Mick Hartley

Darfur seems to have dropped out of the news recently. Perhaps because the fighting's now largely in the past: all the objectives of the government have been achieved. Here's Bernard-Henri Lévy (via ALDaily):

My first conclusion was and still is that we should stop speaking of the crisis of Darfur or even the war in Darfur. It is not a crisis. It is not a war. A war presupposes of course a frontline, presupposes organized battles, and presupposes, even more, two real armies. It is not a war between two armies. It is a war by an army against civilian populations. It is not a civil war, it is a war against civilians.

Of course, you have in Darfur, and in the areas I visited, some guerillas. I could enter [Sudan], I could smuggle myself in thanks to them. But they are so poorly equipped, they are so poorly armed, that they cannot be called an army. Not at all. I saw one battalion, for example, composed of 200 men, young men, not children. They had 5 mortars, they had 3 rocket launchers—very few weapons. They had some cars, which they took from the army in France. These cars had so little fuel, too little fuel to go, so that when they tried to go to the battle, when a few days before my arrival they tried to repel an assault, they had to push the cars to the frontline because of the shortage of fuel. I also saw these guerillas trying however they could to protect what remains of the population of Darfur. I saw this guy with a machine gun and, around his neck, a big, impressive—I don’t know how you call that—a sort of cartouche we say in French.

When I went closer, what was in the cartouche, one out of four holes held a bullet. Three out of four were empty and filled with little papers like this one which were verses of the Quran [which] replaced the bullet. So please, not a civil war. A war against civilians, whom these guys try to protect with their poor equipment. My second conclusion, which I drew from this journey, is that we should get rid of at least … part of the myth of the Janjaweed. There are a lot of big stories about the Janjaweed, these horsemen of the devil, ill-equipped themselves, arriving in the villages burning the huts, spreading fear, like in the Middle Ages. What I saw is not exactly that. I saw huge holes in the ground, craters from bombs which were the result of a bombing. Not of a horseman, but a plane, which flew over the area a few days before my arrival. This is not Janjaweed. This is a real bomber. What everybody told me is that these Janjaweed when they arrive, generally in lorries, in trucks, they are commanded by people in uniforms or have uniforms that happen to belong to the Sudanese Army. […]

…the decision for genocide, the planned decision to eradicate, to exterminate a people is never known in real time. It is never announced on CBS News or in AFP. As you know, the conference of Wannsee, where the final solution against the Jews was decided, was only made known long afterwards. So I will not enter into that. What I must say, what I want to say today in this opening session of the PEN Festival is that I traveled five or six hundred kilometers and in that vast area I hardly found a trace of human life. Sometimes I did not even find a trace of human death; even the dead had been violated. The traces of these villages, which you see here, had been erased, a sort of scorched earth, a policy of scorched earth in huge dimensions, which I, frankly, never saw to this extent. I was in Burundi, I was in Rwanda, I was in Angola, in the worst areas of the war between the MPLA and the seven big groups; I was in South Sudan 7 years ago with John Garang whom I interviewed for Le Monde (and The New Republic I think too). I went to the Nuba Mountains in the center of South Sudan. There, too, I saw some mass murders. But this extent, this burnt earth, this complete devastation, this will to eradicate even the [least] trace of human life, I must confess that I [haven't] often seen it—maybe never.

Another thing which I never saw to this extent (and which makes the polemic about genocide completely outrageous and frivolous) is the impossibility of giving the real number of dead. Nobody knows if it is 200,000 dead, the number which has been given on and on for years, if it is, which is my evaluation, closer to 300,000 or 350,000; some human rights organizations—serious ones—say 400,000, maybe 500,000. From 200,000 to 500,000—nobody being able to decide which is the right figure? Which means that there might be in Darfur hundreds of thousands of children, women, men, raped, killed, burnt without any memory, without any inscription anywhere, without graves, without a face, without a name, without a number.