Commentary > Opinion
from the July 14, 2004 edition
Racism at root of Sudan's Darfur crisis
By Makau Mutua
BUFFALO, N.Y. – The visits by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Sudan last week gave hope that the genocide in Darfur can be arrested before an entire people is obliterated. But anyone - including Mr. Powell and Mr. Annan - interested in averting more tragedy there must understand that Darfur is not an accidental apocalypse of mass slaughters, enslavement, pillage, and ethnic cleansing. The Darfur pogrom is part of a historic continuum in which successive Arab governments have sought to entirely destroy black Africans in this biracial nation.
Darfur is not a mere humanitarian disaster that access by international relief agencies can reverse. The raison d'être of the atrocities committed by government-supported Arab militias is the racist, fundamentalist, and undemocratic Sudanese state. What is required for peace in Sudan is either regime change, in which a democratic, inclusive state is born, or a partition, in which the black African south and west become an independent sovereign state free of Khartoum and the Arab north.
Sudan, like most African postcolonial states, is partially a victim of imperial cartography. Thoughtlessly carved out by the British during the 19th-century scramble to claim Africa, Sudan is a forced crucible of Muslim Arabs and black Africans. The blacks in the south either hew to their ancestral traditional African religions or have converted to Christianity. The fact that black Africans in Darfur are exclusively Muslim has not stopped the Arab Janjaweed militias and the government from exterminating them.
Race - not religion - is the fundamental fault line in Sudan, though religion has certainly added fuel to the fire in the south. Indeed, since independence from the British in 1956, the demon of Sudan has been race. The Arab north, except for brief periods when token Africans were included in government, has exclusively held political and military power. To protest political exclusion, military repression, enslavement, and economic exploitation, Africans in the south rose against the state several years after independence.
Since 1983, the armed insurrection in the south has drawn a scorched earth response from Khartoum. President Omar Bashir and his fundamentalist Islamic government declared a holy war against African groups in the south - the Dinka, Nuba, and Neur peoples. More than 2 million people have been decimated, millions more have been internally displaced, and hordes have been exiled.
Khartoum's genocidal policy in Darfur and the south is also a grab for resources. The Arab north is arid and barren, but the south is arable with vast oil deposits Khartoum covets and badly needs. In the west, in Darfur, Arabs seeking to escape the spreading desert kill and displace Africans for more productive land.
But there is a reality check. Khartoum has been unable to vanquish Africans militarily in the south. That's why Khartoum now appears ready to conclude its peace agreement with the south. But just as the guns are about to fall silent in the south, Arabs in Darfur have killed at least 30,000 Africans and displaced more than a million from their homes and villages.
Both the US and UN through Powell and Annan - whose mediators and proxies, particularly Kenya, are helping broker the peace deal - must make it clear to President Bashir that the accord between Khartoum and the south won't stop the diplomatic isolation and international condemnation of Sudan unless it ends its genocidal policies in Darfur and allows aid workers to care for victims and assist their return home. Both Powell and Annan must speed up work on a UN resolution to condemn the atrocities in Darfur and the south, and to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government and its leaders.
The African Union (AU), the continental body of Arab and black African states, must end the hypocrisy in Afro-Arab relations. Sudan, the bridge between black and Arab Africa, should lead in rewriting the historical script between the two peoples. Since the slave trade era, Arabs have violated and dominated Africans. Yet the Organization of African Unity, the AU predecessor, ducked these inequities under the doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of sister states.
The AU has stayed that odious course. It's telling that the AU has not denounced Sudan for the Darfur atrocities. And, at its annual summit in Addis Ababa last week, the AU declared that the Darfur killings did not amount to genocide. Although the killings clearly meet that definition according to the Genocide Convention, unfortunately Powell also failed last week to declare that the Darfur killings meet the definition of genocide. The AU offer to send just 300 soldiers to Darfur to protect aid workers, monitors, and civilians from Arab militiamen - in an area the size of France - demonstrates lack of political will to confront Sudan.
Important, too, is that Arab states should condemn Sudan; otherwise their anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rings hollow. How can they protest the killing of Palestinians when their kin exterminate Africans in Sudan?
The tragedy of Darfur wouldn't be permitted if it were taking place in Europe. But African states must take advantage of the interest by the UN and the US to bring about maximum diplomatic and economic pressure, including sanctions, to hasten regime change in Sudan. Khartoum must be put on notice that only an open and inclusive democracy will save it from partition into two states, one black African, the other Arab.
• Makau Mutua is professor of law and director of the Human Rights Center at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
To shine a spotlight on some of the important international issues and developments that often do not get sufficient media attention, the United Nations Department of Public Information presents a new initiative - "Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About."
This list includes a number of humanitarian emergencies, as well as conflict or post-conflict situations and spans other matters of concern to the United Nations, although it is far from embracing all of the many issues before the Organization.
The stories are not ones that have never been reported, but are often second-rung issues that need more thorough, balanced and regular attention. The list itself is a snapshot of the most compelling stories that, at this point in time, the Department of Public Information believes are in need of more media attention. And the top story is merely the first among equals.
Ten stories the United Nations thinks the world needs to know more about
That´s barbarous.
Women from North Darfur
Sudan
Darfur: Rape as a weapon of war
at first the summary of the report:
Quote:Sudan crisis
In our silence we are complicit
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"Five to six men would rape us, one after the other, for hours during six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this, he disowned me."
Sudanese refugee woman interviewed by Amnesty International.
The mass rapes ongoing in Darfur are war crimes and crimes against humanity, but very little is being done to stop it.
Amnesty International's report: Sudan: Rape as a weapon of war demonstrates that despite the regional and international focus on Darfur and promises by the Sudanese government to disarm the Janjawid militia, there is still no protection for women and girls.
The suffering and abuse endured by these women goes far beyond the actual rape. Rape has a devastating and ongoing impact on the health of women and girls and survivors now face a lifetime of stigma and marginalisation from their own families and communities. Women and girls are being attacked, not only to dehumanize the women themselves but also to humiliate, punish, control, inflict fear and displace women and to persecute the community to which they belong.
Amnesty International is therefore calling for:
* All parties to the conflict to stop and publicly condemn the use of rape as a weapon of war and to put adequate mechanisms in place to ensure the protection of civilians.
* The Janjawid militia to be disarmed and disbanded and placed in a position where they may no longer attack the civilian population.
* An international Commission of Inquiry to be established immediately to examine evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other violations of international humanitarian law including rape, as well as allegations of genocide.
* The perpetrators of attacks on civilians, including sexual violence against women, to be brought to justice in trials that meet international standards of fairness. The safety of victims and witnesses must be protected
A short quote from the report:
Quote: "I was sleeping when the attack on Disa started. I was taken away by the attackers, they were all in uniforms. They took dozens of other girls and made us walk for three hours. During the day we were beaten and they were telling us: "You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no god." At night we were raped several times. The Arabs(1) guarded us with arms and we were not given food for three days."
A female refugee from Disa [Masalit village, West Darfur], interviewed by Amnesty International delegates in Goz Amer camp for Sudanese refugees in Chad, May 2004
1. Introduction
In March 2004, Darfur, western Sudan, was described by the then United Nations (UN) Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, as the world's greatest humanitarian crisis". (2) Humanitarian organisations operating in Darfur are warning about malnutrition and famine in the region.(3) Today's "worst humanitarian crisis" has been directly caused by war crimes and crimes against humanity for which the Sudanese government is responsible.
The testimony of the Sudanese woman given above echoes hundreds of others, collected by Amnesty International, other human rights organisations, UN fact-finding missions and independent journalists. They all describe a pattern of systematic and unlawful attacks on civilians in North, West and South Darfur states, by a government-sponsored militia mostly referred to as "Janjawid"(armed men on horses) or "Arab militia" and by the government army, including through bombardments of civilian villages by the Sudanese Air Force. In these attacks, men are killed, women are raped and villagers are forcibly displaced from their homes which are burnt; their crops and cattle, their main means of subsistence, are burnt or looted. These massive attacks are the response of the Sudanese government to the insurgency of two armed political groups. These armed groups, mainly of Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnicity were founded in 2003.
The attacks have led to the displacement of at least 1.2 million persons. At least one million people have become internally displaced persons (IDPs) and been forced to move to the vicinity of towns or big villages in Darfur, and more than 170,000 have taken refuge across the border into Chad. Others, of which the exact number is unknown, are in hiding in mountains, valleys or areas held by armed political groups(4).
Massive human rights violations committed in the region include: extra-judicial executions, unlawful killings of civilians, torture, rapes, abductions, destruction of villages and property, looting of cattle and property, the destruction of the means of livelihood of the population attacked and forced displacement. These human rights violations have been committed in a systematic manner by the Janjawid, often in coordination with Sudanese soldiers and the Sudanese Air Force, with total impunity, and have targeted mainly members of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups and other agro-pastoralist groups living in Darfur. Many of the crimes committed in Darfur constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity(5).
There is a large amount of information pointing at the responsibility of the Sudanese government in the human rights violations committed in Darfur. In addition to the military and logistical support and the impunity that it provides to the Janjawid, the Sudanese government has used a policy of repression to deal with the problems of Darfur. It has engaged in arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detentions, "disappearances" and torture in order to punish human rights activists, lawyers, leaders and members of communities in Darfur. The Sudanese government has also used unfair and summary trials, using confessions sometimes extracted under torture without the right to defence, and applied cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments, such as amputations, floggings and the death penalty.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
... Too expensive in the minds of the West.
IMO the biggest culprit and the nations who bear the greatest responsibility for the turmoil are those that colonized and exploited the African continent. And therefore they should be in the forefront of any action taken to mollify the situation. Fat chance.With the European nations it has always been colonize, exploit and leave their droppings.
Well, au, that's one of your famous: they should pay who colonised.
Do you start with the Romans, the Celts?
And the USA get money fromthe UK, France, Spain, and perhaps Portugal?
Why not Walter. When you s***t you should clean it up. The EU or at least those nations responsible should be in the forefront of whatever efforts need be taken. Do you find that unreasonable. If so, why?
As for the US they should be able to sit on the sidelines. The EU should do it on their own.
I do agree that the EU should do something; however, your argument sounds discussable. From your point of view au1929, how is (are) (an) European nation(s) responsible for what is happening in Darfur?
Rick d'Israeli wrote: how is (are) (an) European nation(s) responsible for what is happening in Darfur?
Because any Europeans support miltiants generally or exploit directly in Africa to earn raw materials, oil , iron , silver,gold, platin etc etc.
So they must help them, also if the EU is not gulity because of the cases.
Thok, don't think I am not in favor of the EU going to Darfur. I was just wondering about certain things. But it's clear that we have to do something FAST!
The European nations devided up and exploited Africa for more than a century. It setup unrealistic boundries. Not along tribal lines but based upon those areas that they considered their territory.
We are talking here about Sudan or Africa in general?
(in case of 'Sudan', au, I recommend reading a bit about Sudan's history :wink: )
I spoke about Sudan and Afrika general.
Sudan has......... oil.
Walter
Yes Walter I should have. The British were there but just how much influence they had in today's turmoil if any is an unknown. One for your side.
Oh au1929, you are talking about the BRITISH. Phew! I was afraid you were talking about the Dutch and I had to bring up some nationalistic propaganda to accuse you of a New York - based conspiracy:wink:
No but seriously: I do believe that in certain parts of Africa Europe has a responsibility towards the people living there who are confronted with war, hunger, AIDS etc. But I'm still wondering what part of Sudan's history has a clear indication that the British - or any European nation - have a responsibility in the ongoing slaughtering in Darfur.
Nov 1820 Egypt begins conquest.
12 Jun 1821/1822 Occupation and annexation by Egypt
(nominally under Ottoman suzerainty).
29 Jun 1881 Mahdiya established (Mahdi's "emergence").
26 Jan 1885 Egyptian Sudan fully occupied by the Mahdiya.
2 Sep 1898 Mahdiya extinguished by Britain.
12 May 1894 - 10 Jun 1910 Lado district leased to the Belgian Congo.
19 Jan 1899 Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (condominium).
22 Oct 1952 Self-rule granted.
1 Jan 1956 Independence (Republic of The Sudan).
25 May 1969 Democratic Republic of The Sudan
Feb 1972 - 5 Jul 1983 Southern provinces autonomous.
Jun 1983 - Civil war erupts, large parts of the southern
provinces under rebel control.
15 Dec 1985 Republic of The Sudan
There's a really interesting book online, the English translation of Theodoro Krump's 'Hoher und Fruchtbarer Palm-Baum des Heiligen Evangelij' (Augsburg: Georg Schulter & Martin Happach, 1710):
THE SUDANESE TRAVELS OF THEODORO KRUMP, which give an idea of pre-1800 Sudan.
