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 Sudan Studies from the London Review Of Books: Counter-Insurgency on the Ch
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Sudan Studies from the London Review Of Books
Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap
Alex de Waal
Darfurs landscapes have a cruel beauty, and few are more unyielding
than
the nomadic encampment of Aamo. It is in a stony wasteland on a plain
ringed by mountains formed from ancient volcanic cores. A distant sweep
of pink sand marks the course of a seasonal river, Wadi Kutum. Many
years ago, I stayed there as a guest of the nazir ('paramount chief')
of
a clan of Arab nomads known as the Jalul. With their broad black tents
pitched on the sand, camels browsing on the thorn trees, and sparse but
finely worked possessions, they were the stuff of coffee-table
ethnography books. Today, Aamo lies at the centre of the violence that
is disfiguring Darfur: tens of thousands are already dead and hundreds
of thousands have been driven from their homes. The first massacre of
the conflict took place just a few miles from Aamo, when the Janjawiid
militia murdered several dozen villagers who had sought safety in the
town of Kutum.
I met the elderly nazir, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985. His tent was hung
with the paraphernalia of a lifetime's nomadism - water jars, saddles,
spears, swords, leather bags and an old rifle. He invited me to sit
opposite him on a fine Persian rug, summoned his retainer to serve
sweet
tea on a silver platter, and told me the world was coming to an end. At
that time, Darfur was gripped by drought and disturbing changes were
afoot. The Saharan winds were blowing sand onto fertile hillsides, and
when it rained the water was cutting gullies through the rich alluvial
soil along the wadi. Worse, the villagers who had always played host to
camel nomads were now barring their migrations, and stopping them from
using pastures and wells.
Hilal rebuked me for not speaking Arabic like an Englishman: all
colonial officers had been schooled in classical Arabic, not the
Darfurian Sudanese version I had picked up. He said that the last
Englishman who had enjoyed his hospitality was Assistant District
Commissioner Thesiger, who had served in Kutum. Thesiger was famous in
Darfur chiefly as a crack shot. In those days, only British officers
were permitted to own rifles with enough power and accuracy to bring
down a lion. By the time of my visit in 1985, privately owned firearms
were a rarity. The nazir gave me a giraffe-tail fly whisk when I left.
More as a result of ecological change than colonial hunting parties,
lion and giraffe have now vanished from all but the southern fringes of
Darfur, where the forests stretch into southern Sudan and Central
African Republic. In the semi-arid plateaux of north Darfur, as the
savannas fade into desert, we saw only the occasional gazelle.
Hilal was a commanding figure, even in his eighties, thin, stooped and
nearly blind. The Sufis - and almost all Darfurians are followers of
one
or another Sufi sect, mostly of West African origin - talk of baraka, a
God-given charisma or blessing. 'Sheikhdom comes from God,' Hilal
believed. 'The degrees of sheikhdom are man-made.' Rather than the
formally superior title of nazir, he stuck with the lowlier but more
meaningful sheikh: he was known across the vastness of Darfur simply as
Sheikh Hilal. Today the name of his son Musa is known even more widely:
Musa Hilal is the leader of the Janjawiid; his name is first on the US
government's list of suspected war criminals.
Sheikh Hilal was unbendingly proud of his nomadic way of life. He
insisted that everyone in his tribe possessed camels. 'Look at that
small boy,' he said, pointing to his grandson. 'Even he owns camels.'
This was probably true: even in those straitened times, Hilal's family
was reputed to have several thousand, although the sheikh was too old
to
ride a camel and rarely saw them. His herds were three hundred miles to
the north, pasturing on the sweet grasses of the desert, after the
rains. His nephew had recently sold 120 camels to provide food for
hungry kinsmen, and Hilal had loaned many to poor relatives, from a
herd
that was shrinking faster than he knew. 'We assist each other. No Jalul
will ever need to cultivate,' he said.
But only an hour's walk away, we found an encampment of Jalul who had
lost their camels and goats during the drought and had settled in an
attempt to farm. The local villagers, from the Tunjur group (a close
relation of the Fur, the largest ethnic group in the region), had given
them only dry, sandy soil, keeping the alluvium next to the wadi for
themselves. Famous for its sweet dates, Wadi Kutum is among the most
valuable farmland in north Darfur, and the Tunjur were careful to
register it long before other farmers realised the importance of legal
title to land. The Jalul farmers were resentful, scratching at the arid
uplands in an attempt to grow a few ######### of millet. Their sheikh did
his best to keep up pretences. In the evening he served a lavish meal
of
goat and rice, and gave us directions to where we could find his sons
and camels. When we finished, having eaten more than enough, he called
out to his niece: 'Bring the next course!' There was no next course.
The British conquered Dar Fur ('Land of the Fur') in 1916, defeating
the
army of Sultan Ali Dinar, descendant of the 17th-century founder of the
Fur sultanate, Suleiman Solong, whose long neglected grave lies in the
mountains a day's drive south of Aamo. Like many of Darfur's key
political leaders, Solong was of mixed ancestry, the son of an Arab
father and a Fur mother. Despite talk of 'Arabs' and 'Africans', it is
rarely possible to tell on the basis of skin colour which group an
individual Darfurian belongs to. All have lived there for centuries and
all are Muslims.
Many maps of Darfur have tribal names scrawled across wide territories,
implying that some areas are inhabited exclusively by one of the
region's thirty or more ethnic groups. This can be misleading: there is
such a long history of internal migration, mixing and intermarriage
that
ethnic boundaries are mostly a matter of convenience. Individuals, even
whole groups, can shed one label and acquire another. When the British
overran the region, they found it convenient to suppose that paramount
chiefs had precisely demarcated authority over ethnic groups and
jurisdiction over the corresponding territory. Darfurians concurred
with
this fiction, which helped the British administer Darfur with just a
handful of colonial officers. The key to making this 'native
administration' system work was to award a territory, or dar, to each
group. It wasn't land ownership exactly, but the paramount chiefs were
allowed to allocate land rights to residents. Until the drought of the
1980s, there was enough land to provide newcomers, of whatever
ethnicity, with a plot to farm.
The nomads were an anomaly in this system. Most of those conventionally
described as nomads are in fact herders who occupy well-defined areas,
but there were a few true nomadic groups in Darfur, such as Sheikh
Hilal's Jalul Rizeigat. They moved vast distances between dry-season
grazing areas in central and southern Darfur and wet-season pastures on
the edge of the desert in the north. In the 1970s, the socialist
government of Jaafar Nimeiri gave the Jalul a 'rural people's council'
in the form of a village called Fata Borno (where we left the road to
find Aamo), but this was merely an administrative convenience, a place
where they could register to vote and send their children to school.
For
pasturing their herds, the Jalul relied on mobility, traversing the
migration routes between the arms of Fur and Tunjur villagers, grazing
their camels on the hillsides. Sheikh Hilal described what can best be
thought of as a 'moral geography' of Darfur. It esembled a
chequerboard,
with the red squares representing farms, and the white the pastures his
herds could graze. 'Wherever there is grass and rain, Allah provides
that that is my home,' he said. Ahmed Diraige, a former governor of
Darfur and, since then, a long-time opposition politician, recalls how
his father, Ibrahim, a Fur shartai (shartai is another word for a
paramount chief), hosted Sheikh Hilal's clan and their camels every
season in his village, Kargula, on the southern slopes of the mountain
of Jebel Marra. Shartai Ibrahim would slaughter a bull to welcome the
Jalul, who would pasture their camels on the harvested fields, thus
fertilising them, and help the villagers transport their grain to
market. When he left, Hilal would present two young camels to his host.
Like many other Darfurian Arabs, Hilal casually used racist epithets,
such as zurga ('black'), to refer to the Fur and Tunjur farmers. The
farmers in their turn described the bedouin as savages and pagans. But
the two communities relied on one another, and their leading families
intermarried.
Without a dar, the Jalul and the handful of other nomadic groups relied
on a socio-geographical order that gave them customary rights to
migrate
and pasture their animals in areas dominated by farmers. This worked
for
decades, but by the 1980s, drought, desertification and the expansion
of
farms were threatening these rights. Sheikh Hilal's moral geography had
been disturbed: the cosmic order had given way to chaos. But he would
rather die than change.
'Native administration' was local government on the cheap. The chiefs
were paid a pittance, receiving their reward through local despotism.
After Sudan achieved independence in 1956, successive governments
attempted to build up local services such as police, schools and
clinics. The positions of sheikhs and nazirs were formally abolished
and
'people's councils' set up to do the same job. But Khartoum never
delivered the funds and, by the early 1980s, local government was
bankrupt. If the governor of Darfur wanted to mount a police operation
against bandits, he had to commandeer vehicles and fuel from two rural
development projects funded by the World Bank, or from an aid agency.
If
he wanted to hold an inter-tribal conference to resolve a dispute, he
had to ask wealthy citizens to cover the expenses.
A succession of local conflicts erupted in Darfur in the wake of the
drought and famine of 1984-85. On the whole, the pastoral groups were
pitted against the farmers in what had become a bitter struggle for
diminishing resources. The government couldn't intervene effectively,
so
people armed themselves. A herd of a thousand camels represents more
than a million dollars on the hoof: only the most naive herd-owner
would
not buy automatic rifles to arm his herders. The villagers armed
themselves in response. There was an attempt at a reconciliation
conference in 1989, but its recommendations were never implemented.
It was also in 1989 that the Islamists toppled Sadiq al-Mahdi's
government in Khartoum. (Sadiq had won elections in 1986, the year
after
Nimeiri was deposed.) The head of state was now the devout and ruthless
soldier, Omar al-Bashir, who ruled in uneasy alliance with Hassan
al-Turabi, the charismatic leader of the country's Islamist party.
With
the Islamists in power, the Darfur regional government tried to
compensate for the rarity with which it caught criminals by the
savagery
of the punishments it meted out: execution and public display of the
corpse for armed robbers, amputation for thieves. In 1994, the
government brought back the old native administration council and
allocated territories to chiefs. With no funds to provide services, a
suddenly renewed authority to distribute land (now becoming scarce) and
self-armed vigilantes all around, this was a charter for local-level
ethnic cleansing. Immediately after this administrative reform, there
was another round of killings in the far west of Darfur. Much of the
present conflict, then, has its origins in land rights and the
shortcomings of local dministration. But central government, too, is
implicated in Darfur's plight, with neglect and manipulation playing
equal parts.
Geography is against Darfur. The large town of el Geneina, at the
westernmost edge of Darfur, close to the border with Chad, is said to
be
further from the sea than any other town on the continent. This part of
Darfur, popularly known as Dar Masalit after the dominant group, was
only absorbed into Sudan in 1922, by a treaty between the sultan and
the
British. Quite recently, the sultan's grandson, holding court in a
decrepit palace, used to joke that he still had the right to ecede
from Sudan, and he pointedly hung maps of Dar Masalit and Africa on his
wall, but not of Sudan.
The train from Khartoum terminates at Nyala in southern Darfur after a
three-day journey. It is at least another day's drive to el Geneina, if
the road is not cut by wadis carrying rainwater from the massif of
Jebel
Marra. Khartoum has ignored Darfur: its people have received less
education, less healthcare, less development assistance and fewer
government posts than any other region - even the Southerners, who took
up arms 21 years ago to fight for their rights, had a better deal.
Within Darfur, Arabs and non-Arabs alike have been marginalised, and it
is Darfur's tragedy that the leaders of these groups have not made
common cause in the face of Khartoum's indifference.
Another geographical misfortune is that Darfur borders Chad and Libya.
In the 1980s, Colonel Gaddafi dreamed of an 'Arab belt' across Sahelian
Africa. The keystone was to gain control of Chad, starting with the
Aouzou strip in the north of the country. He mounted a succession of
military adventures in Chad, and from 1987 to 1989, Chadian factions
backed by Libya used Darfur as a rear base, provisioning themselves
freely from the crops and cattle of local villagers. On at least one
occasion they provoked a joint Chadian-French armed incursion into
pursuing them. Many of the guns in Darfur came from those factions.
Gaddafi's formula for war was expansive: he collected discontented
Sahelian Arabs and Tuaregs, armed them, and formed them into an Islamic
Legion that served as the spearhead of his offensives. Among the
legionnaires were Arabs from western Sudan, many of them followers of
the Mahdist Ansar sect, who had been forced into exile in 1970 by
President Nimeiri. The Libyans were defeated by a nimble Chadian force
at Ouadi Doum in 1988, and Gaddafi abandoned his irredentist dreams. He
began dismantling the Islamic Legion, but its members, armed,
trainedand
- most significant of all - possessed of a virulent Arab supremacism,
did not vanish. The legacy of the Islamic Legion lives on in Darfur:
Janjawiid leaders are among those said to have been trained in Libya.
t was in the mid-1980s, when Nimeiri was overthrown, that the Ansar
exiles began to return. A few weeks after meeting Sheikh Hilal, I went
in search of his sons, herding their camels in the desert. As we
travelled north, we saw the tracks of military vehicles crossing the
desert heading south. In 1987, returnees from Libya took the lead in
forming a political bloc known as the Arab Alliance. At one level, the
Alliance was simply a political coalition that aimed to protect the
interests of a disadvantaged group in western Sudan, but it also became
a vehicle for a new racist ideology. The politically insignificant
racist epithets of earlier times began to take on an alarming tinge in
Darfur. The Alliance also latched onto the dominant ideology of the
Sudanese state, the very different Arabism of Nile Valley. The war in
Darfur at the end of the 1980s was more than a conflict over land: it
was the first step in constructing a new Arab ideology in Sudan.
It is hard to find a news account of the present war in Darfur that
does
not characterise it as one of 'Arabs' against 'Africans'. Such a
description would have been incomprehensible twenty years ago, when
Darfurian conceptions of ethnicity and citizenship were still cast in
the mould inherited from the Sultanate of Dar Fur and the string of
comparable Sudanic states that stretched westwards to the Atlantic. The
short but dramatic political career of one Fur politician, Daud Bolad,
illustrates the way in which the terms 'African' and 'Arab' took such a
hold.
Bolad was one of the leading young Islamists of his generation, but
abandoned political Islam after leaving KhartoumUniversity and joined
the Sudan People's Liberation Army, led by John Garang. Nothing could
be
further from the Islamist doctrines Bolad had once championed - and
nothing more inimical to them - than the ideology of the SPLA. Although
Garang is a Southerner and many in his movement urge a separate state
for southern Sudan, he is not a separatist himself. He believes that
the
non-Arabs in Sudan - an alliance of Southerners and marginalised groups
in northern Sudan, such as the Fur - form a numerical majority and
should dominate a secular, pluralist and united Sudan. Garang has
therefore recruited from exploited non-Arab communities on the fringes
of northern Sudan, such as the Nuba, and the string of peoples along
the
Blue Nile valley close to Ethiopia. In 1992 the Sudan government
launched its largest ever offensive, aiming to empty the Nuba region
entirely under the banner of jihad. It failed and today the Nuba have
achieved modest autonomy within the wider framework of a peace deal
signed in Kenya in May.
Bolad and a clandestine network of local activists were Garang's entrée
in Darfur. As he had done for the Nuba and Blue Nile, he dispatched a
small expeditionary force into Darfur in 1991, aiming to begin an
insurrection. It was a disaster. Bolad and his troops had to cross a
vast distance in the dry season. The only water available was in deep
boreholes, which were situated in villages and carefully guarded.
Moreover, the territory was occupied by cattle-herding Arab groups,
who
were fiercely hostile to the SPLA. The government quickly traced
Bolad's
unit and hunted it down, using both the regular army and a militia of
Beni Halba Arabs. A handful of fighters escaped and walked for months
through Central African Republic back to southern Sudan. Bolad was
captured and interrogated by the governor, Colonel al-Tayeb Ibrahim, a
military doctor and leading Islamist known as 'Sikha' or the 'Iron
Rod',
because of his skill at wielding reinforcing rods during student
demonstrations when he was bodyguard to the leader of the Khartoum
University Islamists - Daud Bolad. There is no record of the encounter
between the two. Bolad was never seen again. Worst of all, his diary
was
seized. In it were names and details of every member of his clandestine
network.
Many disappeared into prisons and 'ghost houses', others were so
unnerved by how much was known to their interrogators that they
renounced their cause and were freed, although they were sure that
their
every movement continued to be watched. A generation of opposition
leaders was annihilated or neutralised. Thereafter, radical Darfurian
leaders were suspicious of the SPLA, fearing that it would swallow them
whole, or misuse them for its own purposes. But as the SPLA continued
to
resist everything the Sudanese army could throw at it, and gained a
high
international standing, they, too, learned to characterise their plight
in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign
sympathy for the South: they were the 'African' victims of an 'Arab'
regime.
The 'African' label may have played well to international audiences in
the 1990s, but it had little purchase in Sudan. One reason for this was
the prevalence of radical Islam and its appeal to many Darfurians - the
result of the success of a political experiment by the regime in
Khartoum, masterminded by Hassan al-Turabi. Historically, political
Islam in Sudan was dominated by an Arabised elite originating in
NileValley, with strong links to Egypt. Theirs was a conservative
movement, identified with the Arabisation professed by all of Sudan's
rulers, both military and civilian. But Turabi broadened the agenda and
constituency of the Islamist movement. For example, he insisted that
women had rights in Islam, and today more than half of the
undergraduates at KhartoumUniversity are women. He also recognised the
authenticity of western Sudanese and West African Islam, thus embracing
the traditions exemplified by the early 19th-century Fulani jihads and
the wandering Sufi scholars of the Maghreb.
In ensuring that citizenship was extended to all devout Muslims, Turabi
revolutionised the status of the Sudanese of West African origin, know
as the Fellata. This group, several million strong, consists of ethnic
Hausa and Fulani whose ancestors were from Nigeria,Mali and Niger and
settled in Sudan either on their way to Mecca or as labourers for
colonial-era cotton schemes. The Fellata are famous for their piety.
Until the Islamist coup of 1989, they were not recognised as Sudanese
citizens; Turabi also increased the status of the Fellata sheikhs,
thereby correcting a longstanding anomaly and creating an electoral
constituency. In Darfur, too, he reached out to the religious leaders
of
the Fur, Masalit and other groups. As governor of Darfur, al-Tayeb
Ibrahim made a point of praising the Fur for their piety and took
lessons in the Fur language. The concept of common citizenship through
common faith seemed for a time to be a route to Darfurian national
emancipation.
But the Islamist promise was a sham. In practical terms, little
changed.
Only a handful of Darfurians were elevated to high positions in the
party and the administration. The national government was relatively
even-handed in its treatment of the region's Arabs and non-Arabs, but
only in the context of continuing neglect. Local government was still
bankrupt; banditry was still rife; drought and desertification
continued
to spark local conflicts that the governor could not, or would not, try
to stop. And before long Sudan's 'westerners' found that their version
of Islam was not, after all, accepted on its own terms: they were
regarded as true Muslims only if they adopted Arab values and culture.
In the decade following the 1989 putsch, the differences between
President Bashir and the mercurial Turabi became ever more apparent.
Turabi had ambitions for revolution throughout Africa and the Middle
East; Bashir held to the traditional view of Sudan as the possession of
an Arabised elite. It was a protracted struggle, over ideology, foreign
policy, the constitution and ultimately power itself. Bashir won: in
1999 he dismissed Turabi from his post as speaker of the National
Assembly, and later had him arrested. The Islamist coalition was split
down the middle. Most of the administration, and all of the security
elite in control of the military and various off-budget security
agencies, stayed with Bashir. The students and the regional Islamist
party cells mostly went into opposition with Turabi, forming the
breakaway Popular Congress. Among other things, the dismissal of Turabi
gave Bashir the cover he needed to approach the United States, and to
engage in a more serious peace process with the SPLA - a process that
led to the signing of the peace agreement in Kenya.
The Bashir-Turabi split reverberated in Darfur. Many Darfurians who had
come into the Islamist movement under Turabi's leadership now left
government - and decided to organise on their own. In May 2000, they
produced a 'Black Book' which detailed the region's systematic
under-representation in national government since independence. It
caused a stir throughout the country and showed how northern Sudan was
becoming polarised along racial rather than religious lines.
In describing Daud Bolad as a 'martyr', the 'Black Book' marked a
symbolic rapprochement between the Islamists and the secular radicals
of
Darfur. Hence the unlikely alliance between the latter group, who were
busy putting together the Darfur Liberation Front (renamed in early
2003
the Sudan Liberation Army, or SLA) and the Islamist-leaning Justice and
Equality Movement (JEM). The rebellion should have taken no one by
surprise. But observers of the Sudanese political scene - myself
included - had become so accustomed to the quiescence of Darfur that we
thought the militants were crying wolf when they predicted a major
insurrection. Evidently, the Sudanese government was just as surprised:
its peace overtures in the early months were as half-hearted as its
military preparations. In April last year, the rebels attacked el
Fasher
airport, destroyed half a dozen military aircraft and kidnapped an
airforce general. The SPLA had managed nothing of the kind in twenty
years. The rebels in Darfur had mobility, good intelligence and popular
support.
Critically for Bashir, the central pillar of the Sudanese state - a
cabal of security officers who have been running the wars in Sudan
since
1983 - was still in place. Faced with a revolt that outran the capacity
of the country's tired and overstretched army, this small group knew
exactly what to do. Several times during the war in the South they had
mounted counter-insurgency on the cheap - famine and scorched earth
their weapons of choice. Each time, they sought out a local militia,
provided it with supplies and armaments, and declared the area of
operations an ethics-free zone. The Beni Halba fursan, or 'cavalry',
which had been used against the SPLA in 1991, was an obvious instrument
to employ in Darfur. The northern camel nomads, including former
Islamic
legionnaires, were also on hand. Some claim that their name - the
Janjawiid - derives from 'G3' (a rifle) and jawad ('horse'), but it is
also western Sudanese dialect for 'rabble' or 'outlaws'. Unleashing
militias has the added advantage for the security cabal that it may
derail the near complete peace process with the SPLA and allow them to
retain their extra-budgetary security agencies; it also immunises them
against being charged in the future with committing war crimes.
The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of
Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained;
the
effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military
threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks
of
the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down
fruit
trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers'
claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the
genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological
hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to
secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of
southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine
cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power:
it
is genocide by force of habit.
Sheikh Hilal's world, with its stable cosmos and its relaxed
reciprocity
between farmer and nomad, has disappeared, as he feared it would.
Unrelenting poverty has been transformed into violence by misgovernment
and imported racisms. What to do now in the face of genocidal massacre
and imminent famine? Legal action - trying Musa Hilal and his sponsors
as war criminals - is essential to deter such crimes in future. But
condemnation is not a solution. The Janjawiid's murderous campaigns
must
not obscure the fact that Darfur's indigenous bedouins are themselves
historic victims.
As they did twenty years ago, the people of Darfur face destitution,
hunger and infectious disease. Apocalyptic predictions of mass
starvation were made after the 1984 drought - up to a million dead,
aid
agencies said, if there wasn't food aid. The food didn't come, and many
died - around 100,000 - but Darfur society didn't collapse because of
the formidable survival skills of its people. They had reserves of
food,
they travelled huge distances in search of food, work or charity, and
above all they gathered wild food from the bush. Today, food reserves
and animals have been stolen, and what use is the ability to gather
five
different kinds of wild grasses, 11 varieties of berry, plus roots and
leaves, if leaving a camp means risking rape, mutilation or death?
Predictions of up to 300,000 famine deaths must be taken seriously.
A huge aid effort is grinding into gear. But the distances involved
mean
that food relief is expensive and unlikely to be sufficient. It's
tempting to send in the British army to deliver food, but this would be
merely symbolic: relief can be flown in more cheaply by civil
contractors, and distributed more effectively by relief agencies. The
areas controlled by the SLA and JEM contain hundreds of thousands of
civilians who are not getting any help. As soon as an intrepid
cameraman
returns with pictures of this hidden famine, there will be an outcry,
and pressure for aid to be delivered across the front lines. There's no
reason to wait for the pictures before acting, although it's clear that
cross-line aid convoys will need to carry armed guards.
The biggest help would be peace. In theory, there's a ceasefire; in
practice, the government and Janjawiid are ignoring it, and the rebels
are responding in kind. The government denies that it set up, armed and
directed the Janjawiid. It did, but the monster that Khartoum helped
create may not always do its bidding: distrust of the capital runs deep
among Darfurians, and the Janjawiid leadership knows it cannot be
disarmed by force. When President Bashir promised Kofi Annan and Colin
Powell that he would disarm the militia, he was making a promise he
couldn't keep. The best, and perhaps the only, means of disarmament is
that employed by the British seventy-five years ago: establish a
working
local administration, regulate the ownership of arms, and gradually
isolate the outlaws and brigands who refuse to conform. It took a
decade
then, and it won't be any faster today. Not only are there more weapons
now, but the political polarities are much sharper.
A detachment of 60 African Union ceasefire monitors is in Darfur with a
slightly larger number of African troops providing security for them.
So
far no one is providing security for Darfur's terrified civilian
populace. If troops are to be sent from outside Africa, this should be
their mission. If the local intelligence is good, and a political
process is afoot, the hazards should be minimal. But reconstituting
Darfur will be slow, complicated and expensive. Understanding what has
been lost may be a good place to start.
23 July
Alex de Waal is the director of Justice Africa and the author of
Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn. A revised edition of Famine that
Kills: Darfur,Sudan 1984-85 is due from Oxford.
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