Andrew McGregor

July 1, 2005

This is the second of a two part series on Islamism and Terrorism in Darfur.

The conflict in Darfur is closely tied to the War on Terrorism, largely because the influence of the U.S. to deter ethnic and political violence in the region has been compromised by its growing security alliance with Sudan’s ruling Islamists. Despite meager popular support, the now divided Islamist faction continues to dominate both government and opposition in Khartoum. The radical racial and religious policies of this group have resulted in a shocking tally of death that far surpasses anything committed by al-Qaeda. The price of security cooperation with Sudan’s rulers is the risk of complicity in the brutal destruction of an ancient culture that once rivaled the kingdoms of the Nile.

Although it has been a decade since al-Qaeda operated within Sudan, the nation has been an important recruiting ground with its pool of young men indoctrinated in the government’s jihadist ideology. For now, the insularity of Sudanese Islamism and a distrust of ambitious foreigners preclude active al-Qaeda involvement in the Darfur conflict, but a sudden break in the security partnership with the U.S. could see a return of foreign militants.

Sudan’s western province is widely viewed in Khartoum as a proxy battle-ground for the continuing struggle by President al-Bashir and the security apparatus against Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamist following. Indeed, the terror that has descended on Darfur reveals a shocking cynicism both on the part of the government and the leading opposition party. The atrocities of the government-backed Janjawid militias have occurred under the cover of negotiations to end the war in South Sudan, which no party (especially the United States after its considerable diplomatic investment) wishes to derail. The growing relationship between the CIA and the Sudanese security chiefs (some of whom were named in Congress as suspects in Darfur war-crimes) has effectively sidelined U.S. influence in Darfur. The main groups involved in the fighting in Darfur are described below.

 The Janjawid Militias

The development of the Janjawid is a direct consequence of the ethnic composition of the Sudanese regular army. For decades the regular Sudanese army has been largely formed (60-65%) from Kordofan Nubas and recruits from Darfur. Despite the civil war, the Sudanese army also relies on a large number of troops from the south. For all the rhetoric of jihad in Khartoum, service in the military appeals to few of the Nile-based Arabs who control the political process. With the Darfur troops considered politically unreliable in fighting their kinsmen, the government sought an alternative fighting force in Darfur that could be motivated by racial hatred.

Most Janjawid are drawn from the northern camel-raising Arabs who have suffered most from the disappearance of pasturelands. There are allegations that the Sudanese government has recruited Janjawid from the “Arab” tribes of Chad (such as the Salamat). The Janjawid also recruit from the Fellata population, Muslim migrants from West Africa who are receptive to the message of Islamism. Many Janjawid are simply common criminals, reliable for the dirty work and expendable when international pressure forces a round of arrests. Few, if any, of the Janjawid come from the powerful Baqqara Arab tribes of South Darfur. The Janjawid number about 15,000 – significantly larger than both rebel groups.

Save for the AK-47s and satellite-phones, the horse and camel-mounted Janjawid militias most resemble traditional raiding parties. The tools of the Janjawid (“Devils on Horseback”) include massacres, torture, mutilation and gang-rape. Their main victims are the Fur, the Masalit and the Zaghawa, all of whom once presided over sultanates on the territory of modern Darfur. Janjawid units are expected to pay themselves through the proceeds of looting. Motorized units of the regular army often assist Janjawid raids. Khartoum’s ancient fleet of Antonov bombers has been put to use in Darfur, dropping crude barrel-bombs full of explosives and scrap metal to soften up villages before Janjawid attacks. The use of government helicopter-gunships was common earlier in the conflict before several helicopters were lost to rebel fire.

Janjawid leader Musa Hilal is the son of a leading Jalul Rizayqat shaykh with a long career as a militant/brigand. He was released from prison to take command of the militias. Hilal claimed in an interview with Human Rights Watch that senior officers of the Sudanese regular army led all Janjawid field operations. After being recalled to Khartoum, a reinvented Musa Hilal has emerged as a traveling ambassador of peace and reconciliation, urging Darfuris to unite through intermarriage. This goodwill effort seems tied to attempts to make elements of the Janjawid “disappear” by incorporating members into the police and Popular Defense Forces (a government paramilitary). Undisciplined Janjawid forces are even reported to have engaged in fighting with the regular army.

Rebels: The Sudan Liberation Army/Sudan Liberation Movement

The SLA is composed mostly of Zaghawa and Fur, with representation from the Masalit, Daju and other tribes. The origins of the movement can be found in the self-defense militias created by the Fur in the late 1980s. A Fur lawyer, Abdul-Wahid Muhammad al-Nur, created the Darfur Liberation Front (soon renamed the SLA) in 2002 and armed the group by raiding a police station. Minni Arkou Minnawi, a leader of the secular, left-wing SLA maintains that the movement is not separatist in nature, but has specific demands regarding aid, development, political recognition and the insertion of international peace-keepers. The movement espouses a nationalist approach in which Sudan’s remoter regions would receive the same attention as the Nile corridor.

Unit of the SLA-MM – Note this fighter’s large collection of amulets (Sudan Tribune)

Like most armed groups in the field (including the regular army) the SLA feeds itself at the expense of civilian farmers. Funding for arms comes largely from Fur communities in the Persian Gulf States and other parts of the Sudan. The guerrillas operate in groups of four-wheel drive vehicles mounted with heavy machine-guns over ground they know intimately. The SLA aspires to the highly-mobile tactics used so successfully by the northern tribes of Chad to expel the Libyans, but more closely resemble the low-level military activity of the similarly equipped 1990s Tuareg rebellion in Mali and Niger.

In early 2004, the SLA joined the National Democratic Alliance, a fractious grouping of the southern SPLA and various northern opposition parties. [1] The SLA also signed a cooperative agreement with the Beja Congress, a long established militant group in Sudan’s eastern region representing Muslim non-Africans complaining of similar underdevelopment and under-representation in the central government. The accord was signed in Eritrea, which has also been accused by Khartoum of providing military assistance to the Darfur rebels.

Rebels: The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)

The government describes the Islamist JEM as the military wing of the PCP, but so far JEM has proved less militarily effective than the SLA. The movement is led by Dr. Khalil Ibrahim Muhammad, a Turabi loyalist and author of The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan, an outlawed manifesto that claims the Nile-based Arabs have dominated the government since independence at the expense of the majority of Sudanese. JEM units cooperated with SLA forces in the opening phase of the rebellion in February 2003. For a time the government tried to negotiate a separate agreement with the SLA, but the SLA demanded that both parties be part of the peace process.

Like the SLA, JEM finds many eager recruits in the refugee camps of Chad. Like the Janjawid, JEM also draws recruits from the Fellata population, which was not granted citizenship until 1989 under an al-Turabi initiative. Islamism has a small but fervent constituency of recent vintage in Darfur. Islam as practiced in Darfur is highly different from the Islamist orthodoxy of Khartoum, incorporating many traditional customs and beliefs. It is unlikely that all of JEM’s guerrillas back the Islamist project, but may have found in the organization the means to obtain the weapons and vehicles needed to take revenge for the loss of farms and families. Most of the JEM funding is believed to come through Turabi’s organization. In early May, both the JEM and the SLA appealed to Muammar Qaddafi for funds and political support. Of late Qaddafi has abandoned Arabism for the cause of African unity and identity.

Conclusion

The Sudanese government has considerable military power that would enable it to restore order in Darfur, but is understandably reluctant to divert its resources from the South until the peace process there has been completed. Offers of peacekeeping assistance from the SPLA have been met with charges of SPLA military aid to the rebels in Darfur. The strategy of the Sudanese security forces in Darfur follows a pattern established in the war in the South; divide the opposition through bribery and the inflammation of ethnic or tribal differences while arming pro-government militias. The resulting death or displacement of the population eventually isolates rebel units from sources of support.

In some sense the people of Darfur are being made to pay the price for the private humiliation of Sudan’s security apparatus, resentful that it has had to come to the negotiating table with the South Sudan’s SPLA. The terms of the peace settlement with the SPLA virtually ensure further revolts elsewhere in Sudan to wring similar considerations from the highly centralized government in Khartoum. Unfortunately, the manipulation of race and Islam is likely to continue to substitute for a willingness to create an equitable distribution of wealth and power.

Notes

1. Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army, a South Sudanese rebel force commanded by John Garang, not to be confused with the SLA of Darfur.

Andrew McGregor

June 17, 2005

The United States has made some strange alliances in the War on Terrorism, but none odder than its growing relationship with the ruling Islamists of Sudan. Once eager hosts of Osama bin Laden, Sudan’s Islamist movement has since split, with the two factions now fighting a proxy war in Darfur. In the 1990s, the U.S. rejected every initiative offered by the Sudanese to cooperate on counter-terrorism issues, including an offer to extradite Osama bin Laden. The Sudanese government’s willingness to share its copious intelligence on al-Qaeda has now bought it some immunity from responsibility for the atrocities in Darfur. The CIA has initiated close contacts with Sudanese intelligence director Major-Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, who has also been identified in Congress as a war crimes suspect for his exploits in Darfur. In a sign of growing cooperation many Sudanese prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been released to Sudanese authorities. Besides intelligence sharing, the U.S. is also keen to protect the peace agreement that will end the North-South civil war and release vast new reserves of oil onto the market.

Dr. Hassan al-Turabi

The Arming of Darfur

During the 1980s the Umma Party government of Sadiq al-Mahdi and private sponsors (including General Swahr al-Dahab, a former President of Sudan) began arming Arab militias in South Darfur known as Murahalin. The object of the militias was to put pressure on the Bahr al-Ghazal heartland of the Dinkas (the leading tribe in the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army), which lies directly south of Darfur. [1] With the arms came a Khartoum-based ideology of Arab superiority. The Murahalin carried out their duties with enthusiasm. Looting, murder, abductions and all manner of atrocities were practiced, all without government responsibility, as the militias were not part of the regular army. The Murahalin would serve as the model for the Janjawid raiders of today.

Arms flooded Darfur as the region became a staging base for armed groups involved in the struggle to control Chad in the 1980s. In the 1970s and 1980s many Darfuri followers of the Umma Party were forced into exile in Libya, where they joined Muammar Qaddafi’s Islamic Legion, a force of Arabs, Tuareg and West Africans. Many of these exiles absorbed heavy doses of the radical Arabist ideology propagated by Qaddafi at the time. Qaddafi proposed the creation of an “Arab corridor” through North Africa, which implied the expulsion or extermination of the non-Arab tribes of central Darfur. Based in Libyan-occupied northern Chad, the Islamic Legion became an important conduit for the cross-border arms trade. Law enforcement vanished and in its absence even peaceful communities were forced to arm themselves.

Ecological pressures began to force the nomadic Zaghawa and the northern Arab tribes into the territory of the Fur, the pre-colonial rulers of the region. Attempts to settle there were opposed by the Fur and fighting broke out after which the army focused its efforts on punishing the non-Arab Zaghawa. The Arab tribes were given a free hand to seize land, resulting in the death of thousands of Fur and the displacement of tens of thousands more. In 1991, an ill-fated attempt was made by the southern-based Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army to open a new Fur-led front in the civil war. The local SPLA leader, Daoud Bolad, was a former member of Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamist National Islamic Front (NIF) but became involved in Fur self-defense militias in the late 1980s. He emerged in 1991 as leader of the new SPLA front in Darfur. Bolad’s brief military success was followed by defeat and death in prison.

In the late 1990s, even as oil money began to pour into Khartoum, funds for government services in Darfur began to dry up. Security was virtually non-existent in the countryside and military garrisons rarely ventured out. Gun-rule made an unwelcome return. In 1998 and 1999, northern Arab tribes began moving their herds into Masalit lands earlier than usual, leading to violence in which the Masalit got the worst of it. Thirty thousand Masalit fled to Chad where they were still attacked by Arab militias.

The Turabi Factor

Former leader of the Muslim Brothers and founder of the National Islamic Front, Hassan al-Turabi’s life-long goal of establishing an Arabized and Islamic state in Sudan has run roughshod over the cultural and religious sensibilities of many Sudanese. His first attempt at introducing Islamic law as Attorney-General, the “September Laws” of 1983, was reviled by Muslims and Christians alike. Its emphasis on huddud (traditional Islamic punishments, including amputations and crucifixion) shocked most Sudanese. As the civil war worsened and then-President Ja’afar Nimeiri’s position became more precarious in coup-prone Khartoum, Turabi and the Muslim Brothers were rounded up and blamed for the rapidly deteriorating security situation.

Nimeiri’s overthrow brought a brief spell of ineffective civilian government until Turabi joined Brigadier Umar al-Bashir in an Islamist coup in 1989. Bashir was installed as President with Turabi as an unaccountable power behind the throne. Strict interpretation of Islamic law returned and a brutal campaign against the non-Arab Nuba of Kordofan in 1991-1992 targeted both Muslims and Christians. Even mosques were destroyed in an explicit rejection of non-Arab Islam. Under the influence of Turabi and his deputy ‘Ali ‘Uthman Muhammad Taha the war in the South became a jihad against disbelievers. The ruling arrangement lasted until 1996 when disagreements between Bashir and Turabi seemed to leave the latter in the ascendance. However Turabi miscalculated in 1999 when he introduced legislation restricting the power of the president. Consequently Bashir reasserted his authority and the NIF split under the resulting pressure. Bashir’s supporters became the governing National Congress Party while Turabi’s followers went into opposition as the Popular Congress Party (PCP). Most of the NIF’s membership in Darfur joined the PCP.

Turabi was arrested in 2001 under emergency laws and sent to Khobar prison. His offence was opening peace negotiations with the SPLA without government approval. Turabi was not only held in solitary confinement, but was judged so dangerous that a wall was built around his cell to prevent any interaction with other prisoners. Eventually he was released to house arrest and freed in October 2003.

On April 15, 2005, a Sudanese court sentenced 21 soldiers and 3 others for mounting a coup attempt in March 2004. Two-thirds of the convicted were members of Turabi’s PCP and many of the leaders were military officers from Darfur. Turabi was re-arrested at the time but not charged, though he accused the government of arming the Janjawid raiders of Darfur and purging Black African officers from the army. Following the alleged coup attempt the government suspended the PCP from political activities, partly on charges of aiding insurrection in Darfur. State prosecutors also alleged participation by Turabi in a second coup attempt in September 2004. Most of those charged were from Darfur and alleged by the government to be PCP members. Again Turabi was not charged even though the Attorney-General claimed to have evidence he “indirectly” planned the coup.

After his release, Turabi denounced the government’s actions in Darfur and called for greater political representation for the region in the central government. He also asserted that the government of Chad was responsible for some of the violence in Darfur. [2] The allegations may refer to military aid provided by the Zaghawa-dominated government in Chad to their Zaghawa cousins in the rebel Sudan Liberation Army.

There are many signs that Turabi uses the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM – the Islamist rebel group in Darfur) as a proxy army in his struggle against the government. Turabi covers his own complicity in the Darfur outrages by blaming the Sudanese government for encouraging militias and tribes to fight each other. According to Turabi, PCP members fighting alongside the JEM do so without his authorization. Turabi is playing a dangerous game and has received clear warning from the President: “It would not be difficult for us to bring in Turabi, to issue a presidential decree and have his head chopped off. We could do it and our conscience would not be bothered” [3]

Arab or African?

While the conflict in Darfur has its ethnic and political dimensions, it is largely sparked by the loss of nomadic pasture-lands to desertification or absorption into fenced-off farmland. The conflict also revolves around the traditional marginalization of Darfur, which is poorly represented in the central government and receives little development assistance. To complicate the issue, Darfur has also become a battleground in the ever-shifting web of political rivalries of Khartoum’s Islamists, bent on exploiting Sudan’s Arab/African identity crisis.

The roots of the conflict run deep in Darfur’s history. For centuries the camel-raising Arabs of north Darfur and the cattle-owning Arabs of South Darfur (the Baqqara) were reluctant subjects of the African Muslim Fur Dynasty. Tribute was often collected from the Arabs by force. Islam was better established in the Fur capital than amongst the nomadic Arab tribes and the Fur Sultan’s monopoly of the slave and ivory trade brought significant wealth to the kingdom.

The ancient sultanate was seized in 1874 by the slave army of Arab freebooter Zubayr Pasha and turned over to the Egyptian government. The Mahdi’s rebellion in the early 1880s brought down the Egyptian regime before going on to conquer most of the Sudan. After the Mahdi’s death, his successor, a Baqqara Arab from Darfur, brought the Baqqara tribes to Khartoum where they dominated all of Sudan. A succession of Fur “shadow-sultans” continued to fight for the restoration of the sultanate. The arrival of Kitchener’s British-Egyptian army in 1898 destroyed the power of the Baqqara Arabs.

Determined to eliminate the Sultan during WWI, the British began arming the Arab tribes of southern Kordofan and Darfur in preparation for an invasion of the Sultanate. The veteran Arabists who dominated British intelligence felt comfortable dealing with the Arabic-speaking nomads but had little regard for the “black” Fur. Encouraged by what seemed the approval of the Khartoum government, the Arab tribes wreaked havoc in Darfur and were only restrained with great difficulty at the end of the campaign. The Sultan’s death marked the end of the once-powerful African tribes as a political force in Darfur. Every effort was made to eliminate the legacy of Fur rule in the region, which gradually became a forgotten outpost, even after Sudanese independence in 1956.

There was always a high degree of mobility in Darfur between ethnic groups and intermarriage was common. Most tribes, both nomadic and sedentary, had sections formed from members of other tribes or ethnic groups. During British rule a great deal of effort was devoted to defining tribal borders in neat patterns that had little to do with the incredibly complex system of seasonal land use. These artificial divisions were then used to allocate dar-s (homelands) to each tribe. In the south, where Baqqara tribes had historically acknowledged land-claims, the system worked satisfactorily, but the Arabs of the north, who wandered with their herds in the pastures between farming communities, were never granted their own dar-s. This early interference in Darfur’s social structure laid the foundation for today’s conflict.

Notes:

1. The SPLA is not to be confused with the Darfur-based SLA (Sudan Liberation Army)
2. ‘Turabi slams Government’, Sudan Mirror 1(11), March 1-14, 2004.
3. ‘Sudanese president urges opposition party to dump Turabi’, AP, Sept. 27, 2004.

This article first appeared in the June 17, 2005 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor