Darfur: Thinking the Unthinkable

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Darfur is a victim of what appears to be natural law.  Every government and every bureaucrat and every ideologue wants to amass and consolidate power.  This conflicts with the demonopolization of economic and political power on behalf of the universal right of self-determination both by individuals and by the communities with which they identify. 

  The Sudan should never have been created, any more than should have been Iraq.  For a century, the British deliberately pitted the “Southerners” against the “Northerners” in order to counter any common movement against British imperialism.  In 1969, when I was an amateur expert on the then current genocides in Sudan and in Nigeria as Special Assistant to Deputy Secretary Elliot Richardson in the State Department, responsible for liaison with the NSC, the war in the artificial State of Sudan between the peoples of the South, descendents of an ancient empire, Anzania, with a strong sense of identity (though split by three major tribal groups) was engineered by Israeli intelligence and paid for by the CIA.  The old British policy was to pit the “Black Africans” against the Arabs all across northern Africa.  The Israelis introduced a new grand strategy of pitting the Christians and traditionalists (known in Washington as the “Animists”) against the Muslims all across Africa.

  Darfur does not fit into either the old imperialist strategy or the religious strategy of recent decades, because the people of Darfur are all “black” and all Muslims.  Here the issue is a very simple one of self-determination of a nation against the modern state, which increasingly may be the focus of global conflict during most of the current century.  Many Sudanese who are loyal to the Sudan oppose the imposition of central control in order to protect the State of Sudan if it requires warfare.  The only solution to the Darfur genocide, if it is not too late to make a difference, is immediate withdrawal of the Arab forces from the north and immediate withdrawal of support from their favorite thugs.  Just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the only options for the Darfurians are to kill each other to gain favor with the Khartoum government’s mission of stability at any cost or to kill each other in order to block any of their own factions from imposing its own central control.

  Unfortunately, this pluralist analysis of solutions to many of the conflicts in the world today is controversial because it threatens the African States in OAS and every country in the United Nations, none of whom really want to help the Darfurians, nor do they want to help the United States in its campaign against the State of Sudan.  There is no solution from outside.  The only solution is General Omar Bashir’s declaration that Darfur is no longer part of the Sudan.  I know him personally and my conclusion is that such a bold step would be possible only through a coup in Khartoum.  This was the solution for the three provinces of the South, though the Darfur debacle has led to increased nationalist (tribal?) extremism of the Khartoum government, which may spill over into a continuation of the war between the North and the South that has been waged off and on, mostly on, for half a century.

  Equally unfortunately, the talk by Israelis and Christians about a shoah in Darfur is perhaps not exaggerated, but it is designed primarily to serve the interests of Israeli extremists in their war against Arabs and Muslims as a means to justify their dream of eventually expelling all Arabs from Eretz Israel.  Some observers may consider this assessment to be paranoid, but in fact it is merely a grand strategy of common sense for those who have long been quite open about their basic premises.