Sudan has a great deal in common
with Afghanistan. Both countries are horrendously overpopulated
relative to their carrying capacity, and have exploding populations --
Sudan's population of 40 million people is doubling every 25 years and
that rate is not slowing, raising the spectre of its population topping
a half billion by the end of the century. Both Sudan and Afghanistan
are also desperately poor, with only 7% of Sudan's land and 12% of
Afghanistan's capable of supporting agriculture. What's worse,
over-farming, over-grazing and global warming are producing chronic
drought, which in turn causes massive famine and desertification.
Encroaching desert has already halved arable land in Afghanistan since
1975, and the same phenomenon is happening in Sudan. Both countries
have long legacies of brutal and repressive dictatorships, foreign
occupation, savage and interminable civil war, lawlessness, genocide
and, in the case of Sudan, slavery. And both countries provided safe
harbour for Osama bin Laden.
What is happening now in the Western Sudanese provinces of Darfur is
merely a continuation of a centuries-long legacy of misery, poverty,
conflict and violence. In this week's New Yorker
Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power reports from Darfur, with
first-person interviews with government and rebel leaders and the
victims caught eternally in the middle. Some of the information she
reveals in telling the agonizing story of this impoverished and
hopeless nation:
- The military dictatorship that governs Sudan is desperate
to end US sanctions so that its newly-found oil, which came onstream
only five years ago, can start generating revenue for the bankrupt
nation, so much so that it agreed to end its long and savage civil war
against the rebels in Southern Sudan (where the oil is), and exempt
Sudanese Christians from Sharia law.
- That Southern war has cost two million lives, and the Bush
Administration was active in brokering the peace for three reasons: (a)
many of the casualties were Christians, which led to pressure from
American evangelical churches, a bastion of Bush support, for US
action, (b) the US would have access to an additional source of
much-needed oil and (c) peace would have allowed Bush, in an election
year, to portray himself as a peacemaker as well as a 'war president'.
- Plans to announce the peace were undone when the Western
Darfur provinces, suffering from horrendous drought, rapid
desertification, increasing tension between Arabs and non-Arabs for
scarce land, and long government neglect, began to clamour for
independence (Darfur was an independent Sultanate until Britain annexed
it into its Sudanese colony); the government, tapped out militarily and
not wanting to jeopardize the possible end of sanctions, responded by
outsourcing military retaliation against Darfur's six million people to
local Arab sheiks, warlords and tribal leaders, who they financed and
armed heavily and supported with aerial bombing raids in key areas
occupied by the pro-independence Sudanese Liberation Army.
- These local Arab leaders used this power and military might
to launch a genocidal attack on all non-Arabs in Darfur, deputizing
murderous gangs of Arab bandits called janjaweed,
whose intimidation tactics include burning whole villages, gang-raping
women, decapitation, burning children alive, mass public executions,
ransoming community leaders, burying victims of atrocities and precious
wells in sand, and kidnapping women and children. The bandits steal
everything of value in the destroyed villages as compensation for their
'enforcement' of government authority. As a consequence over a million
Darfur residents have fled their villages to massive refugee centres
elsewhere in the provinces, where there is at least safety in numbers
(50,000-75,000 per camp), and in neighbouring Chad.
- USAID estimates that the death toll from genocide,
starvation and disease will, even with humanitarian and peacemaking
intervention now, exceed 300 thousand and could, without intervention,
top one million by the end of this year. The UN has already established
a food program that has reached 900 thousand of the 1.5 million
affected in Darfur, but the threat to the safety of both Darfur natives
and humanitarian workers is severe.
- There are all kinds of reasons for Western reticence to get
involved: Darfur is an all-Muslim area, so the genocide is ethnic, not
religious, and it is resource-poor, unlike the oil-rich South. European
leaders, not wanting to give Bush a smokescreen for his foreign policy
blunders and rebukes of its allies, have been perversely reticent to
support US humanitarian efforts in Darfur. Arab sheiks and tribal
leaders in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan have announced they will
consider any intervention by the West in their 'internal dispute' as an
unwanted foreign invasion, which they will liken to the US invasion of
Iraq, and will use it to recruit zealous young Arabs to kill all
foreigners, including humanitarian workers and peacemakers, producing a
fiasco similar to the one that occurred in Somalia. One recruiting
brochure says "We call upon you to head immediately to Darfur and dig
the ground deep for the mass graves of the crusader army". Darfur's
refugees say that bringing peacekeepers from the African Union won't
work either, because "African troops are too susceptible to bribes".
And the Sudanese government is probably both unwilling and unable to
rein in the local sheiks and warlords and the rogue janjaweed
gangs. And the only non-Sudanese body with authority to bring thm to
justice for genocide is the International Criminal Court, which the US
government has repudiated.
What can be done? Samantha argues that, despite the danger, we have a
global responsibility to bring in peacemakers and protect the people of
Darfur (and, if the detente with the Southern provinces falls through,
which appears likely, the people of the South as well). But, just as in
Rwanda ten years ago, how can that be done over the violent opposition
of the ruling government of the country? You can only make peace where
there is a desire from both sides to achieve a workable peace. Without
that, peace efforts will constantly be sabotaged by the side
uninterested in peace, which will produce retribution and escalate into
full civil war.
What about invading Sudan? Its government is much more popular, at
least in the North, than the government of Afghanistan, and the end
result of an invasion would inevitably be the same as what we see in
Afghanistan: Tyranny replaced by anarchy, the retrenchment of the power
of local warlords, massive resentment by the locals of the invading
force's inability to bring order or build infrastructure to allow even
the promise of a normal life. Intractible civil war and strife. And
quagmire for the invaders.
Should we arm the non-Arab people of Darfur so they can defend
themselves? After all, the weapons used in the genocide against them
came from the West and from Russia, so can two wrongs make a right? And
we can't disarm the janjaweed
-- in Sudan, as in Afghanistan, there are so many weapons that
disarmament is an impossible objective. This was, of course, how we
dealt with the earlier problem in Afghanistan -- providing arms to the
Taliban and other extremists to allow them to defend themselves from
the invading Russians. We all know how successful that was.
Should we relocate a million or two million people to Chad, and pay
Chad to take them in, and protect their borders? This was how we dealt
with the persecuted Jews after World War II, helping them build a new
homeland in Israel. That, too, has been a political nightmare. Why
would the people of Chad, itself overpopulated and struggling, be
willing to give up part of their homeland to accommodate a huge exodus
of destitute foreign refugees?
The sad reality is that there is no answer. The problem is that there
are too many people and not enough land, water, or resources to support
them. Throughout human history, the maximum sustainable population has
been 160 people per arable square mile (1 person per 4 arable acres),
which would mean that Sudan should have no more than 11 million people,
a quarter of its current population. By the end of the century it could
have fifty times this maximum
sustainable population, and if desertification isn't halted, it will be
even worse. If we think democracy, 'free' trade, education and
technology are somehow going to prevent this situation from being
catastrophic, we're wildly deluding ourselves.
What's happening in Sudan, now, is foreshadowing what will happen
worldwide by the end of this century if we don't address massive
overpopulation, unsustainable resource consumption, and all the
consequences that these two excesses produce: famine, war, destitution,
lawlessness, epidemic disease, terrorism, tyranny, oppression,
suffering, genocide, and ecological collapse. Sudan is a country out of
control, and while we must of course provide humanitarian aid to its
needy masses, and do everything we can to persuade its government to
allow us to help it broker a lasting peace, this is only a stop-gap. We
must convince the government and the people of Sudan that it must
reduce its population and start stewarding its resources in a
sustainable and responsible way. Otherwise the next war, the next
genocide, the next famine, the next epidemic, the next oppressive
government, will be incomparably, unimaginably worse. They say you
can't get blood from a stone, but there seems to be no limit to how
much blood can be wrenched from an ocean of sand.
Photograph of a Darfur refugee camp from this remarkable online portfolio by Bruno Stevens at New Yorker online.
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