Growing violence in Sudan’s Darfur region raises fears of another war

SMA NEWS – DARFUR
Tucked away in the vast arid lands of western Sudan, Darfur may be on the brink of an abyss, with thousands killed or injured and tens of thousands displaced in the latest wave of tribal clashes to afflict the region.

Ominously, the underlying causes of the unrest — land disputes between Arab herdsmen and ethnic African farmers — are in large part those that ignited Darfur’s civil war of the 2000s in which 300,000 people died and 2.5 million were displaced.

The widespread use of rape and kidnappings during that war left a much deeper scar on the ethnically and religiously diverse nation than those caused by other conflicts that have beset Sudan since independence from Britain in 1956.

Feeding the potential for a fully-fledged conflict in Darfur is the preoccupation in Khartoum with the political crisis that began in October when army chief Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan derailed the country’s fragile transition to democracy.

The wave of deadly protests against the coup across much of Sudan has also fed a climate of instability that, coupled with economic problems and the presence of armed groups operating outside the army’s control, has inspired lawlessness in far-flung areas like Darfur, campaigners say.

Another factor is the withdrawal last year from Darfur of UN peacekeepers who protected the hundreds of thousands of displaced Darfurians living in camps.

War in Darfur would have disastrous consequences for Sudan, taking away any chance of a political resolution of its political crisis and speeding it closer to economic meltdown.

Gen Al Burhan, who insists his coup spared the country a civil war, blames all of Sudan’s woes, including the resurgence of violence in Darfur, on what he says is the failure of civilian political groups to agree on a political future.

“The political infighting is effectively the very thing that’s responsible for these events [in Darfur] and everything else that will happen in Sudan,” Gen Al Burhan told a television interviewer last week. Up to 400 people were killed in Darfur in the past month, he said.

The UN said violence in western Sudan this month displaced more than 84,000 people, doubling the number of those driven from their homes this year. Last year, at least 440,500 were displaced, five times more than in 2020, the UN said.