Abstract
Genocide has happened on our watch in Darfur. This cannot be denied. To the casual observer, it appears to be a clear case of the Arab minority regime in Khartoum committing acts of genocide against Africans in the western province of Sudan, Darfur. In reality it is more complex than this. Sudan has only had ten years of peace since it gained independence in 1956 and has not moved beyond its colonial legacy. The government has failed to deal effectively with its economic, social, and political problems. Therefore, it uses a segment of its population as scapegoats. The regime in Sudan does this by using a racial paradigm to disguise the fact that it is a failed state.2 Its predecessors used similar tactics. The government of Sudan has lost legitimacy. Therefore, it resorts to chronic Arabism/Islamism to garner support among Arabs in Sudan and in the other countries. “Them against us.” This has been an effective strategy that has allowed the regime of Omar al-Bashir to cling to power. But it has also disguised the real motive behind the regime’s policy of genocide.
Sudan has become today’s world capital of human pain, suffering and agony. There, one part of the population has been—and still is—subjected by another part, the dominating part, to humiliation, hunger and death. For a while, the so-called civilized world knew about it and preferred to look away. Now, people know. And so they have no excuse for their passivity bordering on indifference.
—Elie Wiesel, “ On the Atrocities in Sudan,” New York, NT, July 14, 20041
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Notes
Fergus Nicholl, “Three Empires on the Nile: Ismail Pasha, General Gordon, The Mahdi and Lord Kitchner in Peter,” in The Kenna Handbook of Sudan, ed. Peter Gwynvay Hopkins (London: Kegan Paul, 2007), 126.
Ann Mosley Leach, Sudan: Contested National Identities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29.
Amir H. Idris, Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 34.
Ibid., 28; and Gerard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 4–5.
Douglass H. Johnson, The Root Cause of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Oxford: James Curry, 2004), 3.
See David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965)
David Easton, A Framework of Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965)
Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (New York, NY: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963)
Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, eds., Comparative Politics Today: A World View (New York: Longman, 1996).
See Dale C. Tatum, “Preaching Smith but Practicing Keynes,” Peace Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (April–June 2006): 237–43.
Norman Anderson, Sudan in Crisis: The Failure of Democracy (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), x, 7.
Jerome Tubiana, “Darfur: A Conflict for Land?,” in War in Darfur: And the Search for Peace, ed. Alex de Waal (London: Global Equity Initiative, 2007), 70.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon, 1965), 52.
United Nations Security Council, “Report of the International Inquiry to the United Nations Secretary General,” Geneva, January 25, 2005.
UN General Assembly, “The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” December 9, 1948, A/RES/260.
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Amnesty International, “Sudan: Arms Continuing to Fuel Serious Human Rights Violations in Darfur,” AFR/019/2007, 5–6.
Honorable Frank R. Wolf, “Stop the Killing in Sudan,” April 2, 2004, [Extensions], House of Representatives, Congressional Record, vol. 150 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004): E518.
Honorable John McCain, May 6, 2004, Executive Session, Senate, Congressional Record, vol. 150, op. cit., S4969.
Honorable Frank R Wolf, “Genocide in Sudan,” June 8, 2004, [Extensions], House of Representatives, Congressional Record, vol. 150, op. cit., E1070.
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President George W. Bush, “The Bush Record: President Bush’s Freedom Agenda Helped to Protect the American People,” January 12, 2009, The White House.
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Susan B. Rice and Gayle E. Smith, “The Darfur Catastrophe,” Washington Post, May 30, 2004.
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© 2010 Dale C. Tatum
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Tatum, D.C. (2010). The War in Darfur: Genocide on Our Watch. In: Genocide at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10967-4_8
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