Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster (review)

When the conflict in Darfur claimed international attention in 2003, journalists and political analysts unreflectively placed it within the framework of Sudan's peripheral wars—southern Sudan revisited on the western frontier. Few knew that Darfur's war had begun as spillover from another conflict, in 1987, when a Chadian militia retreated into the region, pursued by the Chadian government and French troops. The militia leader, Acheikh Ibn Oumar, was both head of his own faction and commander in Gaddafi's Islamic Legion, a band of Sahelian Bedouin mercenaries recruited to bolster Libyan designs on Chad and its neighbors.

One of the very few books in English to track this history is Millard Burr and Robert Collins's Africa's Thirty Years' War: Chad, Libya, and the Sudan, 1963–1993 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), which documents the twists and turns of regional and factional politics in Libya, Chad, and Sudan from the 1960s until Idriss Deby seized power in December 1990. The politics of Chad—its own internal fragmentation alongside the minor version of the Cold War's "Great Game" in which France and the U.S. fought a proxy war with Libya—was a protracted tragedy in itself as well as a prelude to disaster in Darfur. The analyst of Darfur's factional politics, digging into the history of the Janjaweed and the Darfur armed movements, finds layer upon layer of sediments from Chad's wars deposited across that country's eastern border, nourishing today's conflicts.

In Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster, Burr and Collins have updated their original 1999 volume with additional chapters. The new title is not a publisher's gimmick: this is indeed the prehistory of Darfur's tragedy, and it is essential, if difficult, reading for any serious student of the crisis.

The book's shortcoming is its weakness of method. Its sources are almost exclusively English- and French-language publications, including news wires and reports from diplomatic and human rights sources. It does not utilize Arabic language ephemera. The authors have not done their own field research, nor have they had privileged access to any archives. This leaves some significant gaps. For example, the Darfurian origin of the Janjaweed lies with the Mahamid Arabs of northern Darfur, who were the intermediaries for smuggling Libyan arms to Chadian Arab militia before forming a formidable militia themselves. The Mahamid remained obscure until their leader, Musa Hilal, achieved infamy in 2004. Because there is almost no English-language published reference to the Mahamid and their role, this important element is missing from Burr and Collins's account. Similarly, the factional politics of the Zaghawa, including the hot-and-cold relations between Idriss Deby and the leaders of Darfur's Justice and Equality Movement, can be understood only with reference to Deby's betrayal of the Zaghawa Kobe leader Abbas Koty, whom he welcomed back to Chad in 1994 and then had murdered. Underreferenced in English language sources, this episode also fails to appear in this book.

These omissions notwithstanding, the updating of the 1999 book and the publication of Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster is very welcome. Not only does it provide an account of a history indispensable for understanding Darfur, but it is a salutary reminder of how intractable conflicts in the Chad basin can be.