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Background Q&A: Darfur: Crisis Continues

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Carin Zissis
May 4, 2006

Introduction

Three years after government-backed Arab militias known as "Janjaweed" began burning villages and conducting large-scale massacres in the Darfur region, the Sudanese authorities and rebel forces are moving at a painfully slow rate toward peace. In the meantime, a situation the U.S. State Department has called "genocide" has left some 2 million people displaced and hundreds of thousands dead. A well-meaning but ill-conceived peacekeeping mission by the African Union has failed to stop the massacres and destruction of villages. Now the UN Security Council, in spite of reluctance on the part of China and Russia, is calling for greater UN and NATO involvement in the crisis, against the wishes of the government in Khartoum.

What is the background of the Darfur crisis, and who are the main players?

African farmers and Arabic nomads long have competed for limited resources in western Sudan's Darfur region, particularly following a prolonged drought in 1983. Meanwhile, the Muslim government in the north was engaged in a civil war with rebels in the Christian/animist south. The Sudanese government funded Darfur's Arab militias—which came to be known as the "Janjaweed," or "armed horsemen"—to keep the rebels at bay. This enflamed Arab-African tensions in Darfur and, as a Council Special report says, the regime of President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir transformed a competition for scarce resources "into a large-scale violent confrontation tinged with serious racial and ethnic overtones."

The current crisis in Darfur began in February 2003, just after the government began peace negotiations to resolve the civil war with the south. The loosely aligned Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels attacked government targets in central Darfur and demanded autonomy.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.