240 thE sudan handbookIDP camps to ‘concentration camps’. Rebels and displaced civilians alike
are increasingly presenting themselves as ‘Africans’ and stigmatizing their
enemies as ‘genocidaires’. The internationalization of the war may have
produced irreversible changes of political consciousness among Darfuris.
The complexities and accommodations between different groups that
characterized an earlier era of Darfuri life may now be irrecoverable.
Back in Brejing refugee camp on the Chadian border, the ‘Orchestra
of the Dawn of Free Darfur’ is still performing. Someone in the crowd
brandishes a portrait of Omar al-Bashir, superimposed on the body of a
hyena. The crowd jeers. And Abdallah Idris sings:
Omar Bashir has armed the janjawid who have killed our wives,
He’s a butcher of human beings,
He has brought the horseriders, the janjawid.
The guys riding horses, your father will go to The Hague!
Our revolution says: all criminals should go to justice.
Darfur file is in the Hague, now. Be patient, don’t escape,
no escape!
Omar Bashir, you’re blind, you opened your eyes when the issue
arrived at the International Criminal Court.
Our problem is ethnic cleansing and genocide.Recommended Reading
Daly, Martin. Darfur’s Sorrow: A History of Destruction and Genocide. Cambridge:
University Press, 2007.
De Waal, Alex (ed.). War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, Global Equity
Initiative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Doornbos, Paul. ‘On becoming Sudanese’, in Sudan: State, Capital and
Transformation, edited by Barnett, Tony and Abdelkarim, Abbas. London:
Croom Helm, 1988: 99–120.
Flint, Julie and de Waal, Alex. Darfur: A New History of a Long War. London:
Zed Books, 2008. O’Fahey, Rex Sean. The Darfur Sultanate. London: Hurst and
Co, 2008.
Prunier, Gérard. Darfur: An Ambiguous Genocide. London: Hurst and Co, 2005.
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors
(www.riftvalley.net).