Genocide in Darfur: A few ‘Lone Rangers’ vs. ‘the devil on horseback’

    “It’s gratifying,” said Gurwitz, “finally to see that we can fill a conference room like this with people who are interested in what’s happening in Darfur.” Referring to a description of Darfur as “a genocide in slow motion,” he added, “we’ve watched these events taking place. We’ve known at every step what’s happening. We have unequivocal evidence of the atrocities and the mass murders that have taken place, yet somehow the international community can’t muster the will to do what’s necessary to stop the killing.”

    Giving an overview of the conflict in Darfur, he related it is a template that can be seen in many other conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Sudan straddles the dividing line between two cultures, he noted, northern or Saharan Africa, which became part of the Arab Empire in the 7th and 8th centuries, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the Arab culture meets the traditional African culture. Both cultures are Muslims, he added, so what has been taking place in Darfur is not motivated by religious differences. It is an ethnic conflict between people who basically look alike and whose ethnicity is self-defined.
    As in the Tutsi/Hutu clash in Rwanda and its neighbors, European imperialism laid the groundwork for bloodshed in Darfur. “There are a lot of failed states in Africa and the Middle East,” said Gurwitz, “that were created simply by virtue of the fact that they are artificial creations. They were drawn with the pen and they weren’t drawn with respect, with good consideration for the ethnicity of the people who were residing within boundaries.”

    He noted one of the major tribes in Darfur, the Fur, are a traditionally agricultural society of farmers and espouse the African culture. For centuries they were able to work out agreements on sharing the land with area tribes of the nomadic Arab culture. Things soured, however, when a severe drought in the ’90s caused the old ethnic rivalry to surface again in the competition for diminishing resources.
    As a counterpart to this, Gurwitz explained that, earlier, following Sudan’s independence from Great Britain in 1956, civil war had broken out between Arabic northern Sudan and Christian/animist southern Sudan. This conflict finally ended in 1972, but erupted again in the 1980s, ushering in two decades of what was to be one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century, with southern Sudanese being taken as slaves by those from the north.

    When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, Gurwitz related, he came with a mandate from his evangelical supporters to end the bloodshed in Sudan. Sen. John Danforth was appointed as a special envoy to negotiate a peace and in 2005 the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed, guaranteeing southern Sudan a certain number of government cabinet ministers.

    Part of the conflict there had stemmed from the south previously feeling it was not being represented in the government at Khartoum, a similar concern of Darfur’s. However, southern Sudan had significant oil and water resources, Gurwitz pointed out, which was not the case with Darfur. Just as the north/south conflict was winding down, the tension between Khartoum and Darfur was ramping up.

    Playing a significant role in this was the Sudanese military and the policy of the Khartoum government to conscript rival tribesmen to put down revolts. Thus, when militia composed of Sudanese Arabs, the Janjaweed, were let loose on Darfur following an attack by Darfurian rebels against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2003, the old ethnic rivalry soon came into play, noted Gurwitz.
    What followed, he said, was the ethnic cleansing that has been a characteristic of the conflict ever since, marked by sexual violence (castration of men, raping of women) and racial epithets. “The clear goal,” he noted, “is to depopulate the area of African tribes and to resettle it with Arab tribes.”

    As evidence, he recommended going to Google Earth’s Darfur package and zooming in on the map of that region. “It’s a moonscape,” he said. “It’s been depopulated. The villages are gone.” Diplomats may say that the situation has stabilized, he said, but in reality it has been stabilized because there are few populated areas left to destroy.
    “It’s been burned. It’s been looted,” he continued. “The people have been chased off and now two and a half million of them are living in refugee camps and in displaced persons camps.” These camps have now become the target of the Janjaweed, whose mode of operation is to swoop armed into a village mounted on horses or camels, following bombing by government planes. They proceed to kill the fleeing inhabitants, loot the village and burn it to the ground.

    Noting it took several years and the combined pressure of China and Russia, who have strong interests in the oil fields of southern Sudan, to bring about the admittance of 10,000 international peacekeepers there, Gurwitz is not optimistic about Sudan permitting an even larger peacekeeping force into Darfur any time soon.

    He also noted an additional complication here is the administration’s War on Terror, since Osama bin Laden was a protected “guest” in Sudan during the mid ’90s.
    “While the Bush administration has done more than any other country in the world to try to make progress on the situation in Darfur,” said Gurwitz, “it’s been reluctant to push too hard because there’s some trickle of intelligence information that we get from Sudan concerning bin Laden and al-Qaida.”