Genocide in Darfur: Cause and Effect

Saturday, gunmen firing rocket-propelled grenades attacked a convoy of 30 civilians carrying medical aid and relief supplies in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Those who were not burned to death in the attack were shot.

This is the latest massacre in a three-year war that the World Food Program calls “a humanitarian crisis in one of the most forgotten corners of the world.” Some experts place the death toll over 400,000 with over two million displaced since the conflict began in 2003.

The attack took place as human rights groups held protests against sexual violence in Darfur, where they say thousands of women and girls have been raped by Arab militiamen known as the Janjaweed, who work under the auspices of the Sudanese government.

A full-scale, government-sponsored military operation, with support of the Janjaweed, began as a counterinsurgency. It now appears aimed at total annihilation of the African tribes in the Darfur region.

“Every day we surveyed evidence of killings,” says Brian Steidle, a photographer for the African Union, and a former Marine. “Men castrated and left to bleed to death, huts set on fire with people locked inside, children with their faces smashed in, men with their ears cut off and eyes plucked out, and the corpses of people who had been executed with gunshots to the head. We spoke with thousands of witnesses -- women who had been gang-raped and families that had lost fathers."


“Women and children bear the greatest burden. The Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps are filled with families that have lost their fathers. Every day, women are sent outside the IDP camps to seek firewood and water, despite the constant risk of rape at the hands of the Janjaweed. Should men be available to venture out of the camps, they risk castration and murder. So families decide that rape is the lesser evil.”

Routine torture in Darfur, Sudan: Amputation of the Hands and Feet
**Warning!!! Extremely Graphic Content**
The campaign of mass killing and torture began when Darfurians, fearing that an end to the generation-long conflict in southern Sudan would divide access to the country’s resources between the ruling elite and the southerners (leaving Darfur empty-handed), accused the Sudanese government of neglect. Two local rebel groups — the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement — blaming the Sudanese government for oppressing non-Arabs in favor of Arabs, staged an armed rebellion in early 2003. Khartoum responded by unleashing the Janjaweed and the Sudanese military on the black African civilian population. The atrocities they have committed include ethnic cleansing; impeding international humanitarian efforts; bombing civilian targets; and murdering, starving, maiming, torturing, displacing, and raping civilians (Wikipedia).

“When asked why their villages were attacked and burned, most of the refugees said it was because of their black skin,” claims Jerry Fowler, a Washington Post reporter who went to Darfur in 2004. “They believe that the Khartoum-based government of President Omar Hassan Bashir wants to give their land to his Janjaweed allies who, like him, are Arab. Members of the black African tribes will simply have to go. Like the Janjaweed, the Darfurians are Muslims. But culturally and ethnically they retain an African identity, of which they are proud. They also tend to be more settled than the nomadic Janjaweed. Racism undoubtedly does play a part in Bashir's support of the Janjaweed, as the blacks are seen as inferior” (Jerry Fowler, Washington Post). Human rights organizations, other journalists, the U.S. Department of State, and the United Nations have also documented evidence of ethnic and racial bias in the region.

After fighting worsened in July and August 2006, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 1706 which called for a UN peacekeeping force to supplant or supplement a poorly funded, ill-equipped 7,000-troop African Union Mission in Sudan peacekeeping force. Sudan strongly objected to the resolution and said that it would see the UN forces in the region as foreign invaders (Wikipedia).

"Sudan has made it quite clear to the whole world that it will not accept U.N. peacekeepers," said Kofi Annan, head of the United Nations. "If the Sudanese do not give their consent, no government, not yours or mine, is going to give troops for a peacekeeping operation in Darfur. . .I have gone out and indicated to the Sudanese that if they cannot protect their people, and they are refusing to let the international community come in and assist, they will be held individually and collectively responsible for what is happening and what happens."

As of today, over 200,000 refugees have poured into neighboring Chad, carrying with them the contagious humanitarian plight. Armed Janjaweed, crossing the Sudanese border in pursuit, clash with Chadian military forces. Regional stability is threatened as Sudanese and Chadian rebel militias have built a base from which to plan an overthrow of Chadian president Idriss Deby. Hundreds of thousands of famine-stricken residents of the Central African Republic (CAR) fear for their lives as the conflict spreads south from Chad and Sudan into CAR’s northern territory, where foreign rebels have teamed up with local militias, threatening an overthrow of its government as well.

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