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April 2002 Horrific
Violence but No Systematic Plan for Genocide in Sudan I have spent decades tracking the disasters, wars, and other violent calamities that have come to define Sudan, a country whose suffering breaks my heart. I am one of the few people in the world to have traveled in every part of the country, and have documented a wide range of horrors—natural and man-made. Ihave difficulty in using the term genocide in reference to Sudan. Unlike the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry, the Sudanese government does not have a rational, methodical, massive scheme to liquidate a particular group or people. The largely Moslem North has historically looked down on the (largely non-Moslem) South, considering it "black," "African," "backward," "inferior." But the National Islamic Front (NIF) government doesn’t want to eliminate the southerners. On the contrary: the NIF wants to dominate, exploit, and enslave them. The NIF wants control of southern labor, land, water, cattle, and oil. From that point of view, it would be counter-productive to eliminate one or more of the peoples of the South. In any case, one-third of the country’s population is in the South, so it wouldn’t even be possible to "clear out" the region. The Sudanese situation is not like Rwanda, where the Hutu policy was to kill all the Tutsis; neither is there a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing, as in the former Yugoslavia. In Sudan, there has certainly been horrific violence: massacres, burning of villages and fields, abduction and rape of women, removal of children from their families, looting, pillaging and terrorizing. Yet there is insufficient planning and bureaucratic control for all this to rise to the level of genocide, as defined in the UN Convention. It is true that the NIF government has armed the Begarra tribes to perform as proxy militias, but these are not well-trained, centrally-organized troops; they are essentially bandits and thugs. They receive little training—certainly no training in the laws of war. Many of the soldiers are in fact teenagers and boys who have been recruited under pressure, or even abducted. They are fighting without an overarching long-term goal; they want their spoils (a cow, a woman, whatever they can loot) and they want them now. The corruption of children taken for soldiers is yet another tragic aspect of this war. There is another aspect to the fighting that frustrates a determination of genocide. This is not only a war between the North and South; there is fighting among related tribes in the South. There is societal breakdown on all sides of the conflict. Some of my colleagues point to slavery as a mechanism of genocide (southern Christians and animists are the groups taken as slaves). It’s important to note that slavery has been institutionalized in Sudan for 5000 years. Slavery by definition requires a workforce; slavers and slave traders don’t systematically decimate the populations they want to exploit. I think it is all to the good that the issue of slavery has motivated various groups to take an interest in Sudan. It is a very curious coalition, consisting of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Christian Right, and liberal groups, many of them Jewish. Will their efforts to end slavery through slave redemption be successful? It is hard to say, but I rather doubt it. I tend to think it will simply inject more money into the system, encourage desperately poor families to "sell" their children into slavery so they can be "redeemed" for cash. I’ve had reports of particular individuals being "redeemed" over and over. It’s likely to become a vicious cycle. As an historian, I can tell you that a parade of nations has foundered in the swamps of Sudan—the Egyptians (ancient and modern), the Turks, and the British, all of whom strongly favored the North over the South. In 1885, when Prime Minister Gladstone sent General Gordon to Khartoum to extricate the Egyptians and Turks, and to install a moderate northern Arab leader, Gordon ended up beheaded by the Mahdi (which set up a Moslem fundamentalist theocracy). I hope that Senator Danforth’s mission is better thought out and more fruitful. I tell the Gladstone/Gordon anecdote to illustrate that world powers have failed to understand Sudan’s complexities. In our own time, the United States intelligence community has not invested in Sudan; without intelligence agents, linguists, and analysts deeply versed in the country, there is simply no way to understand the politics, or problems, of the place. No country has ever achieved its objectives in Sudan. And the Sudanese? They have suffered, almost without respite. I do not see how the present conflict can be solved. The NIF government cannot compromise on the fundamentalist severity that defines it, and it is unwilling to suspend Shar’iah for non-Moslems. Southern animists cannot accept to live under the strictures of Islamic law, nor should they be so afflicted. It seems to me that the South needs to have the right of self-determination, like East Timor or Kosovo. If the secular parties in the North are strengthened, perhaps Sudan can become a federation, with the South as an autonomous state with control over its own oil. Otherwise, I think that North and South should separate. But will the North loosen its claims on southern land, labor, water, and oil? I find that hard to imagine. Robert O. Collins, Professor Emeritus, Department of History University of California, Santa Barbara, Author (with J.M. Burr), Requiem for the Sudan: War, Drought and Disaster Relief on the Nile (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1995).
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