Minh T. Nguyen

# re: Save Darfur Rally this Sunday

Here is a brief summary of the conflict by me, since I haven't seen a good one anywhere else. Please read it, I think I wrote an excellent summary...

Sudan is a huge country the size of western Europe,

with 37 million people. The people are all black

Africans, but they are many different ethnic groups

with their own traditions, cultures and societies in

various parts of the country.

In the north it borders middle eastern countries

like Egypt and Lybia, and it includes the Sahara

desert which is slowly spreading south with Global

Warming. The people of the north speak Arabic, and

consider themselves to be "Arabs", even though they

are black Africans. But the arabs we normally call

arabs have little to do with them. Many of the

Sudanese "arabs" of northern Sudan feel that they

are the height of civillisation and look down on the

non-arabic speaking Africans in the rest of the

country as being inferior, much the same way

Europeans think of africans.

Anyway, these arabic-speaking northern Sudanese

people run the country, and control the capital

Kartoum. The government is quite a nasty

dictatorship, and it isn't very popular with anyone

in Sudan. Even those Sudanese arabs who are very

racist towards the south, don't like their

government.

In the south of the country it borders with

countries like Ethiopia and Kenya. There the people

are the more traditional Africans. They have their

own African languages and traditional African

religions. The north has been fighting a brutal

civil war with the south for decades. Millions of

people in the south have died, and millions more

have become refugees and have been displaced into

other parts of the country. There is hardly any

development in the South due to the war, and so it

is mostly subsistance farming. There have been peace

talks in the last few years and it looks like that

war is coming to an end.

Sudan has lots of OIL. Other countries want the oil,

and so many countries, such as China, back the

Sudanese dictatorship and support all its

attrocities. The United States, in the face of

diplomatic and humanitarian pressure, had to boycott

Sudanese oil and not buy it. The United States is

very keen to be able to buy oil from Sudan again,

and were hoping for a deal to be reached quickly.

In the West of the country is a province called

Darfur, where the current conflict is. It is home to traditional non-Arab africans. Except unlike the south, the people of Darfur are generally Muslims. They don't speak arabic though, and are more traditional africans. They include several different ethnic groups, including the Fur (Dar Fur means Home of the Fur).

In the last few years the government has been creating racist northern "arab" sudanese militias to ethnically cleanse the province in favour of the "arabs". In the last few years the ethnic cleansing is almost complete, and all the non-arab villages have been burnt to the ground and all the non-arabs are living in refugee camps. The genocidal militias are called the Janjaweed, although they are just off-duty government troops with government weapons and government support.

The Darfur province borders the African country of Chad. Chad has a lot of the same ethnic groups as Darfur. The government of Chad is run by one of the ethnic groups that is being ethnically cleansed in Darfur. The Chad government is a bit corrupt, but it is reasonably popular and has the democratic support of the population. Most of the refugees from Darfur have fled across the border to Chad. Chad supports them as best they can, but Chad is a very poor country.

Unfortunately the genocidal Sudanese Janjaweed militias have been crossing the border into Chad. There they have gone from terrorizing the refugees to trying to overthrow the Chad government and bring the Sudanese fascists to power in Chad. They came very close several months when the fascists marched on the Chad capital N'Djamena. Chad managed to fight off the Janjaweed attack, but it was a close call. Chad's oil fields were run by a coalition of the World Bank and western governments. The World Bank and western governments shut off Chad's oil and money supply in the middle of the Janjaweed offensive against Chad because Chad was spending the money on defending itself against the fascist invasion.

For some bizarre reason the media portrays the invading janjaweed militias in Chad as though they were some kind of rebellion against a repressive Chad government. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not that the government isn't a bit repressive, it is. But it is the best government Chad can hope for right now, and it would be a disaster if Chad fell to the genocidal Sudanese forces and ended up like Sudan.

As a dirt poor African country, and the only country in the world which is doing anything for the people of Darfur, Chad frequently threatens to stop taking the refugees and hand off the problem to someone else. So far that hasn't happened.

Some of the victims of the genocide in Darfur have been fighting back to defend themselves. Chad has been quietly helping them. I don't know whether or not they have committed any attrocities themselves in retaliation against innocent Arab civillians who weren't involved. But either way they are the good guys in this conflict and they are badly needed.

The other force helping out in Sudan is the African Union. But they are only allowed to watch, never to defend anyone, and they have to let the Sudanese government come with them whereever they go to observe. The government passes everything on to the Janjaweed and so the African Union peacekeepers can do nothing.

Sudan, and the refugees in Chad, urgently need humanitarian aid, and a peacekeeping force with the power to stop the genocide.

Carl Kenner

# re: Save Darfur Rally this Sunday

Sorry about the formatting of the top of my comment above. I cut and pasted into and from notepad, and didn't notice it had put line-breaks everywhere.