A week after the bombings that forced aid workers to evacuate, the Sudanese village of Tawilla experienced more bloodshed Wednesday in attacks that claimed at least 15 civilian lives. The Sudan News reported the village skirmishes appear to be retaliation against recent attacks by Sudan Liberation Army rebels.
Violence of this magnitude has become tragically commonplace in the African nation of nearly 40 million. Various reports estimate the number of those displaced to be between 1.6 and 1.8 million, along with another 70,000 killed in attacks or dead from hunger.
While it is the western desert region of Darfur that is currently embroiled in fierce fighting between rebel groups and government forces, according to Sharon Hutchinson, professor of anthropology at UW-Madison, the conflict is closely related to brutal struggles in the southern portion of Sudan. In 2003, after 20 years of civil strife, African resistance movements including the Sudan People's Liberation Army and government-sponsored Arab militias had navigated the peace process and established tenuous ceasefire agreements, with the aid of United States diplomacy.
\The U.S. government was holding out to the government of Sudan certain carrots: 'If you sign this peace [agreement], we'll do things for you,'"" Hutchinson said, adding in exchange for compliance with the accord, the U.S. would remove Sudan from the State Department list of countries accused of sponsoring terrorism. In addition, American firms would be allowed to invest in Sudan, lifting sanctions established in 1997. Once altercations began in Darfur in Feburary 2003, talks between the SPLA and the Sudanese government disintegrated.
Both President Bush and outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to the deaths in Darfur as genocide, marking the first time high-ranking American officials have labeled the ongoing crisis, according to UW-Madison political science Professor Scott Straus.
""After the declaration, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing Kofi Annan to establish a commission of inquiry into whether or not genocide is occurring within Darfur, and that commission is currently investigating,"" Straus said.
Straus, who studied the genocide in Rwanda during the mid-1990s, drew a distinction between the differing situations in the two nations.
""In Rwanda, there was a kind of organized extermination campaign that in the course of 100 days, at least half a million civilians were killed. Rwanda was a very rapid, very intensive genocide,"" Straus stated. ""In Darfur, the violence has been a much slower motion kind of violence, and has entailed both specific killing of men and the displacement of large populations of people from a particular ethnic category.""
Associate professor of history at Duke University Janet Ewald acknowledged tensions in Darfur were not beyond resolution, though the divisions between northern and southern Sudan are too deep for hope of reconciliation.
""The ultimate solution has to be a democratic government in Sudan that attends to political representation and equitable distribution of wealth in the country,"" Ewald said.
""We tend to forget that every 100 years nation states such as Germany or France or England were actually quite diverse within their own borders ... diversity doesn't necessarily undermine democracy, he said.""
