Some background on Darfur

Martin Meredith has written a masterful book entitled The Fate of Africa. It focuses primarily on the last 50 years, and how Africa has succeeded, and more importantly, failed, since in the independence era began.

(It makes a good companion to another excellent book on Africa, one by Thomas Pakenham entitled The Scramble for Africa. That book focuses on Africa's colonial era.)

Meredith tells the story of General Bashir, Sudan's current president who seized power in 1989. The beginning of Bashir's rule presaged the genocide in Darfur.

Shortly after seizing power in Sudan in 1989, General Omar al-Bashir addressed a rally holding a copy of the Koran in one hand and a Kalashnikov rifle in the other. 'I vow here before you to purge from our ranks the renegades, the hirelings, enemies of the people and enemies of the armed forces,' he declared.

Bashir's coup marked the beginning of an Islamist dictatorship that dealt ruthlessly with Muslim and non-Muslim opponents alike.

One institution after another - the civil service, the army, the judiciary, the universities, trade unions, professional associations, parastatal organizations - was purged of disssent.

A new Islamic penal code promulgated in 1991 provided for public hanging or crucifixion for armed robbery; execution by stoning for adultery; and death for apostasy.

Bashir also formed his own Islamic militia, the People's Defence Force, modelling it on Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

Meredith describes the awful fighting and unrest in the South, and the presence of oil led to ethnic cleansing.

Though reduced to a wasteland, southern Sudan still possessed the ultimate prize for both sides: oil.
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The oilfields lay mostly in Nuer and Dinka territory. To protect the area from rebel attacks, the government initiated a campaign of ethnic cleansing, using the army and Baggara militias to drive out the local population and establish a cordon sanitaire around the oilfields.

And then, as if Sudan had not seen enough bloodshed, the terrible war in Darfur started up.

But just as one war was winding down, another broke out in the western region of Darfur, threatening disaster of a magnitude that had not occurred since Rwanda. Its origins lay in an age-old conflict over land between nomadic Arab pastoralists and settled 'African' agriculturalists that intensifed during the 1980s as a result of drought and increasing desertification. Arab pastoralists moving southwards from the arid northern part of Darfur into areas occupied by black Muslim tribes - the Fur, Msaalit and Zaghawa - were involved in a series of violent clashes. Rather than working to defure tensions, the Khartoum government sided with Arab pastoralists, providing them with arms.

Rebel movements cropped up, and the government struck back.

Khartoum reacted with a savage campaign of ethnic cleansing intended to drive out the local population and replace it with Arab settlers, just as it had done in oil-producing areas of the south and the Nuba mountains. The air force bombed villages; the army launched ground attacks; and Arab militias known as janjaweed were licensed to kill, loot and rape at will. They burned to the ground hundreds of villages, killed thousands of tribesmen, raped women en masse, abducted children and stole cattle.

Consider this same government is resisting the presence of UN troops in Darfur. How willing do you think this government is to solve this problem through diplomacy?