Alex de Waal is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, and programme director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He is the author of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan (revised edition, Oxford University Press 2005) and, jointly with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (forthcoming, Zed Press, September 2005).
The content of “Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap” is located externally.
Alex de Waal is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, and programme director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He is the author of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan (revised edition, Oxford University Press 2005) and, jointly with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (forthcoming, Zed Press, September 2005).
Three of the suspects in the attempted bombings in London on 21 July were born in the Horn of Africa. One, Yasin Hassan Omar, was born in Somalia; a second, Osman Hussein, in Ethiopia; and a third, Muktar Said Ibrahim, in Eritrea. Ten years ago, when Osama bin Laden lived in Khartoum, the Horn of Africa could plausibly have been described as both the headquarters and the front line of international jihadism. American analysts have argued that Africa’s porous borders and ineffectual policing make the continent attractive to groups like al-Qaida, and the Pentagon has two major anti-terrorist operations in sub-Saharan Africa: a base in the tiny Red Sea state of Djibouti (sandwiched between Somalia and Eritrea) monitors the movements of suspected terrorists and the Pan Sahel Initiative is intended to hunt down jihadists in the Sahara. But they are chasing ghosts, mopping up the remnants of a jihad that had already failed in the late 1990s. It’s unlikely that the attempted bombings alleged to have been committed by Yasin Hassan Omar, Osman Hussain and Muktar Said Ibrahim can be traced back to Islamism in their respective homelands. It is much more probable that their jihadism belongs to a new militant manifestation nurtured in European cities over the last few years.
The rise and wane of political Islam in the Horn has left deep imprints on the region and on jihadism itself. In 1990, as the anti-Saddam coalition triumphed in Kuwait, Islamists took solace from the collapse of three of the most disliked secular dictatorships in Africa: Hissène Habré in Chad in December 1990, Siad Barre in Somalia in January 1991 and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia in May 1991 (precipitating Eritrea’s secession). In the networks of the Islamist international, Sudan claimed credit for all this. Khartoum’s new radical Islamist government had thrown open its doors to militants from across the Muslim world. They had counted on Islamist revolutions sweeping the Arab world in 1990, after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait had dramatically shown up the rottenness and dependency of the Gulf monarchies, as they turned to America to save them. When this didn’t happen, the jihadists instead congregated in Khartoum, where Islamists had staged a coup d’état in 1989, and their sheikh – Hassan al-Turabi – had created a Popular Arab and Islamic Congress to rival the conservative Organisation of Islamic States and the moribund Arab League. The PAIC meetings attracted people as disparate as the old leftist Palestinian George Habash, members of Hamas, Algerian jihadists and Iraqi Baathists – not to mention Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Then, in December 1992, President Bush dispatched the US army to Somalia on what he described as a humanitarian mission. The Islamists didn’t believe that for a moment: for them it was another invasion of a Muslim country. But Operation Restore Hope made them realise the importance of the African front in the struggle for a new caliphate. Bin Laden rented a villa in Khartoum, bought up several businesses and opened training camps. And Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, an Egyptian and a senior commander of al-Zawahiri’s Tanzim al-Jihad, was sent to establish an African Muslim army, beginning in Somalia.
Years later, after 11 September, when the litany of al-Qaida terrorist outrages was compiled, the Black Hawk Down episode in Mogadishu in October 1993 was included. It shouldn’t have been. Al-Banshiri’s deputy, Mohammed Atef, was in town, but as a student of the Somali method of urban insurgency, not as a planner or instructor. He cheered on Aidid’s militia, but they didn’t need any help from him. (Atef later became al-Qaida’s military commander in Afghanistan.) Al-Banshiri was said to have been impressed by the bravery and military prowess of the Somalis, but saddened by their factionalisation and unwillingness to acknowledge that Islam offered an alternative future for the country. Only the small outpost in Luuq, set up by Somalia’s Islamist party, al-Itihaad al-Islaamiya (‘The Islamic Union’), showed potential, and there the jihadists made their headquarters.
Luuq sits on a narrow neck of land between two horseshoe bends of the Jubba river. It’s an old trading centre, founded in the Middle Ages by the first Muslim merchants in the Horn. The single gate to the town is flanked by steep riverbanks. The Jubba flows south from the Ethiopian highlands, a ribbon of blue and green in a flat reddish plain. Before Somalia’s collapse in the late 1980s, the floodplains were farmed by the Gabwing, a small clan who had the misfortune to live next to the home district of the president, Siad Barre, whose Marehan clansmen greedily eyed the fertile alluvial land. In 1988, when the country was on the brink of civil war, I asked the chief of the Gabwing in Luuq about the workings of his customary court. Waiting until we were out of earshot of any government functionaries, he explained: ‘No one comes to my court now. It is total war.’ Week by week, his villagers were losing their land at gunpoint to well-connected Marehan merchants and army officers.
Five years later, in the depths of the civil war, I returned to the Jubba Valley. Most of the Gabwing villages along the banks of the river had vanished. Asked about the Gabwing, the Marehan warlords who now controlled the region laughed and denied that a people with such a name had ever lived there. But in Luuq it was different. Here, a recently arrived band of nervous young men was trying to run a local administration based on Koranic principles, without reference to clan distinction. Most were students; a few were teachers and professionals who had lived abroad. A few poorly armed militiamen guarded the town gate. Gabwing farmers had gathered on the land protected by the meanders of the river and were farming maize and tomatoes.
In the chaos after Siad Barre was overthrown in January 1991, the Islamists had made several attempts to gain a foothold in Somalia. But the country’s major clans were heavily armed and determinedly independent and none would cede any territory. So the cadres of al-Itihaad targeted the leftover places, those belonging to the forgotten minorities who were the main victims in the war. The Itihaad followers were a mixed lot: some idealistic students, some criminals and mercenaries, a couple of businessmen with links to Arab countries, militiamen aggrieved by land seizures and exclusion from local power. Their first base was the seaport of Merca, just south of Mogadishu, where the local Hamar people were traders with a long urban history and no militia. They welcomed the earnest young men who came promising honesty, equality and respect for women. When the US marines of Operation Restore Hope fanned out from Mogadishu in January 1993, however, the Islamists thought it wise to leave Merca, and headed for Luuq. The Americans wouldn’t go to the remote Jubba Valley.
For al-Banshiri, its attractions included its proximity to Ethiopia and Kenya, where al-Qaida’s next operations were planned. Al-Banshiri drowned in a ferry accident on Lake Victoria in May 1996, while trying to set up a Ugandan battalion, but not before he had established a cell in Nairobi. Run by a Lebanese American and a man from the Comoros Islands, and made up mainly of disaffected Kenyan Muslim youths, this cell went on to bomb the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998, killing 225 people. The Luuq outpost also channelled arms to Somali insurgents in south-eastern Ethiopia who were fighting under the banner of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, piggybacking the jihadist agenda on the age-old grievance of Muslim lowlanders against the Christian highland domination of the country.
There are as many Muslims in Ethiopia and Eritrea as there are Christians, and they have been there since the beginnings of Islam. One of Islam’s holiest cities, Harar, lies on the eastern slopes of the Ethiopian highlands – though it has never been the site of religious conflict. There are also substantial Muslim minorities in the other East African countries, populations not discovered by Islamic intellectuals until the 1970s. Further to the west, Islam has dominated the Sahel and savanna for centuries, and extremist Islamist political groups have recently emerged in northern Nigeria. All these Muslims are overwhelmingly Sufi, and their version of Islam incorporates mysticism and the cult of saints. Puritan evangelists and political Islamists have long tried to make African Muslims more orthodox, pressing for adherence to Islamic law and female dress codes and trying to end such ‘un-Islamic’ practices as drinking alcohol and building tombs.
Two months after al-Banshiri’s death, assassins trained in Luuq loitered outside the central post office in Addis Ababa. Their target was Ethiopia’s minister of transport and communications, Abdul Mejid Hussein. An ethnic Somali and veteran of Ethiopia’s left-leaning student movement, Hussein symbolised the new Ethiopian government’s commitment to ethnic and religious pluralism. He was also leading painstaking efforts to resolve the extraordinarily complicated internal conflicts that were preventing the ethnic Somali region of Ethiopia from achieving stability. Leaving his office next to the post office, Hussein took six bullets but survived. One of his bodyguards was killed.
Ethiopia’s retribution was swift. In August 1996, helicopters supported by armoured columns crossed the border and attacked Luuq. The overwhelmed al-Itihaad militia ran for it, but 18 foreign al-Qaida members – suspected to be Pakistanis and Egyptians – fought to the last man, who drowned himself in the Jubba river rather than surrender when his ammunition ran out. The Ethiopians captured thousands of documents, which they handed over to the Americans, although the Americans, short of Arabic translators, didn’t begin to examine them for 18 months. Ethiopia’s chief of staff warned the Somali factions that if there was another terrorist attack traced to them, he would not hesitate to go as far as Mogadishu. Further smaller raids drove the point home.
Since the Ethiopian attacks, al-Qaida has had no military base in the Horn. Chastened, al-Itihaad dismantled its militia and its attempt to build an Islamic micro-state, focusing instead on setting up Islamic law courts and schools, and buying influence with the main clan factions. A civil Islamism is alive and well in Somalia. The Islamists run most of the schools and clinics, and Islamic law is enforced in many courts. Women cover themselves far more than their mothers ever did.
For a while Somali jihadists continued to take whatever chances came their way, acquiring arms from Eritrea during its bloody border war with Ethiopia, for example, and shipping them on to its affiliates inside Ethiopia. Other radical Islamist groups have cropped up on the margins of Somalia’s factional politics, occasionally sparking rumours of secret training camps for international terrorists. The Ethiopians use these stories to justify their continuing interventions. Such lurid claims tend to become less credible the closer one gets to them. After 9/11, the State Department, bemused about how to handle this stateless territory, stumbled on the simplest and most effective measure: it published the names of those it suspected of al-Qaida links. Every political leader in Somalia is also a businessman, and all business there involves financial and trade links with East Africa, the Arabian Gulf, Europe and America, so even a hint that assets might be frozen or money transfers blocked is enough to cause any named suspect to be shunned.
Although jihadism has been reduced to the political margins, its tiny number of adherents still pose a danger. An al-Qaida cell, operating from Mogadishu, bombed Mombasa’s Paradise Hotel and shot at an Israeli airliner in November 2002. Several cell members – including a Tanzanian, a Sudanese and a Yemeni – are still at large. Aden Hashi Ayro, a former al-Itihaad fighter who trained in Afghanistan, runs a nameless network that has no political programme and makes no proselytisation efforts: he is interested only in killing. His thugs murdered four foreign aid workers, including an elderly British couple who ran a school. Raids and abductions sponsored by the Ethiopians and Americans continue, although they are clumsy, brutal, often net the wrong people and serve only to add to Mogadishu’s lawlessness.
While recuperating from his bullet wounds, Hussein, together with his wife, Anab, was invited by the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, for a Nile cruise. The two men had been the target of another assassination attempt a year earlier. In June 1995, Mubarak had taken the precaution of flying his armour-plated car to Addis Ababa for the twenty-minute drive from the airport to the conference hall where the summit of the Organisation of African Unity was to be held. Halfway along one of the city’s boulevards, gunmen leapt from the crowds lining the streets and opened fire. A block downhill, a truck filled with explosives burst through. Mubarak had been accompanied from the airport by Hussein, who didn’t know that the car was bullet-proof and threw himself to the floor. He and Mubarak clutched each other as the president’s driver spun the car round and sped back to the airport.
News of the assassination attempt reached Ethiopia’s chief of security, Kinfe Gebre Medhin, within a minute. He was on the steps of Africa Hall, inside the United Nations compound, awaiting the procession of heads of state. Instantly he confronted his Sudanese counterpart, Nafie Ali Nafie. Gebre Medhin knew that Khartoum was supporting terrorist cells. In Sudan itself the al-Qaida network included al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (‘The Society of Islam’), led by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, later convicted of conspiracy for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, whose operatives were intent on murdering Mubarak. Other sponsored groups across the Horn included Eritrea Jihad, al-Itihaad and, bizarrely, the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which takes inspiration from self-proclaimed Christian prophets. Nafie had assured the Ethiopian intelligence chief that the summit would pass without incident. It’s still not clear whether he was lying, or had been kept in the dark. At any rate, Gebre Medhin had his revenge twice over. Acting against orders, he led the commando squad that cornered the terrorist cell in an Addis house. And he also commanded a tank unit that crossed the Sudanese border close to the Blue Nile river, defeated the army garrisons there, and then handed over the territory to the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
The Eritreans thought Gebre Medhin had been naive to believe Sudanese assurances. As early as January 1994, Eritrea’s president, Isseyas Afewerki, had declared that since Khartoum was backing jihadists from Eritrea’s Muslim population who were planting landmines on Eritrean roads, he would respond by supporting the Sudanese opposition. ‘President Omer al-Bashir will be overthrown within a year,’ Afewerki announced. Bashir is still in power, but Eritrean-backed guerrillas from the Beja tribe, who live on both sides of the Eritrea-Sudan frontier, soon sealed off the border and prevented further Sudanese infiltration. They are still insurgent in Sudan, threatening another war on its eastern flank.
While militant Islamism in Somalia was a local affair, buffeted by the currents of civil war, in Sudan it enjoyed the backing of the most powerful individuals in the state. Hassan al-Turabi, a lawyer and philosopher, was the visionary, with a grand plan for an Islamic state in Sudan and Islamist revolutions in neighbouring states. His student cadres spread across Sudan, setting up schools, clinics and micro-credit schemes, seeking practical solutions to the pressing problems faced by ordinary Sudanese. Most of these Islamist social projects didn’t work, but at least they tried. Turabi’s security cabal ran clandestine training camps, sometimes under the cover of Islamic philanthropic agencies, and smuggled al-Qaida operatives onto Sudan Airways flights destined for all over Africa and the Middle East. Khartoum airport even had a terrorist protocol unit responsible for meeting and greeting these men when they returned, ensuring that they bypassed customs and immigration and went straight to safe houses. A terrorist cell can survive without state sponsorship, but its capability is infinitely greater if it has a government to facilitate its every move.
In the three years following the assassination attempt on Mubarak, a military coalition of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda, with the discreet endorsement of the US government, brought Sudanese jihadism to a halt. They launched an undeclared regional war in which all three states sent troops across Sudan’s border. They also co-ordinated action with the new Rwandan government, which was facing a similar problem from Congo. The Sudanese president repeatedly protested that his country had been invaded. The invaders denied it, crediting their victories to Sudanese rebels. With this knife at its throat, Sudan rapidly closed down militant bases, expelled bin Laden, and reined in its jihadist security agencies. The world saw a raft of UN and American sanctions – a Clintonite version of regime change – and, a few days after the East African embassy bombings, Clinton anticipated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war by precisely but mistakenly destroying Khartoum’s al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory with cruise missiles. A soil sample containing traces of a precursor to the deadly chemical agent VX was evidence that something illegal had been going on there, but most analysts agree that Sudan’s chemical weapons were stored elsewhere. Sudanese diplomats now turned the tables on the US, threatening to demand a UN investigation if the US raised Sudan at the Security Council. The firestorm in the night sky had been frightening, but what really worried Sudan’s security chiefs was the foreign battalions that secretly threatened to capture major towns. As the Islamist project began to fall apart, President Bashir turned on his mentor, al-Turabi, and eventually jailed him. Bashir and his powerful deputy, Ali Osman Taha, gambled that if they made peace with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the south, then at least they would stay in power. That improbable scenario came to pass earlier this year and on 9 July, the SPLA commander in chief, John Garang, flew to Khartoum to be sworn in as vice president. Garang died in a helicopter crash only 22 days later but his successor, Salva Kiir, is likely to consummate the peace deal. But even if Sudan returns to war, it will not be a renewed jihad aimed at founding an Islamic state but a nasty struggle for power.
Throughout East Africa, the fortunes of political Islamism rose and fell in the 1990s. By the time of 9/11, it was already into its endgame. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon occurred just two days before the UN Security Council was due to debate lifting the sanctions on Khartoum which had been imposed in the wake of the Mubarak assassination attempt. The US had decided to abstain, having concluded that Sudan was no longer sponsoring terrorism. But the Global War on Terror made Bashir understandably nervous: his regime’s history made it a soft target. He offered more counter-terrorist co-operation. His security chief, Salah Gosh, widely suspected of command responsibility for the extreme violence in Darfur and elsewhere, has visited both London and Washington DC to discuss Khartoum’s extensive files on the terrorists it once hosted. Bashir, Gosh, Nafie and others live on their nerves: they know they are implicated, and will sacrifice anything except themselves to stay in power. Last month, al-Qaida added the Sudan government to its list of targets, accusing it of selling out.
Khartoum had been saved from certain military defeat when its adversaries fell out among themselves. In May 1998, Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war over their disputed border, and a couple of months later Ugandan and Rwandan troops fought each other in the occupied Congolese city of Kisangani. As the attempt to found an Islamic state was running into the sand, so was the rival left-wing project of revolutionary militarism. The guerrillas-turned-governments in the four ‘frontline states’ were, like the Sudanese leaders, concerned only with staying in power.
This parallel is more than a neat coincidence. The radical Islamists and their regional enemies shared ideological fervour and organisational discipline. Both believed that enduring problems of state and society could be overcome by revolutionary change; and, as this failed, both reverted to simple power politics. Like other political creeds, jihadist Islamism is shaped by the contours of local politics – and sometimes it vanishes into the landscape.
The demise of grand ideology in the Horn did not mean the end of violence or militancy. Various ideologies have emerged from the ruins of the Islamic state project. Most are regional or tribal. In Darfur and Chad, Arab supremacism took over. Leaders of the infamous Janjawiid militia adhere to the philosophy of Qoreish, according to which the lineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and his Qoreish tribe are entitled to rule Muslim lands. This supposedly gives the Arabic-speaking Saharan Bedouin of the Juhayna confederation the right to dominate all the land between the Nile and Lake Chad. While US Special Forces chase a handful of jihadists in the mountains of the central Sahara, they have overlooked this vicious and archaic ideology, which has spread far more havoc just a few miles to the south.
A century ago, the first fundamentalists saw their task as challenging the imperial powers and their modern rationalism. Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who invented Islamism as a socio-political movement in the 1920s, saw his Muslim Brothers as a party comparable to the Fascists and Communists he contended with. For the next generation, the struggle was with secular pan-Arabism, Communism and, in Africa, leftist liberation movements. For Muslims in the Horn, 9/11 came at a moment when the Islamist project had been overtaken by the politics of exhaustion. By declaring his War on Terror, President Bush provided a convenient new enemy, but resisting America is so remote from the real problems faced by ordinary Muslims as to be meaningful only to a handful of misfits and criminals. Luuq was a real and courageous attempt to build an Islamic community in Somalia’s ruins, though it was fatally hijacked by al-Qaida. Ayro’s murders, by contrast, are utterly meaningless.
Today, East African Muslims are more likely to be radicalised in Finsbury Park or Brixton than in Khartoum or Luuq. Personal bitterness, a search to find affirmation in membership of small exclusive groups, and the endless news stories about Muslims being victimised in Palestine, Iraq and Europe are all more significant influences on young Muslims in England than al-Itihaad or Eritrea Jihad. What we have learned so far about Yasin Hassan Omar, Hussein Osman and Muktar Said Ibrahim suggests that this is their story.
Alex de Waal is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, and programme director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He is the author of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan (revised edition, Oxford University Press 2005) and, jointly with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (forthcoming, Zed Press, September 2005).
Ahmat Acyl Aghbash is known to few, and then mostly for his grisly end—he stepped backwards into the spinning propellers of his Cessna aeroplane in 1982. His last words can only be guessed. His legacy is the Janjawiid militia, now infamous for genocidal atrocity in Darfur.
The plane was a gift from Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and for ten years Ahmat Acyl was both a commander in Libya’s multinational pan-Sahelian ‘Islamic Legion’ and leader of a Chadian Arab militia known as the Volcano Brigade. Today, Acyl’s fighters from the Salamat of south-central Chad and the Sudanese intermediaries who smuggled their weapons can stake a good claim to be the original Janjawiid. Acyl’s name crops up in most histories of the long-running wars between Libya, Chad and Sudan. His supplier’s name doesn’t. It was Sheikh Hilal Mohamed Abdalla, whose Um Jalul clan’s yearly migration routes took them from the pastures on the edge of the Libyan desert in northern Darfur to the upper reaches of the Salamat River where it crosses from Sudan into Chad. Renowned for their traditionalism, vast herds of camels and the huge reach of their semi-nomadism, the Um Jalul were a logical intermediary for Libya’s gun-running. Their encounter with the Salamat militia, first social, then commercial (the Jalul sold camels) and finally military, forged the Janjawiid, which is now headed by the Sheikh’s younger son Musa Hilal.
Acyl’s gifts to Darfur also included an Arab supremacist ideology which holds that the lineal descents of the Prophet Mohamed and his Qoreish tribe are entitled to rule Muslim lands. Specifically, the Juhayna Arabs, a group that includes both Salamat and Um Jalul, should control the territories from the Nile to Lake Chad. Darfur, an independent sultanate until just eighty years ago, lies in the centre of this land, its massif providing both the most fertile land and the headwaters of the Salamat river. The Qoreishi ideology, mobilized through a shadowy group known as the ‘Arab Alliance’ or ‘Arab Gathering’ motivates some of those involved in the vicious war to control this land. Understanding the hideous violence in Darfur demands an understanding of complex local histories that is possessed by few Sudanese and fewer foreigners. Generally relegated to a footnote of Sudanese history, as Gerard Prunier explains, Darfur warrants its own political ethnography.
Darfur’s is an ambiguous genocide indeed. The crudity of its violence belies fine-grained particularities of motive that only make sense within the unique history of Darfur and its neighbours. Theirs is no centralized blueprint for racial annihilation, but rather a shading of different agendas and opportunistic alliances. The pivot of these is the Um Jalul, and its aspiring leaders’ links with Chad, Libya and—more recently—Khartoum. The Um Jalul are a clan of the Mahamid, who are in turn a section of the Abbala (‘camel-herding’) Rizeigat of Northern Darfur and Chad. Their Bedouin roots can be traced back five centuries at least, when their patrilineal Juhayna ancestors crossed the Libyan desert, entering Darfur from the north-west. Juhayna Arabs were already present in Darfur when the Fur Sultanate emerged in the early 17th century and were part of its bilingual Arab-Fur identity from the outset. In the mid-18th century, the Sultan granted the Baggara (‘cattle-herding’) Rizeigat jurisdiction over a huge area of land south-east of the Sultanate’s heartlands. Known as ‘hawakir’ (sing.: hakura), such grants are the basis of Darfur’s land tenure today, and who controls them is the subject of bitter political struggle. The Baggara’s northern cousins, more mobile and living in the more densely-administered northern lands, were less fortunate. Until today, many Abbala Rizeigat ascribe their role in the current conflict to the fact that they weren’t allocated a hakura a quarter of a millennium ago.
Others also didn’t receive hawakir. After annexing Darfur on 1 January 1917—almost the last territory to be added to the Empire—British colonial officials began tidying up the splendid confusion of Darfur’s ethnic geography. Another Northern Darfur Arab group, the Beni Halba, were collected in one district, which was then allocated to them in a latter-day hakura. The Abbala Rizeigat had their eyes on a territory that forms a ‘U’ shape north of the mountainous centre of the region. But the leading families of the two main sections—Mahamid (including Um Jalul) and Mahariya—couldn’t agree on who should be paramount chief, or nazir. Since 1925 there have been at least six attempts at unifying the different sections. None has succeeded. One stratagem used by the rival sheikhs to increase their chances was to enlarge their numbers by attracting followers from Chad. The Um Jalul had an advantage here: there are more Mahamid than Mahariya clans in Chad, and in the 1970s they were armed by Libya and organized by Ahmat Acyl, the warlord who began to enmesh Darfur in Chad’s racial war.
As we turn political ethno-political lens, we find that the contours of Janjawiid mobilization correspond to the political fractures within the Abbala Rizeigat. Heads of Mahamid lineages have key positions while most leading Mahariya families are uninvolved. A third section, the Ereigat, also plays a different but equally critical role. Historically impoverished and marginal, Ereigat men found employment at the colonial police stables. Living adjacent to towns, their sons obtained an education and joined the police and army. One of these boys, Abdalla Safi el Nur, rose to become an airforce general and was Governor of Northern Darfur at the time when the Janjawiid coalesced from a tribal militia tolerated by the government into becoming a proxy for military intelligence. Another became an army general and, now retired, heads the parliamentary defence committee. Meanwhile, the Baggara Rizeigat—far more numerous and powerful—are themselves divided. Several are leading lights in the Arab Gathering. But the paramount chief, Nazir Saeed Madibbu, is trying to steer a neutral course through Darfur’s mayhem, hoping to negotiate peace and clear his tribe’s name.
Historians of mass atrocity will be unsurprised to learn that much of the dynamic of escalation can be attributed to extremely local power-struggles, and that even at the lowest levels of ethnic aggregation, such as the sub-sections of the Rizeigat (themselves one of a half dozen large Arab tribes in Darfur), extreme violence is the choice of a minority. Such is the poor state of basic documentation of Darfur that these basic facts have not been detailed. That is still the case. Prunier’s account makes not a single mention of Ahmat Acyl, Hilal Abdalla or his son, the Qoreish and its manifesto, or indeed the Abbala Rizeigat and the Um Jalul, though all are essential to understanding Darfur’s descent into war and atrocity.
The Darfur rebels’ history is equally important and also little documented. They spring from convergent resistance movements based among Darfur’s three largest non-Arab groups, the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit. Multiple versions exist of the origins of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), not least among the members of the two groups themselves. All concur that the SLA has sympathies with the Southern Sudan-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and took both arms and advice from the latter in 2003, but that it emerged two years earlier from an alliance of Fur militiamen and Zaghawa desert fighters, independently of the SPLA. Until 2003—when SPLA members assisted in writing the SLA manifesto—the main SPLA role had been training Masalit volunteers who crossed Sudan’s eastern border to its camps in Eritrea. (Denied economic opportunities at home, many Masalit have migrated across the entire breadth of Sudan looking for work.) A couple of battalions of these Darfurians were then transferred to Southern Sudan, from where they planned to return home to bolster local self-defence units. Thwarted by the government, many deserted and went back home in 2001. The SPLA then lost interest in Darfur, while the local rebellion quietly gathered force. After reconnecting in January 2003, leader John Garang and Darfur’s guerrillas have with regarded each other with ambivalence. The SLA could indeed become part of a grand alliance of Sudan’s marginalized peoples and thereby a springboard for Garang to take power on behalf of an ‘African’ majority. But Darfurian leaders are fearful that they will be manipulated, and with good cause. The SLA was catapulted to prominence before it could develop internal political institutions, so that it is an amalgam of village militia and rural intellectuals marshaled by indigenous warrior tradition and the discipline of former army NCOs. The Fur and Zaghawa wings have often disagreed and even on one occasion fought each other.
The origins of JEM are even more controversial. The leadership is drawn from the ranks of Darfurian Islamists and they widely believed to have received funds from Islamists abroad. In contrast to the amateur public relations machinery of the SLA, JEM runs a sophisticated political bureau. JEM’s roots lie in the fragmentation of Sudan’s Islamist movement in the late 1990s, as the twin dreams of national development as an Islamic state and the emancipation of all Muslims as equal citizens, regardless of colour, disintegrated into internal squabbling. The implosion of the Islamic project was clear when, in December 1999, President Omar al Bashir dismissed the government’s eminence grise Hassan al Turabi, sheikh of the Sudanese Islamists, and later put him in gaol. Darfur’s Islamist leaders were already disaffected. Handicapped by the latent Arabist racism of the leadership, which hails almost entirely from Khartoum and the middle Nile Valley, few Darfurians had risen to the top ranks of the government or the civil service. A clandestinely-published ‘Black Book’ documented the racial and regional domination of the Sudanese state.
There are many conspiracy theories concerning the origins of the SLA and JEM, but Prunier’s account—that the Darfur rebellion emerged as a direct consequence of a memorandum of understanding between John Garang and Turabi in 2001—is among the unlikeliest. Putting forward such a claim requires strong supporting documentation, of which Prunier provides none.
The critique in the Black Book was aimed, in fact, at Turabi as well as Bashir. Following the 1999 split and Turabi’s imprisonment Bashir and his lieutenant Ali Osman Taha relied more and more on their own kinsmen, security officers and Islamist cadres drawn from precisely the same Nile Valley tribes fingered in the Black Book. Alarmed at its haemorrhage of support in Darfur, Khartoum’s security cabal turned to one of the few senior military figures from Darfur, Gen. Abdalla Safi el Nur, who responded by putting his kinsmen into key local security posts. The alliance between Khartoum and the Saharan Bedouins is one of convenience. Accustomed to seeing Sudan through an ‘Arab-African’ lens, many observers have missed the fact that the riverine Arabism of Bashir and Taha, coloured by the Islamic movement’s orientation to Arab civilization, is a far cry from the Qoreishi beliefs of Acyl’s Bedouin acolytes. Khartoum’s ruling elites regard the Darfur Arabs as no less backward than their non-Arab neighbours. True adherents of the Qoreish ideology reciprocate by dismissing the riverine tribes as half-caste ‘Arabized Nubians.’
Lacking local knowledge about what is actually driving the Darfur conflict, many have given it their own spin. The debate over the label ‘genocide’ is an example of high-velocity spinning. Both diagnosis of ‘genocide’ and the question of what to do about it are fraught with ambiguity.
One approach was followed by the U.S. government. Following a Congressional resolution in May 2004, the State Department dispatched a team of investigators to refugee camps in Chad to ascertain whether the Sudan Government was committing genocide. On 9 September, Secretary of State Colin Powell reported, ‘genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Jingaweit bear responsibility—and genocide may still be occurring.’
A determination of genocide should demonstrate both that a crime is committed that fits the definition in the 1948 Genocide Convention (actus reus) and also specific intent on the part of the perpetrator (mens rea) ‘to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’ Powell had good evidence for a pattern of atrocities that looked like genocide. He had no proof of intent. But to equivocate—as his predecessor Madeleine Albright had done over Rwanda a decade earlier—risked being pilloried. State Department lawyers were encouraged by the reasoning of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Faced with the problem of proving genocidal intentions when the accused denied them, the tribunal’s judges ruled that it was legitimate to infer intent from the ‘general context’ of extreme violence directed against a group. Another good reason for making this inference, it is almost impossible to reach a conclusion about genocide while it is actually occurring, which would mean that the Genocide Convention would only be good for prosecutions after the fact. Powell’s phrasing was, however, curiously passive. He did not say that Khartoum’s leaders and their militia were genocidal criminals. And in the next breath he said that U.S. policy would not change.
A different approach to determining genocide was adopted by the International Commission of Inquiry into Darfur, set up by the UN Security Council, which reported in January 2005. The ICID detailed the same pattern of abuses as in the State Department report. ‘However,’ it continued,
the crucial intent of genocidal intent appears to be missing, at least as far as the central Government authorities are concerned. Generally speaking the policy of attacking, killing and forcibly displacing members of some tribes does not evince a specific intent to annihilate, in whole or in part, a group . . . Rather it would seem that those who planned and organized attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for the purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.1
In short, the killings in Darfur looked like genocide but were actually a byproduct of defeating the rebellion. The Commissioners, all of them veteran independent human rights specialists, had shied away from the fence that the Americans had so readily jumped. But Khartoum—despite trumpeting the ‘no genocide’ finding—could take no solace from a report that found that ‘the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide,’ and which noted that individuals—including government officials—may have possessed genocidal intent. And unlike Powell, the ICID recommended a specific course of action, namely referral to the International Criminal Court. In March, the U.S. swallowed its longstanding opposition to the ICC, and allowed the Security Council to refer the Darfur case to The Hague. The ICC is currently examining a sealed list of 51 individuals identified by the ICID. Although indictments are many months away, the prospect of extradition to face prosecution in The Hague has prompted a shiver of fear among Khartoum’s security chiefs. The blades are whirring just behind them.
The ICID determination is based on a higher standard of proof than the State Department’s. It is open to interesting and important legal dispute. Much hinges on primary purpose and double effect. On the one hand it can be argued that genocide is a predictable corollary of counter-insurgency conducted in a certain manner. And that the previous two decades of warfare in Sudan exemplify this. All modern genocides, it may be noted, occur during war. On the other hand, the 1948 Convention is precise in what constitutes intent, and legal work needs to be done if that is to be broadened to include genocidal outcomes as a secondary impact of other aims. Moreover, if the purpose of the determination is to prosecute individuals for known crimes, then beginning with a charge of genocide is surely fruitless: the case is better made by building up from multiple instances of mass murder and group-directed war crimes and then deducing that these cumulatively amount to genocide. Both empirically and legally, the ICID has taken a serious and thoughtful position, which will be scrutinized and contested.
Prunier gives a sketch of the debate over genocide, opening by characterizing the ICID report as part of ‘a coordinated show of egregious disengenousness.’ ‘The semantic play,’ he writes, ‘ended up being an evasion of reality. The notion that this was probably not a “genocide” in the most strict sense of the world seemed to satisfy the Commission that things were not too serious after all.’ Given the title of the book and Prunier’s previous work on the Rwanda genocide this is a disappointingly inadequate conclusion.
After the question of genocide, the most controversial issue in Darfur is the death rate. The question of how many people have died in Darfur is important but desktop demography is hazardous when the methods of data collection are varied and have not been fully scrutinized. Prunier is not alone in hinging strong claims on the fact that in one survey of refugees, 61% said that they had seen a ‘family member’ killed. As a general index of horror this is a compelling statistic. But it is impossible to make any numerical inference until one knows what the investigators meant by ‘family’. Demographers distinguish the household (usually defined as those who eat together daily, and usually used as the unit of enumeration) from the family, which commonly stretches far wider than those five or six individuals. Until there is a thorough population-based survey of mortality in Darfur, all estimates for deaths from violence, disease and hunger will remain conjecture.
Prunier has some good sources but often treats them casually. In his catalogue of international neglect of the conflict, for instance he says that Justice Africa failed to mention Darfur in its October 2003 briefing (p. 126). There were in fact four paragraphs that month on Darfur, which had been covered in every issue since March including a warning on 27 May that the strategy of ‘arming local militia’ would, if followed, ‘run the risk of creating a vicious internecine war targeting civilians.’
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide provides a competent sketch of the history of Darfur and the position of the conflict within the politics of Sudan and the region. The account is valuable in locating Darfur within the politics of the central Sahara and the long-running three-cornered wars between Libya, Chad and Sudan. Prunier correctly describes pre-colonial Darfur as an ‘ethnic mosaic’ rather than a region with a binary polarized ‘Arab’-‘African’ identity divide and notes the ambiguity of the term ‘Arab’ (though he doesn’t explore the varieties of Arabism). He makes useful points on the politics of the Umma Party, the main party in the ruling coalition toppled by the current government, and the Darfur Development Front in the 1960s and 1980s and on Libyan-Sudanese relations in the 1970s and 1980s. Errors and omissions are inevitable in any analytical narrative of Darfur: the chief difficulty of this book is that the author omits entirely the central protagonists.
International efforts to find a solution to Darfur’s agony are now in the hands of the African Union. Prunier dismisses this as ‘the politically correct way of saying “We do not really care”.’ But American, British and other international support to the Kenyan-headed North-South peace process, followed a similar formula of ad hoc multilateralism, and did bring an end to twenty years of comparably vicious war. Darfur’s peace process is in some respects more challenging. There is no cohesive leadership on either side and the political issues that divide the belligerents have yet to be thrashed out—the agenda for negotiations is itself a matter of acrimony. Meanwhile, the best hopes for a settlement may come from connecting external peacemaking to internal initiatives. Darfur’s own provincial aristocrats, the paramount chiefs—including the ruling Arab families—are seeking an exit from their predicament, one that restores a conservative social order and salvages their tribes’ reputation. If the Janjawiid are to be politically decapitated, it may be through the efforts of these hardened old tribal chiefs, arguing that for the government and its allies to submit to their mediation is a better option than extradition to The Hague and a cell in a Dutch basement.
Alex de Waal is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, and programme director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He is the author of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan (revised edition, Oxford University Press 2005) and, jointly with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (forthcoming, Zed Press, September 2005).
This paper is an attempt to explain the processes of identity formation that have taken place in Darfur over the last four centuries. The basic story is of four overlapping processes of identity formation, each of them primarily associated with a different period in the region’s history. The four are the ‘Sudanic identities’ associated with the Dar Fur sultanate, Islamic identities, the administrative tribalism associated with the 20th century Sudanese state, and the recent polarization of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ identities, associated with new forms of external intrusion and internal violence. It is a story that emphasizes the much-neglected east-west axis of Sudanese identity, arguably as important as the north-south axis, and redeems the neglect of Darfur as a separate and important locus for state formation in Sudan, paralleling and competing with the Nile Valley. It focuses on the incapacity of both the modern Sudanese state and international actors to comprehend the singularities of Darfur, accusing much Sudanese historiography of ‘Nilocentrism’, namely the use of analytical terms derived from the experience of the Nile Valley to apply to Darfur.
The term ‘Darfurian’ is awkward. Darfur refers, strictly speaking, to ‘domain of the Fur’. As I shall argue, ‘Fur’ was historically an ethno-political term, but nonetheless, at any historical point has referred only to a minority of the region’s population, which includes many ethnicities and tribes.1 However, from the middle ages to the early 20th century, there was a continuous history of state formation in the region, and Sean O’Fahey remarks that there is a striking acceptance of Darfur as a single entity over this period.2 Certainly, living in Darfur in the 1980s, and traveling to most parts of the region, the sense of regional identity was palpable. This does not mean there is agreement over the identity or destiny of Darfur. There are, as I shall argue, different and conflicting ‘moral geographies’. But what binds Darfurians together is as great as what divides them.
Identity formation in Darfur has often been associated with violence and external engagement. One of the themes of this paper is that today’s events have many historic precursors. However, they are also unique in the ideologically-polarized nature of the identities currently in formation, and the nature of external intrusion into Darfur. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the U.S. determination that genocide is occurring in Darfur. There is a danger that the language of genocide and ideologically polarized identities will contribute to making the conflict more intractable.
While primarily an exercise in academic social history, this paper has a political purpose also. It is my contention that, for almost a century, Darfurians have been unable to make their history on their own terms, and one reason for that, is the absence of a coherent debate on the question, ‘Who are the Darfurians?’ By helping to generate such a debate, I hope it will be possible for the many peoples for whom Darfur is a common home to discover their collective identity.
The first of the processes of identity formation is, the ‘Sudanic model’ associated with indigenous state formation. In this respect, it is crucial to note that Dar Fur (the term I will use for the independent sultanate, from c. 1600 to 1916, with a break 1874-98) was a separate centre of state formation from the Nile Valley, which was at times more powerful than its riverain competitors. Indeed, Dar Fur ruled Kordofan from about 1791 to 1821 and at times had dominion over parts of the Nile Valley, and for much of its life the Mahdist state was dominated by Darfurians. Before the 20th century, only once in recorded history did a state based on the Nile rule Darfur, and then only briefly and incompletely (1874-82). This has been grossly neglected in the ‘Nilocentric’ historiography of Sudan. Rather than the ‘two Sudans’ familiar to scholars and politicians, representing North and South, we should consider ‘three Sudans’ and include Dar Fur as well.
The Keira Sultanate followed on from a Tunjur kingdom, with a very similarly-placed core in northern Jebel Marra (and there are many continuities between the two states, notably in the governance of the northern province) and a Daju state, based in the south of the mountain. Under the sultanate, we have an overall model of identity formation with a core Fur-Keira identity, surrounded by an ‘absorbed’ set of identities which can be glossed as Fur-Kunjara (with the Tunjur ethnicity, the historic state-forming predecessor of the Fur-Keira) enjoying similarly privileged status immediately to the north). This is a pattern of ethnic-political absorption familiar to scholars of states including imperial Ethiopia, the Funj, Kanem-Borno and other Sudanic entities. Analysing this allows us to begin to address some of the enduring puzzles of Fur ethnography and linguistics, namely the different political structures of the different Fur clans and the failure to classify the Fur language, which appears to have been creolized as it spread from its core communities. However, the ethnography and history of the Fur remain desperately under-studied and under-documented.
Surrounding this are subjugated groups. In the north are both nomadic Bedouins (important because camel ownership and long-distance trade were crucial to the wealth of the Sultan) and settled groups. Of the latter, the Zaghawa are the most important. In the 18th century, the Zaghawa were closely associated with the state. Zaghawa clans married into the ruling Keira family, and they provided administrators and soldiers to the court. To the south are more independent groups, some of which ‘became Fur’ by becoming absorbed into the Fur polity, and others of which retain a strong impulse for political independence, notably the Baggara Arabs. As in all such states, the king used violence unsparingly to subordinate these peripheral peoples.
To the far south is Dar Fertit, the term ‘Fertit’ signifying the enslaveable peoples of the forest zone. This is where the intrinsically violent nature of the Fur state is apparent. The state reproduced itself through dispatching its armies to the south, obtaining slaves and other plunder, and exporting them northwards to Egypt and the Mediterranean. This nexus of soldiers, slaves and traders is familiar from the historiography of Sudanic states, where ‘wars without end’ were essential to ensure the wealth and power of the rulers.3 O’Fahey describes the slaving party as the state in miniature.4 This in turn arose because of the geo-political position of the Sultanate on the periphery of the Mediterranean world, consumer of slaves, ivory and other plunder-related commodities.5 During the 18th and 19th century, the Forty Days Road to Asyut was Egypt’s main source of slaves and other sub-Saharan commodities. When Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Egypt, he exchanged letters and gifts with the Sultan of Dar Fur.
All the major groups in Darfur are patrilineal, with identity inherited through the male line. One implication of this is that identity change can occur through the immigration of powerful males, who were in a position to marry into leading families or displace the indigenous men. Historically, the exception may have been some groups classed as Fertit, which were matrilineal. A combination of defensive identity formation under external onslaught and Islamization appears to have made matrilineality no more than a historical fragment. This, however, only reinforces the point that identity change is a struggle to control women’s bodies. With the exception of privileged women at court, women are almost wholly absent from the historical record. But, knowing the sexual violence that has accompanied recent conflicts, we can surmise that rape and abduction were likely to have been mechanisms for identity change on the southern frontier.
Identity formation in the Sultanate changed over the centuries, from a process tightly focused on the Fur identity (from about 1600 to the later 1700s), to a more secular process in which the state lost its ideologically ethnic character and ruled through an administrative hierarchy (up to 1916). It is also important to note the role of claims to Arab genealogy in the legitimation and the institutions of the state. The founding myth of the Sultanate includes Arab descent, traceable to the Prophet Mohammed. This is again familiar from all Sudanic states (Ethiopia having the variant of the Solomonic myth). Arabic was important because it brought a literate tradition, the possibility of co-opting traders and teachers from the Arab world, and above all because of the role of Islam as the state religion.
The state’s indigenous Arab population was meanwhile ‘Arab’ chiefly in the archaic sense, used by Ibn Khaldun and others, of ‘Bedouin’. This is a sense still used widely, and it is interesting that the Libyan government (one of three Bedouin states, the others being Saudi Arabia and Mauritania), has regarded Tuaregs and other Saharan peoples as ‘Arab’.
This model of identity formation can be represented in the ‘moral geography’ of figure 1.
| Figure 1 |
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| Moral geography of the Dar Fur sultanate as seen from the centre. |
One significance of this becomes apparent when we map the categories onto the Turko-Egyptian state in the middle Nile Valley, 1821-74. For this state—which is essentially the direct predecessor of what we have today—the core identity is ‘Arab’, focused on the three tribes Shaigiya, Jaaliyiin and Danagla. (The first and second are particularly dominant in the current regime. The last is ‘Nubian’, illustrating just how conditional the term ‘Arab’ can be.) The other identity pole was originally ‘Sudanese’, the term used for enslaveable black populations from the South in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but which by a curious process of label migration, came by the 1980s to refer to the ruling elite, the three tribes themselves. Meanwhile, the Southerners had adopted the term ‘African’ to assert their identity, contributing to a vibrant debate among Sudanese intellectuals as to Sudan’s relative positions in the Arab and African worlds.6 From the viewpoint of Southern Sudan (and indeed east Africa), ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ are polar opposites. From the viewpoint of Darfur and its ‘Sudanic’ orientation, ‘Arab’ is merely one subset of ‘African’. Darfurians had no difficulty with multiple identities, and indeed would have defined their African kingdom as encompassing indigenous Arabs, both Bedouins and culturally literate Arabs.
The transfer of the term ‘African’ from Southern Sudan to Darfur, and its use, not to encompass the Fertit groups but to embrace the state-forming Fur and Tunjur, and the similarly historically privileged Zaghawa, Masalit, Daju and Borgu, is therefore an interesting and anthropologically naïve category transfer. ‘African’ should have rather different meanings in Darfur.
Dar Fur’s downfall came in the 1870s because it lost out to its competitor, the Turko-Egyptian regime and its client Khartoum traders, over the struggle for the slaving/raiding monopoly in the southern hinterland. The current boundaries of Sudan are largely defined by the point at which the Khedive’s agents had reached at the time when their predatory expansion was halted by the Mahdist revolution. Their commerce and raiding inflicted immense violence on the peoples it conquered, subjecting them to famine and in some cases, complete dissolution and genocide. Historians have managed to reconstruct some of the societies that existed before this onslaught, but others live on in memory only, and others have disappeared without trace.7
The second model is the ‘Islamic model’. This substantially overlaps with the ‘Sudanic model’ and complements it, but also has distinctive differences, which came to a head with the Sudanese Mahdiya (1883-98). Let us begin with the overlaps.
Islam was a state cult in Dar Fur from the 17th century. Most likely, Islam came to Dar Fur from the west, because the region was part of the medieval Kanem-Bornu empire, which was formally Islamic from the 11th century if not earlier. Nilocentric historians have tended to assume that Islam reached Dar Fur from the Nile Valley, but there is much evidence to suggest that it is not the case. For example, the dominant Sufi orders in Darfur are west African in origin (notably the Tijaniya), and the script used was the Andalusian-Saharan script, not the classic Arab handwriting of the Nile Valley.
The majority of Darfur’s Arab tribes migrated into the sultanate in the middle of the 18th century, from the west.8 They trace their genealogy to the Juheiyna group, and ultimately to the Prophet (in common with all ruling lineages, Arab or non-Arab). During the 18th century, they exhibited a general south and eastward drift. At all times they were cultivators and herders of both camels and cattle, but as they moved east and south, cattle herding came to predominate and they became known collectively as the Baggara. Most of the tribal names they now possess emerged in the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries, in some cases as they merged into new political units. An interesting and important example is the Rizeigat, a vast confederation of clans and sections, that migrated east and south, with three powerful sections (Nawaiba, Mahamid and Mahriya) converging to create the Rizeigat of ed Daien in south-eastern Darfur. But they also left substantial sections to the north and west, historic remnants of this migration. These sections have a troubled and uncertain relationship with their larger southern cousins, alternately claiming kinship and independence. Whereas the southern, Baggara, Rizeigat were awarded a territory by the Fur Sultan (who had not subjugated the area where they chose to live), the northern clans continued a primarily nomadic existence on the desert edge, without a specific place they could call home. When sections did settle (and many did), they were subject to the administrative authority of the Sultan’s provincial governor of the northern region, Dar Takanawi or Dar el Rih. For historic reasons, this was an area in which administration was relatively de-tribalised, so the northern Bedouins were integrated into the Sultanate more as subjects than as quasi-autonomous tribal units.
The same process explains why we have a large Beni Halba Baggara group, with territorial jurisdiction, in southern Darfur, and a small Abbala group further to the north, and also similarly for the Misiriya whose main territories lie in south Kordofan, but who have remnant sections in northwest Darfur and Chad. Meanwhile the Zayadiya and Ma’aliya are not Juheiyna at all, and did not migrate in the same manner, and had different (though not necessarily easier) historic relations with the Sultanate.
The Hausa and Fulani migrations that occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries also have important parallels. They too populated substantial territories in Darfur (and also further east), and included remnant and more purely pastoral sections (such as the Um Bororo) that continued the eastward migration well into the late 20th century. An important component of the eastward drift is the influence of the Haj (many see themselves as ‘permanent pilgrims’, seeking to move towards Mekka), and Mahdist tradition that emphasizes eastward migration.9 As we shall see, militant Mahdism is itself an import into Sudan from west Africa, brought with these migrants. There are other significant groups with origins to the west, such as the Borgu and Birgid, both of them sedentary Sudanic peoples. We should not see eastward migration as exclusively a phenomenon of politically-Islamized groups, pastoralists or Arabs.
The Juheiyna groups brought with them their own, distinctive ‘moral geography’, one familiar to pastoral nomadic groups across the central Sudan and Sahelian regions. This sees all land as belonging to Allah, with right of use and settlement belonging to those who happen upon it. It sees Darfur as a chequerboard of different localities, some belonging to farmers and others to herders, with the two groups in a mutually-advantageous exchange relationship. It is also open-ended, especially towards the east. (The extent to which this is co-terminous with the moral geography of a Muslim pilgrim, exemplified by the west African migrants in Sudan, is an interesting question.)
This is represented in figure 2, which was drawn for me in outline by one of the most eminent Abbala Sheikhs, Hilal Musa of the Um Jalul Rizeigat, in 1985.
| Figure 2 |
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| The ‘moral geography’ of Darfur, from a camel pastoralist viewpoint. |
Several legacies of this are evident today. Most of the ‘Arab’ groups involved in militia activities including land grabbing are what we might call the Abbala remnants, with weak historic claims to tribally-defined territories, and traditions of migration and settlement to the east and south. Meanwhile, the majority of the Baggara Arabs of south Darfur are uninvolved in the current conflict.
Three other elements in the Islamic identity formation process warrant comment. One is Mahdism, which arrived in Darfur from the west, and has clear intellectual and social origins in the Mahdist state founded by Osman Dan Fodio in what is now northern Nigeria. Unlike the Nile Valley, where the Mahdist tradition was weak, in the west African savannas it was strong and well-articulated. Dan Fodio wrote ten treatises on Mahdism plus more than 480 vernacular poems, and insisted that the Mahdi had to bear the name Mohamed Ahmed (which ruled him out).10 The first Mahdist in 19th century Sudan was Abdullahi al Ta’aishi, grandson of a wandering Tijani Sufi scholar from somewhere in west Africa, who met the Dongolawi holy militant Mohamed Ahmed in 1881 and proclaimed him the Mahdi, in turn becoming his Khalifa. The majority of the Mahdist armies derived from the Baggara of Darfur and Kordofan, and for most of its existence the Mahdist state in Omdurman was ruled by the Khalifa and his Ta’aisha kinsmen. In fulfillment of Mahdist prophecy and to support his power base, the Khalifa ordered the mass and forced migration of western peoples to Omdurman. The Mahdiya was, to a significant extent, a Darfurian enterprise. And it involved extreme violence, though of a radically different kind from that on which the Dar Fur sultanate was founded. This was religious, messianic Jihad, including population transfers on a scale not seen before or since.
Such is the stubborn Nilocentrism of Sudanese historiography that the influence of west African and Darfurian forms of Islam on this pivotal episode in Sudanese history are consistently under-estimated. It was the collision between the heterodox Mahdist Jihadism of the west, including the egalitarian ideology of the Tijaniya, and the more orthodox and hierarchical (though also Sufist) Islam of the Nile Valley that created the Mahdiya.
The Mahdist period is remembered even today in the cultural archive of a time of extraordinary turmoil and upheaval. It was a time of war, pillage and mass displacement. In 1984/5, people looked back to the drought of 1913/14 as their historical point of reference. One wonders if the current historic reference point is the famine of 1888/9, known as ‘Sanat Sita’ because it occurred in the year six (1306 Islamic calendar), and which seems to have surpassed the Darfurians’ otherwise inventive capacity for naming tragedy.
Beyond that historic precedent, I do not want to suggest that there are parallels between the Mahdiya and contemporary or recent political Islam in Sudan, which has had its own manifestations of extreme violence and jihadism. On the contrary, I would argue that it is the failure of Sudan’s recent Islamist project that has contributed to the war in Darfur. This arises from the last important theme of Islamic identity, namely Hassan al Turabi’s alliance-building across the east-west axis of Sudanese identities.
Among the many intellectual and practical innovations in Turabi’s Islamism was an opening to African Muslims as individuals and African Islam as a tradition. The National Islamic Front recognized that Darfur represented a major constituency of devout Muslims that could be mobilized. It made significant openings to Darfur and to the substantial Fellata communities across Sudan.11 It promised that Islam could be a route to enfranchisement as citizens of an Islamic state. In doing so, Turabi and his followers moved away from the traditional focus of the political Islamists on the more orthodox Islam of the Nile Valley, and its close association with the Arab world. It was, unfortunately, a false promise: the Sudanese state is the inheritor of the exclusivist project of the 19th century Khartoum traders, and sought only to enlist the Darfurians and Fellata as foot soldiers in this enterprise. For the Fellata it had a quick win: it could grant them citizenship, correcting a longstanding anomaly of nationality policy. And it has gained the loyalty of many Fellata leaders as a result. But for Darfurians, the best it offered was relative neutrality in the emergent conflicts between Darfur’s Arabs and non-Arabs, and increasingly, not even that. Darfur was marginal even to the Islamists’ philanthropic projects in the 1990s, which at least provided basic services and food relief to many remote rural communities. Perhaps because the Islamists took the region for granted, and certainly because the ruling groups were focused on the threats from the South, Nuba and Blue Nile, Darfur was neglected in the series of Islamist projects aimed at social transformation.
When the Islamist movement split in 1999, most Darfurian Islamists went into opposition. By an accident of fate, the most powerful Darfurian in the security apparatus was an airforce general from the Abbala Rizeigat, and members of those sections were rapidly put in place as leaders of the Popular Defence Force in critical locations, removing men whom the government suspected of having sympathies with the Turabi faction. Thus was created a set of militias popularly known as ‘Janjawiid,’ adopting a term first used to refer to Chadian Abbala militias that used western Darfur as a rear base in the mid-1980s, and who armed some of their Abbala brethren and helped instigate major clashes in 1987-90. The Darfur war is, in a significant way, a fight over the ruins of the Sudanese Islamist movement, by two groups, both of which seem to have abandoned any faith that the Islamist project will deliver anything other than power.
The third note of significance concerns the position of women. In the Tijaniyya sect, with its far more egalitarian tradition than the Sufis of the Nile, women can achieve the status of sheikh or teacher. This reflects both the religious traditions of the Sudanic region, and also the relatively higher socio-economic status of women in savanna societies, where they could own their own fields and engage in trade in their own right. Darfurian ethnographies repeatedly note the economic independence enjoyed by women, among non-Arab and Arab groups alike. The subsequent spread of Islamic orthodoxy, described more below, contributed to a regression in women’s status.
The British conquest of Dar Fur in 1916, and the incorporation of the then-independent sultanate of Dar Masalit in 1922-3, represented a clear break with the past. Darfur was ruled by an external Leviathan which had no economic interest in the region and no ideological ambition other than staving off trouble. Darfur was annexed when the basic determinants of British policies in Sudan had already been established, and the main decisions (e.g., the adoption of Native Administration after 1920, the expulsion of Egyptian civil servants after 1924, the embrace of neo-Mahdism and the Khatmiya, the adoption of the Famine Regulations in the 1930s, the Sudanisation of the civil service, and the moves towards independence) were all taken with scant reference to Darfur.
The key concern in Darfur in the decade after the conquest was security, and specifically the prevention of Mahdist uprisings. An attack on Nyala in 1921 was among the most serious threats the new rulers faced, and the last significant uprising was in 1927. In riverain Sudan, the British faced a more immediate danger, in the form of revolutionary nationalism on the slogan of unity of the Nile Valley, among the educated elite and detribalized elements, especially Sudanese soldiers. To suppress both, and to ensure the utmost economy in rural administration, the British chose a policy of ‘Native Administration’. This was not ‘Indirect Rule’ as practiced in the Nigerian Emirates or Buganda (except in the case of the Sultanate of Dar Masalit, where the British officer was a Resident). Rather, it was the creation of a new hierarchy of tribal administrators, with the significant innovation of the ‘omda, the administrative chief intermediate between the paramount chief (‘nazir’ for Arab tribes) and the village sheikh. ‘Omda was an Egyptian office specially imported for the purpose.12
In a series of ordinances, the British regularized the status of tribal authorities. A particularly important act was to grant judicial powers to chiefs, in addition to their executive powers. This was a means of setting the tribal leaders to police their subjects, to keep an eye on both millenarian preachers and discontented graduates. (It is interesting that the leader of the 1924 nationalist revolt, Ali Al Latif, as a detribalized Southerner or ‘Sudanese’ in the parlance of the day, having no tribal leader to whom he could become subject, was kept in jail in Sudan long beyond his prison term, and then exiled to Egypt.) Along with this came the ‘Closed Districts Ordinance’, much criticized for shutting off the South and Nuba Mountains from external influences, but used in Darfur to keep an eye on wandering preachers and west African immigrants.
But the most significant corollary of Native Administration was tidying up the confusion of ethnic identities and tribal allegiances that existed across Sudan. This was an administrative necessity more than an ideological cleaning-up.
The colonial archives from the 1920s and ’30s are filled with exchanges of letters on how to organize the ethnic chaos encountered in rural Sudan.13 In Darfur, the most significant question was the administration of the Rizeigat, which included shoring up the authority of the pro-British Nazir, Madibbu, regulating the shared pastures on the Bahr el Arab river, also grazed by the Dinka, and deciding the status of the Abbala Rizeigat (initially subject to Nazir Ibrahim Madibbu, then with their own deputy Nazir, finally with their own full Nazir). Other activities included grouping the two sections of the Beni Hussein together, and providing them with land in north-western Darfur (a very rare instance of a wholesale tribal relocation, albeit one done with the consent of the section that needed to be relocated), administratively uniting the two parts of the Beni Halba, finding means of appointing a chief for the Birgid, grouping the miscellaneous sections living in an area called ‘Dar Erenga’ together to form one tribe, etc. A lot of attention was paid to the Fertit groups living on Darfur’s southern frontier, including a brave but futile attempt to move them into Southern Sudan and create a ‘cordon sanitaire’ between Muslims and non-Muslims. But this was an anomaly: the basic approach was ‘live and let live.’
Native Administration was reformed in the 1940s and 1960s (when chiefs were stripped of most of their judicial powers) and formally abolished in 1971, although many people elected to Rural People’s Councils were former native administrators.
Along with the regularizing of tribal administration came the formalizing of boundaries. The British stuck with the four-fold division of the Dar Fur sultanate into provinces, and demarcated tribal territories for the Baggara in south Darfur (following the Sultan’s practice). Elsewhere, the allocation of tribal dars was somewhat haphazard. The creation of Dar Beni Hussein in the western part of north Darfur was anomalous: when a group did not present a problem, it was left to be. However, the de facto recognition of the legality of a tribal dar in south Darfur began to build a legacy.14 Beforehand, the term ‘dar’ had been used in many different senses, ranging from a specific location or administrative unit, to the specific territory of an ethnic group, to the whole Sultanate, to an abstract region such as Dar Fertit. But, by constant usage, twinned with a tribally-based administrative system with judicial powers, the term ‘dar’ came primarily to refer to an ethnic territory in which the dominant group had legal jurisdiction. By the 1970s, Sudan’s leading land law scholar could conclude that tribes have become ‘almost the owners of their homelands.’15 During most of the 20th century, this had no significant political repercussions, as it coincided nicely with the customary practice of a settler adopting the legal code of one’s hosts. There was sufficient free land, and a strong enough tradition of hospitality to settlers, that by the 1970s all ‘dars’ in south Darfur were ethnically mixed, some of them with very substantial settler populations from the drought-stricken north.
Let us not over-emphasize the implications of tribal administration for identity formation. It undoubtedly slowed and even froze processes of identity formation. But it was lightly implemented. Many district officers in Darfur reveled in the myriad forms of ethnic identity and chieftanship they found, documenting the intermediate identities of the Kaitinga (part Tunjur/Fur, part Zaghawa), the Jebel Si Arabs, the Dar Fongoro Fur, and numerous others; also allowing Darfurian administrators to keep their wonderful array of traditional titles including Sultan, Mek, Dimangawi, Shartay, Amir, and Nazir. Given that there were no significant economic interests in Darfur, no project for social change or modernization, and no land alienation, we must recognize the limits of imperial social engineering. It had a very light hand, both for good and ill.
Indeed, in the 1960s and ’70s, Darfur became something of a textbook case for identity change. During the preparatory studies for establishing the Jebel Marra Rural Development Project, a number of eminent social anthropologists were employed to study social change in Darfur.16 Among their writings are a number of studies on how sedentary Fur farmers, on acquiring sufficient cattle, would ‘become Baggara’ in stages, to the extent of teaching their children the Arabic language and adopting many socio-cultural traits of the pastoralists they moved with. This was a remarkable reversal of the previous pattern whereby communities ‘became Fur’ for political reasons; now individuals might ‘become Baggara’ for economic ones. There were also studies of the sedenterization of nomads, underlining how the nomad/farmer distinction is an extremely blurred one. Sadly, there were no comparable studies in northern Darfur.
Most proposals for a settlement of Darfur’s conflict include the revival of Native Administration in some form, both for the resolution of inter-communal conflicts (including settling land disputes) and for local administration.17 Whether or not the important role of chiefs’ courts will be re-established is far less clear. However, the context of the early 21st century is very different from the 1920s. This is clear from a brief examination of the role played by the tribal leaders in the resolution of the 1987-9 conflict and the revived Native Administration Council after 1994.
The first major conflict in Darfur of recent times occurred in 1987-9, and had many elements that prefigure today’s war, not least the fact that the major protagonists were Fur militia and Abbala Arab fighters known as ‘Janjawiid’. Belatedly, a peace conference was called including tribal leaders on both sides, some of whom sought to reestablish their authority over younger militant leaders, and some who sought for advancement of their own positions. Assisted by the fact that the NIF coup occurred while the conference was in session—allowing both sides to make compromises without losing face—an agreement was reached. But it was not implemented; fighting broke out again, and another conference was held in early 1990, which came with similar recommendations, which again were not properly implemented. The key lesson from this is that Native Administration is not a solution in itself, but rather a component of finding and implementing a solution. Control of armed groups, payment of compensation, and measures to deal with the causes of dispute are all necessary.
A form of Native Administration Council was established in 1994, a measure that coincided with the division of Darfur into three states and renewed conflict in western Darfur. There are two ways in which the NAC is implicated in the conflict. First, the government saw the award of chieftancies (usually called Emirates) as a means of rewarding its followers and undermining the power of the Umma Party, which retained the allegiance of many of the older generation of sheikhs. Second, the positions were awarded with a new, simplified and more administratively powerful view of ethnicity. The very rationale for creating the new entities was to reinforce the power of a central authority (a party as much as, or more than, a state). In a militarized environment, with no services delivered by party or state, the reward for the new chiefs was the power to allocate land and guns within their jurisdiction. It was a recipe for local level ethnic cleansing, which duly occurred in several places.
During the colonial period—less than four decades for Darfur, scarcely three for Dar Masalit—and the first decades of independence, Darfur was subject to a state in Khartoum which knew little, and cared less, about this faraway region. Little changed with independence. The entire debate over Sudanese independence was conducted in Nilocentric terms: the dual questions were whether Sudan should be united with Egypt, and what should be the status of the South.18 The position of Darfur was almost wholly absent from this discourse, and remained a footnote in ongoing debates on Sudanese national identity. For example, perhaps the most eloquent analyst of the dilemmas of Sudanese identity, writing in the format of fiction that allows him to explore more explicitly the unstated realities of Sudanese racism, treats Darfurian identity wholly within the North-South framework.19
The state that ensued was a clear successor to the Turko-Egyptian colonial state. It was, and remains, a merchant-soldier state, espousing Arabism, using Arabic as a language of instruction in schools and in the media, and promoting Islam as a state ideology. Its political discourse is almost wholly Nilo-centric: the key debates leading up to independence concerned whether Sudan would opt for unity with Egypt under the slogan of ‘unity of the Nile Valley’, and subsequent debates on national identity have been framed along the North-South axis of whether Sudan is part of the Arab or African world. There were brave attempts by scholars and activists to assert that Sudan is at once Arab and African, and that the two are fully compatible. These efforts came from all parts of the political spectrum: it is particularly interesting to see the Islamists’ arguments on this score.20 Some of the academic historians who engaged in this debate worked on Sudan’s westward links. They, however, were both academically a minority and found no political reverberations for their writings. Whether polarizing or attempting bridging, the discourse was overwhelmingly North-South. And, within Northern Sudan especially, we see the relentless progress of absorption into the culture of the administrative and merchant elite.
What we see is a process that has been called many names, of which I prefer ‘Sudanization,’ following Paul Doornbos, who produced a series of superb if under-referenced studies of this phenomenon in Dar Masalit in the early 1980s.21 ‘Arabization’ is not adequate, because Darfur’s indigenous Bedouin Arabs were also subject to the same process, and because it did not result in people who were culturally ‘Arab’. Rather, individuals came to belong to a category of Sudanese who spoke Arabic, wore the jellabiya or thoub, prayed publicly, used paper money, and abandoned tribal dancing and drinking millet beer. Doubtless, the newly-Sudanised were at social and financial disadvantage when dealing with the established elites. But they were not expropriated of land or identity, and most of them straddled both the ‘Sudanised’ and local identities, and gained from it.
One of the most marked aspects of Sudanisation is a change in the status of women. The Darfurian Sudanised women is (ideally) circumcised, secluded at home, economically dependent on her husband, meek in her behaviour, and dressed in the thoub. The spread of female circumcision in Darfur in the 1970s and ’80s, at a time when the Sudanese metropolitan elite was moving to abandon the practice, is perhaps the most striking physical manifestation of this process, and yet another illustration of how identity change is marked on women’s bodies. It is also an illustration of the recency of a ‘traditional’ practice.
What is remarkable about these processes of identity change is not that they occurred, or that they were subject to the arbitrary impositions of a state, but that they were almost entirely non-violent (with the significant caveat of genital mutilation). This is an important contrast with the South and the Nuba Mountains.
Incorporation into a Sudanese polity did bring with it a clear element of racism, based on colour of skin, and facial characteristics. Although both the Sudanic and Islamic processes of identity formation could not avoid a racial tinge, it was with Egyptian dominance and the successor Sudanese state that this became dominant. The Egyptian or Mediterranean littoral ‘moral geography’ of Dar Fur can be charted as early as 1800, when the Arab trader Mohamed al Tunisi lived there: he graded the land and its inhabitants according to the colour of skin, the beauty of women, and their sexual mores.22 A broadly similar racist classification became evident in Egyptian occupation of the Nile Valley in the mid-19th century, and remains essentially unchanged today.
A particularly important difference between Darfur and other parts of Sudan is the significance of land and labour. Under the British and independent governments, very substantial agricultural schemes were established along the Nile and in eastern Sudan, and subsequently in south Kordofan. These involved widespread land alienation and the transformation of a rural peasantry into a wage labour force, much of it seasonally migrant.23 In Darfur there was no land alienation to speak of, and seasonal labour migration is almost entirely within the region, to work on locally-owned smallholdings (some of which are large by Darfur standards, but do not match the huge registered schemes of the eastern savannas). The violent depredation and dispossession inflicted by the Sudanese state in the 1980s and 90s on the Nuba, Blue Nile peoples and adjacent areas of Upper Nile, creating mass internal displacement with the twin economic aims of creating mechanized farms owned by a Khartoum elite and creating a disadvantaged labour force to work them, has no parallel in Darfur. To a significant degree, Darfur has served as a labour reserve for Gezira and Gedaref, but because of the distances involved, the migration is long-term and not seasonal.24 And the Darfurian labour reserve has never been of strategic economic significance, such that national economic policies have been geared to sustaining it. Male outmigration has left the poorest parts of Darfur with a gender imbalance and a preponderance of female-headed households.25
Labour migration has had implications for the way in with the riverain elite regards westerners. In the 1920s, landowners were reported as saying that just as God (or the British) had taken away their slaves, he/they had brought the Fellata. The lowly status of this devout Muslim pilgrim group is closely associated with their low-status labouring occupations, and much the same holds for the Darfurians (of all ethnicities). The term ‘abid’ was often applied to them all, indiscriminately, reflecting both racism and their labouring status.26 It is arguable that racist attitudes followed economic stratification, rather than vice versa. In either case, there is a clear association between status and skin colour.
Incorporation into a Sudanese national state also, simultaneously, represented incorporation into a wider regional identity schema, in which the three attributes of skin colour, economic status and Arab identification all served to categorize populations. Mohamed al Tunisi would feel at home in the contemporary moral geography of Sudan, almost two centuries after his travels.
The complex history of identity formation in Darfur provides rich material for the creation of new ethnic identities. What has happened is that as Darfur has been further incorporated into national Sudanese processes, wider African and Middle Eastern processes, and political globalization, Darfur’s complex identities have been radically and traumatically simplified, creating a polarized ‘Arab versus African’ dichotomy that is historically bogus, but disturbingly powerful. The ideological construction of these polarized identities has gone hand-in-hand with the militarization of Darfur, first through the spread of small arms, then through the organization of militia, and finally through full-scale war. The combination of fear and violence is a particularly potent combination for forging simplified and polarized identities, and such labels are likely to persist as long as the war continues. The U.S. government’s determination that the atrocities in Darfur amount to ‘genocide’ and the popular use of the terms ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ by journalists, aid agencies and diplomats, have further entrenched this polarization, to the degree that community leaders for whom the term ‘African’ would have been alien even a decade ago, now readily identify themselves as such when dealing with international interlocutors.
Internally, this polarization began with some of Darfur’s Arabs. Exposed to the Islamist-Arabism of Khartoum, drawing upon the Arab lineage ideology latent in their Juheiyna identities, and often closely involved in Colonel Gaddafi’s ideologically Arabist enterprises in the 1970s and ’80s, these men adopted an Arab supremacist ideology. This seems to have been nurtured by Gaddafi’s dreams of an Arab homeland across the Sahara and Sahel (notwithstanding the Libyan leader’s expansive definition of ‘Arab’ which, true to his own Bedouin roots, includes groups such as the Tuareg), and by competition for posts in Darfur’s regional government in the 1980s. In 1987, a group of Darfurian Arabs wrote a now-famous letter to Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi, demanding a better deal for Darfur’s Arabs. They appealed to him as ‘one of their own’. At one level this was simply a legitimate demand for better political representation and better services. But within it lurked an agenda of Arab supremacism. Subsequently, it has become very difficult to separate the ambitious agenda of a Darfurian Arab homeland from wider and more modest goals, and to identify which documents are real and which are not. But there is no doubt that, twinned with similar ambitions among the Chadian Juheiyna Arabs, there was a political and territorial agenda emerging. This helps explain why some of the first and fiercest clashes of 1987 were in the highland Jebel Marra area of Gulu, a territory which would be clearly indicated a ‘Fur’ heartland on any moral geography of the region including that of Sheikh Hilal, reproduced above, whose son Musa has since become infamous as commander of a major PDF brigade. The attacks on Gulu in 1987 and again in 2002 and 2004 represent a symbolic strike at the heart of Fur identity and legitimacy, as well as a tactical assault on a Fur resistance stronghold.
This newly-politicized Arab identity was also militarized. Three overlapping strands of militarization can be seen. One is the Ansar, the core followers of the Mahdi, who are historically a political, religious and military movement. Between 1970 and 1977, the Ansar leadership was in exile in Libya, planning its return to power, which it tried in 1976 and failed. Many returned to Sudan in 1977 as part of the ‘National Reconciliation’ between Sadiq el Mahdi and Nimeiri, but were not, as they had hoped, absorbed into the national army. Instead, they were settled on farming schemes. Disproportionately drawn from the Baggara tribes, former Ansar fighters were instrumental in the creation of the first Baggara militias in the mid-1980s. A second group of Ansar returned in 1985-6, following the fall of Nimeiri.27 While in Libya, the Ansar had been organized, trained and armed alongside Gaddafi’s Islamic Legion, which drew recruits from across the Sahelian countries.28 This is the second contributor to the militarization of the Bedouin. The Islamic Legion was disbanded after its defeat in Ouadi Doum in 1987, but its legacy remained. The third contributor was the formation of Arab militias in Chad, which used Darfur as a rear base for their persistent but unsuccessful attempts to take state power. The different political, tribal and ideological strands of this story have yet to be teased apart. Clearly there are important differences within these groups, including a competition for the allegiance of the Ansar fighters between the Umma leadership and the NIF. Gaddafi was also quite capable of treating with non-Arab groups such as the Zaghawa when it suited him, and was quick to recognize the government of Idris Deby when it took power in late 1990. Although Deby had been a commander of the forces that defeated the Libyan army and Islamic Legion a few years earlier, Gaddafi’s main quarrel was with Hissene Habre.
While there is a definite strain of Arab supremacism, the significance of ‘Arab’ identity must not be overstated. The groups involved in the current conflict are overwhelmingly Juheiyna Abbala (excluding for example the Zayadiya), with relatively few Baggara groups (notably including one part of the Beni Halba, many of whom were armed and mobilized in 1991 to counter the SPLA incursion into Darfur). This means that the largest and most influential of Darfur’s Arabs are not involved, including the Baggara Rizeigat, the Habbaniya, the Maaliya and most of the Taaisha. As the conflict continues to spread and escalate, this may change, and there are clear attempts by some in government to bring in all Arab groups (especially the Rizeigat) on their sides, and attempts by some on the rebel sides to provoke them.
The character of Arab supremacism is manifest in a racist vocabulary and in sexual violence. The term ‘zurug’ has long been used in the casual racism of Arabs in Darfur, despite—or perhaps because of—the absence of any discernible differences in skin colour. Attributions of female beauty or lack thereof are similarly made, again despite or because of the lack of noticeable difference. The term ”abid’, which has long been used by the riverain elites to refer to all Darfurians, has been adopted by some Arab supremacists to refer to non-Arab Darfurians, despite—or because of—its lack of historical precedent. And widespread rape itself is a means of identity destruction or transformation, particularly salient and invasive for Muslim communities. In the early 1990s Nuba Mountains counterinsurgency campaigns, there is ample documentation that rape was used systematically and deliberately for this purpose.29
The creation of ‘Africanism’ is more recent than the ascent of Arab supremacism. It owes much to the SPLA, whose leader, John Garang, began to speak of an ‘African majority’ in Sudan to counter the Islamist government’s claim that Sudan should be an Islamic state because it had a majority Muslim population. Garang reached out to the Nuba and peoples of southern Blue Nile, for whom ‘African’ was an identity with which they could readily identify. For example, the Nuba clandestine political and cultural organization of the 1970s and early ’80s, known as Komolo, asserted the Nuba’s right to their own cultural heritage, which they identified as distinctively ‘African.’ Under the leadership of Yousif Kuwa, Komolo activist and SPLA governor of the Nuba Mountains, the Nuba witnessed a revival of traditional dancing, music and religion.30
Trapped in a set of identity markers derived from the historical experience of the Nile Valley, a number of educated Darfurian non-Arabs chose ‘African’ as the best ticket to political alliance-building. The veteran Darfurian politician Ahmed Diraige had tried to do this in the 1960s, making alliances with the Nuba and Southerners, but had then switched to trying to bring Darfur’s non-Arabs into the Umma Party, hoping thereby to broaden and secularise that party. Daud Bolad, a Fur and a prominent Islamist student leader, switched from one political extreme to the other and joined the SPLA, leading a poorly-planned and militarily disastrous SPLA expedition into Darfur in 1991. Sharif Harir, a professor of social anthropology and as such inherently distrustful of such labels, was one of the first Darfurian intellectuals to recognize the danger posed by the new Arab Alliance, and has ended up reluctantly donning the ‘African’ label. He is now one of the political leaders of Darfur’s Sudan Liberation Movement.
The influence of the SPLA on the Darfurian opposition should be acknowledged. What was originally a peasant jacquerie was given political ambition with the assistance of the SPLA. Indeed, the Darfur Liberation Front was renamed the SLA under SPLA influence, and it adopted Garang’s philosophy of the ‘New Sudan’, perhaps more seriously than its mentor.
It is a commonplace of ethnographic history that communal violence powerfully helps constitute identity. In times of fear and insecurity, people’s ambit of trust and reciprocity contracts and identity markers that emphasize difference between warring groups are emphasized. Where sexual violence is widespread, markers of race and lineage are salient. Much anecdotal evidence indicates that this is happening today, and that the civilian communities most exposed to the conflict are insisting on the ‘African’ label. We can speculate that it serves as a marker of difference from the government and its militia, an expression of hope for solidarity from outside, and—perhaps most significant in the context of forced displacement and threats of further dispossession—a claim to indigeneity and residence rights.
From the point of view of the SLA leadership, including the leadership of the communities most seriously affected by atrocity and forced displacement, the term ‘African’ has served them well. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the depiction of ‘Arabs’ killing ‘Africans’ in Darfur conjures up, in the mind of a non-Sudanese (including many people in sub-Saharan Africa), a picture of bands of light-skinned Arabs marauding among villages of peaceable black-skinned people of indeterminate religion. In the current context in which ‘Arabs’ are identified, in the popular western and sub-Saharan African press, with the instigators of terrorism, it readily labels Darfur’s non-Arabs as victims.
From the point of view of the government in Khartoum, the labels are also tactically useful. While insisting that the conflict is tribal and local, it turns the moral loading of the term ‘Arab’ to its advantage, by appealing to fellow members of the Arab League that Darfur represents another attempt by the west (and in particular the U.S.) to demonize the Arab world. In turn this unlocks a regional alliance, for which Darfur stands as proxy for Iraq and Palestine. Looking more widely than Darfur, the term ‘Arab’ implies global victimhood.
The U.S. determination that Darfur counts as ‘genocide’ plays directly into this polarizing scenario. It is easy for self-identified Arab intellectuals in Khartoum (and elsewhere) to see this finding as (yet another) selective and unfair denigration of Arabs. If, in the confrontation between the Arabs and the Israelis and Americans, Arabs are cast as ‘terrorists’, warranting pre-emptive military action and a range of other restrictions on their rights, now in the context of Africa they are cast as ‘genocidaires’ and similarly cast beyond the moral pale and rendered subject to military intervention and criminal tribunals. Arab editorialists are thus driven both to deny genocide and to accuse the U.S. of double standards, asking why killings in (for example) Congo are not similarly labeled.
In fact, the U.S. State Department was reluctant to conclude that Darfur counted as genocide, and the Secretary of State insisted, almost in the same breath that he announced ‘genocide’, that it would not change U.S. policy. The impetus for the genocide finding did not come from Washington’s neocons, but rather from liberal human rights activists in alliance with the religious right. The origins of this alliance lie in the politics of support for the SPLA (with the Israeli lobby as a discrete marriage broker) and influence trading in Congress, specifically finding an issue (slavery in Southern Sudan) that brings together the Black Caucus, the Israeli lobby, the religious right (for whom Sudan is a crusade) and the human rights groups (who began campaigning on this long before the others). Several of these groups were frustrated that the State Department, under the Republicans, had switched from a policy of regime change in Khartoum to a pursuit of a negotiated peace for Southern Sudan. The war in Darfur was a vindication of their thesis that no business could be done with Khartoum’s evildoers. The atrocities were sufficiently swift and graphic, and coincided with the tenth anniversary of the preventable genocide in Rwanda, giving remarkable salience to the genocide claim. Congress passed a resolution, and the State Department prevaricated by sending an investigative team, confident that because there was no evident intent at complete extermination of the target groups, that their lawyers would find some appropriately indeterminate language to express severe outrage, short of moral excommunication of Khartoum (with which State was still negotiating) and military intervention. What they had not counted on was that the definition of Genocide in the 1948 Convention is much wider than the lay definition and customary international usage, and includes actions that fall well short of a credible attempt at the absolute annihilation of an ethnic or racial group. The State Department’s lawyers, faithful to the much neglected letter of the law, duly found genocide, and the Secretary of State, doubtless judging that it would be more damaging to ignore his lawyers’ public advice, duly made the announcement, and then said that this would not affect U.S. policy.
Arrived at more-or-less by accident, the genocide finding has a number of implications. One is that it divides the U.S. from its allies in Europe and Africa. Given that the Sudan peace process is a rare contemporary example of multilateralism (albeit ad hoc) and rare example of a success in U.S. foreign policy (albeit incomplete), it is important that this unity is not fully sundered. At present, it appears that the State Department has succeeded in keeping its policy on track, despite being outflanked by the militants in Washington. (Had the Democrats won in November, we might have faced the ironic situation of a more aggressive U.S. policy.) The damage has been minimized, but some has been done.
Second, the broader interpretation of the Genocide Convention, while legally correct, is one that diplomats have been avoiding for decades, precisely because it creates a vast and indeterminate grey area of atrocity, in which intervention is licensed. A tacit consensus had developed to set the bar higher: now the U.S. has lowered it, and Arab critics are correct: if Darfur is genocide, then so is Congo, Burundi, Uganda, Nigeria and a host of others. The neocons do indeed have another weapon in their armoury of unilateral intervention. Arguably, they didn’t need it, already having sufficient reason to intervene on the basis of the September 2002 U.S. National Security doctrine.
And thirdly, for Darfur, the genocide finding is being internalized into the politics of the region. This is occurring in the context of considerable external dependence by Darfur’s political organizations and communities. The political organizations have centered their strategies around external engagement. The Islamists in the Justice and Equality Movement have a strategy for regime change, using the atrocities in Darfur to delegitimize the Khartoum government internationally, thereby bring it down and bring them to power. The SLA, representing a broad coalition of communities in arms, has yet to develop a full political programme, and is instead largely reacting to events, especially the escalating atrocities since late 2003. It seeks international intervention as a best option, and international monitoring and guarantees as a second best. The communities it represents, many of them either receiving or seeking international assistance, are also orienting their self-representation to the international audience. They have been provided with a simple and powerful language with which to make their case.
The other lenses for analyzing Darfurian identities are too subtle and complex to be of much use for journalists and aid workers. So we are stuck with a polarizing set of ideologically constructed identities, mutually antagonistic. If, as seems likely, these labels become strongly attached, they will hugely complicate the task of reconstructing the social fabric of Darfur—or, given the impossibility of returning to the recent past—they will obstruct the construction of a new Darfurian identity that stresses the common history of the region and the interdependence of its peoples.
Let me conclude this essay with two main observations.
First, who are the Darfurians? I argue that Darfur has had a remarkably stable continuous identity as a locus for state formation over several centuries, and is a recognizable political unit in a way that is relatively uncommon in Africa. But the incorporation of Darfur into Sudan, almost as an afterthought, has led not only to the economic and political marginalization of Darfurians, but the near-total neglect of their unique history and identity. Just as damaging for Darfurians as their socio-political marginalization has been the way in which they have been forced to become Sudanese, on terms that are alien to them. To overcome this, we must move to acknowledging a politics of three Sudans: North, South and West. It is probably a naive hope, but a recognition of the unique contribution of Darfurians and the inclusive nature of African identity in Darfur could provide a way out of Sudan’s national predicament of undecided identity. Short of this ambition, it is important for Darfurians to identify what they have in common, and undertake the hard intellectual labour of establishing their common identity.
Second, what we see is the gradual but seemingly inexorable simplification, polarization and cementing of identities in a Manichean mould. Within four generations, a set of negotiable identities have become fixed and magnetized. We should not idealize the past: while ethnic assimilation and the administration of the Sultanate may have been relatively benevolent at the centre, at the southern periphery it was extremely and systematically violent. Similarly, while Sufism is generally and correctly regarded as a tolerant and pacific set of faiths, it also gave birth to Mahdism, which inflicted a period of exceptional turmoil and bloodshed on Sudan, including Darfur. Violence has shaped identity formation in the past in Darfur, just as it is doing today. Also, from the days of the Sultanate, external economic and ideological linkages shaped the nature of state power and fed its centralizing and predatory nature. Today, the sources and nature of those external influences are different. A ‘global war on terror’ and its correlates influence the political and ideological landscape in which Darfur’s conflict is located, including the very language used to describe the adversaries and what they are doing to one another and the unfortunate civilians who are in the line of fire. The humanitarians and human rights activists, as much as the counter-terrorists and diplomats, are part of this process whereby Darfurian identities are traumatically transformed once again. Hopefully there will be a counter-process, which allows for Darfurians to carve out a space in which to reflect on their unique history, identify what they share, and create processes whereby identities are not formed by violence.
Endnotes