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5 Minute Tute: Darfur

What happened in Darfur?

What happened in Darfur was symptomatic of all the wider problems in Sudan. Sudan has suffered many regional revolutions over the past few decades as a result of bad central governance from Khartoum. Darfur was just one of those rebellions. Darfur, in the West, was a relatively wealthy part of Sudan but saw its wealth extracted by Khartoum through taxation and yet received nothing in exchange. Over the same period the region suffered a series of escalating terrible droughts which reduced the amount of land available for pasture. This put the Fur and other black African tribes in direct conflict with the nomadic Arab tribes favoured by Khartoum. Traditional reconciliation mechanisms broke down in the 1980s and 1990s when the Arab tribes were armed by the government in Khartoum and so felt less need to bargain.  After years of pent up anger, conflict broke out in 2003.

Was Colin Powell right to call it a genocide?

I don’t think so. In fact, the UN issued a report in 2004 which decided it wasn’t genocide either. I would call it a counter-insurgency exercise which got terribly out of control. Women and children were systematically killed much like in a genocide, but the government’s aim was to supress the rebels rather than eliminate entire ethnic groups. It was a brutal and nasty Maoist strategy of trying to drain the water to kill the fish.

How did the conflict end?

It didn’t! The conflict is on-going. There have been endless rounds of peace conferences, but people continue to get killed. The rate of displacement and killing is certainly less than in 2005, but the basic causes of the conflict have not been addressed and neither has either side been able to prevail militarily. It is a low level military stalemate.

Why did it receive so much attention from western celebrities?

There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, after it was labelled a genocide by Colin Powell, many important constituencies rallied around the Darfur cause. The Jewish element was also important, as prominent Jews reacted very strongly to this. Secondly, the crisis happened at a time when humanitarian interventionism was enjoying a renaissance. Tony Blair gave a famous speech in Chicago in 1999 and claimed the West has a moral duty to intervene when awful regimes commit mass atrocities. Particularly in America, there was a strong sense the USA had screwed up over Rwanda and Yugoslavia and that the West should not be caught napping again. The timing was important too as it was almost exactly the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Thirdly, for a lot of the celebrities, it seemed like a cut and dry issue: a nasty Muslim regime killing innocent civilians in Africa. For them, it was obvious what should be done.  I would say they were seriously wrong in seeing it in such black and white terms.

In 2010, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan for genocide committed in Darfur. Why has he still not been brought to trial?

Firstly, we must remember that the ICC has no enforcement mechanism at all and is solely depended on the actions of its member countries. Sudan is not a subscribing member of the ICC.  So for President Bashir avoiding capture is really not that hard, he just stays at home and only visits countries that are not subscribing members of the ICC.

The bigger answer here is that a lot of African and Middle Eastern governments view the ICC as an agency of Western repression and Western white superiority against Africans and Arabs. The West is considered hypocritical to set up a court to enforce justice on their terms when they are the same nasty colonial people who plundered their lands only one or two generations ago.

 

 

 

 

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