According to Barbara Amiel, the battles bordering on genocide in Darfur are manifestations of racisim and much more[h/t to Jack]:
Back from his late-April visit to Darfur, actor George Clooney was asked by HBO’s Bill Maher if the bloodshed in Sudan’s terrible conflict “has anything to do with race?” I held my breath but needn’t have bothered. George and Bill weren’t touching that one. They managed, as most commentators do, to talk about the genocide of “a people” by “them” without giving away who exactly are the “people,” who are the “them,” and why them are doing it to the people.
Racism is the core force behind the carnage in Darfur, which is just a new manifestation of a battle that has been going on in that part of the world since about the seventh century. The conflict is between Arabs and black Africans, although self-identification as African is a convoluted matter in ethnically mixed Sudan.
… If race is the major theme in this conflict, there are other leitmotifs, including the largely unexploited oil reserves located in the south. Another strand is the battle beloved of Hollywood westerns, in which cattlemen massacre the sodbusters over their competing approaches to land use. The cattlemen need huge tracts of land to feed their livestock and look with hostility on the turnip and potato growers who block their grazing and cattle drives. In Sudan, farmers tend to be Africans, the cattle herders are Arabs, and the fight over land has been aggravated by the creep of the Sahara Desert. In the long run, the small farmers generally win these encounters because growing crops and raising chickens produces more calories of food per acre than grazing animals, but in the short run the herders have the money and power.
Nothing brings out the barbarism in human beings like racial and religious conflicts. Human beings shoot, bomb and send millions to gulags in national and ideological conflicts. In racial and religious wars they prefer to inflict more agonizing deaths, as well as mutilation, amputation, humiliation and rape. In Darfur, local militias of Arabs, called janjaweed, backed by Sudanese government forces, have created two million refugees and hundreds of thousands of mangled dead.
The immediate need is to send in an international force to impose law and order. They will not be peacekeepers, since there is no peace to keep. If euphemisms are required, they can be called peacemakers. The organization of a force is the job of the UN, which, as usual, is all but useless. With luck it will ask the French to go, since asking the Americans or their British allies is ideologically unthinkable.
Then what? Either Sudan splits into two countries, or a genuine federation needs to be created with real money and power-sharing with the south. Sudan’s oil resources, currently in the hands of the north Sudanese and the Chinese, should bring enough money to go around. The less happy solution would be to install a local strongman, one who has the fewest genocidal inclinations while being strong enough to keep the peace. And, if the UN and international community ignore the ongoing problem and turn a blind eye, then I’d suggest an old reliable: blame the entire problem on the Jews.
