What is Darfur and where is it to be found? Why care about it and will anything I do or don’t change it? Why does it go together with genocide?

These and many more questions are often left unanswered because people are either ignorant on the topic or choose to ignore it. Apparently, however, those who have decided to engage their minds in learning and thinking about it much has changed and this rather permanently.

If you haven’t caught it – I’ve recently become impacted by the reality of genocide in the world and awaken to where and how it’s present today. I’ve added a new category Genocide Monitor to the blog and have undertaken the task of making it known to you – my friends and readers. So you’ll be hearing more and more about it from me, along with all the rest that I normally post on here.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a way of isolating the e-mail notifications for the Genocide Monitor posts from all the rest. So, if you decide to unsubscribe, you’ll have to unsubscribe from all notifications through the link at the bottom of the e-mails you receive or from this page: Stay tuned. I’ll be honest and say that I’ll be a bit disappointed because I believe this to be important and that’s why I share it. Yet I won’t bother you about your decision.

Darfur is used to refer to the three federal states of West, South and North Darfur, which are located within the borders of Sudan.⁽¹⁾

Since 2003 the region of Darfur has been declared a humanitarian emergency due to the burst of a years-long struggle between the Baggara Arabs (nomads) and the Black African (farming) communities. The overpopulation of the region, combined with its limited resources and drought have led the nomads to enter the lands of the farmers. The incompatibility of the two groups is obvious by their lifestyle.

The fighting parties in Darfur are on one side the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed (mostly nomads), and on the other side the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement (mainly non-Arab ethnic groups). What makes the war Genocide is the deliberate atatcks by the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed targeted primarily towards the Black African ethnic groups – their dislocation or extinction (proven by the mass killings disregarding gender or age). The situation is worsened by the fact that the Janjaweed is powered by the government (although this is publically denied) and thus is far stronger than the African rebel groups.

While there’s some UN peacekeeping troops, the The UN’s mandate forbids intervening in the internal politics of any country unless the crime of genocide is being committed. This is why it is important that the situation be classified as what it is – genocide. The UN has been known to deliberately avoid the use of the term genocide and the case of Rwanda from 1994 is a perfect one.  It was only in 1998 that the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was enforced it in regards to two of Rwanda’s government officials. By then an approximate of 1million people have lost their lives or been displaced from their homes. Far too late.

Below you will find the testimony of American ex-soldier Brian Steidle who was dispatched as a member of the observation team in Darfur. It provides one of the most direct and uncut representations of the situation by an independent source. His testimony is also available in the form of a documentary: The Devil Came on Horseback.

The videos below do contain visual imagery which may be shocking.

The second video follows the first one exactly, while the third repeats a short piece but continues on with more information.

Footnotes
_______________________

1. Most of the information in this article is derived from Wikipedia’s pages on the topic and their links to other resources. For more, check the Wikipedia page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur↩ Back to the text

Tags: darfur, genocide in the world, humanitarian emergency, war in darfur