238 thE sudan handbookexile, relying on his once strong but slowly eroding reputation amongst
hundreds of thousands of Fur IDPs to maintain a role as a key actor in
Darfur. The JEM makes up for its limited popularity and its narrow ethnic
base in a few Zaghawa clans by more enterprising military exploits. In
May 2008, the movement launched a lightning raid on Khartoum from
the Chadian border. Recalling a similar attempt in the 1970s by Sadiq
al-Mahdi to depose Jaafar Nimeiri in an attack mounted from Libya, the
JEM attack was a military failure but a success in political and media
terms. By bringing the war to the centre of the country, the JEM gained
national standing. After the raid it rallied a number of factions, mostly
from the SLA. The ‘new JEM’, which is supposed to have shelved any
traces of Islamist ideology, has enlarged its base considerably and had
in its ranks not only Zaghawa from all clans, but also Masalit and Arabs
from Darfur and Kordofan, some of whom are former janjawid. In late
2009 and early 2010, though, there was a sudden rapprochement between
the governments of Chad and Sudan. JEM was deprived of its rear-bases
and its main source of vehicles, arms and money, its troops had to go back
to Darfur and its leader, Dr Khalil Ibrahim, was expelled to Libya. Never-
theless JEM remains the most prominent rebel movement in Darfur.
The war in Darfur is an evolving conflict. It has given rise to mass
killing and displacement on a vast scale, but the intensity of the killing,
culminating between mid-2003 and mid-2004, has considerably decreased
since then. Mortality statistics have been the subject of dispute. In
October 2004, the United Nations released a figure of 70,000 deaths
from hunger and disease between March and September 2004. It was
based on mortality studies carried out by the World Health Organiza-
tion in a few IDP camps during a three-month period (June to August
2004), and a survey conducted by the Coalition for International Justice
of around a thousand refugees in Chad at the same time. By relying on
these somewhat limited studies, the WHO arrived at average mortality
figure of 10,000 deaths per month. In March 2005, the United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) used this
average to estimate a total of 180,000 deaths since September 2003, aThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors figure obtained simply by re-multiplying these 10,000 deaths per month
(www.riftvalley.net).