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Keeping up: Echoes of genocide
From a new report from
ENOUGH via
Coalition for Darfur:
A recent opinion piece in The Washington Post stated as “fact” that genocide has “concluded” in Darfur. However, the notion that there has been a definable transition “from genocide to anarchy,” as Alex de Waal and Julie Flint titled their piece, misses the broader context of the process that is underway in Darfur. The Darfur these authors melodramatically describe—a “murky world of tribes-in-arms and warlords who serve the highest bidder” —is precisely what the architects of genocide in Khartoum had in mind when, beginning in mid-2003, Sudan’s government set forth to destroy and displace the civilian support base for Darfur’s rebel groups. The promotion of anarchy and inter-communal (or, popularly, “inter-tribal”) fighting is part and parcel of Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency campaign. The conditions in Darfur and eastern Chad today are not evidence of an end to genocide and the onset of an entirely new and different war—they are the echoes of genocide.