African Seminar
Crisis in Darfur
Darfur is in the western region of Sudan, which is Africa’s largest country, located just south of Egypt on the eastern edge of the Sahara desert. The conflict in Darfur began in the spring of 2003 when two Darfuri rebel movements, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), launched attacks against government military installations as part of a campaign to fight against the historic political and economic marginalization of Darfur. At the time, the Sudanese government, which was working on negotiations to end a three-decade long civil war between North and South Sudan, responded swiftly and viciously to extinguish the insurgency. Through coordinated military raids with a government-armed militia, also known as the janjaweed, the Sudanese military specifically targeted ethnic groups from which the rebels received much of their support.
Since the beginning of this conflict, the government sponsored Janjaweed militias have used rape, displacement, organized starvation, threats against aid workers and mass murder. Violence, disease, and displacement continue to kill thousands of innocent Darfurians every month. The civilian casualties are vast. Over 400 villages have been completely destroyed and millions of civilians have been forced to flee their homes. An immense humanitarian crisis has resulted from the mass displacement of these civilians. From direct attacks and the deterioration of living conditions, many experts estimate that as many as 300,000 people have lost their lives.
In May 2006, the Sudanese government signed a peace agreement with one of the rebel movements, however, continues to fight the two other groups (SLM-Abdel Wahid and JEM) that refused to sign the agreement. The rebels also suffer from serious internal divisions and due to political differences, the movements began to fight one another, making the conflict in Darfur even more complex, and jeopardizing the lives of more civilians in the process.
In 2007, the Sudanese government’s divide-and-conquer strategy, described by Human Rights Watch as “chaos by design,” caused an increasingly frenzied free-for-all in Darfur. Rebel groups fragmented further and criminal activity as well as intertribal fighting increased exponentially. The attacks by the janjaweed have multiplied as well. Of the eight largest displacements between January and November 2007, seven resulted from government or Janjaweed attacks.
The United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force (UNAMID) now in Darfur replaced an under funded and under equipped African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur in January 2008. UNAMID to this day remains without the necessary resources to protect the 2.7 million internally displaced persons who live in large camps across Darfur. There are also around 300,000 Darfuri refugees living across the Sudanese border in neighboring Chad. Overall, the UN estimates that roughly 4.7 million people in Darfur (out of a total population of roughly 6 million) are still affected by the conflict.
As the conflict in Darfur enters its sixth year, conditions continue to deteriorate for civilians. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, even by the most conservative estimates. The United Nations puts the death toll at roughly 400,000. Up to 2.5 million Darfurians have fled their homes and continue to live in camps throughout Darfur, or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic. Based on Sudan’s behavior over the past five years, it is clear that unless the international community imposes additional political costs for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s intransigence, his government will continue to buy time by accepting initiatives only to backtrack later or impose new conditions that render them useless.