Genocide in Darfur, Sudan

One of the most difficult challenges facing us today is that in the absence of an emancipatory alternative all sorts of nefarious tendencies enter to fill the void. We witnessed this in the 1990s, when the collapse of both Communism and the internal socialist humanist opposition in Yugoslavia created a void that Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic took advantage of by fomenting ethnic hatred against Kosova and genocide against Bosnia.

Tragically, the failure of much of the Left to speak out against the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia and Kosova is being repeated today in the near-silence over the genocide being waged against Black Africans in Darfur, in western Sudan.

Conflicts in Darfur have been going on for decades between Black Africans and the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, which has long opposed the interests of the Fur, Masaalit, and Zaghawa communities of Darfur (an area the size of France with a population of four million). Sporadic uprisings have occurred there over the past three decades. Conflict intensified in the 1980s, when Colonel Ghadafi of Libya encouraged the creation of an "Arab corridor" into Central Africa; he supplied weapons to Arab militias in Sudan, which launched attacks against the citizenry of Darfur.

By the 1990s, the element of racism against the Black Africans in western Sudan became pronounced when 27 Arab pastoral groups declared war against the "Zurug" (or Black) non-Arab groups of Darfur. Last year Sudan moved to repress any dissent in the region by letting loose the janjaweed militias—death squads 20,000 strong, not unlike the units employed by Milosevic against Bosnia and Kosova and the interahamwe used in Rwanda against the Tutsi. The janjaweed openly talk of "exterminating" the Blacks of Darfur.

Groups have arisen to defend the inhabitants of Darfur, such as the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. Sudan has responded with a scorched-earth campaign of aerial bombardment, systematic rape, and unleashing the deadly janjaweed on the civilian populace. Tens of thousands have been killed and raped, over a million have been forced from their homes, and much of the populace is slowly being starved to death.

Though this genocide resembles Sudan’s 20-year war against secessionists in the south, there is one major difference—whereas the southern rebels are Christian and animist, the people of Darfur are Muslims. This is not an inter-religious war, but a racial-ethnic war, as an Arab-dominated government seeks to wipe out indigenous Black Africans.

The Bush administration still refuses to say that genocide is occurring in Darfur; it brokered the talks between Sudan and the southern rebels and does not want to upset its new-found alliance with the Sudanese government, which it sees as an ally in its "war against terrorism." U.S. Black and civil rights organizations have also so far said little about the issue. Nor has anything been done by the African Union, created as a result of the political impotence of the Organization for African Unity.

Why is the genocide in Darfur not a larger issue in the anti-war and other movements? Is it because the U.S. is not behind the conflict? Does this mean another Rwanda will be allowed to happen? Have we learned nothing from the genocide in Bosnia—or the ongoing war of the Indonesian government against the people of Acheh? Just because the U.S. is not militarily involved in a conflict doesn’t free us from solidarizing with the victims of ethnic cleansing, religious fundamentalism, and statist terrorism. The radical movement cannot afford to focus only on opposing U.S. actions; it has to proceed on the basis of the kind of new society it is for. Anything less eliminates the ground for extending the most basic kind of human solidarity.

This text is excerpted from "World crises and the search for alternatives to capitalism: Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives 2004-2005," published in the July 2004 issue of News & Letters. Vist News & Letters on the web to read the full document.

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