Darfur

Darfur for Dummies

by Mik Awake

If you're anything like us here at The Inquirer, the utterly baffling conflict that continues to rage in Darfur is about as clear to you now as the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream was in high school. Like many, you're probably at a loss to explain who is fighting whom, who are the victims, and what's at stake.

It seems as though every time someone attempts to take a step back and decipher the situation, the coverage only makes sense (like many Shakespearean dramas) while you're reading it. But after you put away the article, magazine or treatise, all sense eludes you.

Fret not, for today The Inquirer has assembled a Cliffs Notes version of the conflict that, since 2003, has become the first genocide of the 21st Century. Or: the world's most urgent humanitarian crisis. Or: simply, Darfur.

Setting

Sudan is a large country in northeast Africa. Darfur, roughly the size of France, is in the western part of Sudan. Darfur is populated mainly by subsistence farmers.

Actors

Al-Bashir, the Warrior King: Arab; 62 years old. Military leader of Sudan. Lives in the capital, Khartoum.

Janjaweed, the Evil Horsemen: Government-backed henchmen. Commonly employ such tactics as "scorched-earth policy," burning entire villages, raping and enslaving women. As Samantha Power describes them in her gripping New Yorker piece of 2004, the Janjaweed are:

Arab militiamen who have carried out much of the pillaging, killing, and raping in Darfur. These men, who receive orders on Thuraya satellite phones, have joined up with the Sudanese Air Force and Army . . .

The Darfur People: Black Africans. Muslim subsistence farmers. At the hands of the aforementioned Evil Horsemen, over 2,000,000 are now displaced, spread across western Sudan and neighboring Chad. Anywhere between 50,000 and 500,000 are dead.

The Rebels of Darfur, Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM): The SLA is a large military faction composed of Black African fighters from Darfur. Originally organized in the late 1980s to defend the people of Darfur against the threat of the - then under-armed - Evil Horsemen, they are the only thing standing in between the Warrior King and the people of Darfur. To fend off the Evil Horsemen, the SLA have joined forces with the JEM. It is a shaky marriage at best.

The JEM are a newer, smaller Islamist rebel group led by Hassan al-Turabi, who was once a close ally of Sudan's Warrior King. The JEM have strong links to radical Islamist groups like Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. The Warrior King, al-Bashir, is perhaps most fearful of the aspirations to power secretly held by the JEM.

Conflict

To begin understanding Darfur, toss religion away as a motivating cause. Though religion fueled the twenty-year Sudanese civil war between the Muslim North and Christian South, Darfur is not a religious genocide like the Holocaust. It is first and foremost a political conflict between a geographical region and its government. But as with many other African nations, the political and the ethnic are often two names for the same thing.

Put simply, the people of Darfur have been left out of the Sudanese government for years. The people of Darfur were accustomed to threatening the government with secession. Their anger reached a breaking point in early 2003 when they attacked government positions in Darfur. The Warrior King Bashir, sensing a threat to his power, unleashed his Evil Horsemen on the civilians of Darfur. The wheels of the Darfur crisis were thus put in motion.

Plot Summary

See The Inquirer's GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: Sudan Timeline

Themes

In his article, "The Politics of Death in Darfur," which was originally published in the May issue of Current History and republished in the August Harper's, Gerard Prunier