Sudan is a nation confronted by three intractable political challenges, where peace has been elusive and political solutions to state-society conflicts chimerical. In the south of the country, the people under the leadership of the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA) had fought the central government for some twenty years and in the process up to a million people had lost their lives. In the east, there is a simmering rebellion fueled by politics and disgruntled army elements that live scattered among the Beja in and around Kasala. In the west, the region of Darfur has become known as a land of an all-out scorched-earth war, rape, plunder, and refugees.

 

          The daily suffering of the people of Darfur has left Africans as well as the world scrambling for a “solution” to this intractable problem. Since Darfur borders Chad and the Central African Republic, the crisis has led Darfurians to become cross-border refugees. They have fled for survival, attempting to escape the marauding Janjaweed (Arab militias) and the central government’s aerial bombardments. They live in a no man’s land in tent cities in the middle of the Sahara desert.

 

          In antiquity, Sudan was a province of Meroe. It came to be known as Beled al Sud (land of the black people) in AD 700 when Islam was introduced into the region. The citizens of ancient Meroe and their leaders were black Africans, and historians have noted that the kingdom was so powerful that it had attempted the conquest of the land of the Egyptians.[1] When the soldiers of the Prophet, Muslim Arabs, began to subjugate Christian Sudanese, Darfurians initially resisted and were conquered. Just as the 25th Egyptian dynasty subjugated most of the northern area of what is now known as Sudan, the Arab Muslims conquered and controlled South Sudan and Darfur.

 

          The atrocities committed by the conquerors in the process of the Islamization of Christians and followers of traditional African religions bordered on genocide, and the rampant racism of the occupiers and the introduction of slavery into the region sealed the fate of many Darfurians. The new system opened the way to the sexual exploitation of women and child labor. Thus it would not be an exaggeration to state that today’s Darfur insurrection is an anti-slavery rebellion conducted in the 21st century.

 

          In the south, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army under the late John Grang, fought the Khartoum government to a standstill for almost three decades and has finally had its voice heard. Today it has established de facto independence. The Machako Agreement signed between Khartoum and the SPLA in Kenya gives the vice presidency of the Sudan government to the president of the SPLA.[2] In addition, the agreement guarantees, at least on the level of theory, a fair and balanced scheme for economic development and a formula for wealth sharing. It also assures self-rule up to six years, after which a referendum is to be held in the south on whether to stay within Sudan or opt for de jure independence. The SPLA has forced the Khartoum government to make key concessions to end the conflict and the government has acquiesced, forced also by international pressures.

 

          However, while peace is holding in the south, no olive branch has been offered in Darfur. The inhabitants of Darfur continue to suffer from the maniacal raids of the state-sponsored Arab militias and government helicopter gun ships. These raids so far have claimed the lives of 300,000 people and displaced 2.5 million inhabitants who have become refugees. Those affected by the terror are estimated at about 4 million and close to a million of those are beyond the reach of humanitarian assistance.[3]

 

          The Darfur insurrection started in 1987. The year is important because it was a year of famine in the region and also a time when Arab Muslims began to organize and provoke the Darfurians, namely, the Fur, Zagawa, and Massalit farmers. The government soon began to organize the Janjaweed, the mounted Arab militia that has operated in league with the government to push largely African ethnic groups out of the area. This was a period of rising ethnic antagonisms. The civil war in neighboring Chad began to spill over across the border bringing with it a supremacist ideology that was adopted by some Arabs giving rise to the Janjaweed.

 

          The creation of the Janjaweed was a direct consequence of the ethnic composition of the Sudanese regular army. For decades the army had been mostly composed of Kordofan Nubas and some Darfurians. Since military service did not exactly appeal to Nile-based Arab elites who have dominated the political process, and because Darfurian troops were considered unreliable in fighting their people, the government came up with the idea of having a fighting force imbued with racial hatred that would stamp out the Darfur rebellion. It found this fighting force among northern pastoralists who had suffered from the desertification of their pasturelands. Although allegations have been made that the government recruits Janjaweed from the “Arab” tribes of Chad, most of the recruits are immigrants or their descendants from West Africa who, for one reason or another, have been Islamized.

 

          In any case, the provocations by the Janjaweed quickly turned into direct attacks using modern weapons secretly provided by the Sudanese central government of Sadiq al Mahdi. These attacks and the government’s open policy of disarming Darfurians led to outrage and to the establishment of the Fur self-defense militia, which was renamed the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA). When Arab pastoralists refused to pay blood money for atrocities committed against Zagawa farmers, the Zagawa joined the SLA.[4]

 

          According to Minni Arkoi Minawi, leader of the SLA and a former English teacher, the manifesto of the Sudanese Liberation Army gives as its purpose the establishment of a nation in which the diverse peoples can live within a framework of determining their own destiny, live in political equality, where there is no discrimination based on race or in the distribution of economic goods. However, before these lofty goals could be realized, the SLA split into two groups. The majority group favored Minni Arkoi Minawi and the other group went under the leadership of Abdulwahid Mohammed Alnur, a Fur.

 

          A different armed group operating in Darfur is the Justice for Equality Movement (JEM), whose beginnings and agenda are a bit different from those of the SLA. In 1989, General Omar Albashir overthrew the Sadiq al Mahdi government in a military coup. The coup was successful in part because an important politician and Muslim scholar, the Sorbonne-educated Ph.D., Dr. Sheik Hassan Al-Turabi, was a key behind-the-scenes leader of the new government. In 1991, Al-Turabi became the General Secretary of the National Islamic Front (NIF), which facilitated the building of a network of Islamic organizations and officials from the local population in far-flung Darfur. In 1999, Al-Turabi brought the government of Sudan to a standstill when he requested that parliament devolve some of the powers of the all-powerful presidency. The situation led to a crisis, to the dissolving of parliament, to the firing of thousands of NIF members from government posts, and to the declaration of a state of emergency. During this period, NIF-sponsored black African officials who had been organized by Al-Turabi in Darfur lost their livelihood overnight. In 2003, they formed the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), which is led by Dr. Khalil Ibrahim Muhammad, an Al-Turabi supporter. Muhammad was the author of The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan, an outlawed manifesto that claims that Nile-based Arabs have dominated the government at the expense of the majority of Sudanese. Indeed historically, the British colonial rulers after tacking Darfur on to Sudan in 1917, only provided education in Darfur to the sons of chiefs, so as not to produce challengers to their authority. As a consequence, in 1935, the region had only one elementary school. There was no maternity clinic until the 1940s, and when Sudan attained independence in 1956 Darfur had few hospitals and very little infrastructure and endured a policy of malign neglect by the national elite, raising the question of whether Darfur had a future in Sudan.[5] Thus, when the Darfur rebellion began, the JEM was a natural ally and its units cooperated with SLA forces in the opening phase. Although initially the Khartoum government had tried to cut a separate peace with the SLA, the latter had demanded that both the SLA and the JEM be part of the peace process

 

          In mid-2004, the Darfur tragedy forced itself into the international arena. In sharp contrast to the official U.S. reaction to the Rwandan massacres under the Clinton administration, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called the situation in Darfur “genocide.” He accused the Sudanese government of using famine and mass rape as weapons of war. But such castigation was for international consumption. Sudan, after all, is a major oil producer and has become a critical ally of the U.S. in its war against terror. Thus neither the U.S. nor the European Union prodded the United Nations for international sanctions. But the irony is that southern Darfur also contains significant unexploited oil reserves that are attracting diverse international interest into the region from countries such as China, Britain, the US and some Horn of Africa nations that have their own agendas. [6]

 

          By May 5, 2006, the African Union (AU) managed to get some of the rebels to join with the government in Khartoum in signing the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) in Abuja, Nigeria. But the peace agreement seems to have actually made security worse because it removed the capacity of Darfurians to defend themselves against the Janjaweed, which is critical to civilians in the area. Only one of the three major rebel groups involved in Darfur’s forty-month civil war signed the DPA with the government of Sudan. That group is the SLA faction headed by Minni Arkoi Minawi. This SLA faction announced that it would honor the ceasefire imposed by the agreement and moved its major fighting force north, where Minawi is fighting for control of his own ethnic group, the Zagawa.

 

          By ending offensive operations that used to keep the Janjaweed at bay, the SLA faction of Minni Arkoi Minawi has let security of the people deteriorate so badly that the local SLA force is a ragtag army without equipment. Many of its fighters are children armed with clubs. And Khartoum has done little to disarm the Janjaweed, which is terrorizing the people such as the Massalit in villages and on farms. AU troops that have been sent to Darfur rarely conduct aggressive patrolling that could provide a deterrent to the violence, claiming they are not mandated to conduct patrols but are expected only to report cease-fire violations.

 

          Meanwhile, Minawi and his forces that are signatories to the Darfur Peace Agreement have been conducting a reign of terror throughout villages in North Darfur in an effort to fight the rival SLA faction led by Abdulwahid Mohammed Alnur and others who have rejected the Peace Agreement. The violence has been focused against civilians; the killing has targeted young men. The internecine conflict has contributed to the displacement of tens of thousands of people.

 

          In August 2006, the three Darfur rebel groups that had refused to sign the African Union peace deal met in Asmara, Eritrea, and formed a new alliance to fight the Khartoum government. They called themselves the National Redemption Front (NRF).[7] The front consists of the Justice and Equality Movement, a holdout faction of the original Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), and the Sudan Federal Democratic Alliance (SFDA). The NRF rejects the Darfur Peace Agreement, otherwise known as the “Abuja Document,” and claims the “front will not only deal with Darfur issues but all issues in the Sudan.”[8] The NRF is also expected to renew calls for Sudan to replace African Union troops with a UN peacekeeping mission. Meanwhile, the AU, which has threatened sanctions against groups that do not accept the peace deal, will mull over this latest development during its upcoming summit in Gambia as it scrambles for an “African solution” to the conundrum: Whither Darfur?

 

 

Notes

 

1. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

 

2. On 26 May 2004, the Government of Sudan and the SPLM/A signed a Protocol on Power Sharing in Naivasha, Kenya (accessed 8/1/06).

 

3. Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, A Short History of A Long War (New York: Zed Books, 2006).

 

4. For a longer narrative of the conflict see Robert O. Collins and J. Millard Burr, Darfur: the Long Road to Disaster (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006).

 

5. Rex Sean O’ Fahey, “Does Darfur Have a Future in the Sudan,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 30; 1. Winter 2006.

 

6. Enver Masud, “Sudan, Oil, and the Darfur Crisis: Are the U.S. and Britain seeking a pretext for intervention in order to take advantage of Sudan’s Oil?” (accessed 8/18/06)

 

7. See here (accessed 8/5/06).

 

8. See here (accessed 8/5/06).

 

 

Aaron Tesfaye, is author of Political Power and Ethnic Federalism: the Struggle for Democracy in Ethiopia (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002).

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