Darfur

In early 2003, Sudanese rebel groups called the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) took up arms against government forces and a government-backed militia group known as the “Janjaweed” (Agrawal, 2006). The rebels claimed that the government is oppressing the ethnic black Africans in favor of Arabs. The militia group and government have since been accused of systematically terminating civilians who happen to be in the same ethnic group as the rebels (Agrawal, 2006). The Sudanese government has been accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide toward the black Africans. The International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations, based on analysis of the information they have gathered, have determined that the Government of the Sudan and the Janjaweed are responsible for human rights violations equivalent to crimes under international law (United Nations 2004, 3). The Commission also found that the government and the militia conducted attacks including the, “killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur” (United Nations 2004, 3). In 2006, the estimated death toll of the Darfur conflict was 200,000 with presumed millions more forced to relocate (Hagan 2006, 1578). In April 2008 John Holmes, the United nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, said that 300,000 are believed to have died since 2006 (New York CNN 2008). This brings the death total to an astonishing 500,000 with millions of other people displaced. The controversial argument over this topic has been whether or not this constitutes genocide. The United Nations officially defined the term “genocide” at the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (Hannaford 2009, 4). They define genocide as,

Any of the following five acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,...