, the distance between a destroyed Fur village and an Arab village is less than 500 meters.[14]

Destroyed villages as of August 2004 (Source: DigitalGlobe, Inc. and Department of State via USAID)

In 2004, Chad brokered negotiations in N'Djamena, leading to the April 8 Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement between the Sudanese government and JEM and SLM. A group splintered from the JEM in April — the National Movement for Reform and Development — which did not participate in the April cease-fire talks or agreement. Janjaweed and rebel attacks have continued since the ceasefire. The African Union (AU) formed a Ceasefire Commission (CFC) to monitor observance of the putative ceasefire.

The scale of the crisis led to warnings of an imminent disaster, with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan warning that the risk of genocide is frighteningly real in Darfur. The scale of the Janjaweed campaign led to comparisons with the Rwandan Genocide, a parallel hotly denied by the Sudanese government. Independent observers noted that the tactics, which include dismemberment and killing of noncombatants and even young children and babies, are more akin to the ethnic cleansing used in the Yugoslav Wars but have warned that the region's remoteness means that hundreds of thousands are effectively cut off from aid. The Brussels-based International Crisis Group reported in May 2004 that over 350,000 people could potentially die as a result of starvation and disease. ^[15]

On 10 July 2005, Ex-SPLA leader John Garang was sworn in as Sudan's vice-president.^[16] However, on 30 July 2005, Garang died in a helicopter crash.^[17] His death had long-term implications and, despite improved security, talks between the various rebels in the Darfur region went slowly.

An attack on the Chadian town of Adre near the Sudanese border led to the deaths of three hundred rebels in December 2005. Sudan was blamed for the attack, which was the second in the region in three days. ^[18] The escalating tensions in the region led to the government of Chad declaring its hostility toward Sudan and calling for Chadian citizens to mobilise themselves against the "common enemy". ^[19] (See Chad-Sudan conflict)

May Agreement (2006)

On May 5, 2006, the government of Sudan signed an accord with the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA). However, the agreement was rejected by two other, smaller groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and a rival faction of the SLA. ^[20] The accord was orchestrated by the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, Salim Ahmed Salim (working on behalf of the African Union), AU representatives, and other foreign officials operating in Abuja, Nigeria. The accord calls for the disarmament of the Janjaweed militia, and for the rebel forces to disband and be incorporated into the army. ^[21][22]

July-August 2006

During July and August 2006, fighting had been renewed, "threatening to shut down the world's largest aid operation" as international aid organizations considered leaving due to attacks against their personnel. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for bringing a force of 17,000 international peacekeepers to the region in order to replace the African Union force of 7,000 (AMIS). ^[23]

Internally displaced women in North Darfur.

On August 18, the deputy head of the UN Peacekeeping Forces, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Hedi Annabi, warned during a private meeting that Sudan appears to be undertaking preparations for a major military offensive in the region. ^[24] The warning came a day after UN Commission on Human Rights special investigator Sima Samar stated that Sudan's efforts in the region remains poor despite the May Agreement. ^[25] On August 19, Sudan reiterated its opposition to replacing the 7,000 AU force with a 17,000 UN one, ^[26] resulting in the US issuing a "threat" to Sudan over the "potential consequences" of this position. ^[27]

On August 24, Sudan rejected attending a UNSC meeting to explain its plan of sending 10,000 Sudanese soldiers to Darfur instead of the proposed 20,000 UN peacekeeping force. ^[28] The UNSC announced it will hold the meeting despite Sudan's refusal to attend. ^[29] Also on August 24, the International Rescue Committee reported that hundreds of women were raped and sexually assaulted around the Kalma refugee camp during the last several weeks. ^[30] On August 25, the head of the US State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, Assistant Secretary Jendayi Frazer, warned that the region faces a security crisis unless the proposed UN peacekeeping force is allowed to deploy. ^[31]

On August 26, two days before the UNSC meeting, and on the day Frazer was due to arrive in Khartum, Paul Salopek, a US National Geographic Magazine journalist appeared in court in Darfur facing charges of espionage; he was later released after direct negotiation with President al-Bashir. ^[32] This came a month after Tomo Kriznar, a Slovenian presidential envoy, was sentenced to two years for spying. ^{Access: Public What do you think? Print views (7,460)}