Africa
Darfur Crisis - From The Inside
By Vince Gainey
Jan 10, 2005, 01:31

Map: Courtesy of www.icg.org

Polo's Bastards' Contributor, Vince Gainey has recently returned from a 6 week posting in the middle of the Darfur Crisis in West Sudan with a major international aid agency. Previously, Vince has spent time in The Sudan both in the 80's and the 90's, accompanying cross-border aid convoys into northern Ethiopia, following the big famine. He also worked in the western provinces of Kordofan, and in Darfur, on longer-term development programmes and, more recently, has spent time in Southern Sudan, managing a major aid and humanitarian programme.

Here, Vince describes how The Sudan has managed to spiral out of control and into the situation it currently finds itself in. - Editor.

Sudan, quite frankly, is a mess. In fact, it has pretty much always been a mess, but the mire is getting deeper by the day. Having just been on the verge of clambering out of 20 years of conflict in the south, and with a peace agreement within spitting distance, Darfur then erupted. The two issues are not of course unconnected: The SPLA (Sudan People's Liberation Army) rebels of south Sudan have been fighting the Islamist Government in Khartoum for 20 years in order to achieve greater regional autonomy in the south and a greater share in the wealth of the Sudan as a whole. The oft-vaunted public message about this being a Muslim-Christian conflict, is a gross and inaccurate over simplification of a far more complex conflict.

In October 2002 a cessation of hostilities between Government and SPLA forces was declared and since then the two sides have been edging closer to a comprehensive peace agreement that will give the south a high degree of political autonomy (including exemption from Sharia laws) and, after a proposed 6 year interim period, allow a referendum to give the south the opportunity to opt for total separation from the north.

With peace close in the south, other marginalised peoples of Sudan saw their chance: The peoples of Darfur in the far west have long been isolated from political and economic power in Sudan. This isolation has cost them dear in terms of development and the region shows few signs of having benefited from the oil revenue that has purchased new warplanes, and tanks, and rebuilt the government ministries in Khartoum. Darfur has always been bandit country out on the fringes of society and the law. Much of North Darfur is open desert where Arab nomads have always been the only inhabitants tough enough to survive and, through that toughness, have exercised their own laws and codes far divorced from central government.

West Darfur is the mountain fastness of Jebel Marra, rising to over 10,000 feet above the desert, high and cool, and inhabited by the Fur people ("Dar Fur" means Land of the Fur). South Darfur is savannah country inhabited by farmers of more African extraction, and seasonally by nomads, using the green lands to feed their cattle and camels in the dry season from October to June.

Darfurians have had little opportunity to benefit from the political process to date or from the income flow from Sudan's increasing oil exports (over 300,000 barrels a day now, and rising). Scattered armed resistance throughout the state crystallised in 2003 into a full armed rebellion against the central government, led by two military factions; the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the latter having a strong Islamic agenda, being closely aligned to the Islamic Ideologue, Hassan El Turabi, former Eminence Grise of the current government and since 2001, their Bete Noire.

Dervish dances by the Sufi followers of the Saint Hamed en Nil in Omdurman.

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