Gérard Prunier, a professor at the University of Paris, has performed an unusual feat: He has managed to produce the earliest book-length analyses of two African genocides. Just one year after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Prunier published The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide; now, 10 years later, while Africa is experiencing yet another genocide, Prunier is again the first out of the gate with his analysis, this time Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide.
The fact that his book is being published while the genocide is still going on speaks volumes about the international community's ability and willingness to effectively deal with the death and destruction occurring in western Sudan. While an estimated 400,000 people have died, the world has focused its efforts elsewhere, primarily on reaching, and then implementing, the Naivasha peace agreement in hopes of ending the two-decade-long war between Khartoum's National Islamic Front (NIF) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. While certainly a worthwhile goal, the distraction it has created and the leverage it granted to the genocidal regime in Khartoum has generated a situation where, according to the international aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières, millions of lives are now “dangling by the thin thread that is humanitarian aid.”
As Prunier explains, this is no accident. When Darfur first began to receive media coverage in 2004, politicians around the world sought to portray it as a “humanitarian crisis” as opposed to the “political crisis” it truly is. Whereas a political crisis would require a political response, a humanitarian crisis requires merely a humanitarian response. Prunier notes that the United Nations and the rest of the world quickly passed the responsibility for the situation off to humanitarian organizations on the ground, expecting them “not to complement political action but themselves to be substitutes for what the politicians should have done.” They have, in essence, succeeded in creating an “impression that something is being done without that ‘something' being political.”
Prunier examines the history of the Darfur region, going back to the 17th century, as he describes just how the current situation came to pass. While that history is dense and complex, Prunier manages to effectively convey the point that the current “Arab vs. African” context in which the genocide is taking place is not a distinction that appeared until shortly after Sudan became independent in the late 1950s.
Darfur had always been neglected and marginalized by the rulers in Khartoum, but with independence came elections, and with elections came “electoral tactics” that exaggerated the “racial-cultural” nature of the region. Amid years of drought and famine, those seeking electoral support told the “African” agricultural tribes that the region's woes were the fault of “the Arabs,” while those seeking the support of the more nomadic “Arab” tribes claimed that it was the “Africans” who were cutting them off from lands that were rightfully theirs and destroying their way of life.
At the same time, Darfur was being used as a pawn and battleground in a three-way struggle between Chad, Libya, and the regime in Khartoum. Libyan dictator Muammar Quaddafi, who harbored dreams of an “Arab Union” in the region, had set off a border dispute with Chad, and soon began using Darfur as a launching pad for attacks. Weapons and soldiers flooded the region while various political and military alliances were made and broken. As Prunier writes, while “Darfur did not seem to matter enough to be taken seriously at the level of good governance … it certainly mattered enough to become an increasingly racialized battleground between Khartoum, Tripoli and N'djamena.” By the early 1990s, the regime in Khartoum had been overthrown by the NIF, while the Libyan-backed General Idriss Deby had likewise overthrown the government in Chad. When all was said and done, Darfur “had been left in a state of total chaos.” And so it remained for more than a decade.
Following the attacks of September 11, writes Prunier, “Khartoum was quick to understand that for a born-again Christian president, a repented sinner would be more valuable than a routine ally” in the war on terrorism, and soon became an important intelligence asset to the CIA -- a relationship that continues to this day. Around the same time, President Bush began to take an interest in the north-south peace process, in part because it was an issue important to his religious political base.
All the while, Khartoum continued to ignore the needs of the people of Darfur until 2003, when two rebel movements -- the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement -- launched a coordinated raid in which they managed to kill more than 30 Sudanese soldiers, destroy a handful of military planes and helicopters, and capture the commander of an air-force base.
Khartoum responded by launching attacks, not against the rebels themselves but against their perceived supporters in Darfur. Russian-built Antonov aircraft were used to bomb villages, an utterly reckless tactic considering that the Antonovs are transport planes, not bombers. As such, the bombs couldn't actually be aimed -- and, in many cases, weren't actually bombs at all. Instead, they were mostly “old oil drums stuffed with a mixture of explosives and metallic debris” that were simply rolled out of the plane's open rear ramp, “completely useless from a military point of view” but effective as “terror weapons aimed solely at civilians,” writes Prunier.
As part of its “counterinsurgency” campaign, Khartoum also recruited, trained, paid, and coordinated with Arab militias known as the Janjaweed. Mostly criminals, former soldiers, and jihadists, the Janjaweed were given the task, once the bombs had stopped falling, of sweeping in on horseback and killing, looting, and raping, as well as burning the villages to the ground.
The attacks continued for more than a year, but it was not until thousands had died, and hundreds of thousands of others had fled, that the world began to even take notice -- though it still did next to nothing. The UN Security Council passed several resolutions demanding that Khartoum stop its attacks and disarm the Janjaweed, which Khartoum routinely ignored. People debated whether what was taking place was “genocide,” as the United States finally declared the situation in September of 2004. Not that it made any difference. Prunier reports that he was informed by a high-ranking member of the Bush administration in October 2004 that then-Secretary of State Powell had essentially been ordered to use the term “genocide,” but to follow it with a declaration that it “did not obligate the United States to undertake any sort of drastic action” -- which is exactly what Powell did.
The UN sent a commission of inquiry to Sudan in the latter part of 2004, and though it reported that it could find no genocidal “intent” on the part of those responsible for the death and destruction in Darfur, it did find overwhelming evidence of “indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur.” The names of those responsible for these crimes were then handed over to the International Criminal Court for prosecution -- and just happen to be many of the same people the world was counting on to carry out the Naivasha peace agreement and end 20 years of civil war.
In 2004, the African Union (AU) agreed to provide some 300 troops to patrol Darfur, a region the size of France, though their mandate was limited to protecting their own cease-fire monitors. Since then, the AU has expanded the size of its mission to roughly 4,000, but its mandate remains more or less the same. The AU is ill-equipped and unprepared to bring peace to Darfur, but the rest of the world has been more than happy to let it take the lead. As Prunier explains, the mantra of “‘African solutions to African problems'” [has] become the politically correct way of saying ‘We do not really care.'” The AU has been set up to fail, given a “‘Mission Impossible' type of situation” that it cannot handle in order to give the impression of “serious international involvement.”
Prunier concludes that what has taken place in Darfur does meet the standard set out by the 1948 Genocide Convention, though he argues that “the practice of genocide or quasi-genocide in Sudan has never been a deliberate well-thought out policy, but a rather spontaneous tool used for keeping together a ‘country' which is under minority Arab domination.” Though nearly all of the people of Darfur are Muslim, Prunier states that the genocide has occurred mainly because “a large chunk of the Muslim North has decided to act not according to its religious identity but rather in line with its racial origins.”
Prunier's focus on the details of Darfur's history can be overwhelming at times, but he does a good job of explaining how, for nearly all of its existence, Darfur has been routinely ignored, marginalized, or exploited by Khartoum, and how this marginalization and exploitation sowed the seeds of the current conflict. While Prunier does not claim to have answers or solutions for the current crisis, his book is the first, and thus currently the best, examination of the crisis in Darfur -- one that ought to be read by anyone who seeks to truly understand the 21st century's inaugural genocide.
Kyle Mantyla is a policy analyst with People For the American Way. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
