Monday 23 November 2009

The War in Darfur: The Resource Dimension

Latest Darfur paper: The War in Darfur: the Resource Dimension

Presented by Mohamed Suliman at a conference at the American University in Cairo on the 5th of April 2008

In 1983, at the height of the Sahel drought of 1982/84, skirmishes over land erupted between the farmers of Jebel Marra and the pastoralists of northern Darfur. Bad leadership at local, provincial and central government levels allowed the skirmishes to escalate to an armed conflict. A number of objective and subjective factors, one prominent of which was the closeness of the Libyan/Chadian war, helped in spiralling this deterioration. In 2003, war erupted and still continues in Darfur. In the process, skirmishes over land have become a war about identity; Sudanese of Arab origin are fighting against Sudanese of African origin. This remarkable transformation of a resource conflict into an ethnic war seems to be characteristic of many armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel region. Let a resource conflict endure and escalate and you end up with an identity war!
Read More

No comments: