Africa

Africa

Darfur, the conflict that just won’t go away

Darfur, the conflict that just won’t go away

There was a time when Darfur was the quintessential African conflict. Between the mad dictator, the gruesome genocide and the Hollywood celebrity intervention, it had it all. Nearly a decade later, and the world’s attention has moved on – even as the fighting, and the atrocities, continue. By SIMON ALLISON.

Darfur is back in the headlines, again for all the wrong reasons.

Immediately after [the soldiers] entered the room they said, “You killed our man. We are going to show you true hell… Then they started beating us. They raped my three daughters and me. Some of them were holding the girl down while another one was raping her. They did it one by one.” This is the devastating testimony of one female resident of Tabit, a small town in Darfur where Sudanese government soldiers are alleged to have raped 221 women in a single night in October 2014.

News of the mass rape was first reported by a local radio station in December, and subsequently investigated by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which found plenty of evidence to support the claims. “The deliberate attack on Tabit and the mass rape of the town’s women and girls is a new low in the catalogue of atrocities in Darfur,” Daniel Bekele, HRW’s Africa director. The rights group has said it may amount to a crime against humanity, and is urging the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate.

Darfur is no stranger to crimes against humanity. It is for his actions in Darfur, remember, that the ICC issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted for the full gamut of serious offences: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The United Nations (UN) estimates that as many as 300,000 have died as a result of the conflict between the government and various rebel groups, with millions displaced (450,000 in 2014 alone).

Despite – or, more likely, because – of its longevity, the fighting in Darfur has largely slipped off the African news radar in recent years. There was a time when it was the poster child for African conflicts, a cause célèbre adopted by vocal western activists and Hollywood royalty. George Clooney, we’re looking at you.

To Clooney’s credit, he’s stayed involved, establishing the Satellite Sentinel Project in 2010 to monitor rights abuses from the sky, and getting himself arrested in 2012 at a protest outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington DC. But even he hasn’t been able to maintain international interest in a complex situation that has little geo-strategic pay-off for major powers (yet another perfect example, if one was needed, of how celebrity endorsement fails to solve complex political issues).

Instead attention has shifted in recent years to the conflicts in Somalia, Mali, the Central African Republic, Libya and Nigeria. Even within Sudan, Darfur has been upstaged by the dramatic secession of South Sudan and subsequent civil war there; and the ongoing fighting between the government and southern rebels in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states.

Darfur, however, remains a region at war, and the lack of scrutiny has allowed the Sudanese government to get away with repeated and serious human rights violations against citizens there, the very people it is supposed to be protecting. Recently, the situation has deteriorated even further.

The attacks on Tabit occurred in a wider context of a rise in government attacks on civilians, Human Rights Watch said. A newly created government force, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), consisting largely of former militias, led a spate of attacks on villages in 2014. In January 2015, the UN panel of experts on Sudan reported that over 3,000 villages were burned in Darfur in 2014, predominantly in government-led attacks,” said Human Rights Watch.

The presence of the hybrid United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (Unamid) has struggled to stem the tide of violence. The mandate of its 15,869 police and military personnel (of which 870 are from the South African National Defence Force) is too weak, and the ground it is expected to cover too large, to effect any kind of resolution to the conflict.

Worse, Unamid has been criticised for failing to investigate – and even covering up – atrocities that it has witnessed. “It is fair to say that Unamid peacekeepers largely failed to protect Darfur civilians, and their presence didn’t deter either the government or the rebels from attacking the civilians,” said Aicha Elbasri, a former Unamid spokesperson who leaked a stash of documents to Foreign Policy magazine last year which purported to show the mission’s complicity in underplaying the severity of the situation on the ground.

In or out of the headlines, Darfur remains one of Africa’s most serious and enduring conflicts. That the mass rape at Tabit is shocking, but not extraordinary, shows just how bad things remain – and how little is being done, by anyone, to improve the situation. DM

Photo: People walk to fill water containers at the Zamzam IDP camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), near El Fasher in North Darfur February 4, 2015. Thousands have fled areas in east Jebel Marra and north of Tawilla due to clashes between government forces and armed opposition groups, according to local media. REUTERS/ Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

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