Global warming is driving violent conflicts in Darfur and around the globe.
First
aircraft would come over a village, as if smelling the target, and then
return to release their bombs. The raids were carried out by
Russian-built four-engine Antonov An-12s, which are not bombers but
transports. They have no bomb bays or aiming mechanisms, and the ‘bombs’
they dropped were old oil drums stuffed with a mixture of explosives
and metallic debris. These were rolled on the floor of the transport and
dropped out of the rear ramp which was kept open during the flight. The
result was primitive free-falling cluster bombs, which were completely
useless from a military point of view since they could not be aimed but
had a deadly efficiency against fixed civilian targets. As any combatant
with a minimum of training could easily duck them, they were terror
weapons aimed solely at civilians. After the Antonovs had finished their
grisly job, combat helicopters and/or MiG fighter-bombers would come,
machine-gunning and firing rockets at targets such as a school or a
warehouse which might still be standing. Utter destruction was clearly
programmed.
The
air raids were not the end of the story. The violence then began in
earnest. Janjaweed militiamen, riding horses or camels or driving Toyota
Landcruisers, would surround the village, then move in to plunder it,
rape the women, burn the houses down and kill any remaining inhabitants.
This was the opening act, in July 2003, to the genocide in Darfur, in western Sudan.
What
was first reported to Western TV viewers as a tribal conflict between
‘Arab horseback militias’ and ‘African farmers’ looks, on closer
examination, to have been a war by a government on its own population,
in which climate change played a decisive role.
Ethnically
speaking, Darfur is an intricate web of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ tribes,
where ‘Arab’ is usually associated with nomadic lifestyles and ‘African’
with settled farming. A further complexity is the distinction between
‘native Arabs’ and those who first entered the country in the nineteenth
century, mainly as Islamic preachers and traders. This core group of a
quasi-colonial foreign elite, as GeÅLrard Prunier puts it, was
supplemented by slave and ivory dealers, who put themselves on the same
level as the native Arabs. Although they had come from outside as
conquerors, they eventually merged with the indigenous group, but to
this day retain an elite position in Darfur society.
The
Janjaweed, infamous for their brutality, first appeared in the late
1980s at various trouble spots, in a role ‘halfway between being bandits
and government thugs’. They are recruited from former highwaymen,
demobilized soldiers, young men from mostly ‘smaller Arab tribes having a
running land conflict with a neighbouring “African” group’, common
criminals and young unemployed. These people receive money for their
work: ‘$79 a month for a man on foot and $117 if he ha[s] a horse or a
camel’. ‘Officers – i.e. those who could read or who were tribal amir –
could get as much as $233.’ Their weapons are provided to them.
As
in Rwanda ten years earlier, then, these were by no means men who
killed spontaneously out of hatred or revenge, but rather ‘organized,
politicized and militarized groups’. At the time of writing, between
200,000 and 500,000 inhabitants of Darfur have died as a result of their
work. There had been massacres in the earlier period too, but at least
since 1984, when a disastrous famine hit the country, the history of
violence has been closely bound up with ecological problems.
There
have been conflicts for seventy years or more between Darfur’s settled
farmers (‘Africans’) and nomadic herdsmen (‘Arabs’), but they have
become increasingly severe as a result of soil erosion and greater
livestock numbers. Elements of modernization and judicial dispute
resolution, which were introduced in more peaceful times thirty or so
years ago, swept away traditional strategies for problem-solving or
reconciliation without establishing new or functioning forms of
regulation. Instead, during the last thirty years, there has been a
tendency for weapons to be used straightaway even in small local
conflicts.
In
the disastrous drought of 1984, the sedentary farmers tried to protect
their meagre harvests by blocking access to their fields by ‘Arabs’
whose pastureland had dried up. As a result, the nomads were unable to
use their traditional marahil, or herding routes and feeding places. ‘In
their eagerness to push towards the still wet south, they started to
fight their way through the blocked off marahil. Farmers carrying out
their age-old practices of burning unwanted wild grass were attacked
because what for them were bad weeds had become the last fodder for the
desperate nomads’ depleted flocks.’
Here
we see quite clearly that climate-induced changes were the starting
point for the conflict. The lack of rainfall – in many parts of Darfur
it declined by more than a third for a whole decade – meant that the
northern regions were no longer suitable for livestock and that the
herdsmen had to tear up their roots there and move south as full nomads.
Furthermore, the drought produced large numbers of internally displaced
persons (IDPs), who were accommodated in newly built camps; as many as
80,000 starving people were on the move trying to reach one. The
government’s first reaction was to declare them all ‘Chadian refugees’
and to order their deportation en masse, in an operation known as
‘Operation Glorious Return’.
At
the same time, a dramatic rise in population figures, averaging 2.6 per
cent a year, led to overuse of pasture and other land and added to the
anyway high potential for conflict. Whereas disputes over land and water
had traditionally been settled at conciliation meetings chaired by a
third party with government support, a different policy came into
operation after General Al-Bashir’s military putsch in 1989. Now
government-backed militias increasingly intervened, making the conflicts
sharper and more likely to end in violence.
Today’s
conflicts are between government troops or militias and the twenty
rebel organizations, so that an overview is as impossible for the
participants as it is for outside observers. The largest rebel group –
the Darfur Liberation Front (DLF), formed in February 2003 – initially
campaigned for the independence of Darfur, but soon decided to go for a
country-wide solution and renamed itself the Sudan Liberation
Movement/Army (SLM/SLA). In addition there is now a Justice and Equality
Movement (JEM), which also seeks to weaken the government in Khartoum.
The
war in Darfur began when SLA guerrillas attacked the airport at El
Fasher, and the government retaliated with the raids on villages
described earlier. Nomadic Arab tribesmen then used these as an
opportunity to appropriate farmland and animals. ‘As the clashes
intensified, the government in Khartoum dismissed the governors of
northern and western Darfur, who had come out in favour of a negotiated
solution.’ Government aircraft continued to bomb villages
indiscriminately and deployed the Janjaweed to fight against the rebels.
These
have since engaged in a genocide interrupted only by periodic attempts
to achieve a ceasefire. Violence has become a permanent feature of the
situation. Neither the rebels nor the government are capable of a
decisive victory, and nothing suggests that the opposing sides are
genuinely interested in peace. Moreover, not only the Janjaweed but also
the regular army and rebel troops have been inflicting violence on
civilians.
The
high toll of the brutal fighting in Darfur has all the characteristics
of a climate war; it also represents a new type of simmering warfare to
be found in African societies in fragile or broken states. One of the
main differences between the civil wars of today or tomorrow and
classical interstate wars is that the parties have no interest in ending
the conflict and many political and financial interests in keeping it
alive. Violence markets and violence economies have come into being –
non-state areas in which business is done with weapons, raw materials,
hostages, international aid, and so on. Obviously, no trader in violence
is keen to see his business come to an end; he will therefore regard
any attempt to restore peace as an unwelcome disturbance.
A
study published in June 2007 by the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) summed up the situation as follows. In Darfur
environmental problems, combined with excessive population growth, have
created the framework for violent conflicts along ethnic lines – between
‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’. So, conflicts that have ecological causes are
perceived as ethnic conflicts, including by the protagonists themselves.
The social decline is triggered by ecological collapse, but this is not
seen by most of the actors. What they do see are armed attacks,
robberies and deadly violence – hence the hostility of ‘them’ to ‘us’.
The
UNEP soberly noted that lasting peace will not be possible in Sudan so
long as environmental and living conditions remain as they are today.
But those conditions are now marked by shortages that pose a threat to
survival (because of drought, desertification, deficient rainfall), and
which are further exacerbated by global warming. The road from
ecological problems to social conflicts is not one way.
* *
Published on Audubon Magazine by Harald Welzer, July 12, 2012