What Lies Beneath (An Addendum to an Agreement)

My fellow Changester and frequent duel partner/blog-punching-bag Michael Kleinman recently pointed that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's account of the conflict in Darfur "contain[s] more than a grain of truth," and notes that we need to listen to this perspective "If we want to influence the Sudanese government."

And I agree. But with an important addendum: That our internal bullsh*t meters are on high alert.

As Michael rightly notes, Bashir did not suddenly get bored and decide that a scorched earth campaign in Darfur might liven up his day. Rather, the conflict evolved out of a long history of regional conflict, exacerbated by environmental and land issues, and officially sparked by a rebel attack on a Sudanese military base in 2003.

However, what's missing from this list --- and what makes the conflict in Darfur so devastating --- is the government's heavy-handed role in entrenching ethnic and tribal tensions and using them to its advantage.

I recently re-read, on the advice of a friend, an ICG report from March 2004, which traces the "politicization and mobilization of ethnic groups" in Darfur from the 1970s to the present conflict. Successive regimes in Khartoum, beginning before Bashir, armed tribes of Arab descent, first to prevent the spread of the ongoing North-South Civil War in the 1980s, and then as a means to "manage" Darfur's regional conflicts. Propaganda emanating from Khartoum helped to add a strong racial element to the conflicts. The report notes:

"Against the backdrop of environmental degradation however, government weaknesses and manipulation of the ethnic fabric of the region produced an alarming shift in the nature of conflict, with ethnicity becoming a major mobilizing factor. Differences between the two types of conflict are significant. Traditional conflicts were generally sporadic and at low levels of violence. Ethnically driven conflicts that emerged in the late 1980s were sustained and exceptionally fierce, with ethnic solidarity helping to draw in additional parties."

Khartoum's meddling in Darfur extends beyond guns and propaganda, and includes redrawing administrative boundaries, largely at the expensive of black African groups, and dissolving established patterns of land ownership and access. When conflict erupted over land access, Khartoum repeatedly armed and supported Arab tribes and stoked supremacist sentiments among their ranks.

For Bashir to say that the "government is playing the role of intervention to help stop this struggle" is misleading, at best, if taken at face value --- the government has indeed intervened, with an effort to stop the struggle, but their tried-and-true tactic is not to broker some kind of deal, but to arm and assist those allied with its own interests. (And, as Michael writes, Bashir is "at best a lying, semi-genocidal thug.")

The conflict in Darfur cannot be boiled down to a simplistic "one side versus another" analysis, but Khartoum's critical role in entrenching tensions and exacerbating conflicts must be kept in mind --- and we should listen to Bashir, but we must pair his "grains of truth" with our own "grains of salt." (Or, rather, an entire salt mine.)