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Introduction
IN the month of July 2003, a crisis broke out in Sudan. In the Darfur region a conflictwas started between the Janjaweed militia and the Non-Baggava people. Although the
Sudanese government denies it, they have participated in the Janjaweed operations.The
fighting is ongiong and the opposing sides are armed. The fighting has been distressingand displaced nearly 2.5 million people. The public in their American response has
labeled certain members of Congress on their efforts to stop Sudan. So, apparently it's
more important for Sam Brownback, a Kansas republican, to become first in the votingcommunity, then the people of Darfur to be healthy and stable.
Introduction
The government of Sudan is responsible for ethnic cleansing and crimes against
humanity in the context of an internal conflict in Darfur, one of the worlds poorest and
most inaccessible regions, on Sudans western border with Chad. Since 2003, theSudanese government and the ethnic Janjaweed militias it arms and supports have
committed numerous attacks on the civilian populations of the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa andother ethnic groups perceived to support the rebel insurgency. Government forces
oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians
including women and childrenburnings of towns and villages, and the forcible
depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa.The Janjaweed militias, Muslim like the groups they attack, have destroyed mosques,
killed Muslim religious leaders, and desecrated Qurans belonging to their enemies.
Countless women and girls have been raped. Hundreds of villages have been bombed and
burned; water sources and food stocks have been destroyed, property and livestocklooted. Mosques, schools and hospitals have been burnt to the ground.
The United Nations estimates that more than 2 million people have been left homeless in
the fighting. There are almost a quarter of a million refugees in neighboring Chad, one ofthe poorest countries in Africa. Abandoned villages have been destroyed. Even when the
villages are left intact, many refugees are unwilling to return to Darfur unless their
security is protected. If we return, one refugee told Human Rights Watch, we will be
killed.
Estimates of how many people have died as a result of the conflict in Darfur vary widely.
It is likely that at least 100,000 people have died from violence, disease and otherconditions related to forced displacement and insufficient access to humanitarian
assistance. The toll of death and displacement continues to rise. Those left homeless are
still at risk: camps are poorly protected, and women and girls are frequently the targets ofsexual attacks when they venture from the camp to find firewood and food for their
animals.
The Drawings
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Human Rights Watch researchers Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault visited Chad
in February 2005 to assess the issues of protection and sexual violence in the refugeecamps along the Darfur/Chad border. In her work as a pediatrician, Dr. Sparrow
habitually asks children to draw while she talks to their parents or guardians. She did the
same thing in Darfur. While Bercault and Sparrow spoke with parents, teachers, andcamp leaders, the children drew. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew
scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the Janjaweed, the
bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages,and the flight to Chad.
As Sparrow and Bercault visited schools in refugee camps in Chad, many children
between the ages of 8 and 17 shared the drawings they had done in their schoolnotebooks, often alongside their lessons in Arabic or math. Schoolchildren from seven
refugee camps and the border town of Tine offered Human Rights Watchs researchers
hundreds of drawings in the hope that the rest of the world would see their stories as
described in their own unique visual vocabulary of war.
Genocide in Darfur, Sudan
About the size of Texas, the Darfur region of Sudan is home to racially mixed tribes ofsettled peasants, who identify as African, and nomadic herders, who identify as Arab.
The majority of people in both groups are Muslim.
In the ongoing genocide, African farmers and others in Darfur are being systematically
displaced and murdered at the hands of the Janjaweed, a government-supported militia
recruited from local Arab tribes. The genocide in Darfur has claimed 400,000 lives anddisplaced over 2,500,000 people. More than one hundred people continue to die each day;
five thousand die every month.
Government neglect has left people throughout Sudan poor and voiceless and has caused
conflict throughout the country. In February 2003, frustrated by poverty and neglect, two
Darfurian rebel groups launched an uprising against the Khartoum government.
The government responded with a scorched-earth campaign, enlisting the help of a militia
of Arab nomadic tribes in the region against the innocent civilians of Darfur.
Since February 2003, the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the government-
sponsored Janjaweed militia have used rape, displacement, organized starvation, threats
against aid workers and mass murder. Violence, disease, and displacement continue tokill thousands of innocent Darfurians every month.
Americans have a particularly important role to play in supporting peace in Darfur. The
US government has been proactive in speaking out in support of the people of Darfur, but
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there is still much work that needs to be done. The United States and international
governments have yet to take the actions needed to end this genocide.
Long-term peace in Darfur requires that the government of Sudan, the Janjaweed militia
forces and the rebel groups of Darfur find a way to resolve their political and economic
disputes. The international community managed to broker a peace deal in May 2006, butviolence in Darfur actually increased in the wake of this deal.
Thousands of innocent civilians continue to die from murder, disease and starvationevery month. Today, millions of displaced civilians living in refugee camps are in dire
need of international support as the violence continues.
At this time, human security is the highest priority for the people of Darfur. The worldhas left the responsibility of providing security to the African Union Peacekeeping
Mission in Darfur. As Sally Chin of Refugees International has noted, the world has
given the African Union the responsibility to protect, but not the power to protect.
We must now work to ensure that the world fulfills its responsibility to protect the
civilians of DarfurHello, this is Senator Barack Obama, and today is Wednesday, February 15, 2006. For
more than two years now, we have been watching a rolling genocide take place in Darfur,
western Sudan. Many of you I'm sure are aware of the tragedy that has been unfolding
there. For those of you who are not, essentially what we have seen is a systematictargeting on the part of the Khartoum government and the Janjaweed Arab militia that
have systematically uprooted, killed, murdered, pillaged, raped, Africans, driven them
from their homes into enormous displaced-person camps. Refugee camps, within Sudan.It's estimated that at least 300,000 people have been killed. It's known that at least 2
million people have been displaced. The administration early on in this tragedy
acknowledged that this was genocide that was taking place. I think there has been broadrecognition in the international community that the behavior of the Sudanese government
has been scandalous. The rationale that has provided from the Sudanese government for
what has been taking place is that there is a battle going on between Sudanesegovernment and rebels that operate within the area. But, the real victims have not been
rebel sympathizers, or the rebels themselves, they've been innocent men, women and
children.
For more than a year now, I've been working with other Senators to see what we can do
to really push the Administration to take this as seriously as it warrants. To the
Administration's credit, the United States government has probably paid more attention tothis issue than some of our European allies. We have been a major contributor of aid to
the region; we have helped to finance the African Union, to provide peace-keeping forces
in the Darfur area. So, in a lot of ways, the United States government has been muchmore on top of this than Europeans, Canadians, and others, who oftentimes accuse the
Untied States of being indifferent to the problems of the third world. On the other hand,
what has been done is not enough. The few thousand African Union troops who have
been placed in Darfur are primarily providing witness to some of the atrocities that are
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taking place there, but they don't have clear rules of engagement, they are under-armed,
under-trained, they don't really provide the sort of protective force that would be needed
to not only ensure that existing villages aren't ravaged by the Janjaweeds, but moreimportantly, that the 2 million displaced people could actually safely start returning
home.
Recent reports indicate that in the past few weeks alone, more than 20,000 people have
been displaced. There are also indications that the Janjaweed, recognizing that the AU
forces, the African Union forces, are not particularly effective, have started targetingthem. So there is a sense of deterioration in Darfur, the situation may be getting worse,
rather than better. And, what's most disturbing is that the United States government
seems to be backing off a little bit, the commitment that it made to deal with the problem.
There was a quote from the under-secretary for African Affairs, Secretary Frasier, inwhich she indicated that, maybe this was not a genocide after all. And, if that ends up
being the United State's attitude, then we could see continuing problems of a scale that
might eventually reach the same scale in which happened in Rwanda.
So, here are a couple of things that we think need to happen. Number one: we need a UN
peace-keeping mission in Darfur. There have been conversations; the UN SecretaryGeneral, Koffee Annan, the AU forces, and the Bush Administration have all
acknowledged this. There's got to be a sense of urgency in which the US diplomatic
efforts are focused on getting this UN peace-keeping force up to about 20,000 troops, and
placing them in Darfur as quickly as possible with a strong protection mandate, ratherthan a monitoring one. In the mean time, it's going to take about year, at best, to get a UN
peace-keeping force in place. We're going to have to supply and rally, bridging money
and forces for the AU throughout this year, because, since it's sort of in lame-duck status,the Janjaweed recognize that AU forces are not particularly effective, they may become
more and more of a target. We're going to have to provide this successor UN force with
our own lift and logistic assets. We're going to have to provide our military hardware,like transport and attack helicopters, and so forth. And, we're going to have to really force
other countries like Canada, Australia, some of the European countries that are not
engaged in peace-keeping in other places, or at least are not immediately involved inmajor activity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, as we are, to deliver the troops that are
needed.
So, it is absolutely critical that we start focusing on this now. The situation, as bad as it is,could deteriorate further. This is something that is of interest, I think, to all of us, not just
for humanitarian reasons, although when you read the accounts of women being raped
when they are out collecting firewood, when you read just horrendous accounts of entirevillages being decimated and children being murdered, that it just breaks your heart, and
humanitarian concerns should be sufficient, but we also have a strong national security
interest. If you start seeing more and more failed states, more and more displacedpersons, more and more refugees, all of that becomes a breeding ground for terrorist
activity, it becomes a breeding ground for disease, and it creates refugees that put
pressure on our own borders. In an inner-connected world we can't insulate ourselves
from these tragedies. So, we're going to, over time, have to develop some strategy as the
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world's remaining super-power to address these issues, and Darfur is an important test
case. We've already failed one test in Rwanda, we shouldn't fail another.
Anyway, if you are interested in the issues related to Darfur, you can always contact my
office, or get on the website. Your voice is obviously critical in this issue. I appreciate
you, as always listening in. Thank you for downloading, and I will talk to you next week.Bye bye.
.
AU: African Union
DLF: Darfur Liberation FrontICC: International Criminal Court
IDP: Internally Displaced Person
JEM: Justice and Equality Movement
SLM/A/A: Sudan Liberation Movement/ArmySLM/A: Sudan Liberation Movement
SPLA: Sudan People's Liberation ArmyUN: United Nations
UNAMID: United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur
UNSC: United Nations Security Council
The Genocide in Darfur - Briefing Paper
June 2008Introduction
To download the briefing paper as a pdf, please click here.
As the conflict in Darfur enters its sixth year, conditions continue to deteriorate for
civilians. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, even by the most
conservative estimates. The United Nations puts the death toll at roughly 300,000, whilethe former U.N. undersecretary-general puts the number at no less than 400,000.(1) Up to
2.5 million Darfuris have fled their homes and continue to live in camps throughout
Darfur, or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic.Based on Sudans behavior over the past five years, it is clear that unless the international
community imposes additional political costs for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashirs
intransigence, his government will continue to buy time by accepting initiatives only tobacktrack later or impose new conditions that render them useless.
Humanitarian assistance in Darfur continues to be at risk of collapse, in part because of
sustained harassment by the Sudanese government, and in part because of the
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governments militia allies and common criminals. In September 2006, the United
Nations estimated that such a collapse would cause up to 100,000 civilian deaths every
month.(2) Troublesome developments suggest that such a failure is becoming morelikely: the World Food Programs Humanitarian Air Service received no funding in the
first three months of 2008.(3) Last-minute donations totaling six million dollars funded it
through the beginning of May. (4)
In the second half of 2007, the Sudanese governments divide-and-conquer strategy,
described by Human Rights Watch as chaos by design,(5) caused an increasinglyfrenzied free-for-all in Darfur. Rebel groups fragmented further and criminal activity as
well as intertribal fighting increased exponentially.(6) Still, the effects of tribal fighting
should not be overemphasized. Of the eight largest displacements between January and
November 2007, seven resulted from government or Janjaweed attacks. Only one was theresult of intertribal fighting.(7) In early 2008, deaths and displacements from military
operations by the government, its allied militias and rebels were even more common
relative to those caused by tribal conflicts.
To download the briefing paper as a pdf, please click here.
1 Edith M. Lederer, UN Says Darfur Conflict Worsening, with Perhaps 300,000 Dead,
Associated Press 22 April 2008.
2 United Nations News Service, UN Daily News, 14 September 2006. Issue DH/4732.
3 Hijackings Cut WFP Food Supplies for Darfur as Funding Shortfalls Threaten
Humanitarian Air Service, United Nations World Food Programme 10 March 2008.
4 WFP Sudans Air Operation Gets One-Month Reprieve from Closure, United Nations
World Food Programme 28 March 2008.
5 Cf. Human Rights Watchs report entitled Chaos by Design, & ENOUGHs strategy
briefing entitled Echoes of Genocide in Darfur and Eastern Chad.
6 The International Committee of the Red Cross. Recurrent Violence Remains the
Primary Concern for Darfurians. 9 August 2007.
7 SudanDarfur: Humanitarian ProfileNovember 2007, United Nations Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs November 2007.