The Sudan Handbook

238 thE sudan handbook

exile, 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, a

The 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).