Jane Springer - Genocide: A Groundwork Guide

We knowmore about the realities of ethnically targeted human destruction in Darfur than on any other previous such occasion in history. So much the greater is our moral disgrace.Eric Reeves

Bombed-out mud huts in a parched desert landscape. A two-year-old boy, face in the sand, beaten to death. Corpses stuffed into wells. An adult skeleton, wrists still tied behind its back. Anguished African women and small children in crowded refugee camps.

These images and others like them show up from time to time in the newspapers, on radio and TV. The situation in the Darfur region of Africas largest country, Sudan, goes on and off the radar of the Western media depending on what other news is catching their attention. Meanwhile, the killing of African villagers continues.

It frequently happens in the early morning. Hundreds of janjaweed (armed horsemen) ride into the villages on horses or camels, their turbans covering everything except for their eyes. The Sudanese air force, in planes or helicopter gunships, have usually bombed the villages rst, killing many people and scattering the rest, who are desperate to nd a place to hide. Then the janjaweed, backed up by government soldiers, round up the men and boys and take them out of the village. If the hostages are lucky, the janjaweed and soldiers just shoot them. More often they torture them rst. Sometimes they chain them together and burn them alive. Sometimes they behead them and throw their heads down a well to poison it for anyone left behind.

Many girls and women are kidnapped and brutally gang-raped, often in front of their families. It is common for the janjaweed to call the women slaves as they are raping them, shouting that now they will have Arab babies, and to mutilate or kill them afterwards.

The villages are utterly destroyed. First the janjaweed and soldiers take whatever they want money, jewelry, food, farm animals and then they set the huts on re so that there is nothing for anyone to come back to. The people who do manage to escape face a dangerous hungry trek to camps that are not much safer than their homes.

Many camps lack adequate food, shelter or health care. When women and girls leave the camps to gather rewood they risk being attacked and raped by janjaweed waiting to terrorize them.

Sudans western province of Darfur is huge, the size of France. In early 2003, the largely Arab government of Sudan was confronted by a small rebel movement of African villagers in Darfur. The rebels, called the Sudanese Liberation Army, had taken up arms to protest the critical shortage of resources in Darfur and discrimination by the government in the capital, Khartoum. In response, the government turned to Arab nomads, the janjaweed, who were already often in conict with the African farmers over their land and cattle. The government supplied arms to the janjaweed nomads and ordered them to massacre the farmers and force survivors to ee their homes. Some of these nomads are from Chad and Libya, neighboring countries badly affected by drought.

The traditional conict between the Arabic nomads and African farmers has always been more of an economic conict than an ethnic one. But now the Sudanese government is promoting hatred against the Africans. This is in a place where most people are Muslims and most also have dark skin, so at least for foreigners, it is hard to tell the Arabs and the Africans apart.

An estimated 450,000 people from the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur tribes have been killed or have died from starvation and disease since 2003. Another 2 million of Darfurs 6 million people have been forced to ee and are living in refugee camps, 220,000 of them in Chad. Approximately 3.5 million people in Darfur are in need of food because instability in the region and the scorched earth scenario have made it impossible for them to grow any crops.