News Features

The Darfur crisis in western Sudan, what is being called the first great genocide of the 21st century, has metastasized.

With porous desert borders, the neighbouring countries of Chad and the Central African Republic are now being dragged into it through waves of escaping Afro-Sudanese and Chadian refugees seeking resettlement, and direct military incursions by Sudanese forces in pursuit, or by local proxies of the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime.

Yet, unaccountably, in an age of instantaneous communications, few of us have a very clear idea of what is actually taking place there, and why.

The recent PEN World Voices Festival’s “Crisis Darfur” event in New York gave two distinguished media activists, actor Mia Farrow and French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, an opportunity to report on their continuing visits to Africa’s latest killing fields.

Lévy, author of more than 30 books, including the bestseller American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, made an extensive, clandestine visit to Darfur in 2007, when he reported for Le Monde and for the New Republic on the ethnic cleansing and evidence of genocide he witnessed.

Previously, Lévy had undertaken diplomatic missions for the French government to the Taliban war in Afghanistan and filed front-line reportage from battle areas in Pakistan, Bosnia, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Israel.

Accompanying his presentation with projected photographs of bombed mud-brick huts in Darfur’s sub-Saharan region, Lévy expressed his profound shock at the intensity of what he witnessed there, contending: “We should stop speaking of the ‘crisis’ or the ‘war’ in Darfur.

This supposes a real war, two real armies. It is a war by an army against a civilian population. Of course, you have some guerrillas, but they are so poorly equipped and armed it cannot be called an army. They have very few weapons. So this is not raiding by the Janjaweed tribesmen; it is aerial bombing or Sudanese-officer led tribesmen coming in armed trucks and jeeps. It’s hard violence.”

The worst of the Darfur carnage is customarily attributed to the Janjaweed, a notorious pro-government militia comprising of northern, traditionally nomadic Muslim tribal soldiers. The government claims to be embarrassed by the killings, village burnings, rape, and persistent abduction of young women by these mobile jeep-equipped tribesmen, but it is difficult to account for the mechanized air assaults on Darfuri villages by “tribals”.