environmental degradation as a cause of conflict in - Steiner Graphics

MUCH is being written in the Western media about the ongoing genocidal warin Darfur, the Sudan’s westernmost province, an area approximately the sizeof France. Much is being written on what is happening on the ground, muchless about the causes. I write here as an historian of Darfur and as an observer ofthe Sudanese political scene.The conflict is being presented in the media as a war between Arabs and Africans,with Arab militias, called janjawid, carrying out massacres, rape and pillagewith the support of the Khartoum Government.This simplifies and misrepresents a very complex reality. Darfur comprises threeecological and ethnic ‘zones’; the northern zone includes Arabs, Zayyadiyya and theso-called ‘Northern Rizayqat’, who include the Irayqat, to whose ruling family thejanjawid leader, Musa Hilal, belongs and non-Arab (mainly Zaghawa and Bideyat);all are or have been traditionally camel nomads. The central zone on both sides ofthe Jabal Marra mountain range is inhabited largely by non-Arab sedentary farmerssuch as the Fur, Masalit, Tama, Qimr, Mima and others, cultivating millet and speakingtheir own languages, while in the south there are a series of Arabic-speakingcattle nomads—the Baqqara; the Bani Halba, Habbaniyya, Rizayqat and Taaisha arethe main groups. Language in itself is not an ethnic marker; groups like the Birgedand the Berti have lost their own language within the last century. They now speakArabic, but do not regard themselves as Arabs. All are Muslim and no part of Darfurwas ever ethnically homogenous. For example, a successful Fur farmer would investin cattle; once the cattle reached a certain number, it would be more profitable tocross the ethnic frontier and ‘become’ Baqqara and in a few generations his descendantswould have an ‘authentically’ Arab genealogy.This ethnographic map derives from research from the 1970s and before. It isalmost certainly out-of-date, given the general rapidity of change in Africa. Neverthe-lessmy reading of Human Rights Watch and other reports is that the basic factson the ground have not changed that greatly.Historically, Darfur as a state was both a Muslim sultanate and an African sacralkingship, established in around 1650 and heir to a very old tradition of stateformation associated with two ethnic groups still present in Darfur, the Daju andTunjur (both non-Arab), going back to probably the twelfth century. The sultanatefrom the mid-seventeenth century was dominated by the Fur people from whom theruling dynasty came, but ruled by a title-holding elite recruited from all the majorethnic groups. The sultanate had a complex administrative system, partly Muslim,partly drawing on older Sudanic state-formation structures; under the sultans (forangeri in Fur), the people were ruled through an administration that was efficientand by the eighteenth century literate in Arabic, even though the court languageremained Fur. The pinnacle of the state was the fashir or al-Fashir, the province’scapital from the 1790s, a palace complex that served as a ritual, political and re-24