A businessman told me recently that there’s a lot of money to be made in south Sudan; he called it the new frontier. I don’t doubt him. There are many South Africans in south Sudan seeking their fortune, and Khartoum counts on lucrative business opportunities to keep eyes off Darfur.
At the moment, the only South Africans in Darfur are with the African Union mission, and they are mandated to keep their eyes on the war. I can only hope that they have read Gérard Prunier’s book, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. It is, quite simply, the best I have come across on the subject and should be required reading for anybody with more than a passing interest in Sudan.
The troubles in Darfur are not new, and that’s what this book is about. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions have lost their homes and belongings. The Sudanese government is the biggest culprit, but it’s not alone.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi, during that period in the 1980s when he considered himself the leader of the Arab world, distributed vast quantities of arms in Darfur. His plan, the book suggests, was to help al-Bashir get rid of Africans and replace them with Arabs. At the time, each leader was scratching the other’s back.
Al-Bashir was getting oil, in the days before he found his own supply, and Gadaffi was, apparently, supposed to be given some sort of sovereign control over Darfur. There was even talk of merging the two countries into something of a ”greater Libya”. But the two men seem to have had a falling-out around the time important oil reserves were found in southern Sudan, putting paid to Tripoli’s expansionist hopes.
Prunier’s take on the Darfur crisis is not without its critics but, as the saying goes, sometimes the truth hurts. The war in Darfur is not an isolated occurrence in Sudan, which was also host to the war between the predominantly Arab north and the mostly African south. Often referred to as Africa’s longest war, this conflict was sorted out at the negotiating table in Kenya a couple of years ago.
The south, thanks to the hard-nosed techniques of veteran fighter John Garang, managed to get a power-sharing agreement out of Khartoum. Garang was given the post of vice-president and his southern rebels managed to get a couple of Cabinet posts as well as some autonomy and a chance to secede following a referendum scheduled for 2011.
Darfur, largely ignored by Khartoum since it became part of Sudan in 1916, couldn’t help but notice the new deal given to its southern cousins. Adding insult to injury, many of the troops used by the Sudanese government to quell Garang’s rebels came from Darfur. Yet, once they had completed their national service and returned home, they found that being African in Darfur had much less going for it than being African in the south. The south, through fighting, had been given concessions, while Darfur continued to be ignored by central government.
Prunier describes the cocktail of circumstances in Darfur that created the explosive mix that erupted into all-out war in 2003: the return of demobilised soldiers from the newly tamed south to a region with virtually no opportunities for advancement or a better life, and where the struggling population is already under threat from pro- and anti-government forces, on land that is being used well beyond its carrying capacity.
It is a terrible reality. The book is difficult to read, but only because it is so blunt and so clear. Prunier says the West’s calls for African solutions to African problems is just another way of saying we don’t care.
He argues that all parties to the conflict knew that setting up an AU peacekeeping mission was setting Darfur up for a fall. Clearly, it’s time for plan B.
My businessman friend should read this book.
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide by Gérard Prunier is published by Cornell University Press