Echoes of genocide in Darfur, eastern Chad

By JOHN PENDERGAST and COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN

Is the genocide in Darfur over? Reports in major news outlets suggest that genocidal attacks by Khartoum-sponsored militia are a thing of the past and that Darfur’s agony today is born of anarchy.

Clearly, the violence in Darfur has escalated — but suggesting that the crisis there is now a free-for-all, with the moral equivalency that phrase implies, ignores the political logic driving a catastrophe that appears, on the surface, to be defined by armed chaos. The reality is far different — and, for the recently-authorised AU-UN peacekeeping force and upcoming peace negotiations to be successful, that reality must be understood.

Various writers in the Western capitals have missed the broader context of the process that is underway in Darfur. Beginning in mid-2003, Sudan’s government set forth to destroy and displace the civilian support base for Darfur’s rebel groups. The promotion of anarchy and inter-communal (or, popularly, “inter-tribal”) fighting is part and parcel of Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency campaign. The conditions in Darfur and eastern Chad today are not evidence of an end to genocide and the onset of an entirely new and different war — they are the echoes of genocide.

The regime’s behaviour is unswerving. Khartoum employed a similar divide-and-destroy strategy during its war with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army(SPLA) during the 1990s. Having sown the seeds of divisions between various Southern Sudanese ethnic groups, government officials in Khartoum sat back and watched as inter-communal violence tore southern communities to pieces.

Some of the worst violence occurred when Dinka and Nuer commanders in the SPLA fought in Upper Nile, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Only when the SPLA reunified and communities began to work toward reconciliation did a peace deal for Southern Sudan become possible.

Who is primarily responsible? In Darfur, the same government officials lit the match to ignite the genocide and fuel the chaos we are witnessing today. As the government’s divide-and-destroy policy envisioned, there is indeed increased fighting between and among communities, including among Arab groups that had previously worked together to destroy non-Arab villages. Follow the full picture >>>>