Riding with the Janjaweed

[CHIMO]

“Africans have killed Arabs for years over grievances about land and water,” said Musa Hilal, a notorious strongman among the Janjaweed, while giving interviews over tea and cakes in a Khartoum hotel. “Things like that give birth to bitterness. When the government put forward a programme of arming all the people, I will not deny I called our sons and told them to become armed, and our sons acquiesced.”

While recent journalistic accounts suggest that the current Darfur crisis began only this year, serious conflict has been continuous there since 1985, at the height of a particularly serious drought that ravaged the region. Triumphant nomads, accounting for only 15% of the Darfur population, backed by the Sudan government and the Jellaba, roamed Darfur “liberating” land and driving black farmers from their homes.

The conflict escalated after the military coup of 1989 which brought to power the hardline Arab and Islamic nationalist government of President al-Bashir, who gave huge road-building and construction contracts to Osama bin Laden. O’Fahey says: “The coming to power of the National Islamic Front injected an ideological and racist dimension to the conflict, with the sides clearly defining themselves as ‘Arab’ or ‘Zurq’ .

But the professor has no doubt either about the Janjaweed ideology. “It’s essentially racist. They have contempt for Darfur Africans and do not believe they are true Muslims. The genocide in Darfur will be very hard to end even if there is will among the international community to do so.”

http://www.sundayherald.com/43939

[gottaB]

1. Inside the Janjaweed: A personal account in last week's Observer

Inside the Janjaweed