Darfur, Sudan (October 2008)
Introduction and Historical Back Ground of Sudan and Darfur
Sudan is the largest country on the African Continent. It is about 1/4 the size of the United States. As a former British Colony until 1956, Sudan had been divided into a North and a South Region. Each Region had autonomy in ruling their area. The North is controlled by a Muslim Arab population while the South is populated by non-Arab and characteristically a large black Christian population. The problem occurred after the British integrated the nation under a single administration and tipped the balance of power. The North was already the bigger region and implemented Muslim religion and ideology. The South was a combination of Christian and various tribal code belief systems. The South felt that this gave the Muslim Arabs of the North too much power over their life and culture. In essence, this took away from the autonomy that the locals felt they possessed. In 1946, the North and South were unified and led to one of the longest wars in human history to be fought out. Many say that this was a series of wars, where others including myself feel that this is a war that has changed from Muslim Arab control of a country to ethnic cleansing of the black population that occupied the South Region. The previous wars were merely battles and the original war has never ended and is continuing with increasingly dire consequences today. Genocide. Of course peace treaties were signed and the bulk of the fighting subsided., but the “wars” that followed were a result of no permanent resolution from the first war. The major problems over the entire history of Sudan since this unification has involved the difference of Arab and Non Arab populations and the preferential treatment and needs of the Arab population over the indigenous black pastoral society of the South. The South fought back as rebels, guerrillas, or insurgents. They have resisted against the Khartoum governrnent policies toward them.
The small windows of peace were only times of reorganization for the coming battles. The Arabs wanted a Muslim state under Sharia law throughout Sudan. The South wanted to continue the autonomy they had always possessed in the past. The Northern Arabs possessed greater influence over the Southern non-Arab South who did not want to live under Islamic Law. The uniting of the once separate regions now had created an insurgency that was set to resist the Khartoum Arab Government and had done so since the moment of Independence of Sudan as a nation. The South region including the Darfur rebels have fought for a sovereign state within Sudan for over 50 years. They are fighting to end the oppression they have been facing at the hands of their Northern Arab neighbors.
Sudan Civil War (1955 to 1972)
The Southern insurgency, separatists, and other anti-Khartoum groups united to form the Anyanya Guerilla army that frustrated the Khartoum government by planning attacks against government forces and creating separatist pressures on Khartoum. The original plan was to provide a lot of autonomous self rule in the South, but the new administration was leaning against that approach prior to the start of the guerilla war waged from the South. Sudan’s government was unable to extinguish the insurgency and hundreds of thousands were misplaced due to the conflict and close to a half million deaths resulted from the conflict. The heavy majority of casualties were non-military or rebels. By 1971 all of the rebels united for the first time of the conflict and acted as a single entity. The original conflict ended when an agreement was carved out between the newly formed Southern Sudan Liberation Movement and the Khartoum Government. The South was given large amounts of self rule that they were to be originally granted.
Second Sudan Civil War (1983 to 2005)
The second Sudan civil war began where the first left off. The South was resistant to any infringement on their autonomy in their region. From 1985 through the nineties coups and rebellions resulted from the fragile situation in Sudan. Fuel shortages, starvation and shortages of essential items led also to riots and violence. Governments in Khartoum were overthrown and each time the new administration differed in how to deal with the country’s problems. The biggest effect on the South was each time they thought they were going to be given their autonomy back the next leadership threatened and attempted to mandate Sharia law harshly on the country including the South. In the mid-nineties all non-Muslim judges were removed in the South and replaced with Islamic Muslim judges. This is the same period of time that Sudan’s Islamic government supported Saddam Hussein in the first Iraq War. Osama bin Laden was a guest of the Khartoum Government as well. He assisted the Islamic State by improving Infrastructure through his construction company and in the end turned the companies over to the Sudan Government or to other Sudanese private sector to operate. He built roads and other infrastructure to assist the Islamic government in their quest to rule the entire country under strict Sharia Law an ideology Bin Laden promotes. Through out this time Bin Laden had been funneling money to Islamic extremist groups throughout the region and Africa in attempts to overthrow their current governments and replacing them with Islamic and Sharia based systems as well as planning and conducting terrorist attacks around the globe. I mention this because I want to express the level of Islamic Fundamentalism that the government itself supported in Khartoum during this period. Terrorist camps that operate around the world were in Sudan as guests. It got to the point that US Cruise missiles targeted Sudan along with Afghanistan after the two US Embassies were bombed by the Bin Laden network in Africa. The atrocities against the Southern non-Arab black population reached epic levels as close to 2 million non-Muslims have been killed since the original conflict began in 1956 and nearly four million starving refugees have fled from the war. Reports of nearly 200,000 Nubian Sudanese women and children have been enslaved in the North. In 2005 a peace agreement was signed to end the violence, at least temporarily. The terms were very good for the South if they can actually happen. The terms provided that Oil revenues be shared equally between the North and South, the South will have autonomy for six years at which time a referendum for secession will be held. Sharia law remaining in the South was to be voted on by an elected assembly, along with a few other provisions. All parties signed the agreement. In essence it provided the Khartoum leadership and their Janjaweed henchman six years behind partially closed doors to exterminate the South of the non-Arab population.
So What Started The Current Conflict?
The current conflict in Darfur is a combination of problems arriving at one place at one time. Climate change over the past thirty years have gave way to desertification of the remaining grazing ranges in the North. The herders have moved further South and are now in conflict again with rebel forces, not that the killing has ever subsided since the last peace agreement. Rebels of the South as described earlier are at odds against two groups from the North. The first being the Sudanese Military and the second being the Janjaweed which is financed by the government in Khartoum despite their denying any connection. The Janjaweed is an armed nomadic militia group of African Arabic speaking tribes from the North in Sudan. Their intent is to acquire land and resources from the Southern region. Once again the Khartoum is using these hired thugs to murder, rape and kill the non-Arab population in the Darfur region. The government forces and the Janjaweed reap havoc on villages suspected of providing resources or members to the rebel groups opposing Khartoum and Islamic law and rule. It has been described in many ways but to say this is anything different than a continuation of the first and second civil war described above is a big mistake that will soften the tone of the actual picture of what is going on in Darfur. This is a continuation of policies by an Islamic government to invoke genocide on the people of non-Arab descent in Sudan. The level of urgency has far passed crisis mode in the past few years as the Sudanese Government has arrested reporters, killed witnesses and limited the amount of information that is able to come out of the region. The UN has ordered troops in to support the African Union Forces there but they have been ineffective and efforts have failed to protect the refugees and to further complicate the situation the conflict has been spilling over to Sudan’s neighbors.
TERRORISTS RULES!!!!!!!!!!!