April 7, 2005. A band of 350 men riding horses and camels suddenly appear in the village of Khor Abeche. They rampage through the village “killing, burning and destroying everything in their paths and leaving in their wake total destruction with only the mosque and the school spared.” (This according to a joint statement by the UN and African Union, BBC News, 4/9/05.) Outsiders don’t know exactly how many men of Khor Abeche were killed, how many women raped, how many children burned to death.

Khor Abeche is in Darfur, in the western region of Sudan. Since February 2003 the black people of Darfur have lived and died in a reign of terror. Besides the killings, the rapes, and the burning of their homes, many have starved to death because their livestock has been slaughtered, their crops destroyed, and their drinking water contaminated. About 2.5 million people have been forced from their homes and villages. Most of those who survive live in misery in hastily assembled refugee camps or have become refugees in neighboring Chad.

Most of Darfur’s black African people live by farming, while the lighter-skinned Arab people of the region are often herders of cattle or camels. Both blacks and Arabs are generally Muslim. But this has not prevented a competition between the two groups over land that goes back many years.

Until the late 1980s, leaders of the two groups usually resolved differences peacefully. But then, as drought turned arable land to desert, competition intensified. The black farmers resented camel-riding Arabs who trampled their land looking for pasture. Arabs resented those blacks who herded cattle across their grazing land. Fighting began, people and cattle were killed, villages and nomad tents burned.

Leaders of a military coup in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, seized power just as a possible settlement of the land conflict seemed near. The new leaders favored the Arab groups, denying the black African farmers their share of political representation and the country’s resources. Ethnic and racial hatred led to war, with a rebel black African army fighting Sudanese government troops. Unable to defeat the rebels, the Sudanese government hired Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, who have repeatedly swooped down on unarmed villagers like those at Khor Abeche. These attacks have been supported at times by Sudanese helicopter gunships.

This deliberate killing of civilians, combined with the creation of huge numbers of refugees suffering from malnutrition and disease, has so far killed some 400,000 people in Darfur. Civilians in the region continue to die at the rate of 15,000 a month. (This according to www.sudanreeves.org) African Union peacekeeping troops have not been able to halt Janjaweed raids, to prevent them from stealing relief supplies or even to protect terrified women who must venture from refugee camps to gather wood for fires and are often assaulted and raped.

The Janjaweed also frequently attack convoys of humanitarian aid workers, who are trying to serve the area’s 150 refugee camps. Some aid workers have been robbed, others arrested by local government officials. (Washington Post, 4/25/05).

The attacks on the Black Africans of Darfur by Janjaweed and Sudanese government forces are a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, international agreements that prohibit deliberate wartime attacks on civilians. The African Union’s 2,200 peacekeeping troops are too few to make a major difference. A proposed troop increase to over 6,000 will be an improvement but still insufficient for a region about the size of Texas. The Sudanese government has repeatedly denied that it supports the Janjaweed. It claims it is only fighting African rebels, and not committing atrocities.

But the best word to describe what is happening in Darfur is not “atrocities.” It is “genocide.” That word was coined by Raphael Lemkin as a direct result of the Holocaust. It combines the Greek geno, meaning “race” or “tribe” with the Latin cide, from cadere, meaning “killing.” More than any other individual, Lemkin was responsible for the creation and passage of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was ratified by the General Assembly on December 9, 1948. Article 2 states:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

A.  Killing members of the group;
B.  Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C.  Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part …"

Because of its gravity, the term "genocide" is not used lightly by world leaders. But on September 9, 2004, Colin Powell, who was then the U.S. Secretary of State, used that word to define for U.S. senators the situation in Darfur.

What is happening is Sudan is “a manmade disaster that is complicated by politics, religion, poverty, racism, breakdown of the rule of law, geographic isolation, lack of infrastructure, decades of conflict, and, not insignificantly, oil development,” said Eric Reeves in an interview. (Smith College Quarterly, April 2005).

Reeves is a Smith College English professor who has for six years educated himself, and become an expert on, Sudan. He has traveled to the country, written and spoken regularly about the terrible events there, and established a website to share this knowledge with others (www.sudanreeves.org). Reeves advocates for international intervention to stop the continuing genocide that the nations of the world – including the United States – and the United Nations have done very little about.

Please respond to the following questions:

(1) Why is the situation referred to as a “manmade disaster?” What are the reasons for “the manmade disaster” in the Sudan?

(2) Why is “genocide” an appropriate word to describe it?