What does the massacre of an entire population look like? How do you explain to traumatized Sudanese women lining up with their undernourished children in a Darfur refugee camp that there is a difference between “acts of genocide” and actual “genocide”?

Since 2003, over 200 000 have died in Darfur and Chad, and 2.5 million have fled their homes seeking safety from the deadly internal and cross-border raids of the Sudanese Arab Janjaweed. “To outsiders, the conflict is seen as tribal warfare. At its roots, though, it is a struggle over controlling an environment that can no longer support all the people who must live on it” says Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The struggle finds children dying of cholera and succumbing to freezing nights and malnutrition. The struggle finds women lying outside refugee camps, raped while getting water, attacked by dark figures on horseback (if men went out, they would be killed).

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Like Rwanda in 1994, an ethnic rift precipitated the violence. Sudan straddles the ethnic borderline between the North African Arab nomads and the black sub-Saharan African tribes such as the Fur (Darfur means ‘land of the Fur’). In Sudan, the black Africans claim that Khartoum has favored the Arabs, giving them more access to water and pastureland. Revenue from newly tapped oil resources has flowed almost entirely to Arabs in Khartoum. In 2003, rebels from Darfur began to attack government targets; they and their villages faced swift retaliation from Khartoum which sent gunships to shell black villages. Following that devastation came the government-sponsored Janjaweed riding horses and camels, raping women and burning villages. These mounted warriors were directed to seek out rebels in their home villages, massacring anybody on their way, and were free to destroy or burn whatever was left behind.

“They raped our women to make sure we would never forget them,” said a Darfur village elder. “The villagers don’t regard the children of rape as their real children and will not love them as their own. When people see them, they remember the horrifying sight of a Janjaweed on a camel.” Four years later, the result has been gradual mass genocide of black civilians, with an estimate of more than 200 000 killed. Over two million are now displaced persons living in refugee camps, with nothing, often separated from their families. What began as a response to quash a rebellion, has turned into a massive exercise of power by the Sudanese government, led by President Bashir. The conflict began while Sudan was still in the grips of civil war between north and south that had killed 1.5 million. The war ended in 2004, but Khartoum has taken little action since to disarm the Janjaweed. Instead, the Sudanese government has aided and abetted the Janjaweed, providing them with air cover and weapons to wreak havoc on defenseless black farmers. After four years of debate, the UN in August 2007 finally agreed to send in a 26 000-strong peacekeeping force to stop the violence and reinforce existing aid efforts. However, it is too late for hundreds of thousands of victims. Today the situation is even more complex, as the government hands out arms to any side, Arab or African, willing to declare themselves against the rebels, sometimes even arming both sides in the same mini-conflict. And the war has spread into Chad and the Central African Republic. Since November 2006 eastern Chad has had more than 200,000 IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) because of janjaweed attacks on the border. The real purpose of procrastinating and extending the conflict is to keep people busy with a constant crisis so that the “divide and destroy” policy can ensure that booming oil revenues remain in the same hands. The result: a silent genocide.

Jan Grarup

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