environmental degradation as a cause of conflict in - Steiner Graphics

Zalingei in the southwest with cash crops such as mangoes and oranges destined forthe markets further east. It was only in the mid-1960s that Darfurians, both Araband non-Arab, began to enter the national political arena and assert their own identity.The Darfurians tended to vote in democratic periods for Umma Party (whichgrew out of the Mahdist movement of the late nineteenth century), although thetowns usually voted for the Democratic Unionist Party (linked to the Khatmiyya Sufibrotherhood), although there was general dissatisfaction with what was seen asKhartoum’s neglect of the region, which found its expression in the Darfur DevelopmentFront established in 1966. When I first went to Darfur in 1968 members of theruling elite made a conscious decision to help me with my fieldwork, providing mewith informants and documents —a fact that I did not discover until many yearslater (in 1994 in fact). They wanted their history told.In the 1970s matters began to change; the military coup under Ja’far al-Numayribrought to power in the Sudan a regime which was a combination of young pan-Arabists, many Ba’th-influenced, Communist sympathisers and independent intellectuals.It was an exciting time to be in the Sudan; it was also in hindsight adisastrous time, especially for Darfur. Why Darfur? One of the al-Numayri’s ‘YoungTurk’ objectives was modernisation—trivially, but significantly, illustrated by thefemale traffic police, in their snazzy white uniforms at the end of Sharia al Qasr;my students were both confused and fascinated. More serious was the determinationto end all remnants of the colonial era. One aspect of this new policy was thenationalization of businesses owned by expatriate communities, Armenians, Greeks,Copts and others—an imitation of ’Abd al-Nasir’s policies that worked poorly in theSudan. Another aspect meant the end of indirect rule, of ‘tribalism’ and ‘sectarianism’.In Darfur, the most indirectly-ruled province of the Sudan and where the sultanicsystem was more or less intact, this translated into the abolition of the Nativecourts and the end of chiefly rule. The problem was that the old order, with rootsgoing back over several hundred years, was uprooted, while what replaced it neverreally functioned. How misguided this policy was to be shown in the 1980s.One of the root causes of the present crisis goes back to the mid-1980s whenprolonged droughts speeded up the desertification process in northern and centralDarfur, which in turn led to much pressure on water and grazing resources, as thecamel nomads were forced to move southwards and become farmers. This intensifiedpressure on grazing and water. Conflicts over wells, that in earlier times weresettled with spears or, hopefully, mediation by elders or religious figures, becamemuch more intractable when the area started to become awash with guns, largelybrought in from Chad or Libya.The militarization of the crisis has grown ever since Sadiq al-Mahdi while PrimeMinister in the mid-1980s took the disastrous decision to give arms to the Baqqaraof southern Darfur ostensibly to defend themselves against the Sudan Peoples Lib-26