Over the last fortnight I've sought to get to the bottom of the conflict in Darfur. My assessment of the Khartoum government surprised many readers by casting doubt on the allegation it was waging genocide in Darfur. This was never intended as a plug for the current regime, which I find thoroughly unsavory; my argument, though, was that the Khartoum regime's motives had to be examined. We know from experience that UN humanitarian missions as well as unilateral ones can be a form of imperialism. The payoff to the occupying power is largely administrative; a no-go zone is sanitized, validating the "international community's" prior conduct. Haiti, for example, is kept in perpetual misery by foreign interventions that contain its problems but also prevent their solution.

However, it is true that the behavior of the regime in Khartoum has led to horrendous misery. Unlike the lead-up to the crisis in Rwanda, there's no report of a major state-sponsored or state-sanctioned public campaign for genocide against the affected population; nor is there a hopscotch pattern of state-sanctioned pogroms, as there was in Rwanda since independence (a pattern which had intensified in the lead-up to April '94). But genocides are not all alike; and the atmosphere in Darfur where the latest might occur, is different anyway. A sudden mass slaughter orchestrated by radio and goons is neither required, nor yet the most effective suppression tactic, that a bloody-minded ruler in Sudan might use.

This article in the Sunday Herald sums up the dilemma:

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.”

(The risk in insisting that there's no difference-or insisting that calamities are made by moral monsters-is that one loses any ability to act as a responsible citizen. Heads of state who make errors of judgment are equated with Hitler, imposing impossible moral standards. And-most important of all-we become blinded by good intentions. If mass suffering is caused only by evil scumbags, then you have to locate the evil scumbags-and that is harder than it looks. One becomes focused on evil, and overlooks the dangers of laziness, or poor understanding. If you think the only threat to health is psychopathic killers, then you might do nothing about your addiction to cigarettes or McDonalds cuisine.)

The need of regimes to perpetuate themselves needs to be understood not as a "right" that states "deserve," but a way to understand the most powerful fundamentals of politics and foreign relations.

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 (text-JRM), 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.
[Ibid]

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.
[Ibid; emphasis added-JRM]

Where is the evidence that the Sudanese regime is "to flush all the Fur out of the fertile mountains and resettle the area with nomadic plains Arabs"? To answer this question, we do have HRW report on Darfur:

Human Rights Watch’s March-April investigations uncovered large-scale killings in fourteen incidents in Dar Masalit alone in which more than 770 civilians perished between September 2003 and late-February 2004. These are not the only incidents that occurred in Dar Masalit during those six months, but rather those which Human Rights Watch was able to corroborate with testimony from witnesses and other credible sources. Human Rights Watch obtained further information from witnesses to mass executions in the Fur areas of Wadi Salih province in the period from November 2003 through April 2004. Although this information is also far from complete given the difficulty of access to victims living in government-controlled towns and camps for the displaced, it indicates that the attacks on Masalit and Fur villages often follow a similar pattern.[*]

All fourteen incidents in Dar Masalit involved coordinated attacks by the army and Janjaweed. Four were conducted with prior air attacks-starting in late December 2003. In two incidents prior to late December, helicopters lifted supplies and/or troops into the area before the attacks. In five of the incidents, a location was subjected to attack more than once. At least six of the fourteen incidents involved clusters of villages, up to thirty in one example.

From mid-2003, attacks on villages rather than rebel positions have been the norm rather than the exception. While many of the bigger villages have self-defense units - first set up in the 1990s to give a measure of protection against Arab raiders - many have had little or no armed presence at all. The SLA in Dar Masalit, at least when Human Rights Watch visited, did not base armed men in villages; they were hidden under outcroppings of rocks and in ravines. In several instances when the rebels attempted to intervene in attacks on Masalit farming communities, they arrived too late to prevent destruction and death. On other occasions, the reported presence of rebels in a market has been sufficient to trigger an attack.

A couple of new developments in the Darfur, Sudan crisis:

• In mid-June, it became known that the Sudanese janjawid militia were recruiting Chadian Arabs in their war against the Fur (IRIN). This is important because the Khartoum government stands accused by the international community of waging a war of genocide against the [Muslim] Fur, as an extreme reaction to a tribal battle for water resources in Darfur. The janjawid are seeking to drive the Fur out of their villages, and the Khartoum government has been confirmed to be abetting a deliberate campaign of genocide against the Fur. At the same time, the Bashir junta in Sudan is returning to its old allies in Chad, Arabicized Chadians who-until 2002-had been fighting a Libyan-supported campaign against the Chadian government. (Libya's government has struggled to win control over parts of Chad since the 1970's by backing a rebel movement. The Bashir junta and the main Chadian rebel group are both pro-Qadafi.) This was pointed out by Jonathan Edelstein a fortnight ago.
• UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says Sudan's government has promised to "remove all obstacles" to easing the humanitarian crisis in Darfur (BBC). In the lead-up to this diplomatic agreement Friday, the NYT had called for sanctions against Sudan ("Death in Darfur"), and I presume will continue to call for asset freezing, suspension of aid, and the like. According to Reuters, these are definitely a distinct possibility. The BBC account suggests that the Sudanese agreement with Annan may be a ruse to get the NGO pressure off himself-he looks like he's "done something."

Also, those interested in the Sudanese civil wars are advised to Sudan: The Passion of the Present, a web log devoted to the matter. My own view is that sanctions do not work when the target state's policy is something required to remain in power. This EU proposal seems more promising to me.

European Union in the US: The EU will provide €12 million in support of the African Union observer mission to Darfur for a period of 12 months. The observer mission will comprise up to 120 observers and a possible protection force of 270 military personnel. The observers will support the implementation of the cease-fire agreement signed by the parties to the Darfur conflict in Addis Ababa on 28 May 2004. In particular the mission is expected to: (i) ensure that the rules and provisions of the cease-fire are implemented; (ii) define routes for the movement of forces to reduce the risks of incidents; (iii) assess requirements for de-mining operations; and (iv) receive, verify and judge complaints related to possible violations of the cease-fire. The observer mission is currently being deployed in Sudan. A successful implementation of the cease-fire agreement is a precondition if vital humanitarian aid is to reach the millions of Sudanese that have been affected by the conflict.

Like many-including Helena Cobbam of the Christian Science Monitor-I am hoping the international community will avoid an invasion of Sudan; yet, there's a steady drumbeat of reportage from the Darfur region (NW Sudan) to the effect that the Khartoum government is implicated in the massacre of its own citizens: Washington Post, NYT, BBC, Human Rights Watch, UN Emergency Relief (IRIN), Reliefweb, and the like. An understandable reaction by some is the "lies! lies! It's all lies, I tell you!" (e.g.); Sudan, after all, has oil, and invading it on behalf of a group of Black Muslims would be perceived by some Western diplomats as a wedge between Muslim factions. Christian Solidarity International (CSI) has poisoned the well with regard to Sudan (ESPAC), leading others to wonder if any allegation of human rights violation there was a neo-colonial canard.

Yesterday Sudan's government promised to comply (AFP) with the terms of a UN resolution urging it to disarm the Janjawid militia. While many Arab leaders denounce the resolution (e.g., Arab League spokesman Hossam Zaki-Arab News), Egypt is supposed to send observers and Nigeria is also sending troops to the region (IAfrica).

I remain extremely curious as to what the bloc in the Security Council will do in the event of Khartoum continuing to delay. One logical course of action would be, nothing. Nothing could be undertaken for a long time, while the violence subsides. Another course of action is a steady accumulation of foreign observers and armed forces in the area, moving ever closer to an armed clash with the Sudanese army (which has just acquired advanced Russian fighter aircraft). Or finally, a series of airstrikes that turn Darfur and Kordofan Provinces into international protectorates, much like Kosovo

UPDATE: I linked to the John Laughland article, which I felt was essentially a fundamentalist litany-the allegations against Sudan are lies generated by the Western propaganda machine, there never were Serb atrocities in Kosovo, the whole endeavor is an attempt to get control of Darfur's (?) or the rest of Sudan's (?) immense (sic) oil reserves. I learned later that Mr. Laughland's article had received a promotion, and now appears in the Guardian. To be fair, the Guardian seeks to have a broad range of opinion on its pages, but as Crooked Timber points out, this would induce readers' heads to explode. Mr. Laughland's essay receives a favorable essay here (Peterson/ZNet); ZNets the "it's lies, all lies" position, again by arguing that Khartoum critics are ignoring other genocides (e.g., US action in the Vietnam War, the CIA-backed G30S coup in Indonesia, the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor...). Samantha Powers comes in for criticism-essentially she's denounced as a stooge. Perhaps my life would be easier if I just snarled at people who introduced conflicting ideas. If some testimony or piece of evidence doesn't fit in well with my existing views of the universe, screw it!

On 31 July 2004, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling upon the government of Sudan to take responsibility for the human rights of Darfur's people, and honor commitments to disarm the Janjawid militia. The language was very mild, and did not impose any commitment on the UN member states to intervene; indeed, the measure did little more than express "expectation" that Khartoum would honor the agreements it made in N'Djamena and Addis (a month earlier) to facillitate the work of peace monitors.

At this time, the Khartoum government has been implicated in waves of killing in Darfur against hamlets allegedly supporting the rebel movement in the West. The situation been declared to be 'genocide' by the US Congress, 'massive human rights violations' by the European Union and 'the worst humanitarian situation in the world' by UN officials.I've listed a number of NGO sites warning of genocide in Darfur, too many to be plausibly dismissed as "stooges" of Western imperialists intent on seizing Sudan's oil (which is not in Darfur, and which has a high recovery cost). However, the UN SCR Resolution 1556 does not include explicit action against Sudan.

The pressure on the UN SC to water down the resolution was pretty strong; Russia just recently sold the Khartoum government a fleet of 12 MiG-29's (info on the MiG-29 Fulcrum here). China and Pakistan refused to accept even the watered-down version; Pakistan's representative Munir Akram said this was because the resolution was "not balanced," and insisted that any form of pressure on Khartoum would induce the rebels to make unreasonable demands.

But Mr. Akram cannot imagine that the draft resolution against Khartoum would have helped the insurgents in Darfur; if he does, he must have little knowledge of Sudan's record of insurgent warfare. Simply put, Sudan does not risk defeat in its civil war if it abstains from massacring the population of Darfur. Does he really suppose the rebels are identical with the huge numbers of Fur being slaughtered by the Janjawid?

No, I think he understands the truth; I also think he dreads the liquidation of another Muslim state. On the one hand, Sudan could be a repetition of the Rwanda massacre (per Samantha Powers, et al), in which the Clinton Administration suppressed the use of the word "genocide" to avoid being required to intervene; on the other hand, it's possible that this is an entrenched habit of mind-economic strangulation, villification of the sovereign power, invasion, and international colonization. Years later, the liquidation of the Fur and the Nuba could still underway, yet imperceptible and clean. It's possible both are true-that Khartoum is the jackal and we are the crocodile in this picture. Let's look again.

I wanted to get some more contrarian musings so I stopped by Al-Muhajabah's Veiled 4 Allah (1, 2, 3). AM's summary of the situation is not terribly surprising; the war is ethnic, not sectarian, and the customary defensiveness of Muslims is ill-placed with respect to the Sudan. In fact, it's a very complicated conflict, and involves desertification and battles for scarce water resources as well as pay-offs to the Arabacized tribes in the northwest who fill out the ranks of the Janjawid.

I've reviewed the conflict earlier (see archives, linked at top of post); there are two rival Muslim sultanates that eventually were absorbed into Sudan. The Funj Sultanate was located in the area where the White and Blue Niles merge, and the people there are usually characterized as "Arab." The Fur and their allies, the Zaghawa and Masalit, are located in Darfur, a sultanate that once included the gigantic province of Kordofan. The inclusion of the southern third of the country is something of a historic accident. The Fur were never defeated by the Funj; instead, the British conquered Darfur in 1916, and at independence, the Sudanese polity was largely dominated by the [more intensely] Arab[icized] Funj. The Funj are actually a matrix of ethnicities and languages, like the rest of Sudan; but the political atmosphere favored adoption of Arab language and rituals. Partly this enables the Funj to adopt the Muslim=Arab narrative in its wars against the subject peoples it inherited from Britain and Egypt.

The Arabs involved in the Darfur conflict are the Messiriya and the Rezeigat clans; these are nomadic bands whose lands extend into Chad. The Fur, Zanghawa, and Masalit are settled farmers; they are very vulnerable because of desertification. But, according to this paper by Fouad Ibrahim (PDF; link courtesy of Al-Muhajabah), it is incorrect to blame resource scarcity for the warfare in Darfur. On the contrary, Darfur is a rich country which would doubtless flourish if it were independent. This aspect is discussed by Mohamed Suliman in "The Case of the Fur and Nuba Conflicts in Western Sudan." Mr. Suliman makes the point that the "Arabs" of Sudan are actually Arabicized, reflecting the roots of their dialect and their political affinities; Arab nationalism tends to award rights and privileges in a certain way. I am grateful to him not only for that, but for discussing the far-less noted Nuba conflict in southern Kordofan; see also Suliman, "The Nuba conflict in the Sudan" and Roger Winter, "The Nuba People: Confronting Cultural Liquidation."

None of these articles linked supports thesis that the Khartoum government is being vilified. Some object to the misapprehension of the conflict by outsiders, such as the depiction of this as a struggle between Arabs and Africans (yet it transpires this is a distinction without a difference; the conflict is racial, and the principles see themselves thus). It was on the eve of Omar Bashir's 1989 coup that the wars in Kordofan and Darfur erupted, a result of drought and emigrations from Chad. By '88, the drought was over, but quarrels over land and water access, hitherto redressed by councils in neutral territory, were now used by the Sadiq al-Madhi regime in Khartoum; they armed the nomadic principles, and later-after the coup-deployed modern government aircraft against the settled peoples in both areas. According to Mr. Suliman (linked above) the wars were driven by desperation; the aggressors were moving out of an ecologically impacted area (Chad, N. Darfur or Kordofan) to a less impacted one, and appealing to the central government when they encountered resistance.

Why did the state governments of Kordofan and Darfur side with the Arabs and arm them? One reason is convenience and ethnic affinity; settled areas are in fact harder to govern for Khartoum, which operates like a classic mounted empire; the leaders of the country are basically modern incarnations of the Il-Khans and Timurids of Persia. Another reason Mr. Suliman points out is that the water resources of Sudan are under pressure from a third direction: mechanized farming!

The mechanised farming problem has two ways of taking our land: the government planned mechanised farming schemes, which are given from Khartoum from the Ministry of Agriculture regardless of the reality of the area. Land is just allotted to certain people, who are mainly retired army generals or civil servants, or wealthy merchants from northern Sudan or local Jellaba who have been living in the area for a long time and here accumulated wealth. They have links with Khartoum and the central Sudanese government, because they originally come from the North. These people acquire land and then go and tell their relatives that they too can acquire land through the ministry. They join forces together and acquire more land.

[...]

The government just demarcates land regardless of the realities of the area. They do not care if there are villages in this land or not. In the area of Habila mechanised farms have circled many villages. [...] This phenomenon is becoming massive.

Besides the planned mechanised farms, there is the unplanned land acquisition. Here you have somebody who is powerful and wealthy, who just comes in and cleans up a piece of land which is actually owned by the community. But because he is powerful he just cleans it and brings in his tractors and his workers and begins to farm. And then, if any resistance happens, he will go to the authorities to protest and ask them to protect him. Because he can bribe the authorities, he can pay and do whatever he likes. Otherwise, he has a politician friend, or an army officer, who is powerful and can send an order down here, so his friend can get the land. There are also other ways of getting land, for example burning down a village and forcing its inhabitants to move on.