The War in Darfur

Reclaiming Sudanese History

Anders Hastrup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415524872
• eBook ISBN: 9781135120009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

No other crisis in Africa has received as much attention in the West during the past 10 years as the war in Darfur, yet the underlying complexities of the war and the background to the crisis remains poorly understood by scholars, activists and aid workers.

This anthropological study of the war in Darfur explores the personal experience of war from the perspective of those refugees who have fled from it and puts forward potential solutions to the conflict. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in the refugee camps of neighbouring eastern Chad, The War in Darfur: Reclaiming Sudanese History gives a voice to people who to date have had little opportunity to articulate their experiences.

Through facilitating the telling of the refugees' tale, examining what happened and how, this book will be an interesting contribution to the areas of refugee studies, anthropology and history.

1 Introduction

Modes of explanation and production of history

This book is about the crisis in the Sudanese province of Darfur as it has been experienced by the ones who have fled from it. The ambition is to bring forward voices from the people who so far have had very little chance to articulate their experiences to an outside public. As such, this book seeks to make the affected people’s own stories a vital component in understanding one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in the first years of the new Millennium. Throughout I will attend closely to the semantics in the accounts of the refugees from the Darfur crisis.

It is a work of anthropology based on fieldwork conducted in the refugee camps of eastern Chad inhabited by as many as a quarter-of-a-million people who have fled the war in Darfur and now find themselves in the neighbouring country. This is where I met the people whose narratives form the core of this work. It is also a work of history, in the sense that throughout these voices are not only heard as instances of personal suffering, they are read as testimonies of specific historical and situated perceptions of Darfur, the causes of the crisis, and the role of Darfur in the history of Sudan. My aim, fusing anthropology and history as disciplinary points of departure, is not to uncover any final truths about what happened in Darfur. Rather, the overall aim of this work is to uncover modes of explanation employed when refugees who have fled an extremely brutal civil war recount courses of events and in doing so produce history of a certain kind. The voices heard there and the accounts given of what went on, and still goes on, in Darfur provide a series of different statements, claims and explanations.

Methodologically, the book moves on from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s method of “thick description” (1973), entailing that the anthropologist looks over the local’s shoulder, to a particular method of deep listening to oral accounts of the war in Darfur. The work implicitly discusses the interrelation between anthropological and historical knowledge, and the way in which a history of a given area can be brought to light through a careful act of listening to a variety of voices all wanting to narrate what has happened at a certain time. This work is thus a contribution to the understanding of the patterns of historical development in Sudan, and the region within which it is situated, elicited through anthropological fieldwork, the defining feature of which in the elegant phrase of Wendy James and Paul Dresch is “listening for the unsaid, looking for the visually unmarked, sensing the unrepresented, and thus seeking for connections among parts of the obvious which locally remain unstated” (Dresch and James 2000: 23).

The chaotic realities of present-day Darfur and eastern Chad, and the way in which the lives and conditions changed for millions of people in the course of a very short time span make it difficult to write a traditional history. First, because the idea of a linear progression of history is belied by the complexity of time, remembered and recounted, and second, because the war is still very new, and it is still ongoing. As this book shows, “historical” knowledge is contested, and when refugees account for the past in Darfur these accounts are interwoven with expectations for the future. In other words, when refugees talk about what has happened they do so stressing how wrong it is and implicitly how they wish for the situation in the future to change back into what it was before. As the interviews in this work show, past, present and expectations for a future coexist in the narratives and combine to explain the situation in Darfur.

As many as three million Darfurians are internally displaced in Sudan itself or live in camps for refugees in Chad. They have fled raiding militias who have burned down their villages in systematic scorched earth campaigns. This book brings forward refugees’ own accounts of what has happened and what they consider to be the motives behind the destruction of Darfur. The refugees rely on humanitarian assistance and food aid, which is brought in from international humanitarian agencies, and have done so since 2004. The history of the population of Darfur has become a global concern since the outbreak of the conflict in 2003, and the area of Darfur has been the focus of one of the most extensive (and expensive) relief operations by the United Nations (UN) and international agencies in recent years. The implied globalization of the Darfur crisis means that multiple voices have sought to speak out for Darfur. Some of these voices are very high pitched. The American Save Darfur campaign has worked to convince and mobilize everyone from students to political leaders in the United States (US) over the unique and unprecedented evil taking place in Darfur, “qualitatively different from the morally bad”, as Agnes Heller (1993: 155) has characterized the connotations and paradox of evil.

As awareness about Darfur increased, a huge number of humanitarian agencies moved into Darfur and started relief work there. Historically, the apex of this attention was reached when the then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, called the events in Darfur a “genocide” in September 2004. The unprecedented brutality of the Darfur crisis has made it gain attention of a particular humanitarian kind where the local experiences are translated into a non-local quantitative language of statistics. For the international agencies to explain the displacement of Darfur, they must contain it in a vocabulary that defies locality, applicable in similar situations around the world. Employing a method of deep listening throughout this book means devoting a different kind of attention to the crisis beyond quantification and statistics. I shall elaborate further on what this method entails later in this work.

This is thus not a work seeking to find the “hard facts” of what has happened in Darfur. “Fact-finding” in my view, is too often an exercise where one seeks proof for claims that one has already made; the knowledge one comes across serves the main purpose of creating evidence for the already assumed. Many of the refugees we shall meet in this work have already been interviewed and have been asked about their experience of the “genocide”; they are to some extent used to presenting their histories to outsiders. This work addresses the implicit modes of explanation that emerge in this meeting head on. In the pages to follow, I have attempted to be unbiased by a preconceived acceptance of outsiders’ categories. Many of the “facts” related in the interviews have forced me to reconsider earlier assumptions of the root causes and the chronology of events in Darfur. My presentation of the voices from Darfur will, therefore, be closely linked to a reconsideration of the history of the conflict and the position of Darfur in Sudan’s history.

Ironically, the immense attention that the Darfur crisis has received in the Western public, especially in the US, means that many voices have remained unheard. Through the outrage over the “genocide” in Darfur, the area is perceived as a stage where a monolithic mayhem has been unleashed, destroying everything that was there before. Through the lense of a particular international legal category, Darfur is seen as a place that needs to be saved in order to preserve a way of life that existed prior to the outbreak of conflict. However, Darfur is not a rainforest or some unique ecosystem that has existed unchanged and bounded for centuries. Just as statistical evidence quantifies and simplifies a myriad different experiences of flight and trauma, the Darfur campaigns in the West seek to raise awareness of a quantitative kind, where sheer attention is a goal in itself. This necessitates an overshadowing of complexities in order for the campaigns to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. This book is not motivated by a desire to let as many voices from Darfur as possible be heard, but by a devoted attention to the refugees’ accounts and a wish to move beyond both humanitarian statitistics and awareness-raising campaigns despite all their merits.

Darfur, like the rest of the world, is a place where history has unfolded and changes have been introduced both gradually and at times dramatically. The past seven years in Darfur’s history have been a time of unprecedented drama. The entire area has been fundamentally, and probably irreversibly, changed as entire communities have been forced to flee and millions of people have lived and continue to live in a prolonged state of emergency. In that sense, people of Darfur seem caught between past and future in the prison of the present.

Analytically, my ambition is to uncover and discuss what this circumscribed present means for the refugees. Through their words, this work offers an exercise of backtracking along their paths at the same time as it offers a look forward. Refugees offer their version of events in Darfur years after their occurrences in a geophysical setting provided by the camps in Chad that they were unwillingly put into. People quite literally fled overnight from a combination of scorched earth tactics, land invasions and aerial bombardment. Years later, the refugees still wonder exactly what went on and why. People did not know what had happened to them, and some have seemingly lost their will to comprehend the events that they had become victims of. In this light, I want to argue that some of their statements can be heard as examples of a refusal to understand “history”. They are important testimonies to the experience of violence and give a comprehensive portrait of the severe and thoroughly traumatizing effect of the war in Darfur on parts of the civilian population in ways that are difficult to convey in humanitarian statistics.

The suggestion that the Darfurian refugees live in a circumscribed present does not, of course, imply that they have no ideas about a historical course of events or about temporality. The majority of the people I met would offer explanations focused on continuity and a pattern of events that ultimately led to the destruction of their villages, the murder of their family members and rape of the women. The refugees are able to see their own fate and the sudden disruption of their lives in a wider historical perspective. Thus, in spite of the immediate rupture of their social lives, the refugees are not blind to the deeper and wider patterns that caused it. The excavation of the particular mode of explanation as a production of history lies at the core of this work, suggesting, with anthropologist Michael Jackson, that storytelling puts pieces together “as a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances” (Jackson 2002: 15).

The act of listening to accounts with the aim of uncovering how modes of explanation produce history is initially an act of listening to people’s memories. Memories and recollections rarely appear in any strict chronological order, and the refugees in eastern Chad are no different from other people in that respect and they recall bits here and there from both before and after the outbreak of war and their flight when asked to relate “what happened” and “why”. On interviewing former combatants from the 1936–39 Palestinian rebellion Ted Swedenburg (2003: xxvi) notes the degree to which old people’s memories were over-determined by their current situation and how, “under the pressure of Israeli colonial repression, the various strands of popular memory and official Palestinian history fused into a fairly unified picture”. The refugees from Darfur are “oppressed” too, living under the hardships of the camps in eastern Chad, and the voices heard in this book are voices “under pressure”. At stake here, then, is a tension between personal experiences and unified accounts that emerge when refugees are interviewed in their present circumstances. Throughout this work interviews are dissected and discussed with specific attention to the mode through which the personal account fuses into a unified picture that transcends the individual experience. As the interviews will show, the historical memory of Darfurians is indeed oftentimes a struggle for the creation of a “unified picture”. Memory itself can quickly become political and a certain presentation of the past becomes loaded with expectations for the future. This is where we transcend memory as such, and come close to emergent explanations of the past. Eventually, this allows us to see the refugee camps as loci for a certain production of history. The circumscribed present, in which people live in the camps is therefore seen to be extremely complex, because the refugees are circumscribed on all accounts: by international categories and humanitarian statistics, by a struggle to make a unified picture and present a unified account out of bits and pieces of personal memory — and by the spatial confinements of the refugee camps, which deny access to a wider physical space.

Before moving on to my particular analytical project, it is important to include some more overall considerations and potential dilemmas associated with doing fieldwork in the Darfurian refugee camps in eastern Chad. The first is the location of the camps, the fact that they are located outside the state of Sudan. This means that refugees are able to speak more freely than if they were living in Sudan proper where there is a tight security control of people’s movement and utterances and a meticulous control of international agencies by agents of the Sudanese state. Humanitarian agencies working in Darfur are subject to close scrutiny by the Sudanese government’s Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC), which expels agencies if their aid is “too political” or if their humanitarian assessments disagree with the official truths of the war as established by the government in Khartoum. I myself was expelled along with the Norwegian Refugee Council working as assistant camp coordinator for Kalma Camp in South Darfur in the autumn of 2006. The reason was the agency’s reporting of the widespread exposure to rape and sexual violence experienced by women and girls venturing outside the camp, a phenomenon vehemently denied by the Sudanese government.

The second consideration is the number of refugees in eastern Chad compared to the displaced still in Darfur, and the representative value of analyzing Darfurian refugees “only” by listening to the refugees in eastern Chad. Although there are more than 250,000 refugees from Darfur living in the camps in eastern Chad, they comprise no more than roughly ten per cent of the total number of people who have fled the horrors of Darfur. The experience of the international community by refugees in eastern Chad is in many ways different from the experience of their fellow Darfurians within the borders of the state of Sudan. In Chad, their status as refugees is different from the status of the “internally displaced” (IDPs) inside Sudan. They are provided assistance by the United Nations High Comissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other UN agencies and are in some ways better off than most IDPs in Sudan because of the access to humanitarian aid. This accessibility and the ability for the refugees to speak freely has meant that eastern Chad has been visited by a large number of human rights organizations, fact finding missions, and concerned celebrities, who would have difficulties getting access to the vast majority of Darfur’s displaced who still live in Sudan. This implies that compared to the internally displaced persons remaining in Darfur, refugees in eastern Chad have greater experience as interviewees bearing witness to the atrocities in Darfur. The camps in eastern Chad have become “classic” sites for finding facts about what happened in Darfur. One has to be aware of the possibility of what might have become routine answers to the questions wanting to uncover the unique, personal experience behind the atrocities taking place. As we shall hear in the interviews, refugees are very much aware of their potential audiences and it is common to hear requests from the people in the camps directed at the intended listeners (along the lines of “we ask you, the international community, to bring peace to Darfur”).

Answers given can be loaded with expectations from the interviewer and what he or she might do with the results and the analyses. For the interviewer to translate the findings into anthropological and historical knowledge he or she must be aware of the inherent politics potentially at play, and the way the interviewer himself or herself is not a neutral listener, merely noting down facts as they are recounted. Rather, the interviewer is a character from whom the interviewee may have a series of expectations and the person interviewed may thus frame the answers in a certain manner. In the case of the Darfurian refugees in eastern Chad, the fact finding missions that have visited the camps in the course of the conflict may even have equipped people with a vocabulary and a specific way of framing their answers that they may not otherwise have had. As we can hear from the following quote, the young man interviewed has taken note of what happened to him in Darfur, how many were killed and how he fled to Chad:

After I came here to the camp (fi al mo’askar), I heard about the International Criminal Court (al mahkama al janaiiya al duwlia) deciding to issue arrest orders (amr qabd) against anyone who had committed crimes in Darfur (kul man yirtakabu jera’im). For instance, genocide, rape and so on. So I thought, what is genocide (“idaba jama’aiiya” da keif)? So I asked one of the persons (ahad afraadihi) from the ICC who were here, they said, “Genocide is when people kill in large numbers”. I said “OK”. And I have notes here (andi nota henna) where it says that one person has killed 50 or 53 persons in one hour and in one place (fi saa’a wahid wa fi hitta wahda) so I found out that this means it looks like (yisbah) a genocide. And one day they came and asked us: who wants to bring to justice (man allathi yuriid yahkamu) everyone who committed crimes (kull man yirtakabu jeraim) in Darfur? They asked: Who are they (man hum)? Who is the responsible? The responsible one is the president. So he is a criminal? Yes, he is a criminal (yisbahu mujrim). And I saw that my notes [points down to notebook in his lap] could itself become the law and the case needed (al nota yikuun al qanuun wa al qaddiyya). In the old days I would just write down history. After I came here I thought that what I noted down might become an important case (qadiyya). Before, in Sudan, I didn’t think this, I didn’t know.¹

It is interesting to see here how the young man is reintroduced to his own notes and his documentation of events after having been equipped with a new vocabulary and frame of reference given to him from outsiders who have a very specific political agenda behind their fact finding. He is thus reintroduced to his own history in a language he didn’t previously know.

In the following chapters, I will leave aside the search for evidence of the genocide in Darfur. By letting people speak and present their thoughts and ideas in a free flow, contradictions, uncertainties and inaccuracies are allowed to emerge and find their way into the pages. Throughout this work such inconsistencies are put under close scrutiny because they testify to life in a circumscribed present rather than in judicial categories. In the light of this, semantic analyses of the terms, verbs and sentences used and employed when histories of Darfur are recounted by people who were in Darfur at the time of the outbreak of the war are central. As the sentences above clearly reveal, fleeing Darfur and moving to the camps in eastern Chad means moving, at least potentially, into a new semantic territory in addition to the geographical shift, where one can reinvent past experiences in a vocabulary introduced by international bodies. For Darfurian refugees in eastern Chad, the past is quite literally a foreign country, open to subtle semantic reinventions in a state of exile.

Another important implication of studying Darfur in Chad, so to speak, is that although the refugee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on translation and transcription
• 1. Introduction: Modes of explanation and production of history
• 2. Studying war and displacement in Sudan: Framing the field
• 3. Designs for Darfur: Mirror images
• 4. Deep listening: Introducing the project “Darfurian Voices”
• 5. Into the camps: Inscriptions and depictions
• 6. Arabs remembered: Locals and foreigners
• 7. Reinventing the rebellion: Causes and chronologies
• 8. Returns: Circumscribed futures
• 9. Conclusion: Congestion and marginalization
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index