Disaster in Darfur
ONCE AGAIN, our TV screens are filled with images of
destitute African villagers, emaciated with starvation, their faces contorted
with grief and terror. This is Darfur in the west of Sudan, a country that has
been wracked by poverty and civil war for most of its existence but particularly
in the last twenty years.
In this conflict, the Islamist military regime of President
Al-Bashir has launched brutal air-offensives and mobilised local Arab-speaking
armed militias, the Janjawiid, against the thirty or more different ethnic
groups which makeup Darfur’s population, obliterating hundreds of villages and
towns in the process. The intention: to smash their 18-month long, mass uprising
led by the secular Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) and the more Islamist
Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) against decades of discrimination in terms
of funding, education and jobs within the state and positions in the military.
According to most recent estimates by the United Nations
(UN), up to two million people have been displaced internally and across the
border to neighbouring Chad, whilst up to 50,000 have died, cut down by the
government-backed military operations or from starvation.
A parade of politicians from the West have gone to Sudan
(including Colin Powell, Jack Straw and Joschka Fischer, German foreign
minister), issuing veiled threats of UN sanctions and demanding the end of
‘genocide by the Janjawiid’ and the ‘disarming of the militias’ by the Al-Bashir
regime. The Sudanese regime has responded by pointing to the danger of another
Western imperialist intervention under the cover of humanitarian aid, while the
regional Arabic press has correctly attacked Western governments for their
duplicity.
Undoubtedly, Al-Bashir’s regime and its proxy militias have
committed these atrocities. However, genuine concern for the plight of African
poor peasants and workers in Darfur does not enter into the calculations of
Western imperialism or the corrupt politicians and governments that make up the
African Union (AU) which has now become involved in the conflict. Where were
these individuals and governments when over two million people were butchered
over the last twenty years? This was mainly the result of the Sudanese
government’s counter-insurgency measures against the Sudan Peoples Liberation
Army-led (SPLA) armed uprising in southern Sudan against Khartoum’s Shariah
rule. More importantly, none of their proposed ‘solutions’ will solve the
fundamental problems that are the foundation of this crisis.
In fact, the roots of this conflict lie partly in British
imperialism’s colonial subjugation of Sudan but also in huge instability in
relations between regional and Western imperialist powers caused by the economic
and political results of the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989.
Prior to 1989, many African countries fell under the
influence of one of the two superpowers. Although there were local wars, fought
by regional powers as proxies for the great powers, these were in firmly
prescribed limits. The elites of those countries which attempted an independent
existence were able to extract some concessions by balancing between US
imperialism and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Other African countries under the
Soviet umbrella were able to achieve limited social and economic development
through the nationalisation and state direction of the economy, albeit in an
extremely distorted manner and under the control of undemocratic and corrupt
bureaucratic elites.
The collapse of the Soviet Union brought the full force of
neo-liberal policies to sub-Saharan Africa, including Sudan. The International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank forced governments to implement vicious
Structural Adjustment Programmes as a condition for continuing loans. In Sudan
these policies mean that over half the population is illiterate, with only one
out of 50 children finishing primary education, while one woman in nine dies in
childbirth.
In conditions of crushing poverty, without a strong movement
based on the working class and peasantry and able to fight for a socialist
alternative to the devastation that capitalism and imperialism brings, conflicts
based on religious and ethnic differences were bound to develop. Reactionary
elements within many ethnic groupings have intervened into the vacuum and
exacerbated divisions, creating an ideological basis for increasing division in
order to underpin their hold on power amongst the masses.
In Sudan, this was reflected by historical divisions
becoming sharper, leading to civil war, particularly between the northern based
and Islamic military regime and the Christian and animist south. (Animism is a
religious belief that the whole of nature is animated by spirits.)
British imperialism followed its classical policy of divide
and rule in colonising Sudan. It firmly entrenched leaders of the three main
northern Arab tribes as the main conduit of colonial rule and ensured all the
main economic development took place along the Nile and in and around Khartoum
in the north. However, it literally closed off southern Sudan, allowing no Arabs
or Muslims from the North to travel or settle there, frightened of the
development of a Sudanese nationalist movement that threatened to unite the
country against British rule. In the south, the British colonial masters
reintroduced elements of tribal rule which had fallen by the wayside as result
of the growth of the slave trade. In Darfur, it attempted to divide up the
region giving control of particular geographical areas to specific ethnic
groupings – an attempt to set one tribe against another and control all through
payments to tribal leaders.
These divisions, either introduced or strengthened by
British imperialism, have echoed down the years and manifested themselves
particularly sharply since the late 1980s.
However, other processes have sharpened the divisions. Since
1989, the absence of an external enemy, such as the Soviet Union (which
previously attenuated frictions between the main Western imperialist powers and
between those African regimes with interests in expanding their regional
influence), has led to increased competition between different regimes and
powers for influence in areas of conflict and previous colonies. Thus in Sudan’s
Darfur conflict we see the intervention of US and British imperialism as well as
France in Chad across the border. Nigeria’s President Obasanjo is using his
country’s pre-eminent position in Africa to promise the deployment of 1,500
Nigerian troops through the auspices of the AU. This jockeying for influence was
commented upon by one aid official who complained bitterly about the lack of a
united position by Western powers during negotiations between the Khartoum
government and the SLM/JEM in Chad: "The international community has totally
mishandled the Darfur situation. Its divisions have allowed the Khartoum to play
governments off against each other". The sharpest differences are between US and
French imperialism, still at a low-point since the beginning of the Iraq war.
Although oil is not the central issue in determining Western
imperialist intervention, the discovery of massive new oil reserves in Sudan’s
mutinous, southern Western Upper Nile region in 1998, has undoubtedly
concentrated the mind of the Bush regime. It also probably explains why not a
peep of protest emanated from the White House when the Sudanese military started
depopulating the area following requests from Canadian oil companies like
Talisman during 2002.
In fact the Bush administration’s main intervention in Sudan
was to attempt to force a conclusion to the negotiations for a peace settlement
between Al-Bashir’s regime and the SPLA. Bush was pressured into this
intervention by the Republican Christian fundamentalist right who saw Khartoum’s
campaign as an attempt to obliterate Christian believers in the south. The more
‘enlightened hawks’ of the State Department – among them Colin Powell – also
wanted an agreement, seeing it as an opportunity to bring ‘on board’ an Islamic
regime which had rejected support for Al-Qa’ida and other reactionary Islamic
groups since the later 90s. By doing this they hoped to undermine the
perception, particularly in the Arab world, that US imperialism was conducting a
crusade against Muslims internationally.
However, the progress towards an interim peace deal actually
acted to fuel the fires of the conflict in Darfur, because the Khartoum-based
government made it clear that they were only prepared to negotiate with the SPLA
about the civil war in the South (a position which was supported by US
imperialism). Other opposition groups, including those in Darfur, realised that
a peace deal with the SPLA would lead to a strengthened government in Khartoum
which would be prepared to prosecute an even more brutal campaign to crush their
own struggles for autonomy or increased resources.
The conflict in Darfur has been portrayed as an ethnic clash
between Sudanese Arabs and Africans. This is a gross over-simplification.
Particularly over the last twenty years tensions between mainly non-Arab
speaking farmers of ethnic groups like the Fur and the more northern-based
nomads, who mainly speak Arabic as their first language, have been on the rise
as repeated droughts have limited the land available for farming and grazing. In
the past these tensions were ameliorated because of the existence of local
administrations and a certain availability of local funds. The IMF sponsored
adjustment programmes have seen both these disappear.
But the divisions between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have not been
so clear or sharp until recently. Once a farmer had a certain number of cattle
he was accepted as a member of one of the nomadic tribes of the predominantly
Arab-speaking north of Darfur. Many farmers relied on the nomads to graze their
camels and cattle thus fertilising the land. And quite often there was
intermarriage between the ethnic groups of nomadic and farming background.
The publication and circulation of a samizdat ‘Black Book’
in May 2000, outlining decades of discrimination against ethnic groups in Darfur,
marked a decisive change in the situation. In the period following and
especially after the start of armed attacks on government targets in early 2003
by the SLM/JEM, Al-Bashir’s government intervened to arm and encourage the
Janjawiid to attack farmers in Darfur.
Many of the Janjawiid leaders were former members of the
Islamic Legion formed in the 1980s by Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, whose
unfulfilled aim was to form a wider empire in North Africa. These militiamen, on
their return, brought with them racist anti-African and chauvinist, pro-Arab
ideas into what was already a tense situation. Encouragement and military
support from Al-Bashir’s regime was all that was needed to begin the vicious
counter-insurgency which has characterised Darfur for the last eighteen months.
Both British and US imperialism have used the opportunity of
the refugee crisis and threat of starvation to cast themselves in a more
favourable light following the disaster in Iraq, by attempting to portray
themselves as ‘humanitarians’. Given the experience of US imperialism in Somalia
and the present quagmire in Iraq, however, it is unlikely that either Bush or
Blair will commit troops on the ground unless major instability and chaos is
threatened.
Despite the ongoing negotiations with the SPLA, it is the
situation in Darfur that represents the future for Sudan under capitalism. It is
not guaranteed that the peace agreement with the South will hold, while all the
countries which border Sudan face instability and turmoil and are involved to
different extents with the internal instability inside the country.
The ongoing cycle of wars, poverty and starvation, which is
the lot of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, is the product of neo-liberal
and imperialist exploitation at its worst. The wounds this has left on the
continent’s population can only begin to be solved through the overthrow of the
capitalist system that caused them and the creation of a voluntary socialist
confederation of African states.
Kevin Simpson
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