A Sudanese-Canadian human rights expert said Monday at a Sid Smith lecture that the violent conflict in Sudan complicates traditional definitions of genocide, making the process of arguing for a desperately needed intervention a problematic one.
Elfadil Elsharief, president of the Sudanese Canadian Human Rights Organization, gave an intricate and nuanced account of the plight of the inhabitants of the Darfur region of Sudan, whom he said are being persecuted by a “ruthless national government.” The violence in Darfur has been labelled an ethnic conflict and even genocide, with government-supported Arab militias killing, raping, and displacing non-Arab Darfurians.
But Elsharief asserts neither race nor religion are really at the heart of the matter.
“Most violent conflicts are over material resources, real or perceived,” he said.
In the past few years, Elsharief explained, Sudan has been hit by a series of droughts and famines, rendering arable land the object of intense competition. He argued that the root of the current conflict is attempts by the government, which is based in the north-eastern city of Khartoum, to wrest control of Darfurian land from its native inhabitants.
The central government of the country is mainly Arab, while the western region of Darfur is dominated by non-Arab Muslims and Christians. Elsharief says Khartoum has exploited this demography to rally Arab fighters to its cause by disseminating an ideology which he calls “Arab supremacism” or “Arabism.”
He says this type of racism is “alien and inappropriate to Sudan” and is the result of the influence exerted by Libyan dictator Moammar Qadaffi, who once sought to create an “Arab belt” of nations across North Africa. In the late 1980s, there was an influx of Libyan troops in Darfur fighting a war against neighbouring Chad, and they introduced the idea of Arab superiority to the region, according to Elsharief.
“You can’t visually tell the difference between the two groups,” said Max Kelly, policy director for Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), who attended the event. He said Arabism “is just [the government’s] way of distracting the rest of the country from how exploitative their rule is.”
Elsharief said that the lower ranks of the national armed forces are made up primarily of Darfurians, who are mostly not Arab, and as a result the Sudanese government has instead armed informal Arab militias known as the janjaweed mainly from outside Darfur who attack the region’s inhabitants. Although Khartoum does not directly control the janjaweed, Elsharief argued that they are working together, with the government following the militias’ attacks on horseback with air raids. Khartoum has officially never admitted an affiliation with the militias, but it has also appeared unwilling or unable to curb their aggression, despite Western urging.
“The case for intervention in Darfur is compelling,” argued Elsharief, who advocated greater international action than the current deployment of 7,000 African Union peacekeepers, whom he said are “under-resourced.”
He says that half a million Sudanese have been killed in the fighting in the past three years, and many more have been displaced from their homes.
“This massive, deliberate human destruction…would easily justify intervention,” he said.
He also accused the international community of exhibiting “double standards,” pointing to NATO’s intervention in the conflict in Kosovo, a war which claimed some 2,000 lives. Elsharief says the disparity between that scenario and the one unfolding now in Darfur is a clear example of “the international community not valuing the lives of Muslims or Africans” as much as it does the lives of Europeans.
