No Moral Clarity in Darfur

By Sam Dealey/Kebkabiya

As he sips tea on a dusty mat beneath the sparse shade of a thorn tree, Ahmed Hatum Shiib Ahmed recalls the day in early 2006 when his tribal village in Darfur was attacked. Men in desert-beaten pickups with mounted guns swept in at noon, strafing the market and shooting villagers. Then just as quickly, the fighters withdrew to the outskirts, cordoning the village and trapping its inhabitants. In the days that followed, they terrorized the villagers. They stole cattle and camels, eating what they needed and sending the rest on long caravans to distant markets for sale. One by one, over grievances large and small, 20 villagers were killed. On donkey and on foot, the besieged inhabitants stole away in the nights, making the arduous trip across the rock-strewn landscape in search of a safer place. "At times like this, a family has lost all of its resources," says Ahmed, a tribal elder. "This is what happens," he says, and with a sweep of his hands takes in the squalid campsite near the camel-trading town of Kebkabiya.

Among Darfur's displaced, Ahmed's story is a familiar one. Over the past five years, in countless villages across the region, civilians have borne the brunt of a war between government-backed militias known as janjaweed and rebels. Some 200,000 people are dead from violence, hunger and disease, and 2.5 million more are displaced. Although the conflict has no clear ethnic or religious lines, the janjaweed hail from nomadic tribes that identify themselves as Arab, and the rebels represent settled tribes usually labeled African. The plight of the Darfurians has received worldwide attention, with Hollywood stars like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Don Cheadle taking up cudgels on their behalf. The crisis has also become a campus cause in the West, with students taking up collections, demonstrating and attending benefit concerts. Their cry is as simple as it is poignant: Save the Africans before the Arabs destroy them all.

But in Darfur the days of moral clarity, of easily identifiable good guys and bad guys, are long gone. Ahmed is a Maharia, an Arab--the overwhelming majority of whom take no part in the war. And the men who attacked his village are African rebels who rose up against oppression but also mete it out themselves. The Darfur conflict today bears little resemblance to the one that seized international attention four years ago. The rebels are splintered into as many as 20 competing factions; groups of janjaweed militias, dissatisfied with the rewards promised by the government, are crossing sides to join their former enemies; and warring among all tribes has increased. Amid the chaos, the regime of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir continues its brutal crackdown, aggressively attacking rebel redoubts, indiscriminately killing civilians and razing entire villages.

The rebel factions adopt names imbued with idealism, like the Sudan Federal Democratic Alliance and the United Front for Liberation and Development, but their political goals are ill defined, and their chief concern seems to be maintaining their fiefs against rivals rather than protecting the civilians they claim to represent. Alliances form, only to break again, often for no greater reason than the personal ambitions of their leaders and the inevitable clashes they provoke. "It's like a play," says Azzedine Zerual, a project director with unicef in north Darfur. "'You are my friend today, but you will be my enemy tomorrow.' Maybe in a month they'll be friends again, and then enemies."

The splintering among rebels and janjaweed is undermining international efforts to end the conflict. Military solutions are proving futile: the 9,000-odd U.N. and African Union peacekeepers currently in Darfur have failed to stanch the violence, and the planned deployment of 17,000 more has been delayed by Sudanese-government intransigence, insufficient troop contributions and a lack of equipment--notably helicopters, a critical component when policing a region almost the size of Texas. Attempts to get the warring parties to negotiate a settlement have gone nowhere. The rebels' goals vary wildly, and their personalities are prickly. "You can't have a peace process until [the opposition groups] sort themselves out," says Alex de Waal, a Sudan expert at Harvard University. "They'll want to prove themselves on the battlefield before they get serious about peace."

Sudan's killing fields have grown. Fighting along Darfur's western border has spilled into Chad, where a separate civil war is brewing, and rebel attacks against Chinese-run oil fields and Sudanese police garrisons in the neighboring region of Kordofan threaten to push the war eastward. The rebels say the attacks against China's assets are justified by Beijing's support for the Sudanese regime. But while China has since exerted some limited pressure on Khartoum to resolve its crises, the rebel raids could serve only to expand the theater of hostilities.

Amid continued militia and government attacks, it is Darfur's civilians--both Arab and African--who suffer most. Battles last year drove more than 280,000 from their homes. Some find their way to Darfur's swollen relief camps, home now to well over a third of the region's population. But the camps are not immune to the violence. Many are controlled by the armed factions, and gangs of all stripes rob and rape many of those who venture outside. Other refugees wander Darfur's unforgiving scrub, searching for a village or patch of land with some semblance of stability. Darfur's humanitarian operation, already the largest in the world, struggles to service the displaced. Roads are a gauntlet of banditry, and attacks on relief workers are rising.

So, what can be done? International envoys are cobbling together yet another round of peace talks, but for meaningful negotiations to proceed, security must first be restored. The initial step is to ensure that the peacekeepers protect the camps so aid workers can operate freely and escort humanitarian convoys. While there's a great deal of pressure on the Sudanese government, more could be applied to the rebels, who sometimes take international outrage over Darfur as a license for murder. And the aid community should increase efforts to service the Arab majority--people like Ahmed, who suffer many of the same hardships as the Africans.

Driven from their prosperous village, Ahmed and his tribesmen now huddle under crude shelters made from tree branches and strips of cloth and tarpaulin, so destitute they don't even have enough glasses to share in the ritual tea offered to visitors. Ahmed says his people, as Arabs, get no international sympathy. "Even these [relief agencies], they came here with the idea that we are criminals," he says. "Everyone thinks we are criminals, so they do not help." He insists his village never took up arms against its aggressors, but the conspicuous absence of young men in his group suggests otherwise. Stripped of their homeland and modest wealth, they've almost surely joined the war that no one seems able to stop.