by Kallie Szczepanski

Created on: April 16, 2008

Over the past six years, between 200,000 and 400,000 Sudanese civilians have died in Darfur. As a many as 2.5 million have been displaced, either to refugee camps in neighboring countries, or to other regions of Sudan.

THE GENOCIDE

The conflict is due primarily to shifting climate patterns, which have decreased the already scanty amount of rain that falls in Sudan each year. Land that was once barely suitable for nomadic tribes to raise herds of goats, camels, and other livestock has now become part of the desert. Areas that once supported crops are now only good for pasture. Nonetheless, the human population has continued to grow. As with the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, lack of suitable land and falling income is the real driver of what the news media often calls "ethnic tension."

Sudan's population is a complex mixture of different ethnic backgrounds and religions. Along the Nile Valley, the most developed section of the country, most inhabitants are from the so-called "Arab tribes," nomadic Moslems of Nilotic/Turkic descent. The "Arabs" received the bulk of attention from the British colonial government, and continue to control the government in Khartoum.

In the south and east of the country live tribes of Christian and animist African peoples, against whom the government fought the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005). To the west, in Darfur, live settled tribes of Moslem Africans such as the Fur and the Zaghawa. They are primarily agriculturalists, growing grains such as millet and sorghumthat is, they were farmers, until the rains stopped. In media accounts, they are usually referred to as the "Africans."

The government-backed Arabic militias called "janjaweeds" have spent the last six years trying to drive the so-called African farmers off of the land, so they can take it for their own herds. They have been largely successful, too. The janjaweeds' combination of brutal systematic rape, torture, and killings has convinced most of the surviving Africans to flee. In fact, today the main fighting isn't between the Arabs and the Africans; most of the Africans live in camps in neighboring Chad and Central African Republic. These days, most conflict is between different factions within the janjaweeds, as they divvy up the land they've taken.

THE CONSEQUENCES

The consequences of the genocide in Darfur will be numerous and catastrophic. Short of a massive international effort, far greater than any that has been put forward to date, the 2.5 million refugees are unlikely

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