Darfur and the Genocide Debate

Scott Straus

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

Summary:  As western Sudan continues to suffer, much international attention has focused on whether to call what is happening there "genocide." Yet once the term was invoked, it did not trigger outside intervention. Terminology turns out to matter far less than was expected. And once more, the world has dithered while people die.

Scott Straus is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Darfur crisis also has a third, local lineage. Roughly the size of Texas, Darfur is home to some six million people and several dozen tribes. But the region is split between two main groups: those who claim black "African" descent and primarily practice sedentary agriculture, and those who claim "Arab" descent and are mostly semi-nomadic livestock herders. As in many ethnic conflicts, the divisions between these two groups are not always neat; many farmers also raise animals, and the African-Arab divide is far from clear. All Sudanese are technically African, Darfurians are uniformly Muslim, and years of intermarriage have narrowed obvious physical differences between "Arabs" and black "Africans."

Nonetheless, the cleavage is real, and recent conflicts over resources have only exacerbated it. In dry seasons, land disputes in Darfur between farmers and herders have historically been resolved peacefully. But an extended drought and the encroachment of the desert in the last two decades have made water and arable land much more scarce. Beginning in the mid-1980s, successive governments in Khartoum inflamed matters by supporting and arming the Arab tribes, in part to prevent the southern rebels from gaining a foothold in the region. The result was a series of deadly clashes in the late 1980s and 1990s. Arabs formed militias, burned African villages, and killed thousands. Africans in turn formed self-defense groups, members of which eventually became the first Darfur insurgents to appear in 2003.

The mass violence against civilians began in the middle of that year. Khartoum responded to the rebellion in Darfur the same way it had to the conflict in the south: by arming and equipping Arab militias. Thus the janjaweed were born. Their name, which translates roughly as "evil men on horseback," was chosen to inspire fear, and the janjaweed, who include convicted felons, quickly succeeded. Khartoum instructed the militias to "eliminate the rebellion," as Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir acknowledged in a December 2003 speech. What followed, however, was a campaign of violence that primarily targeted black African civilians, in particular those who came from the same tribes as the core rebel recruits.

Human rights groups, humanitarian agencies, and the U.S. State Department have all reached strikingly similar conclusions about the nature of the violence. Army forces and the militia often attack together, as janjaweed leaders readily admit. In some cases, government aircraft bomb areas before the militia attack, razing settlements and destroying villages; such tactics have become central to this war. In late September, a U.S. official reported that 574 villages had been destroyed and another 157 damaged since mid-2003. Satellite images show many areas in Darfur burned out or abandoned. The majority of the attacks have occurred in villages where the rebels did not have an armed presence; Khartoum's strategy seems to be to punish the rebels' presumed base of support--civilians--so as to prevent future rebel recruitment.

Testimony recorded at different times and locations consistently shows that the attackers single out men to kill. Women, children, and the elderly are not spared, however. Eyewitnesses report that the attackers sometimes murder children. For women, the primary threat is rape; sexual violence has been widespread in this conflict. Looting and the destruction of property have also been common after the janjaweed and their army allies swoop down on civilian settlements.

This violence has produced what one team of medical researchers has termed a "demographic catastrophe" in Darfur. By mid-October 2004, an estimated 1.8 million people--or about a third of Darfur's population--had been uprooted, with an estimated 1.6 million Darfurians having fled to other parts of Sudan and another 200,000 having crossed the border to Chad. Exactly how many have died is difficult to determine; most press reports cite about 50,000, but the total number is probably much higher. In October 2004, a World Health Organization official estimated that 70,000 displaced persons had died in the previous six months from malnutrition and disease directly related to their displacement--a figure that did not include violent deaths. By now, the number has probably grown much larger. Despite a huge influx of humanitarian aid since mid-2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned in October of an "unprecedented" food crisis; several months earlier, a senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development told journalists that the death toll could reach 350,000 by the end of the year.

WORD PLAY

Most of these facts are undisputed; the reports from Darfur by aid workers and reporters have been remarkably consistent (although too little attention has been paid to rebel atrocities). Khartoum has, predictably, denied direct involvement in the attacks against civilians, and both the Arab League and the African Union have downplayed the gross violations of human rights (focusing on the civil war instead). Still, not much controversy exists over what is actually happening in Darfur. Yet public debate in the United States and Europe has focused less on the violence itself than on what to call it--in particular, whether the term "genocide" applies.

The genocide debate took off in March 2004, after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a number of articles making the charge. His graphic depictions of events there soon stimulated similar calls for action from an unlikely combination of players--Jewish-American, African-American, liberal, and religious-conservative constituencies. In July 2004, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., issued its first-ever "genocide emergency." MoveOn.org called on Powell to use the "genocide" label for Darfur, as did the Congressional Black Caucus, African-American civil rights groups, and some international human rights organizations (but not Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch). Editorialists from a number of major newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Boston Globe, made similar appeals. Long concerned with the persecution of black Christian populations in southern Sudan, American evangelicals also called for a formal recognition of genocide and for U.S. action--even though the victims in Darfur were Muslim.