Genocide

Darfur

The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 witnessed the horrifying genocide of 800,000 people and left a country devastated by mass famine and atrocious acts of war, such as torture and rape. The ensuing outcry of never again from the international community however, appears to have been nothing but moral lip service as global society has yet again lain as insidious witness to a similar conflict that emerged within Darfur in 2003 (Diep.2007:6). Similarity exists between the Rwandan and Darfur conflict in that both sets of conflicts have taken due to struggles over power and resources between ethnic tribes and dominant elites. Though the major similarity of these conflicts is the relatively slow and at times indifferent response of the international community in recognition of these conflicts as acts of genocide and the subsequent moral intervention to prevent further acts of war crime for occurring. The questions arise then why has this crisis in Darfur been allowed to escalate into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis within recent years? And what lessons can be learnt from this ongoing tragedy?

Darfur is situated in the western province of Sudan, a country that has a very checkered history of conflict. These conflicts have emerged as a direct result of struggles over resources such as water, land, religion and power struggles between competing ethnic groups of indigenous Muslim Arabs and black Africans. However the roots of the current conflict within Darfur can be partly traced back to the colonization of Sudan through Ottoman Egypt and Great Britain and the subsequent centralization of political power in its capital Khartoum. Further reasoning for the cause of the current conflict is the postcolonial development of Sudan’s predatory state and its use of top down warfare through its own armed forces and proxy militia groups. Under British indirect rule Sudan was divided along geographical, economic, religious and ethnic lines in order to increase its...