'The World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis': Understanding the Darfur Conflict

For the past four years, the remote Sudanese region of Darfur has been the scene of a bloody conflict that has led to the death of thousands of people and the displacement of more than two million. The United Nations has described it as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” and the United States government called it “genocide.” The violence and destruction is often compared to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. [ endnote 1 ]

These tragic events have riveted the international community and attracted unprecedented media attention. However, much of the media coverage tends to follow the familiar patterns of sensationalizing the story rather than providing a nuanced analysis of the root causes.

The Darfur tragedy has often been reduced to pictures of miserable refugees living in squalid conditions and caricatured accounts of “Arabs” killing “Black African Muslims.” Moreover, much of the coverage tends to perpetuate the old (and easy) stereotypes about Africa as a continent that is uniquely afflicted by civil wars and instability.

Behind the tragic events in Darfur lies a complex history of deeply entrenched social inequalities, an environmental crisis and competition over natural resources, conflicting notions of identity, the militarization of rural societies, and, above all, a chronic problem of bad governance that has plagued the Sudan since its independence from British colonial rule in 1956.

Darfur: A Profile

The Darfur region lies in the western part of the Sudan (Africa’s largest country), near the borders with Libya, Chad, and Central African Republic. The population of Darfur was estimated in 2002 at about six million, eighty percent of whom live in the rural areas.

At the outset, it is important to dispel a number of misconceptions that have characterized the media coverage of the Darfur conflict. Labeling it as one between “Arabs” and “Black Africans” is misleading. In reality, there are no visible racial or religious differences between the warring parties in Darfur. All parties involved in the conflict–whether they are referred to as "Arab" or "African"–are equally indigenous, equally black, and equally Muslim.

Darfurians represent a multitude of ethnic and linguistic groups. They include non-Arabic speaking groups such as the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, Tunjur, and Daju as well as Arabic-speaking such as Rizaiqat, Missairiyya, Ta`isha, Beni Helba, and Mahamid, just to name a few (see map). There are also a large number of West Africans, such as Hausa, Fulani, and Borno. These diverse groups are dispersed among each other and share similar physical and cultural characteristics.

A long history of internal migration, mixing, and intermarriage in Darfur have created remarkable ethnic fluidity: ethnic labels are often used only as a matter of convenience. For instance, in the Darfur context, for the most part the term “Arab” is used as an occupational rather than an ethnic label, for the majority of the Arabic speaking groups are pastoralists. On the other hand, most of the non-Arab groups are sedentary farmers. However, even these occupational boundaries are often crossed.

For several centuries, the Fur were the dominant political power in the region, particularly in the pre-colonial era. In the seventeenth century they established a kingdom that shared many of the characteristics of other Muslim states in the Sahelian belt. (The Sahel or the Sudanic belt refers to the region south of the Sahara Desert, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Nile basin in the east.) From its capital at Al-Fasher, the Darfur kingdom established extensive political and commercial links with these states as well as with Egypt and North Africa.

The Fur kingdom remained the leading regional power until it was destroyed in 1874 by the forces of Al-Zubair Rahmad, the northern Sudanese trader and adventurer, who brought it under the Turco-Egyptian colonial administration (1820-1884).