DISASTER IN DARFUR - UCSB Department of History - University of ...

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deserts of the West or the swamps and rainforests of the South. They suffered successive
defeats failing utterly to crush the insurgencies or to establish the authority of the Sudan
government in these peripheral regions that produced the most fateful decision of the
independent Sudan. In 1986 Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, great grandson of the
Muhammad Ahmad, al Mahdi, leader of the Umma Party, and a dominant figure in
Sudanese politics since the 1960s, decided to reverse the failure of the Sudan army to
defeat the SPLA by arming with automatic weapons his Baqqara supporters on the
southern Sudan frontier and giving them freedom to pillage, rape, enslave, and kill the
Dinka across the Bahr al-Arab (the Kiir) River supporting the SPLA and its Dinka leader,
John Garang. Riding their horses and brandishing their kalisnikovs the young Baqqara
commandoes from the Missiriyya and Humr, known as the murahileen, wreaked havoc
and death upon the Dinka of the Bahr al-Ghazal and the Upper Nile for the next ten years.
The other large Baqqara group to the west in southern Darfur, the Rizayqat, also raided
across the Dinka frontier to the south, but later turned this new and powerful weaponry
against their northern African neighbors --the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa—with whom
they had many ancient quarrels over space and water.
After the Islamist coup d’état of 30 June 1989 the arming of the Baqqara
murahileen continued under the illusion that these unruly, independent militias could be
integrated into the PDF. More subtle but equally divisive to any settlement on the
frontier of Islam was the determination by the regime to impose its Islamist ideology on
all Sudanese and Arabic culture, language, and Islam as the foundation of Sudanese
society when less than half the Sudanese claim Arab origins and another third were non-
Muslims. The Arabo-centric enthusiasm of Bashir and his National Islamic Front (now