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PART 1
The Background on Darfur
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CHAPTER 1
Disaster in Darfur: Historical Overview*
ROBERT O. COLLINS
Introduction
Darfur (Land of the Fur) is the western region of The Republic of the Sudan (Jumhuriyat as-Sudan). It is approximately the size of France and is divided into three administrative statesâNorth, West, and Southâthat represent the three ethnic zones of Darfur. Northern Darfur State is the home of camel nomads, a small minority of whom are Meidab Arabs, but the overwhelming majority are non-Arab Zaghawa. In the Western Darfur State, on both sides of the volcanic Jabal Marra massif towering three thousand feet above the vast Sudanic plain, live non-Arab sedentary farmers, the Fur, Massalit, Daju, and Berti. Southern Darfur State is inhabited by the cattle and camel nomads, the Baqqara, who claim Arab (Juhayna) origins and speak Arabic, but are ethnically the result of intercourse with their surrounding African neighbors after arriving in southern Darfur in the eighteenth century. All the peoples of Darfur are Muslims. A few Africans still practice their traditional religions, whose vestiges can be found in the Darfurian symbiotic Muslim practices on this frontier of Islam.
The rainfall and drainage from Jabal Marra onto the fertile soils of the western province support a vigorous agriculture by the African settled cultivators, and this is in stark contrast to the semidesert of the north that is dependent for water on intermittent wadis and wells, many of which go dry in the winter months. In the south, the summer rains produce a rolling mantle of grass and reliable sources of water from wells and excavated reservoirs, hafri, for the Baqqara and their cattle.
This bucolic description of cultivators and herdsmen peacefully tending to their traditional pursuits obscures the historic struggle for scarce resources by different people competing for land and water in Darfur. The pastâand most certainly, the current crisisâin Darfur cannot be understood without its history, a fact often overlooked by the media and many of the non-Sudanese officials swept up in the disaster in Darfur.
Darfur in History
Historically, Darfur was transformed from a geographic to a well-defined political entity by the establishment of the sultanate in 1650. Its foundations rested on a centuries-old tradition of state formation dominated by the Fur and a ruling elite that included members of all the principal ethnic groups in Darfur. The Fur sultanate consisted mostly of non-Arab cultivators who employed the organized resources of the state and its heavy cavalry to contain the Arab nomads in their seasonal pastures well beyond Fur and Massalit agricultural lands. This equilibrium was not to last. In 1874, al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, the Jaâali Arab slave trader who had created a personal fiefdom in the Bahr al-Ghazal in the southern Sudan, destroyed the Fur sultanate, opening the pastures and cultivations to the Baqqara Arab nomads. When in 1898 the British had destroyed the revolutionary religious Mahdist State, which had ruled the Sudan since 1885, Ali Dinar, who had inherited the title of sultan in 1890, restored the Fur sultanate and spent most of the next eighteen years driving the Arab nomads north and south of the agricultural lands surrounding Jabal Marra, which comprised the heartland of his sultanate. A significant difference today in this historic struggle for the land is the ferocity of the killing by the Kalisnikov rather than the spear or sword.
In 1916, Ali Dinar, who had been sympathetic to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, was killed by a British expeditionary force, and Darfur was annexed to the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1898â1956), which had succeeded the Mahdist State in the Sudan. The British soon learned that Darfur had little to contribute to the rebuilding of the Sudan. The principal city of El Fasher lay far to the west, and to this day there is neither an all-weather road nor a railroad to this historic capital. In 1959, Sudan Railways completed a line to Nyala, capital of Southern Darfur State and 120 miles south of El Fasher, but its irregular service has never ended the regionâs isolation. Darfur had no exploitable resources, only subsistence cultivators and impoverished herdsmen. The administration consisted of a few resourceful British officers who kept law and order by ruthlessly enforcing gun control and little else, leaving the day-to-day governance to local African chiefs and Arab shaykhs.
The steady improvements in education and healthcare and the introduction of development schemes by British authorities in the greater Khartoum area along the Nile never made their way to Darfur. Peace, however, did result in the migration eastward of young men (all of whom were struggling in a stagnant subsistence economy) looking for work in the new riverain (riparian) development projects, particularly the vast Gezira cotton scheme south of Khartoum between the Blue and White Niles. Once by the river, however, they encountered discrimination by the awlad al-bahar (people of the river) for the awlad al-ghareb (people from the west).
The perceived differences between those Sudanese living along the Nile in villages, towns, and cities and those from the rural hinterland run very silent but very deep in the past and present Sudan. The awlad al-bahar (sometimes awlad al-bilad) are the descendants of the Arab migrants into the Nile valley, who were mostly Jaâaliyyin (pl. of Jaâali) who infiltrated into the heart of the Sudan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They became a sedentary urban society with a literate elite who during the fifty years of British rule became a sophisticated, if not worldly, ruling class that reinforced the disdain and derision of their grandfathers and fathers for the rustic illiterate folk from the West, East, and South. It was among these simple farmers and coarse herdsmen in the western Sudan of Kordofan and Darfur that the Umma Party of Sayyid Abd al-Rahman could count on for the loyalty to solidify his political position in any Sudan of the future. His father, Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah, the Mahdi, had recruited among the Baqqara and Fur the shock troops for his army that destroyed Egyptian rule in the Sudan and established the Mahdist State. They have remained passionately loyal to Mahdism, and after the independence of the Sudan in 1956, the Umma began to introduce selected sons of the old Darfur elite into the political life of Omdurman and Khartoum. Here they became assimilated into the ruling riverain awlad al-bahar; or, in the contemptuous words of the Darfurian political activist, Dr. Sharif Harir, they were corrupted by âriverizationâ after abandoning their traditional roots in Darfur for the political highlife of Khartoum.
The ethnic and cultural discrimination by the riverain-ruling elite in Khartoum against those Sudanese living on the periphery has historically established the pattern of governance by the awlad al-bahar, which constitutes a circumference of no more than a few hundred miles from the confluence of the two Niles and those lands beyond where the authority diminishes with the distance from the heartland. At no time in the past two hundred years has the central government of the Sudanâneither nineteenth century Turks nor twentieth century British and certainly not the independent Sudaneseâactually governed Darfur, the southern Sudan, or even the Red Sea Hills. Officials from the central government occupied the periphery with scattered symbolic posts in the countryside and a garrison and governor in the traditional provincial capitals, but at no time have they rigorously administered, effectively controlled, or demonstrated the usual characteristics associated with governance, good or bad. Geography was much to blame, for El Fasher is some seven hundred miles from Khartoum and El Geneina, on the Chad border, another two hundred twenty miles across sandy plains and dunes, known as goz, stretching hundreds of miles around the mountain massif of Jabal Marra and crossed by ancient tracks whose reliability is largely determined by the weather. The fundamental reason for fragile governance in Darfur, though, remains the dearth of resources and political leadership by those in authority in the central government of Sudan who have preferred to adopt a policy of benign neglect.
Historically, ethnic tensions between farmers and herdsman, African and Arab, latent and volatile, have always been present and accepted in Darfur, but are exacerbated by long-standing competition for pasture, agricultural land, and water, the mundane matters so important in daily life in which verbal disputes can quickly erupt into violence. Quarrels over scarce resources became particularly acute during the great global drought of the 1980s that hastened the desertification of northern and central Darfur, and resulted in increasing tensions over water and grazing areas as the camel nomads moved south in search of both. The drought of the 1980s was not new, just more severe. In the past, the different ethnic groups had usually settled their disputes over land ownership and right to water wells by conferences, ajaweed/muatamarat al-sulh, of the traditional leaders whose rulings were invariably respected and honored. This mechanism began to break down when desertification was accompanied by the introduction of thousands of automatic weapons. By the 1990s, Darfur was short of water but awash in guns.
The Price of Impotence
When the British departed in 1956, they left behind the Sudan Defense Force, soon to become the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). It was a disciplined, professional, mobile army, the finest in the Middle East, equal to the Arab Legion of Jordan. In the ArabâIsrael War of 1967, the Sudanese battalion sent to Sinai to help the Egyptians refused to retreat, disdained to surrender, and had to be annihilated before the Israeli advance could proceed. Moreover, the British found their best soldiers from the peoples of the peripheryâthe Nuba and Dinka of the southern Sudan and the Fur and Baqqara from Darfur who, as the shock troops of the Mahdist armies, had established a reputation as fierce warriors during the Mahdiya and during their sporadic outbursts against the Britishâfor the sons of the awlad al-bahar preferred the urban life of the riverain towns and a political or professional career to the hardships and hazards of soldiering. In 1956, the army was, in fact, the only national institution in the Sudan and in the past half-century of Sudanese independence has intervened three timesâ1958, 1969, and 1989âto seize power from incompetent, corrupt, and self-seeking political leaders who had been democratically elected. At the time of their respective coups, most Sudanese were delighted to see the politicians depart from government until later realizing the tyranny of military dictatorships that have ruled the Sudan for thirty-seven of its forty-eight years of independence.
The decline of the SAF began during the sixteen years of the rule of General Jaâfar Numayri (1969 to 1985) when the senior officers of the Sudan Defense Force were succeeded by younger, less professional officers who could not resist abusing their authority for their own personal advancement while at the same time fighting a war they could not win against the southern Sudanese insurgents. Moreover, the demise of a professional Sudanese fighting force was accompanied by the creation of the Peopleâs Defense Force (PDF) after the Islamist coup dâĂ©tat of 1989 to make the army theologically âcorrect,â yet, as it turned out, incapable of suppressing insurgencies.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Islamic Charter Front (later the National Islamic Front, NIF), led by Hasan al-Turabi, methodically recruited young officers at the military academy into the NIF, among them Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir. When Bashir and his fellow Islamist officers seized power on June 30, 1989, the Revolutionary Command Council founded the aforementioned PDF in order to protect the June 30 Revolution and to suppress the rebellion in the South, essentially replacing the army as the instrument to enforce the Islamization of the Sudan. The soldiers for the PDF were not volunteers but conscripts by a very unpopular draft that numbered one hundred fifty thousand recruits by 1991. Instructors from the Sudan army introduced them to weaponry, but their indoctrination was more religious than military, including interminable lectures on Islam. The ideological guide for the Islamist state, Hassan al-Turabi, made clear that it would be impossible to âIslamizeâ the Sudanese army because its professional officers had been âsecularizedâ and unwilling to accept an Islamist regime that required a âlarge popular defense forceâ that would create an âIslamizedâ society (Middle East Policy, 1992).
The PDF, though little more than a rabble in arms, was to crush the battle-hardened Nilotic veterans who constituted the bulk of the Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Army (SPLA) forces in southern Sudan. When Colonel John Garang decided to defect from the Sudanese army after the mutiny of the Fifth Battalion at Bor in May 1983, he spent that summer forging them (along with a flood of other disaffected southern troops) into the Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Movement (SPLM), whose military branch was separate from the political branch and was known as the Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Army (SPLA). The latter trained in camps across the Ethiopian border and received support from the communist regime of President Haile Miriam Mengistu. Within two years, the SPLA was ready to take the offensive against the Sudanese army and later the PDF.
Neither the demoralized remnants of the old Sudan Armed Forces nor the massive cannon fodder of the PDF were trained, equipped, or motivated to fight in the semideserts of the West or the swamps and rainforests of the South. They suffered successive defeats, failing utterly to crush the insurgencies or to establish the authority of the Sudan government in these peripheral regions.
In 1986, Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, great grandson of the Muhammad Ahmad, al Mahdi, leader of the Umma Party, and a dominant figure in Sudanese politics since the 1960s, decided to reverse the failure of the Sudanese army to defeat the SPLA by arming with automatic weapons his Baqqara supporters on the southern Sudan frontier. He gave them freedom to pillage, rape, enslave, and kill the Dinka across the Bahr al-Arab (the Kiir) River, who supported the SPLA and its Dinka leader, John Garang. Riding their horses and brandishing their Kalisnikovs, the young Baqqara commandos from the Missiriyya and Humr, known as the murahileen, wreaked havoc and death upon the Dinka of the Bahr al-Ghazal and the Upper Nile for the next ten years. The other large Baqqara group to the west in southern Darfur, the Rizayqat, also carried out raids across the Dinka frontier to the south, but at the outbreak of the insurgency in Darfur, they turned this new and powerful weaponry against their northern African neighborsâthe Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawaâwith whom they had many ancient quarrels over territory and water.
After the Islamist coup dâĂ©tat of June, 30 1989, the arming of the Baqqara murahileen continued under the illusion that these unruly, independent militias could be integrated into the PDF. More subtle but equally divisive to any settlement on the frontier of Islam was the determination by the regime to impose its Islamist ideology on all Sudaneseâwith Arabic culture, language, and Islam as the foundation of Sudanese societyâeven though less than half the Sudanese claim Arab origins and another third were non-Muslims. The Arabo-centric enthusiasm of Bashir and his National Islamic Front (after 1998, it became known as the National Congress Party) government reopened old and deep wounds in Sudanese society. Throughout the centuries there has been (by consent, intermarriage, or forced enslavement) a mixing of African and Arab in the Nile Basin that has produced those unique individuals today known as the Sudanese. The sensible Sudanese are more concerned about their cultural heritage than their genetic purity, but the hardcore fervently seek, through manufactured Arab genealogies, their direct descent from the Prophet. Injecting an ideological and racist definition as to who is âArabâ and who are zuruq, black, or the mo...
