Alex de Waal, director of Justice Africa (London) and author of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-5, (updated version out this autumn), writes in The Observer on the Darfur crisis.
The article explains the historical origins of the conflict and the groups involved with the unique insight of someone who knows the history, the people and the region inside out. The article proposes some solutions to the crisis which he feels are more realistic than those currently pursued.
The article dismantles the Arab -v-African description of the conflict.
Until recently, Darfurians used the term ‘Arab’ in its ancient sense of ‘bedouin’. These Arabic-speaking nomads are distinct from the inheritors of the Arab culture of the Nile and the Fertile Crescent.
‘Arabism’ in Darfur is a political ideology, recently imported, after Colonel Gadaffi nurtured dreams of an ‘Arab belt’ across Africa, and recruited Chadian Arabs, Darfurians and west African Tuaregs to spearhead his invasion of Chad in the 1980s. He failed, but the legacy of arms, militia organisation and Arab supremacist ideology lives on.
Now why am I not surprised to see that perpetual troublemaker, Gadaffi, involved in all of this?
Pamoja Tuangamize Ukimwi
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