Darfur: Overview.

Introduction

Darfur, a region in western Sudan, was at the center of an armed conflict that garnered much international attention in the early twenty-first century, particularly due to what many observers described as a genocide that peaked between 2003 and 2005. The crisis was rooted in numerous interrelated factors, including competition for natural resources, a lack of government-sponsored regional development, and ethnic tension. The core conflict emerged between certain Arab groups (especially the Janjaweed militia), who tended to align with the Sudanese government, and non-Arab rebels who objected to the central government's administration of the region. Data regarding casualties was limited, but some estimates eventually placed the death toll as high as 300,000, while as many as 3 million people were displaced.

The complexity of the situation—and evidence of brutal violence, including against civilians—led to various reactions from the international community. Although virtually all observers condemned the conflict, there was some debate about whether it was tantamount to genocide. There were also competing views of how other nations could best act to avert further catastrophe and help establish order in the region. The United Nations (UN) cited extensive humanitarian atrocities in Darfur and demanded that the Sudanese government take action to disarm the militias, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) accused some high-level Sudanese governmental officials of sponsoring genocide. A joint UN and African Union peacekeeping mission was deployed in the region, and many international relief organizations worked to provide assistance to refugees displaced by the fighting. However, some critics suggested the US government should intervene more directly to help stop the conflict. The issue drew substantial media attention through the 2000s and into the 2010s, stirring debate over US foreign policy in general.

The Sudanese government and one of the main rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), reached a ceasefire in 2010, after which international focus on the conflict declined considerably. The two sides then reached a peace deal in 2020. However, sporadic violence and unrest continued throughout that period. In 2023, armed conflict in Sudan between rival government factions brought fresh instability to the region, including reports of renewed ethnic violence. While the new civil war did not immediately earn as much attention in the US as the alleged genocide, it nevertheless prompted questions about how the US should respond to foreign conflicts and humanitarian crises.

Understanding the Discussion

African Union: An organization that promotes development, human rights, and democracy on the continent of Africa. Its military component assisted with the crisis in the Darfur region.

Ethnic cleansing: The killing and deportation of one ethnic or religious group by another ethnic or religious group which shares a geographic area. At its most extreme, ethnic cleansing merges into genocide.

Genocide: The intentional, systematic destruction of an ethnic group.

Janjaweed militias: Armed Sudanese Arab militias that were blamed for many of the atrocities committed against non-Arab peoples in the Darfur region.

History

One of the major themes of modern Sudanese history has been armed conflict between the country’s ethnic Arab (or "Arabized") and African citizens. A long civil war between government forces and rebels ended in a ceasefire in 2005. After decades of violence that pitted the Arab Muslim north against the ethnic African Christian and animist south, this ceasefire shifted the focus of Arab militias to ethnic African Muslims in Sudan, particularly in the Darfur region. In this case, both sides were Muslim, but the ethnic constructs tended to create an extremely complicated situation.

The Darfur conflict that developed in the early 2000s was also rooted in competition for the limited natural resources in a harsh environment prone to drought conditions, and the historical neglect of the region by the central Sudanese government based in Khartoum. A major drought in 1984, and a subsequent lethal famine, led to significant tension between the region and the central government. While some food aid arrived to the region, the effort was inadequate and numerous preventable deaths occurred. Meanwhile, Libya also began exerting influence in the Darfur region, and like the Sudanese government, it tended to favor the Arab population. The famine and the jockeying for influence in the region altered the traditional patterns of the population’s lives and movements. The increased competition for sparse resources became more acute, while ethnic differences were exploited to incite hatred among the region’s groups.

Further tensions were exacerbated by the civil war between the north and the south, for which many soldiers from Darfur were conscripted. Meanwhile, a conflict with neighboring Chad also broke out, and militias from the region participated in the fighting, which resulted in further tension and upheaval in the region. For a short period at the end of the 1980s, while Sudan’s central government underwent its own upheavals, Darfur gained a semblance of stability. Libya continued to interfere in the region, however, and the region’s population was once again pushed toward starvation and warfare. The southern part of Darfur was briefly pulled into the wider war between southern rebels and government forces. A short-lived rebellion against the government’s anti-African racial policies was put down by the military.

Darfur’s problems continued into the next decade, but the region was increasingly marginalized while power struggles occurred within the central government and resulted in the further concentration of power in the hands of Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, who had seized power in 1989. Darfur and its problems were also ignored against the backdrop of a more momentous event in Sudan’s history, the beginning of the peace process between the north and the south.

Such marginalization led to the rebellion in 2002, with military installments and police stations being the prime targets of rebel forces. Initially, the rebels were successful in their campaign against targets associated with the central government, and the conflict threatened to widen beyond Darfur. The main separatist groups are identified as the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), with many smaller groups also forming. Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, would form to challenge the ethnic African rebel forces.

The government declared a state of emergency in the region and, according to numerous sources, began taking counter-insurgency measures. The Janjaweed militias had been in effect previously, but they were at this time provided more funding and played a greater regional role in the conflict. The militias fought the rebels alongside government forces in 2003 and 2004. Villages were destroyed, and civilians were intentionally targeted. Rape, murder, plunder, and destruction of livestock, property, and crops became tactics designed to subdue the rebels. The violence caused millions of refugees, many of whom fled to Chad. The refugee crisis and cross-border fighting further exacerbated a tense situation between the governments of Chad and Sudan.

Statistics for deaths and refugees in this period have been put at 200,000 to 2 million. The Sudanese government has stated that the statistics are wildly inflated and that the crisis has largely been manufactured by Western governments, and claimed that only 10,000 people were killed. Other monitoring agencies have estimated both higher and lower death counts.

The international community was slow to grasp the scale of the crisis in Darfur. The initial response by humanitarian aid and the initiation of pressure by governments and monitoring bodies was inadequate to meet the crisis. Monitoring bodies were not given full access to the region by the Sudanese government, lending credence to the belief that the situation was worse than the government was willing to admit. The lack of cooperation and bureaucratic delays by the Sudanese government thwarted attempts to acquire sufficient evidence of the crimes committed against the people of Darfur. A number of Western celebrities attempted to call wider attention to the crisis.

In mid-2004, the United Nations drafted a resolution calling on the Sudanese government to disarm the militias, stop military flights over Darfur, and allow for an increase in international assistance to the region. This resolution also paved the way for a joint NATO and African Union peacekeeping mission, UNAMID, designed to stabilize and bring peace to the region. Later that year, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the atrocities being committed in Darfur were systematic, coordinated attacks that amounted to genocide. The UN, while not lessening its condemnation of the humanitarian crisis, has itself avoided the term “genocide.” Many observers have commented that the term “ethnic cleansing” is more indicative of the violence that has taken place.

In 2006, the government and two of the rebel groups signed peace accords. Several rebel groups, however, refused to sign the peace accords and have sustained hostile activity. The Janjaweed militias have also continued to operate in the region, committing further atrocities against the population of the region. The government has apportioned blame for the subsequent violence to the rebels that had rejected the peace accords.

The central government was repeatedly accused of bearing responsibility for funding and encouraging the Janjaweed militias. The threat of proceedings by the International Criminal Court (ICC) led Sudan to set up its own tribunal to charge individuals involved in violations of human rights, but these concessions were viewed by some as cosmetic.

The effectiveness of the peacekeeping forces has been raised as a concern. Refugees have claimed that the peacekeeping forces on the ground have been unable to protect them, while several international aid agencies have had to pull out of Darfur citing safety concerns and violence as reasons for their departure. Efforts to have a UN peacekeeping force take the place of African Union troops were vehemently rejected by Sudan, which expressed the view that such a force is a violation of its sovereignty. In 2007, the United Nations did succeed in creating a joint peacekeeping mission with the African Union troops already there, forming the United Nations–African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID).

Meanwhile, the ICC sought to apprehend rebels suspected of killing peacekeepers and in 2009 it indicted President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bashir was not apprehended, and ICC officials complained that the UN Security Council had not assisted in that effort. In 2010 the ICC also charged al-Bashir with genocide.

In 2011, the brokering of peace negotiations between the government and the armed groups of Western Sudan continued, led by officials in Doha, Qatar. That July, the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur was signed by both the Sudanese government and the rebel coalition Liberation and Justice Movement but not all rebel groups. Two years later, Qatar raised hundreds of millions of dollars for war-torn Sudan, and Darfur in particular; however, the independent Sudan Tribune newspaper reported that activists feared such funds would be diverted to government forces and used against those who need it most, the people of Darfur.

In February 2014, the Sudanese government sent in more forces, an action later cited as the cause for the ensuing uptick in violence. According to a Human Rights Watch report released in February 2015, the Sudanese Army engaged in war crimes such as systemic looting, beatings, and rapes against the civilian population. In addition, an August 2015 UN report condemned the government’s bombing campaigns in civilian areas as breaches of international law.

Between August 2014 and June 2015, the United Nations drew down its forces stationed in Darfur. By mid-2015, just under 18,000 uniformed personnel remained. The conflict in Darfur remained on the UN agenda in subsequent years. In 2018 UNAMID was scaled back further, with the intention of concluding the mission by the end of 2020, despite the assertions of human rights groups that fighting and attacks on civilians in the region continued, albeit to a lesser degree than they had at the height of the Darfur crisis.

Darfur Today

In 2020, a peace accord known as the Juba Agreement (also referred to as the Darfur Peace Agreement) was signed by the Sudanese transitional government, the SLA, and the JEM. Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled Sudan under various titles between 1989 and 2019, had been overthrown in a military coup that occurred during a widespread protest movement and later imprisoned on corruption charges. The transitional government that signed the Juba Agreement agreed to include the SLA and JEM in Sudan's attempt to transition to a democratic government.

Still, despite this peace agreement, numerous groups in Darfur remained vulnerable. In 2023, as rival factions in the Sudanese government fought each other in what became a rapidly escalating war, people in Darfur as well as observers noted an increase in violent, ethnically motivated attacks against the Masalit people, who had been one of the groups targeted during the earlier Darfur genocide. These attacks, which killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands by mid-2024, were categorized as ethnic cleansing by the UN and other observers and raised fears of a renewed genocide in Darfur.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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