The Racial War In Darfur - Michael Pappas

Mike P.

10C

The Racial War In Darfur

In 2003 genocide broke out in Darfur. Darfur is a state the size of France located in western Sudan and has a population of roughly six million people. After the genocide was finally finished it had claimed the lives of over 400,000 people and displaced more than two and a half million people. That is like all of the people in Nevada either being killed or displaced. The cause of the genocide was the Sudanese government’s discrimination of the black Arabs.

Despite the fact  that the vast majority of the Darfur is Muslim, they were still discriminated because of their skin color. A quote from the book Darfur Diaries states, “The government in Sudan takes care of some states and ignores others. . . The policy followed in Khartoum is not the same in Darfur.” (Marlow 35) When this man talks about how some states are ignored he is talking about Darfur and all those affected in it. The government used a task force called the Janjaweed to kill all of the non-Arabian Muslims in Darfur. They would hunt down and kill anybody who was not Arab. Men, women, and children all died at the hands of the Janjaweed.

                         

(Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images)

The killings were carried out systematically and Arabs who opposed the killings were killed as well. The Sudanese government tried to do the same thing that Hitler and the Nazi’s did sixty years prior. The racial cleansing carried out by the Sudanese government lasted many years and from what we know the killings are still going on today. This speaks to how the Sudanese government turned a blind eye to the entire situation after having been the ones who started it. Another quote from the book Darfur Diaries stood out to me, “Those talks with the government are not serious. The government is not giving correct information.” (Marlowe 48) This quote shows how the government acts like they are not responsible for the genocide going on even though they are the ones that instigated it.

Another tremendous problem facing the people of Darfur is that all fighting and conflict leaves millions of people homeless without a place to go. In Correspondence from Abroad by Gerald Martone a passage states, "1 million people have been uprooted, and more than 130,000 have fled to neighboring Chad." This quote shows how even if you are not killed or raped in Darfur, you can be affected by having to flee your home, village, or country entirely.

(www.ncpublicschools.org)

We are not entirely sure what goes on in Darfur because most of Sudan is closed off and not much documentation can be made as to what goes on inside, but from what we hear from most peoples accounts we can be pretty sure that racially fueled killings still go on not only in Darfur but all over Sudan. Although the government still keeps silent about what really happened and continues to go on the problem still affects millions of people all over the state of Sudan, there is still hope for the refugees that reside in Chad to stay safe from the Janjaweed and the Sudanese government that has betrayed them.

Hopefully sometime in the near future the conflict can be fully resolved, people can get back to where they lived, and people can finally start to begin putting their lives back together and the world can move on from this ordeal. Hopefully this will never happen again anywhere, even though every time we say that it seems to happen again.

(pictures.salem-news.com)