On April 30, thousands gathered in Washington, DC to draw attention to the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

(photo: Christopher Leise)

Buried deep within Microsoft Word, the word-processing program, there’s a type of history, a not-so-secret cultural memory that indicates those things that do and those that do not appear in the collective mind of American English and the majority of those that speak it. The program has a built-in, spell-as-you-go mechanism that highlights, with an underscored red squiggle, words and names it thinks its users have misspelled.

An example: Auschwitz deservedly passes spelling muster, though it is a German name. Tod, the German word for death, is greeted with a stern, squiggly reprisal. Microsoft Word is ignorant of Germany’s general expression of death but knows one of its most specific, horrific examples. This is not to suggest that Microsoft’s program is a metaphor for the American public consciousness—more to the point, it shows in concrete terms what the American consciousness contains.

So, who should be surprised that the name Darfur is greeted with red, squiggly suspicion? Word doesn’t recognize the name: How many Americans do? Darfur is not in the news like the rising gas prices are, or the hockey playoffs are, or Brangelina’s baby is—though Microsoft Word is as suspicious of Brangelina as it is of Darfur. Though an estimated 400,000 humans have died in Darfur since 2003, and millions have been displaced from their homeland, NBC and CBS reportedly spent a total of eight minutes—together—in 2004 covering western Sudan. During June 2005, CBS aired 614 spots on the Michael Jackson trial and none on Sudan’s state-sponsored genocide. In the face of this widespread media neglect—from which there are exceptions, notably Nicholas Kristof’s work in the New York Times—how is anyone supposed to know?

According to estimates, some 10 people died in Darfur during the minute and a half it took to read this article’s introduction. Ten humans that were shot, or raped or castrated and then killed, or starved, or killed by an illness that wouldn’t make most of us miss a day of work. These atrocities follow from a complex history of neglect and manipulation of the western region of a Sudanese nation ruled primarily by the North and preoccupied, at least through the 1980s and 1990s, with a rebellious South.

Three weeks ago, Americans from all political parties; from all races, religions and creeds; celebrities, statesmen and starstruck alike; met on the National Lawn facing Capitol Hill to discuss, disclose and hopefully un-dismiss the genocide that has been ongoing in Sudan since 2003. Amongst the rally’s supporters were Barak Obama, the senator from Illinois, the Reverend Al Sharpton and former NBA star Manut Bol. Another was George Clooney.

(A note: Barak, Obama, Sharpton, Manut and Bol all appear up as misspells in Microsoft Word: neither George nor Clooney does.)

Darfur’s genocide is not a simple issue—the best literature on the topic openly admits that not all of the problem makes sense.

It’s clear that Sudan has been a violent place for a long time: 2000 brought the end of a civil war that lasted more than two decades, a conflict between the North and South of Sudan that cost more than three million lives.

In many respects, the current tragedy is the legacy of Turko-Egyptian and British post-colonialism. Prior to this time, Darfur was an independent political entity—and fairly wealthy. Though mostly Islamic since the 17th century, Darfur had a generally secular government, with fairly open intermarriage between the indigenous Africans and the migrated Arabs. As colonialism redefined political Africa, Darfur became absorbed into modern-day Sudan.

Presently, Sudan is ruled by two groups: so-called “riverine” tribes that are relative newcomers, inasmuch as they settled around the country’s current capital, Khartoum, as late as the 19th century. They were able to curry favor with the British and were handed control of the country—as well as control of the military resources—when the British left. So, according to estimates, these riverine tribes, so called because they settled near the Nile River, have almost complete control over the Sudanese people and resources, though they only make up roughly six percent of the population. This has not sat well with the many groups that feel under-represented.

The North-South war of the 1980s and 1990s was an expression of this discontentment: “African” and Christian groups sought a more secular state government and increased distribution of power and resources. Meanwhile, as the Sudanese government’s attention was focused southward, war between Libya and Chad—carried out under the banner of Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi’s vision of pan-Arabism in Northeast Africa—embroiled the Darfur region into a conflict that had nothing to do with itself. However, Khartoum allowed the Libyan army to use Darfur as a staging ground for attacks against eastern Chad in exchange for military resources in its continuing campaign against the Southern Christian/“African” uprising. In the melees between Libya and Chad, battles spilled across borders, increasing tensions between “African” and “Arab” Darfuri. In addition, famine struck, making an already poor area disastrously short on resources. The semi-nomadic “Arab” herders were forced into competition with the more settled “African” farmers for the increasingly scarce grasslands and water supplies, further driving a wedge between peoples that historically paid little attention to their putative racial distinction.

This distinction is crucial precisely because it is blurred. “Arabs” have populated Darfur as far back as the 14th century. There were several substantial movements of Arab peoples up until the 19th century. But, naturally, in between there was interaction between the tribes that has created mixed lineages. According to most reports, these Sudanese, whether “African” or “Arab” by claim to descent, are deeply related.

In Darfur, there’s a saying that translates roughly into “conflict creates origins.” This means that racial affiliations are often redrawn according to each new conflict. Tribal feuds have always occurred in the region, and alliances between groups had previously found “Africans” and “Arabs” on the same sides. What makes the issue doubly complicated is that these people look alike and share similar beliefs. Despite some popular conceptions, including Internet-fueled accounts, this is genocide of Muslims, perpetrated by Muslims. And while it has been characterized as “Arabs” against “Africans” or “blacks,” the persecutors—that is, the Sudanese government by air and the Janjaweed (roughly: “evil horsemen”) militias on horseback—look like their targets and pray to the same god. Moreover, they largely share similar bloodlines.

These perceived racial differences were recently inflamed by the Sudanese government in the name of retaining power. Again, the riverine tribes make up only a very small segment of the population, but are the most insistent on racial considerations in the stratification of power. They, too, self-identify as “Arab,” but do so according to a sense of inferiority within world politics. These riverine Arabs are, at best, distant cousins from their Arab neighbors across the Red Sea, and are largely treated as such, though they long for greater respect. Their fierce insistence on racial terms stems from the desire to perpetuate the perception, both in Sudan and globally, that Sudan is an Arab nation with African backwaters in the South and West.

Thus, the Darfuri have been denied access to political power and resources throughout the history of modern Sudan. As peace accords were being reached between the North and the South, the West began to rebel, insisting upon representation in Khartoum. In an almost clichéd strategy of divide and conquer, the “riverine Arabs” insisted upon a largely imaginary kinship with the older “Arab” tribes in Darfur. Promised seemingly simple rewards for the extermination of “African” insurgents—like roads and useful irrigation—some “Arabs” began a campaign to wipe out the “African” population of Darfur.

With the help of the Sudanese government, mostly through bombing runs and helicopter missiles as well as arms, the Janjaweed, already armed with Libyan weapons, have been torching their enemies’ villages: raping and mutilating as they can, while poisoning water supplies with pesticides. Millions of “African” refugees have fled to safer, but un-arable camps—that is, desert land with barely adequate tents. They are “protected” by 7,000 African Union forces charged with ensuring the safety of a region the size of Texas and which houses a population of six million.

Meanwhile, the genocidal militias surround the refugee camps’ perimeters, raping and murdering those who stray too far from AU protection in efforts to collect food and firewood. As the summer approaches, many whom the Janjaweed do not kill directly will starve from the lack of food following yet another growing season away from tending their farmlands, which were meager to begin with. And many fear a very dry summer, which would likely lead to outright famine—again.

Up to 400,000 have been killed in less than three years, and up to three million internally displaced. And it’s going to get worse. At the time of this writing, a peace accord was reached between the Sudanese government and the main Darfuri rebel force. But the region remains highly volatile, and there is little evidence that the peace deal has made any real impact on the safety of the region. Meanwhile, domestic hot-button issues such as immigration law reform, rising gas prices and Bush administration shakeups monopolize the media day. And so, the hand-scrawled “Not on my watch” penned by President Bush in the margin of an early memo on the rising crisis in Darfur remains just that—a marginal concern.

Hence, groups like SaveDarfur.org, Human Rights Watch and many faith-based and secular groups converged for the April 30 rally, in which the messages were simple and clear. Claiming repeatedly that this is the world’s first opportunity to engage in and arrest a genocidal campaign as it is happening, the numerous speakers appealed to an empty Capitol building and—as it seemed to this reporter—a very distant White House, to put pressure on the UN and NATO, as well as individual European governments, to assemble a peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. The crowd of thousands worked to keep Sudanese politics a secondary consideration and life-saving efforts far to the fore.

There have been gains: Media coverage is up, and the UN passed a resolution backing the peace agreement with the promise of peacekeeping troops, provided Khartoum will accept their presence on Sudanese soil. But gains are not solutions. And peace deals do not necessarily bring peace—and when they do, rarely does peace come quickly. Though the April 30 rally in Washington, DC had a rock-concert air of enthusiasm, it will only have been efficacious if it is a beginning, rather than an end, of grass-roots organizing to pressure state and federal politicians.

Christopher Leise is a Ph.D. candidate in English at UB.