Darfur Crisis Is Not Simple Arab-African Conflict, Duke Historian Says

The situation in the Darfur region of the Sudan is not simply a conflict between two ethnic groups, but rather another chapter in the ongoing civil war in the Sudan, says a Duke University historian.

The 15 members of the United Nations Security Council were scheduled to hear a report Thursday on the situation in Sudan. More than 1.4 million people have fled their homes in what the United Nations earlier this year called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

"The conflict is being presented in many ways as Arab vs. African. That's very troubling," said Janet Ewald, an associate professor of history at Duke. "It doesn't have to do with any inherent animosity between Arabs and Africans."

Ewald is the author of a book on the Sudan, "Soldiers, Traders, and Slaves: State Formation and Economic Transformation in the Greater Nile Valley."

The central government, in an attempt to quash an uprising in the western part of the country, armed local militias, called "janjaweed," and exploited local tensions between farmers and herders, she said. But the real conflict is over representation in the central government and access to local land and water - “ not ethnicity or religion per se, she said.

"The government used the competition of local farmers and herders as a way to squelch a multi-ethnic movement based in Darfur and the protesting of regional inequality within the Sudan," Ewald said. "Muslims and non-Muslims, Arabs and Africans, people with different languages, have lived together in the past and can live together. But the autocratic central government coupled with competition over local resources can exacerbate ethnic and religious differences that were never very salient before."

She said the arguments over whether to label the Darfur situation a genocide are not as important as the international's community willingness to act.

"Whatever you call it, something needs to be done," she said.

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