Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Hardcover)

~ Gerard Prunier (Author)
Key Phrases: Nile Valley, Hissen Habre, Jebel Marra (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Outsiders have never cared much about Darfur. In 1935, when the British ruled this large region in western Sudan, the governor wrote proudly that "we have been able to limit education to the sons of Chiefs and native administration personnel"; he hoped this would keep Darfur backward. Things barely improved after 1956, when Sudan gained independence and the leaders in the far-off capital paid little attention to their country's wild west. By the 21st century, in Gérard Prunier's estimation in Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Cornell Univ., $24), the area was arguably poorer than it had been in the 19th. Modernity had placed the commerce of the ancient Darfur sultanate -- trade in elephant tusks, ostrich feathers and, yes, slaves -- outside the scope of permissible exchange. It had neglected to provide an alternative. Darfur's poverty set the stage for the calamity that began in 2003 and is the starting point for Prunier's inquiry into the origins of today's genocide. Poverty fueled the fights over land and water between agriculturalists and nomadic tribes, providing the kindling for the conflict. But poverty alone did not explain why Darfur's agriculturalists formed two rebel movements to attack the central government's outposts, or why the government hit back with genocidal violence. At times during the fighting and related famine, which have killed upward of 300,000 people so far, Sudan's government dismissed the whole business as a land dispute among local tribes. Only the most credulous believed it. The real trigger for the conflict was manufactured by Sudan's government, with an assist from Libya's Moammar Gaddafi. For nearly all of its known history, Darfur had not been a binary society of African versus Arab: Its people belonged to a mosaic of tribes, all of them Muslim and all of them black. But in 1985, Libyan forces arrived in Darfur to deliver food aid and set about arming some nomadic tribes, who then became identified as "Arabs." The following year, Sudan's newly elected leader, Sadiq al-Mahdi, embarked on his plan to forge an "Arab and Islamic Union." By emphasizing the new central government's Arab identity, this policy led the government's provincial allies to be dubbed "Arabs," too. Thus was racial polarity constructed where none had previously existed. The trigger still needed to be pulled, however. In 2003, two insurgencies that had risen out of many "African" agriculturalists' resentment of the Khartoum-backed "Arabs" reached critical mass, killing several hundred government troops in a series of raids and skirmishes. For a regime that had fought a civil war with Sudan's south for more than 20 years, this hardly counted as a major loss, but the reaction was ferocious. Precisely because the rebels were Muslim, they were more threatening to Sudan's rulers than their Christian and animist opponents: So long as the nation divided along religious lines, the Muslims would retain control, but a split within Muslim ranks could spell the end of the Khartoum elite's dominance. So the government responded by unleashing its Arab militia allies -- not only against Darfur's rebels but also against the tribes from which the rebels drew support. The result was the butchering of fathers and the rape of mothers, the tossing of children into fires, the torching of villages and the poisoning of wells: this century's first genocide. Prunier's short book explains this sequence, but doesn't do so elegantly. The author, an Africanist at the University of Paris, indulges the specialist's urge to condescend: He derides media accounts of the conflict, scorns politicians' pronouncements and sneers at pop stars who "mediatize" African crises. The genocide awaits a better chronicler. Unfortunately, there is still time. Millions of Darfur's villagers continue to live precariously as refugees. The threat of famine hasn't gone away. And the violence continues. Reviewed by Sebastian Mallaby, a Washington Post editorial writer and author of "The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations." Origins of a Catastrophe
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Description

In mid-2004 the Darfur crisis in Western Sudan forced itself onto the center stage of world affairs. Arab Janjaweed militias, who support the Khartoum government, have engaged in a campaign of violence against the residents of Western Sudan. A formerly obscure ‘tribal conflict’ in the heart of Africa has escalated into the first genocide of the twenty-first century. In sharp contrast to official reaction to the Rwandan massacres, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called the situation in Darfur a "genocide" in September 2004. Its characteristics–Arabism, Islamism, famine as a weapon of war, mass rape, international obfuscation, and a refusal to look evil squarely in the face–reflect many of the problems of the global South in general and of Africa in particular.

Journalistic explanations of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe have been given to hurried generalizations and inaccuracies: the genocide has been portrayed as an ethnic clash marked by Arab-on-African violence, with the Janjaweed militias under strict government control, but neither of these impressions is strictly true. Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide explains what lies behind the conflict, how it came about, why it should not be oversimplified, and why it is so relevant to the future of the continent.

Gérard Prunier sets out the ethnopolitical makeup of the Sudan and explains why the Darfur rebellion is regarded as a key threat to Arab power in the country—much more so than secessionism in the Christian South. This, he argues, accounts for the government’s deployment of "exemplary violence" by the Janjaweed militias in order to intimidate other African Muslims into subservience. As the world watches; governments decide if, when, and how to intervene; and international organizations struggle to distribute aid, the knowledge in Prunier’s book will provide crucial assistance.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (August 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801444500
• ISBN-13: 978-0801444500
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #585,379 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Ambiguity, November 7, 2005

By	Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Any attempt to provide a political explanation of the Darfur crisis is bound to use the terms "complex", "ambiguous", "deeply rooted" and "obscure", if only to stigmatize over-simplifications and journalistic coverage. Not so with Gerard Prunier's book. In less than 200 pages, he succeeds in providing a thorough account of the crisis' origins, its unfolding, and the world's reaction to it, in a way that will be both appealing to the informed layperson and to the scholar specialized in African politics. His story is the Darfur crisis made simple, not by way of simplification but through rational understanding, in the way that Hannah Arendt had in mind when she evoked the "banality of evil" in the context of the Holocaust, or following Primo Levi's invitation to understand the morally incomprehensible.

For Prunier, the complexity of the crisis does not preclude us to formulate an ethical judgment on the perpetrators of the crimes and their political sponsors, or on the foreign onlookers who responded with a mix of willful ignorance and moral posturing. Far from castigating the most egregious misconceptions of the country's politics and history, such as the opposition between "Arabs" and "Africans", he shows that categorizations based on racial profiling are part and parcel of the Sudanese political landscape, where they interact with the ideology of Arabism and the opposition between center and periphery. Although the history of Darfur as an independent Sultanate from the fifteenth century onward is relevant to understand what lies behind the conflict, Prunier shows that the origins of the current crisis are to be found in the mid-1980s, a period when a deadly drought, political infighting, foreign interference, ethnic polarization and the spillover from Chad's civil war transformed this westernmost province of Sudan into a boiling cauldron.

In a way, there is nothing "ambiguous" about the genocide, at least if we use the definition of the 1948 UN convention, although the Darfur crisis fails to meet the author's own definition of genocide that he advanced in his previous book on Rwanda. The ambiguity that is mentioned in the title refers rather to the identity of Darfur itself, at the same time close and distant from the political center, and to the response of the international community, which chose to treat a political crisis through a humanitarian angle. As events in Darfur have temporarily receded from the media's attention, reading this book will be essential, not only to understand what has happened, but also to respond to what is to come.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Puts the conflict in it's political and historical context, September 20, 2005

By	Frank "frankfe" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

Prunier wrote "The Rwanda Crisis", which I think is the best analysis of the genocide in Rwanda. When I heard that he had a book on Darfur coming out, I was very eager to read it. I ordered a copy from London because it was published by Hurst & Co. two months before being released in the USA.

This book on Darfur is excellent. It is a thorough and scholarly examination of the crisis in Darfur, and he also analyzes the international community's response to it. The writing is dense and difficult, but it's worth it.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and Eye-Opening work, January 27, 2007

By	Jazz It Up Baby - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, Revised and Updated Edition (Hardcover)

As Yehudit Ronen stated, Prunier rightly labels the response of the international community to the atrocities in Darfur, a "regression of civilization," a description he convincingly argues for in this comprehensive and eye-opening work. In it, he analyzes the historical roots of the conflict in Sudan's western region and discusses why international efforts to halt the tragedy in Darfur have been so impotent.

Prunier takes the reader to the early history of Darfur as an independent sultanate and relates the human movement into the region of people who now constitute Darfur's diverse ethnic makeup. He details the subsequent annexation of Darfur to Sudan and shows how British benign neglect toward the region began an important trend that endured in the era of independence. Prunier surveys the frustration of democratic politics in Darfur and the devastating famine of the mid-1980s in which about 100,000 people died. He addresses the Libyan interference in Darfur to promote Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi's war in Chad. This, he explains, was a critical cause in pitting the Darfurian "Arab" ethnic groups ("tribes" in Prunier's parlance) against their "African," Muslim co-religionists. It was during the chaotic circumstances in the region between 1985 and 1988, Prunier explains, that the pattern of Arab militia attacks on African villages was first established, and atrocities similar in manner, although not in scale, were perpetrated by the dreaded Janjaweed, the "evil horsemen."

Prunier describes how the cynical opportunism of Hasan Abdallah al-Turabi, the Arab Islamist who had led Sudan jointly with Omar al-Bashir after 1989, further fuelled the combustible components of the Darfurian reality. Turabi's political machinations aimed at removing Bashir from power and gaining sole leadership of the country. The catastrophic results of this power struggle, won by Bashir, would be played out on the backs of the Darfurians and Sudanese society as a whole.

At times bitter, at times scornful, Prunier illustrates the neglect of the international media in bringing the crisis to world attention, largely because of the lack of a catchy angle for another African horror story. Prunier states that the international community also paid little attention to the Darfurian violence due to a combination of reasons, among them the overwhelming desire to finally solve the preexisting Sudanese civil war in the south, the U.S. preoccupation with the insurgency in Iraq, and Khartoum's cooperation in Washington's war on terror. Darfur was thus given a backseat in international priorities as the Janjaweed murdered, pillaged, burned, and raped their way through the region.

While not discussing in depth the socioeconomic problems of Sudan--problems crucial in the ignition of the Darfur fire--Prunier contends that it was notions of race in Darfur that led to the horrors there. Despite the ethnic mixing in the region and the blurred racial lines between Africans and Arabs, this distinction was superimposed on the varied ethnic groups of the region, then exploited by the ruling Arab elite in Khartoum. The possibility of a racial alliance between the Darfurian rebels and their southern "brothers" terrified these rulers. Prunier claims that the killing in Darfur should not be seen as genocide, since the aims of the Sudanese government were not to eradicate a people but rather to carry out the brutal suppression of what was seen as an existential threat. Whatever term one uses, however, the carnage and misery unleashed by Khartoum and its Janjaweed cohorts remains just as horrific.