The crisis began in 2003 when the SLA/M and the JEM launched a series of attacks on government military installations. This caught the Sudanese Government by surprise. With few troops in the area and still heavily engaged in the civil war in the South, they responded by expanding and further arming the Arab militias commonly known as the Janjaweed and launching a campaign backed by the Sudanese military against non-Arab communities. Both Sudanese military forces and the Janjaweed, sometimes acting independently and sometimes in conjunction, have deliberately targeted non-Arab civilians in clear violation of international law. They are engaged in a campaign to destroy non-Arab communities in Darfur in an effort to undermine the rebel groups.
Four years later, civilians continue to suffer as the Sudanese government and their Janjaweed proxies restrict international humanitarian access, bomb and strafe civilian targets with aircraft, raze villages, abduct children, murder men and boys as potential rebels, and engage in a campaign of mass rape. Since the outbreak of hostilities in 2003, the crisis in Darfur has resulted in well over 200,000 largely civilian deaths, the displacement of more than two million people, and the suffering of millions more. The decision by the Government of Sudan to conduct ethnic cleansing as a counter-insurgency campaign has attracted significant international condemnation but relatively little action to date.
Following the signing of a provisional ceasefire in 2004 between the Government of Sudan and the two rebel groups, the African Union (AU) provided a small force to monitor that agreement. However, the AU force force lacks the needed equipment, numbers and experience and despite its best efforts has been unable to protect civilians and humanitarian aid workers in the face of intensifying violence.
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More then five years into the crisis in Darfur, insecurity continues to displace people, humanitarian operations are coming under attack, and a political settlement appears distant. Over 4.5 million people are now affected by the crisis, many of which depend on humanitarian assistance to survive. As the crisis continues, internally displaced persons (IDP) camps are reaching capacity. Furthermore, despite the presence of large-scale humanitarian efforts throughout Darfur, the UN announced that malnutrition rates among children rose throughout 2007, reaching the World Health Organization’s “emergency threshold” for the first time since 2004.
Rebel groups have continued to splinter, adding to the complexity of the crisis and increasing the number of confrontations on the ground. In late October 2007 peace talks opened in Libya. However, it quickly became evident that the talks would not be successful after key rebel groups did not attend and those who were present lacked a coherent set of demands. Lack of rebel unity will continue to obstruct the peace process unless efforts are taken to unify rebel groups.
Over the last year humanitarian aid workers increasingly found themselves under attack, thus jeopardizing the very operations that sustain so many people in Darfur. Insecurity has created a climate where humanitarian vehicles are hijacked, staffers are intimidated, assaulted, and in some cases even killed. Meanwhile, the perpetrators are rarely held accountable.
Some hope came with the deployment of the United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) in January 2008. Night patrols by UNAMID, which are aimed at increasing security in the face of armed militias, are being counted among the mission’s earliest successes. However, as of February, only 9,000 of the expected 26,000 troops had been deployed and the mission lacked key equipment, including helicopters. Furthermore, the restrictions imposed on UNAMID by the Sudanese government could jeopardize the success of the mission.
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