Racism at the root of Darfur crisis

By Makau Mutua
East African Standard

The visits by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to Darfur a fortnight ago have given hope that the genocide there might be arrested before the suffering people are completely obliterated.

But anyone, including Powell and Annan, interested in averting more tragedy there must understand that Darfur is not an accidental apocalypse of mass slaughter, enslavement, pillage and ethnic cleansing. The Darfur pogrom is part of a historic continuum in which successive Arab governments have sought to entirely destroy black Africans in this biracial nation.

Darfur is not a mere humanitarian disaster that access by international relief agencies can reverse. The raison d’Ítre of the atrocities committed by government-supported Arab militias is the racist, fundamentalist and undemocratic Sudanese state. What is required for peace in Sudan is either regime change, in which a democratic, inclusive state is born, or a partition, in which the black African south and west become an independent sovereign state free of Khartoum and the Arab north.

Sudan, like most African post-colonial states, is partially a victim of imperial cartography. Thoughtlessly carved out by the British during the 19th century scramble to claim Africa, Sudan is a forced crucible of Muslim Arabs and black Africans. The blacks in the south either hew to their ancestral traditional African religions or have converted to Christianity. The fact that black Africans in Darfur are exclusively Muslim has not stopped the Arab Janjaweed militias and the Government from attempting to exterminate them.

Race — not religion — is the fundamental fault line in Sudan, though religion has certainly added fuel to the fires in the south. Indeed, since independence from the British in 1956, the demon of Sudan has been race. The Arab north, except for brief periods when token Africans were included in government, has exclusively held political and military power. To protest political exclusion, military repression, enslavement and economic exploitation, Africans in the south rose against the state several years after independence.

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Comments

[Mike]

Why is anyone of the west worried about africas negroes/arabs when the west itself is crumbling at every level? The west has bigger problems than to worry about what goes on elsewhere.

[Brianna Lopez]

I am glad to see that not all people are completely blind to what is happening in Darfur. The miniscule amount of publicity this issue has generated never manages to state that the Janjaweed militia is only targeting the black citizens of Darfur, they don't mention that the Janjaweed's goal is to "arabize" the region, that is what I read in one article. I find it absolutely incredible that a conflict the UN call's "The world's worst humanitarian crisis" get's little to no attention. People are being killed, children are being orphaned, and nobody cares. What happened to humanity?
Sincerely,
Brianna Lopez