![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldGérard Prunier's Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) is a powerful explanation of the origins and mechanics of the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Dominick Donald's review in The Guardian summarizes.
Prunier treats Sudan as a sort of colonial state, with a minority of culturally Arab Muslim Sudanese in the northern riverine areas trying to dominate both the Muslims in outlying regions of the north and centre and the Christians and animists of south Sudan. Sudan needs to become an African state if it is to function, but rather than lose power the Sudanese elite has preferred genocide. Unspoken, yes, but Prunier seems to be right in concluding that there was no equivalent to the Wannsee Conference in Khartoum: Everyone in power agrees about what has to be done.
Prunier's Darfur is a victim of its separateness - not just from Khartoum, but from everywhere else in Sudan. Geographically, culturally and commercially it always looked west, along the Sahel, rather than east to the Nile, north to Egypt, or south to Bahr El Ghazal. Its Islamic practices fused Arab with African, unlike the more ascetic, eschatological Muslim brotherhoods prevalent along the Nile, or the animism or polytheism adhered to in the south. Above all it retained a political and cultural identity apart from the homogenising forces of what became Sudan. The Sultanate of Darfur tottered on, essentially independent, until 1916; the Ottomans never established a foothold there, the Mahdists were resisted and co-opted, while once the British brought it into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, they ruled through paternalistic neglect.
Even when Darfur was key to politicians in an independent Sudan - for instance, as a bedrock of support for the neo-Mahdists who ruled the country for much of its first two decades - it was ignored. Ravaged by the 1985 famine - Khartoum effectively denied it food aid - and proxy battles for Chad, it saw in the new century with a marginal economy and a government which, when it paid attention to Darfur, did so through the medium of militias encouraged to define tribal or cultural groups as the enemy.
As Prunier shows, it is the economics and the militias that lie at the heart of the atrocities in Darfur. The Sudan Liberation Army, recognising that the Naivasha power-sharing peace process between Khartoum and the SPLA/M in the south was going to leave Darfur even further behind, took up arms in 2002. All the government could do was unleash the militias in the hope that it could deal with the problem before southerners arrived in government and vetoed any repression. Now probably half of Darfur's population has been driven into camps for internally displaced persons (IDP), beyond the reach of international food aid, where malnutrition and disease are carrying them off at the rate of perhaps 8% a year. This suits Khartoum just fine. For while the international community havers about what it cannot see, Khartoum is free to pay lip service to the Naivasha peace process that will ensure regime survival, keep the Americans off its back, and allow the élite to exploit Sudan's oil.
Prunier treats Sudan as a sort of colonial state, with a minority of culturally Arab Muslim Sudanese in the northern riverine areas trying to dominate both the Muslims in outlying regions of the north and centre and the Christians and animists of south Sudan. Sudan needs to become an African state if it is to function, but rather than lose power the Sudanese elite has preferred genocide. Unspoken, yes, but Prunier seems to be right in concluding that there was no equivalent to the Wannsee Conference in Khartoum: Everyone in power agrees about what has to be done.
