Dar Fur: The Ambiguous Genocide (review)

While Dar Fur in western Sudan is fast disappearing as a multiethnic and economically viable region, reliable and informative works in print about the region and its apparently unending conflict are disappointingly rare. This is why Gerard Prunier's Dar Fur: The Ambiguous Genocide is a welcome contribution. It is the first serious study of the internecine warfare that has devastated Dar Fur, that westernmost, landlocked part of the country which has suffered for decades from governmental neglect and underdevelopment. The author's goal is to explore the underlying causes that brought about what he calls the "explosion" in 2003. First he lists, and then implicitly dismisses as insufficient, several explanations commonly regarded in the media as triggers for the bloodletting in Dar Fur. These include the traditional local intertribal competition and warring over grazing rights and water holes (an explanation favored by the government of the Sudan and its allies), a government-sponsored counterinsurgency campaign that got out of hand (an interpretation put forth by some observers of Sudanese affairs), a deliberate pogrom of ethnic cleansing (an accusation nurtured by the insurgents themselves and the anti-Sudan government forces generally), or genocide (which is the official position of the United States).

Unlike previous fighting in the region, the current onslaught by Dar Furian "Arabs" on "Africans" is, the author contends, far from being local, spontaneous, or unplanned. Military campaigns against the insurgents appeared coordinated as government soldiers and warplanes worked closely with "Arab" militia to bring death and destruction to their enemies. The second explanation, that of a counterinsurgency campaign gone astray, is only technically valid, since there is no "clean counter-insurgency" (154) and the "hope that repression would be limited to combatants was completely unrealistic" (155). Thus this explanation, by itself, is still insufficient. That leaves only "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" as possible explanations. The author condemns the fixation of the media and the politicians in the West on the terms "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" because of their resonance with the public psyche, but he fails to say anything about the applicability or lack thereof of either term to the massacres in Dar Fur. The reason becomes clear in the concluding chapter, where he boldly, and for this reviewer, inaccurately, introduces race (emphasis added) to explain Dar Fur's "ambiguous genocide." He vigorously defends his choice of the word and its resurrection from oblivion at a time when all serious Africanists have abandoned the term as an explanatory tool in any historical context outside South Africa. According to the author, this "Arab racism" was imported into the region in the 1980s when Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and Sudan's Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi manipulated the ideology of "Arabism," a term Mr. Prunier appears to understand only as a biological phenomenon, to subordinate and fully incorporate Dar Fur into the Arab-Muslim world. Since that time the "Arab" Center (sic) in Khartoum, the Awlad el-Balad, almost always sided with their Arab kin in Dar Fur, the Awlad el-Gharib, in what was in fact a "low-intensity-racial conflict" (162).

The first five short chapters of Dar Fur: The Ambiguous Genocide are well-researched, carefully argued, and sufficiently documented. The author's contention that the inhabitants in the region of all ethnic backgrounds have had long and mutually beneficial intercourse is convincing, while his argument that the open military involvement of Libya and Chad is central to our understanding of the conflict in Dar Fur is well taken. What is less convincing is Prunier's interpretation of the crisis in Dar Fur as manufactured by Arab racism. Reference to zurqa, or Dar Fur "African blacks," is not uncommon among their enemies in Dar Fur, the so-called Arabs. But to claim that the multifaceted conflict is reducible to Arab racism whose destructive power was unleashed upon the innocent in Dar Fur is unwarranted. There are many "Arab" tribes in Dar Fur who have remained largely uninvolved...