Darfur and the Crime of Genocide.

• Author: Ice, Ethan R.
• Position: Book review

JOHN HAGAN & WENONA RYMOND-RICHMOND, DARFUR AND THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009).

1. INTRODUCTION

   Since 2003, the genocide in Darfur, Sudan has claimed the lives of over 400,000 civilians, according to estimates provided by U.N. officials. (1) However, this is a number that has been hotly disputed by those on all sides of the conflict. Genocide itself, the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious, racial, political, or cultural group, (2) is a consistently controversial topic, one that often leads to questions over whether the violence was indeed coordinated or random, whether the killing was discriminatorily motivated or simply arbitrary, whether the death toll was grossly overestimated or underestimated. In 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell reviewed a study of several hundred interviews of Darfur refugees, leading him to testify before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee that genocide indeed occurred and may still be occurring in Darfur. (3) This testimony, however, was met with a surprisingly reticent response by the United States and an explicit denial of any genocide by the Sudanese government, the United Nations, and other associated organizations.

   To understand the reasons behind the violence that has transpired in Darfur, one must examine both the incidents that have occurred as well as the racial aspects of the conflict. Darfur is a region in western Sudan, the large northeastern African country that serves as home to both Arab groups as well as to Black African groups. In recent years, the Sudanese state has employed various "Arab-Islamic supremacist and demonizing policies that pit Arabs and Blacks against one another in an 'us' and 'them' kind of conflict." (4) In a sub-Saharan region where resources are extremely limited, growing competition for land and basic necessities has only furthered this divergence between the groups of Arab nomadic herders and Black African farmers. (5) The central Sudanese government has accused the Fur, Jebal, Masalit, and Zaghwa African tribes of promoting rebellious actions and violence. Yet this same government is founded upon Arab-Islamic principles that dehumanize Black ethnic groups and has consequently supported violent action against them by the Janjaweed, an Arab militia group that is supported, funded, and directed by the Sudanese government. (6) The Janjaweed has been at the center of the Darfur crisis, leading a series of calculated and atrocious attacks against the Black ethnic groups of Darfur since 2003. Through the accounts of many surviving refugees, it is obvious that villages were destroyed, thousands of people were brutally murdered, and many women were raped by the racially-motivated actions of the Janjaweed and other joint attacks involving the Sudanese government. This is not simply a war over strict economics; the actions of the Janjaweed and the Sudanese government have clearly established it as genocidal victimization of Black African groups in Darfur. Despite the high level of media exposure and strength of the response by civil society, however, both the United States and the rest of the world have been surprisingly slow in acknowledging and responding to this horrific genocide that has been occurring since 2003. (7)

   In Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, sociologists John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond (the authors) focus on three central questions: (1) why is the United States so ambivalent about genocide?; (2) why do so many scholars deemphasize racial aspects of genocide?; and (3) how can the science of criminology advance understanding and protection against genocide? (8) This book note examines all three questions in relation to the recent genocide in Darfur.

2. THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE UNITED STATES TOWARDS GENOCIDE

   Much of the information that the authors use to establish their claims is based on the very same account on which Colin Powell based his testimony when addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--the 2004 report titled Documenting Atrocities in Darfur. (9) This report was established from a survey of 1,136 Darfur refugees who fled to neighboring Chad during the aftermath of the initial violence, and included tables, maps, charts, and pictures derived from those interviews. (10) In Chapter 5, Eyewitnessing Genocide, and Chapter 1, Darfur Crime Scenes, the authors evaluated the validity and reliability of this report by performing their own interviews and cross-checking overlapping eyewitness accounts to confirm the incidents. All refugee interviews provided a "genocidal trove of evidence." (11) Between maps of locations of mass graves, descriptions of weapons, and names of dead and raped victims as well as Janjaweed militia leaders, the interviews frequently confirmed the atrocities to a stunningly detailed degree. (12)

   Using the interviews in the Documenting Atrocities report, Hagan and Rymond-Richmond were able to identify five key elements fostering or causing a genocidal pattern. Many of the refugees confirmed that tension between Arabs and Blacks had been on the rise before the Sudanese government began to actively encourage and support violence against Blacks. Many refugees also noted that the government specifically armed the Arab Janjaweed militias with weapons and horses, leading many to conclude that "the government does not want Blacks to live in Darfur because they give Arabs weapons to attack us." (13) A third element was the accounts of the Sudanese government bombing the Darfur villages--aircraft and helicopter attacks that could last days, weeks, and even months. Fourth, most of the refugees described carefully planned joint ground attacks, often coordinated with the bombing assaults that were specifically focused towards mechanically killing only Black villagers. (14) Ultimately, these efforts sought to "root out" the Black ethnicity from the future population. Those that were not killed faced starvation as they had lost all their possessions and feared returning to their villages. Finally, refugees often described racial epithets being shouted by the Janjaweed that explicitly targeted only Black ethnic groups. (15) To Colin Powell, these five elements collectively corroborated the "specific intent of the perpetrators to destroy 'a group in whole or in part,' the words of the [Genocide] Convention. (16)

   So how, the authors ask, could the United States remain indecisive to these genocidal atrocities in the face of this massive amount of evidence? Despite Powell's urging of the international community to prevent and suppress acts of genocide, the United States remained very restrained after the issuance of the U.S. Department of State's report. Secretary Powell...