Word: darfur
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...Among Darfur's displaced, Ahmed's story is a familiar one. Over the past five years, in countless villages across the region, civilians have borne the brunt of a war between government-backed militias known as janjaweed and rebels. Some 200,000 people are dead from violence, hunger and disease, and 2.5 million more are displaced. Although the conflict has no clear ethnic or religious lines, the janjaweed hail from nomadic tribes that identify themselves as Arab, and the rebels represent settled tribes usually labeled African. The plight of the Darfurians has received worldwide attention, with Hollywood stars like George...
...Darfur the days of moral clarity, of easily identifiable good guys and bad guys, are long gone. Ahmed is a Maharia, an Arab--the overwhelming majority of whom take no part in the war. And the men who attacked his village are African rebels who rose up against oppression but also mete it out themselves. The Darfur conflict today bears little resemblance to the one that seized international attention four years ago. The rebels are splintered into as many as 20 competing factions; groups of janjaweed militias, dissatisfied with the rewards promised by the government, are crossing sides to join...
...rivals rather than protecting the civilians they claim to represent. Alliances form, only to break again, often for no greater reason than the personal ambitions of their leaders and the inevitable clashes they provoke. "It's like a play," says Azzedine Zerual, a project director with unicef in north Darfur. "'You are my friend today, but you will be my enemy tomorrow.' Maybe in a month they'll be friends again, and then enemies...
...splintering among rebels and janjaweed is undermining international efforts to end the conflict. Military solutions are proving futile: the 9,000-odd U.N. and African Union peacekeepers currently in Darfur have failed to stanch the violence, and the planned deployment of 17,000 more has been delayed by Sudanese-government intransigence, insufficient troop contributions and a lack of equipment--notably helicopters, a critical component when policing a region almost the size of Texas. Attempts to get the warring parties to negotiate a settlement have gone nowhere. The rebels' goals vary wildly, and their personalities are prickly. "You can't have...
Sudan's killing fields have grown. Fighting along Darfur's western border has spilled into Chad, where a separate civil war is brewing, and rebel attacks against Chinese-run oil fields and Sudanese police garrisons in the neighboring region of Kordofan threaten to push the war eastward. The rebels say the attacks against China's assets are justified by Beijing's support for the Sudanese regime. But while China has since exerted some limited pressure on Khartoum to resolve its crises, the rebel raids could serve only to expand the theater of hostilities...