April
2002
Horrific
Violence but No Systematic Plan for Genocide in Sudan
By Robert O. Collins
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
horrorsnatural 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 doesnt 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 countrys population is in the South, so it wouldnt
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 trainingcertainly 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). Its
important to note that slavery has been institutionalized in Sudan
for 5000 years. Slavery by definition requires a workforce; slavers
and slave traders dont 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. Ive
had reports of particular individuals being "redeemed"
over and over. Its likely to become a vicious cycle.
As
an historian, I can tell you that a parade of nations has foundered
in the swamps of Sudanthe 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 Danforths mission is better thought out
and more fruitful. I tell the Gladstone/Gordon anecdote to illustrate
that world powers have failed to understand Sudans 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 Shariah 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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