An African struggle: the campaign to protect Darfur is growing steadily across Africa. Dismas Nkunda—one of its founders—finds hope there

New Internationalist, June, 2007 by Dismas Nkunda

In 2003 I knew little about what or even where Darfur was. Then I met Abdelbagi Jibril, a Darfurian human rights advocate. 'Bagi', as we now fondly call him, is a quiet man, almost shy. Yet the agony of what was being done to his home weighed too much on him. He tried to tell whoever had ears, but no-one seemed to listen.

At a meeting of the Africa Commission in The Gambia, Bagi explained that a place in Sudan was being utterly ignored; yet very serious human rights violations were being committed. Did he mean Southern Sudan, I wondered, where a civil war had been raging for 20 years?

No, he said. There was another place, called Darfur. And it was bleeding. He talked of hundreds systematically murdered, thousands forced to flee, properties stolen and homes razed to the ground. He spoke of young girls being gang raped and of men and boys maimed. The clincher, though, was that this was a Government-sponsored campaign.

Rwanda rerun

Bagi's story touched a nerve with me. As a reporter covering the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the similarities brought my past experiences flooding back.

It was in April 1994 that Rwanda fell apart. In Darfur it was April 2003. I remembered the dead bodies that littered the paths, hill tops, gardens and rivers in Rwanda, and the militias called Interahamwe that killed and raped with no remorse.

After Rwanda came a period of reflection. Ashamed of its inaction as a million people were being slaughtered, the world swore 'never again'. Was history now repeating itself?

When Darfur exploded it was just as ferocious--only it did not capture the same media attention. There were few pictures of the dead, no images of the thousands of malnourished children. The Sudanese Government kept a tight lid on Darfur in an apparent attempt to fool the world. But as we say in Africa: 'Blood smells far and wide.'

That is why a group of African human rights advocates decided to put Darfur where it needed to be; on everyone's lips. We founded The Darfur Consortium, a campaign born out of a deep conviction that the international response had been utterly inadequate, and that a coalition of Africa-focused organizations might be able to get some much-needed political movement.

As we began the campaign, different players' engagement with the conflict was fragmented, polarized and deeply politicized. Left-wing conspiracy theories were playing into the hands of the Sudanese Government: the conflict was exaggerated, they suggested; it was an economic war, and the West's real interest was in Sudan's vast oil and mineral riches. In post 9/11 geopolitics, the US and Britain were in the dock over their true agendas.

On the other hand, China and Russia remained cagey, and the Arab world empathized openly with Khartoum. They saw Sudan--a 'brotherly Arab country'--as fighting an insurrection that was supported by the West.

This highly charged political climate was obscuring the realities on the ground and jeopardizing an effective international response. For example, in late 2004 the US accused the Government of Sudan of the crime of genocide after conducting an investigation among Darfurian refugees in Chad. But quick and explicit rejection of this charge by both the African Union (AU) and the Arab League gave the unhelpful impression that the assessment was politically motivated and thus not to be taken seriously.

Pan-African campaigning

From the start we acknowledged the complexity of the Darfur conflict: it is misleading to describe it as pitting 'Arabs' against 'Black Africans' or as simply arising from tension between pastoralists and farmers. There is a deep-rooted discrimination and marginalization at the heart of the crisis.

We worked closely with Darfurian and Sudanese activists to ensure a credible basis on which we could speak, while avoiding antagonistic, overly politicized and simplistic positions. And as a pan-African coalition we were uniquely able to bring together Arab North African and sub-Saharan African perspectives.

We decided to root our case in existing international humanitarian law. Our initial focus was on the role the AU needed to play. Established in 2001, it was a new organization, a reconfiguration of the old Organization of African Unity (OAU). It seemed more progressive, less inhibited by the political interference that had made the work of the OAU difficult. The protection of human rights had been made an organizational objective, and the right to intervene in 'grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity' was enshrined in its constitution. As the AU was playing a leading role in the Darfur crisis, brokering the political negotiations and deploying ceasefire monitoring troops on the ground, clearly African civil society had an opportunity to make a vital contribution.

However, the Consortium's mix of member organizations--some of them international--meant we could also reach non-African hearts. By March 2005 the Consortium was simultaneously conducting a sustained campaign at the UN Security Council in New York, monitoring the shifting AU position from Abuja and Addis Ababa, pressing the Arab League summit in Algiers and undertaking advocacy with governments and missions in Geneva, London, Khartoum and Cairo.