I recently watched a news broadcast on Al-Jazeera of the Sudanese parliament’s unanimous ratification of the peace agreement between the government and the Sudan’s Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA), headed by John Garang. This is certainly good news. Millions have died in this on-again, off-again conflict over the past four decades, and perhaps it really is coming to an end.

(See also my previous post on the Sudan, Peace in the Sudan? Does the Arab World Care?)

At the same time, a representative of the government, speaking in parliament, launched a scathing attack on the United Nations and on the United States, particularly Congress. He rejected the UN’s criticisms of the Sudan’s support for armed militias raping and pillaging in Darfur (Western Sudan), and personally denigrated Kofi Annan; the diatribe was quite harsh. (The UN is seeking to have the Sudanese prosecuted at the International Criminal Court.) He also went on to say that “certain members of the American Congress” were distorting the Sudan’s good name in the international community by telling lies about the situation there. This guy has got to be kidding.

To clarify the record: for the past several years the Khartoum government has been engaged in a genocidal war against the Christian and animist peoples of the southern Sudan, often deliberately tearing up crops near harvest time in order to create famine in areas supportive of the rebellion. The primary reason that the Islamic regime decided to make peace was that the Bush administration threatened to begin arming the rebels. This threat was renewed after the removal of Saddam Hussein, and Khartoum decided to take it seriously.

Now that there is peace in the south, Khartoum has been supporting armed militias (are there any unarmed ones?), known as the Janjaweed, which are raping and pillaging villages in the Western region around Darfur, resulting in 70,000 deaths and making 2 million homeless. The United States and France have been furiously debating whether or not the attacks constitute genocide (the American position) or merely massive violations of basic human rights (the French position). It has also been reported that the Sudan allowed Syria have use some of its chemical weapons on the people there. (Source: This was reported first in the German weekly Die Welt early last fall. I don’t read German, but I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal citing the article and another article in Le Nouvel Observateur citing the same.) Monday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) had a front-page article which gave the example of this refugee:

Her village of Willo, she says, was destroyed by the Janjaweed, who burned the fields, knocked down huts and chased away farmers in late 2003. Ms. Abdall says she, her husband and four children walked three hours to a refugee camp. Last spring, she returned to plant sorghum… “Then five men with guns on horses, they were the Janjaweed, surrounded me and said, ‘Give us the harvest.’ I was afraid and gave it to them.”

Khartoum denies supporting the militias, but their leader has been seen traveling freely in Khartoum to meet with government officials. They have also, somewhat contradictorily, claimed that the Sudan was fighting a legitimate counter-insurgency in the area, which is actually true (except for the “legitimate” part). With Western aid agencies screaming the urgency of the situation and just barely preventing mass starvation, perhaps the dominant response in Khartoum and much of the region can be summed up by a statement quoted by Robert D. Kaplan from a Khartoum woman in response to the famine in the mid-1980s: “My God, are those khawajas Äwhite foreignersÅ going to have a crisis on their hands!”

(See Kaplan’s book, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, for an excellent primer on the region.)

Contributed by Kirk H. Sowell of Window on the Arab World, and More!
http://www.arabworldanalysis.com