Prunier’s war appetite
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By Magdi El Gizouli
May 7, 2012 — Gérard Prunier, the prominent French historian of East
Africa, published a piece in the New York Times on 5 May under the
title ‘In Sudan: Give War a Chance’ reposted on Sudan Tribune. Prunier
presented his readers with a Rwandan history of Sudan as it were. In
his mind the ills of Sudan stem from an essential racial conflict
between Arabs and Africans, one that that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace
Agreement (CPA) could not resolve since only religion was considered
in its fashioning. The CPA, wrote Prunier, “was signed by only two
sides: the Muslim north and the Christian south. That left fully
one-third of the Sudanese people - the African Muslims - without a
political leg to stand on”.
>From this premise Prunier arrived at the conclusion that the way ahead
is to support the African Muslim rebels fighting the government in
alliance with the southern Christians. “War is a tragic affair, but
the brave Sudanese men who have chosen it as a last resort deserve to
be allowed to find their own way toward a Sudanese Spring, even if it
is a violent one”, he opined. What Prunier is advocating for, without
reservations, is a race war where the Sudanese fight it out to
redemption as Africans and Arabs. He, I suppose, would have the
privilege to observe, count the dead, and eventually publish a
bestseller.
Race has been and continues to be invoked by Khartoum’s rulers and
their rebel contenders in the Sudanese peripheries. It was exactly in
the terms that Prunier now advocates that the Khartoum regime
portrayed the confrontation with the Sudan People’s Liberation
Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in the 1983-2005 round of the Sudanese civil
war fought predominantly in southern Sudan but with lasting extensions
in the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile of northern Sudan, areas where
the SPLA/M found similarly aggrieved allies among the Nuba and the
Ingessena. The SPLA/M’s attempt to open a front in Darfur among the
Fur and the Masalit was not as successful. An invading SPLA force of
Dinka under the joint command of Abd al-Aziz al-Hilu, an ethnic
Maslati and the man who now leads the northern faction of the SPLA/M
in South Kordofan, and Dawoud Yahia Bolad, an ethnic Fur and
disaffected Islamist, was rapidly crushed by a force of locally
recruited Bani Halba in 1991. The invocation of race in Darfur
demonstrated its full wrath in the war that began in 2003.
What deserves investigation is not only the resort to race by rebel
groups seeking to solidify and extend their constituencies or by a
government threatened by an arc of rebellions but the brave resistance
of a critical mass of the Sudanese to the lure of racist mobilisation.
In Darfur, where racial polarization in northern Sudan proved most
devastating, the Rizeigat of South Darfur preferred to preserve the
peace with their Fur neighbours over Khartoum’s war commission, even
after rebel fighters of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) raided Dar
Rizeigat in 2004. Angered by the brazen defiance of the Rizeigat
nazir, Said Madibbu, Khartoum upgraded the sheikh of the neighbouring
Maaliya, traditionally a client of the Rizeigat chieftaincy, to the
rank of nazir in 2005. The government intervention empowered the
Maaliya to claim land ownership rights in areas that the Rizeigat
consider to be under lease to the Maaliya but ultimately their own.
What followed was a neglected chapter of Darfur’s ‘other war’ to use
Julie Flint’s depiction. The Rizeigat and the Maaliya, two peoples
that classify under Prunier’s Muslim Arabs, engaged in episodic deadly
raids until a settlement was reached between the two sides with
cynical government mediation in 2009.
The distinction between the readiness of the northern Rizeigat, the
landless camel nomads of northern Darfur, to serve Khartoum’s purposes
and the unwillingness of their kin, the southern Rizeigat, the
land-endowed cattle nomads of southern Darfur, to do the same might
appear to Prunier and those who share his views an insignificant
detail that does not disturb the race blueprint. To the Sudanese who
are ready to imagine a future beyond the determinacy of war it
bespeaks of the harsh political economy that underlies the country’s
incessant conflicts.
The author is a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He publishes
regular opinion articles and analyses at his blog Still Sudan. He can
be reached at [email protected]
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