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Julie flint & Alex deWaal,
Darfur: a short history of a long war. Zed
Books, in association with International African
Institute, 2005. 151 pages.
Gérard Prunier.
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Cornell
University Press, 2005. 212 pages.
David Morse.
The Iron Bridge (1998)
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What Can We
Learn from Darfur?
Book Reviews by
David
Morse
The horror continues to unfold in
Darfur, in western Sudan, while the world stands idly
by. Attacks on innocent civilians continue, despite
repeated promises by Sudan's central government in
Khartoum to disarm the Arab militias known as Janjaweed,
which it has armed and trained, and despite the signing
of a peace treaty last May.
Most of Darfur's black African
farming villages have been destroyed, the men killed,
the women raped; cattle and household goods stolen,
wells poisoned, the survivors driven from their land.
The survivors, mostly women and
children who have taken refuge in desolate camps, live
on the razor's edge of survival. They depend wholly on
outside humanitarian aid. Supply caravans are attacked
by Janjaweed, rebels, and bandits, causing humanitarian
aid groups to withdraw workers. Rations have been cut to
1,000 calories per day - about half the minimum required
for survival - because nations are reneging on promises
of aid.
What are the seeds of this
violence?
What can we do to end it?
What can we learn from Darfur?
Two books have appeared recently
that focus mainly on the first of these questions. They
seek to unravel the complex history of the violence. But
implicitly they entertain the remaining two questions as
well.
Darfur: a short history of a long war
is as compact as the title suggests, but rich with
detail. Authors Alex de Waal and Julie Flint write from
a wealth of personal experience. Flint is a journalist
who chronicled earlier genocidal attacks by the Sudan
government during the North-South civil war - on the
Nuba people of central Sudan, and on tribal Africans
living in the upper Nile region, where villages were
burned to make way for oil exploration. Alex de Waal is
an activist-writer who has been at the forefront of
mobilizing African and international efforts to address
famine, war, and the scourge of HIV/AIDS that afflicts
much of Africa. Together and separately over a period of
years, the authors have interviewed Janjaweed, rebels,
aid workers, officials of the Khartoum government, and
chiefs of various tribes.
De Waal and Flint take us as close
as we are likely to get to an insider's view of Darfur.
Many of the chapters have appeared previously as essays
in The London Review of Books and elsewhere, and
occasional minor redundancies betray their earlier
origins. In any case, the book is highly readable, given
the complexity of the situation. Darfur: a short history
of a long war has the tightly framed coherence of a
scene viewed through a key-hole.
Gérard Prunier's
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide is a
longer and more academic book, based on extensive
scholarly research. Whereas characters and images loom
fairly large in the other book, Prunier takes a wider,
more distanced approach - not so much a keyhole as an
aerial view. He cites statistics to show how Darfur was
marginalized, from the early twentieth century on -
first under the Ottoman empire, then under the joint
Egyptian and English colonial administration, and
finally, after Sudan gained its independence from
Britain in 1956, under the central government in
Khartoum.
Khartoum, in the north of Sudan, is
dominated by its Arab elite and, for more than two
decades, by the Islamic fundamentalist movement that
grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its president, Omar
Al Bashir, was installed in a bloodless coup in 1985.
Sudan is the largest country in
Africa - less a coherent nation than a sprawling ethnic
watershed, divided from its neighbors by boundaries
drawn at the convenience of the Colonial powers - Egypt,
Britain, and France. Khartoum, in the north of Sudan,
functions less as the capital of a modern state than as
a city-state exploiting its surround territories.
Prunier points out that of 23
intermediate schools operating in the Sudan in 1952,
only one was in Darfur. He estimates that as little as
5-6% of investment reached Darfur, which had a third of
the population.
What Flint and de Waal show by
anecdote and interviews, Prunier shows by statistics and
citations. To depict the encroachment of the Sahara
south into former grazing lands, for instance: Prunier
uses a table showing average precipitation; Flint and de
Waal accomplish the same thing dramatically through an
interview:
Even in his eighties, bedridden and
almost blind, Sheikh Hilal Abdalla was a commanding
figure. As the visitors entered his tent, he swung his
tall frame upright and ordered his retainer to slaughter
a sheep for dinner. He was courteous and imperious in
equal measure. 'Who are you?' he demanded. 'You can't be
British. All the British speak Quranic Arabic!'"
The Sheikh turns out to be the
father of Musa Hilal, chief commander of the Janjaweed,
recruited by the Khartoum government and under its
protection, despite regional efforts to stop his
predations. From the old sheikh we gather that the old
ways - notably the cooperation between nomads and
farmers - are disappearing,
Different as these two books are in
their approach, the authors agree on most of the
fundamentals. Each points out the extreme difficulty of
categorizing 'Arab' and black 'African' ethnicities in a
region where intermarriage has been common and where
skin color in itself is not a reliable index.
To say that 'Arabs' are oppressing
black 'Africans' is to over-simplify a complexly layered
history. And yet none of the authors disputes the role
of racism - in Khartoum's historic exploitation of its
hinterlands, in the 22-year-long North-South civil war
that ended last year, and in the murderous rampage now
taking place in Darfur.
An extended drought led to a famine
in 1984 that Khartoum did its best to ignore. The
drought disrupted the traditionally tolerant
relationship between semi-nomadic herders, who were
mostly Baggara Arabs, and the sedentary farmers, who
belonged to the black tribes - predominantly the Fur,
Masalit, and Zaghawa. "Darfur was an ethnic mosaic,"
writes Prunier, "not a land divided along binary lines
of fracture."
What turned this mosaic into a
killing machine?
In Darfur, the initial struggle
arose from desertification, and Khartoum's inability or
unwillingness to mediate the conflicts - to supply aid
to the drought-stricken, to broker land-sharing
arrangements for farmers, and to keep open designated
paths of migration for herders. Additionally, political
ambitions further destabilized the situation. Lybia's
Omar Kadaffi sought during the late 1980s and early 90s
to create an "Arab belt" across northern Africa. Hoping
to use Darfur to destabilize the government of Chad,
Kadaffi armed Chadian rebels based in Darfur and fanned
'Arab' animosities against 'black' tribes.
In all these struggles - involving
Lybia, Chad, and Khartoum - Darfurians were caught in
the middle.
In the North-South conflict that
racked Sudan for nearly two decades prior to the
outbreak of genocide in Darfur, the mosaic was more
binary. The struggle was polarized in terms of religion,
ethnicity, and distance from the seat of power. Arab
Muslims in the North were fighting blacks in the
marginalized South who were Christians or followers of
indigenous beliefs. The struggle was less over water
than oil.
When oil was discovered in the
south by Chevron in 1978, Khartoum redrew the internal
district boundaries farther south to capture the oil
revenues. This triggered the civil war, which took on a
genocidal character as Khartoum waged wholesale war
against civilians, using proxy militias and weapons
purchased by the proceeds from oil, and also as the
rebels split along tribal lines and began attacking
civilians as well. We are seeing a reprise of this today
in Darfur, which was left out of the North-South peace
agreement.
Yet there is nothing simple about
Darfur - from its standing as a separate Sultanate until
1916, to the use of Darfurian troops by Khartoum during
the civil war. The complexity can be overwhelming.
Prunier occasionally overwhelms with his blind
erudition, tossing in an Arabic phrase that sends the
reader scrambling for the glossary of Arabic terms at
the front of the book. Flint and de Waal are more
readable.
If I had to choose between the two
books, I would recommend Flint and de Waal. for the
casual reader, because it humanizes its subjects. It is
strongest in depicting the origins of the Janjaweed, and
in distinguishing between the two main rebel groups, the
Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation
Army. It also offers a prescient look at the fault-lines
within the SLA, based on personalities and tribal
divisions - which helps one to understand the disunity
among the rebels that came to light so painfully last
May at the signing of the treaty. The book contains a
thumbnail tribal map of Darfur and a chronology, both of
which are useful, and an index that one hopes will be
improved in future editions.
Prunier is most helpful for his
marshaling of facts - concerning the widely varying
estimates of the number of dead, for instance - which he
puts at between 280,000 and 310,000 at the beginning of
2005. (That number has climbed, since, by perhaps
100,000 new deaths.) Scholars will appreciate his full
notes, good bibliography, and somewhat better index.
Equally useful, in his last two chapters Prunier
addresses some profound questions - what constitutes a
genocide, the impact of the word itself, and the
disparity between the "raw African reality and the
international community dreamworld."
In short, these books complement
each other. Both went to press in mid-2005, shortly
before the death of John Garang, leader of the Sudan
People's Liberation Army, in a helicopter crash, but
they build a strong foundation for understanding a
complex and troubling arena of conflict. For anyone who
wishes to be better informed, I recommend them both.
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Julie flint & Alex deWaal,
Darfur: a short history of a long war. Zed
Books, in association with International African
Institute, 2005. 151 pages. $20, paperbound.
Gérard Prunier.
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Cornell
University Press, 2005. 212 pages. $15.60, hardbound
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David
Morse interviewed Sudanese
refugees in South Sudan and Kenya last December, and is
currently working on a book. His articles have appeared
most recently in Alternet, Northeast, The San
Francisco Chronicle, Salon, TomDispatch, and
elsewhere
Publications List.
posted 3 September 2006
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updated 17 March 2008 |
