<i>War in Darfur and the Search for Peace</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: War in Darfur and the Search for Peace John H. Weiss Alex de Waal, ed., War in Darfur and the Search for Peace. Cambridge, MA: Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 431, paper. $24.95 US. War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, edited by Alex de Waal, offers an enlightening tour of the contested intellectual terrain encountered by those who have concerned themselves with the fate of Sudan’s westernmost region since the escalation of the conflict there at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The fact that one is contributing to a journal dedicated to preventing the radical diminishing of peoples and cultures, aka genocide, guides the selection of parts of the volume under review that will receive special attention here. That it is an attempt to understand the failure of negotiations between the Sudanese government and the opposing “movements” rather than the entire course of the genocidal conflict makes this work command attention. When a general history of Sudan is written in years to come, this failure may come to be viewed as an especially tragic defining episode in a period of time when the destruction of the Darfuri people and their culture might have been stopped. The first item presented in the attempt to explain the failure of peace is de Waal’s analysis of the nature of the Sudanese regime in Khartoum. In an essay introducing the volume, “Sudan: The Turbulent State,” he describes a crucially important technique whereby the current National Congress Party regime headed by General Omar al-Bashir maintains its power. Although many other empires have used the principle of “divide and rule” to maintain the dominance of the central authority, few have ever come close to the skill with which the regime that came to power in 1989 has combined the use of land and air units against armed opponents, land and air units against civilians, and the enlistment of tribally based militias (the core of the Janjaweed formations) to create a state of continuing chaos and uncertainty on its periphery in Darfur, just as it did in the southern provinces and the Nuba Mountains in its first decade in power. It is this set of armed actions that de Waal offers as the principal element of the turbulence-creation that serves to perpetuate the power of what he labels the “hyperdominant,” predatory regime in Khartoum. Such is the nature of the government in the Sudanese capital, with its offices and the subordinate institutions and ideologically and organizationally connected individuals occupying them. This set of offices was also the structure that John Garang wished to use as the base for a unified, secular, democratic, and decentralized country. As the al-Bashir regime’s triumph over Garang’s vision of a new Sudan suggests, Sudan is probably best characterized not as a nation-state in the manner of Italy, Argentina, or Malawi, but as an empire-state, ruling over its internal colonies (in the south, the east, the Nuba Mountains, and Darfur), with an especially effective combination of violence, manipulation, and the cooptation of possible opponents. As presented in the volume’s opening essay, de Waal’s list of devices used to stir the periphery’s political brew into a chaotic, deadly pottage appears incomplete. Elsewhere [End Page 379] in the work, however, and in other writings about Sudan, one may find ample additional evidence revealing the government of Sudan’s (GoS) catalogue of the weapons of disorder: selective neglect in delivering to the region vital services and equipment; comprehensive administrative warfare entailing such techniques as limitation of access to the region by journalists and officials, permit proliferation, and the routine imposition of deliberately extended delay; use of terror and torture in the “ghost houses” of the Khartoum area; manipulation of aid organizations into neartotal dependence on Khartoum’s transportation facilities as well as collusion in the limitation of investigators’ access to camp residents; encapsulation and cat-and-mouse censorship of the opposition press; energetic, opportunity-sensitive international media and diplomatic operations; and superbly calibrated, scruple-free, and impressively deceptive international and intranational negotiations. Rather than cataloguing such tactics, however, de Waal’s opening essay continues...