A problem from hell

Jan. 19, 2006 | In the minds of America's opinion leaders, Africa is always in crisis, and the crisis -- whether over disease, hunger, war or natural disaster -- is invariably placed in a frame that Americans, and the wider world, can easily understand. When it comes to wars between people in Africa, the frame of preference is genocide, the systematic slaughter of one group by another.

Genocide is killing on a vast scale -- killing so large and terrible as to seemingly render explanations irrelevant. Genocide appears to stand outside of history, of place, of rationality. The term simplifies the complicated problem of African communal violence into a story of one "tribe's" relentless drive to erase the presence of another.

Yet by imposing the frame of genocide on African conflicts, do we obscure more than we explain? To do more than mourn Africa's dead, shouldn't we understand the actual sources of African conflict? Explanations of civil war are crucial, not only to settling African wars, but for imagining a better future for the world's poorest and most troubled region.

The wider importance of "deconstructing" African genocide is well illustrated by the continent's most vexing civil war, which is taking place in the Darfur region of western Sudan (an area roughly the size of France). Human-rights experts have declared that a new African genocide is underway there; and on the surface, the case for genocide is strong. The conflict pits light-skinned Muslim "Arabs" against black-skinned Muslim "Africans." Arab attackers, so-called janjiweed militias, murder black Africans with impunity and, evidence has shown, at the direction of the government, with the aim of eradicating Darfur's substantial black population. So persuasive is this evidence that the United Nations in June of 2004 agreed that Darfur's Africans indeed qualified as victims of genocide. No matter what language is applied, the bare facts are depressing enough: as many as 300,000 dead and perhaps 2 million people displaced. Even those living in refugee camps remain subject to the violent whims of the janjiweed.

Given American fascination with genocides past, present and future, the next 10 years will likely bring a steady stream of literary and analytical works about the killing fields of Darfur, which Nicholas Kristof, from his influential perch as a New York Times columnist, has called "the first genocide of the 21st century."

But does the conflict in Darfur, however bloody, qualify as genocide? Or does the application of the word "genocide" to Darfur make it harder to understand this conflict in its awful peculiarity? Is it possible that applying a generic label to Darfurian violence makes the task of stopping it harder? Or is questioning the label simply insensitive, implying that whatever has happened in Darfur isn't horrible enough to justify a claim on the world's conscience, and thus invite inaction or even the dismissal of Darfur altogether?

These questions -- and the paradoxical nature of the G-word -- lie at the heart of a much-needed new book by Gerard Prunier, a scholar of African affairs. In "Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide," Prunier, a professor at the University of Paris, casts aside labels and lays bare the anatomy of the Darfur crisis, drawing on a mixture of history and journalism to produce the most important book of the year on any African subject. Clearly and concisely, he describes a complex civil war, where "Arabs" and "Africans" are often indistinguishable from one another to outsiders. Members of both groups can be dark-skinned, Muslim, poor and neglected. Indeed, this last characteristic of Darfurians, the extent of their neglect by Sudan's central government, may be the most significant for understanding the roots of today's conflict. (Although racism cannot be discounted; racial bias exists in Sudan with some people demonizing blacks and holding them as slaves.) Prunier emphasizes the legacy of Darfur's isolation, which began under Britain, colonial ruler of Sudan until its independence in 1955. In 1916, the British incorporated Darfur, which had been an independent country for centuries, into colonial Sudan and then pathetically left it to crumble (as late as the 1930s there was not a single high school student in Darfur, and only four primary schools for younger kids).

Rule by an independent Sudanese government changed little. In the 1960s, and through the decades following, Darfur remained woefully ignored, a poor stepchild to the clique of Arabized Africans who ran Sudan. Yet, according to Prunier, while Darfur's marginalization was systematic and relentless, it did not prefigure genocide. "The social and economic marginalization of Darfur was regional, not racial or cultural," Prunier writes.

In 1984, a terrible famine struck Darfur, breaking the delicate balance between nomadic herders and pastoral peoples. Ever since, Darfurians have lived, Prunier observes with his characteristic pith and understatement, in "a state of endemic insecurity." The ambitions of Muammar Gaddafi in the 1980s to create a mini-empire in the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa led Libya to invade, occupy and "Islamicize" Darfur for many years, with the quiet complicity of Sudan's central government. Neighboring Chad also used Darfur's "barren" territory to play out some of its own strange internal conflicts. When a motley collection of pastoral peoples (the "Africans") staged a quixotic armed uprising in 2003 and 2004, the government mounted a brutal counterattack, training its rage on unarmed civilians and making the situation in Darfur, in Prunier's blunt words, "much closer to a genuine civil war."

While Prunier is critical of using the word "genocide" too loosely, he is careful to document the Sudanese government's efforts to target specific population groups for decimation. Sudan's government has organized the worst forms of violence against unarmed civilians: rapes of women, murders of children, the killings of husbands and fathers in front of their own families. These actions cannot be excused. However, they are not explained either by ignoring the precarious hold that Sudan's government has over some of its territory and the extent to which Darfur's "African" groups are militarized. Indeed, the surge in violence against blacks in Darfur occurred after an armed movement began mounting attacks against the government. Given the weakness of the Sudanese state, Prunier writes, "any armed movement initiated by the non-Arab tribes of Darfur was like a red rag waved before the eyes of an excited bull."

He explains: "the parallel with Rwanda [where in 1994 the Hutu ethnic group organized the mass slaughter of minority Tutsis in 1994] is striking. When Tutsi rebels entered Rwanda in October 1990 they probably did not realize the degree of danger they were creating for the other Tutsi living inside the country. In an atmosphere charged with racism an armed rebellion by the 'inferior' group is fraught with enormous danger for the civilians of that group. Counter-insurgency in Darfur could perhaps only have gone wrong. This was not 'counter-insurgency' organized by a government trying to restore law and order; it was the answer with arms by a racially and culturally dominant group to the insurrection of a racially and culturally subject group. The hope that repression could be limited to combatants was completely unrealistic."

Next page: Is it more tragic when 250,000 people are killed in a genocide than when 250,000 people die in a non-genocidal massacre?