About the Crisis in Sudan

Sudan is geographically the largest country in Africa and has a population of 39 million. Located in a drought-prone area of western Sudan, the Darfur region is roughly the size of Texas and had a pre-conflict population of roughly 6 million people. The people of Darfur generally fall into two groups: sedentary farming groups (such as the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa) and pastoral nomadic groups (such as the Riziegat, Miseriya, and Beni Halba). Although historically ethnic divisions were very fluid, today pastoral nomadic groups are typically considered "Arab" while farming groups are considered "non-Arab".

Starting in the mid-1980’s increasing land and water scarcity led to tensions between the two socio-economic groups. Those tensions were manipulated by Sudanese, Libyan and Chadian politicians and resulted in the creation of Arab militias that began attacking non-Arab communities. A low intensity conflict in the region in the late 1980s was ostensibly ended in 1990, but the Sudanese government selectively disarmed only the non-Arab forces, leaving the Arab militias intact. With Khartoum's tacit approval and in some cases outright assistance, those militias launched a series of escalating offensives against non-Arab farmers in Darfur throughout the 1990s. Those attacks eventually led to the formation of non-Arab rebel groups called the Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) who accused the Arab dominated regime in Khartoum of discriminating against and marginalizing non-Arabs in Darfur.

The crisis began in 2003 when the SLA/M and the JEM launched a series of attacks on government military installations. This caught the Sudanese Government by surprise. With few troops in the area and still heavily engaged in the civil war in the South, they responded by expanding and further arming the Arab militias commonly known as the Janjaweed and launching a campaign backed by the Sudanese military against non-Arab communities. Both Sudanese military forces and the Janjaweed, sometimes acting independently and sometimes in conjunction, have deliberately targeted non-Arab civilians in clear violation of international law. They are engaged in a campaign to destroy non-Arab communities in Darfur in an effort to undermine the rebel groups.

Four years later, civilians continue to suffer as the Sudanese government and their Janjaweed proxies restrict international humanitarian access, bomb and strafe civilian targets with aircraft, raze villages, abduct children, murder men and boys as potential rebels, and engage in a campaign of mass rape. Since the outbreak of hostilities in 2003, the crisis in Darfur has resulted in well over 200,000 largely civilian deaths, the displacement of more than two million people, and the suffering of millions more. The decision by the Government of Sudan to conduct ethnic cleansing as a counter-insurgency campaign has attracted significant international condemnation but relatively little action to date.

Following the signing of a provisional ceasefire in 2004 between the Government of Sudan and the two rebel groups, the African Union (AU) provided a small force to monitor that agreement. However, the AU force force lacks the needed equipment, numbers and experience and despite its best efforts has been unable to protect civilians and humanitarian aid workers in the face of intensifying violence.