Darfur Background

Together we can end the genocide in Sudan.

Entire villages bombed and destroyed; countless women and young girls raped; humanitarian aid blocked; hundreds of thousands murdered and more than 2.7 million civilians displaced — this is the climate of impunity that continues today in Darfur, a region in Western Sudan. Today, Darfur is the site of an ongoing genocide and an immense humanitarian crisis.

Darfuri survivors have horrible stories to tell. This account comes from Amnesty International’s report Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War: “There was also another rape on a young single girl aged 17: M. was raped by six men in front of her house in front of her mother. M’s brother, S., was then tied up and thrown into [the] fire.”

Since February 2003, the Sudanese government and its proxy Janjaweed militias have executed a campaign of mass murder, mass rape, forced starvation, and cultural decimation against Darfur’s civilians. More than 400,000 people have been killed. Millions are now either displaced within their own country or cling to life as refugees in Chad and the Central African Republic. The World Food Program estimates that millions need daily food aid in order to survive.

In July 2004, Congress unanimously declared that the situation in Darfur constituted genocide. The White House followed with its own official genocide determination in September 2004.

The Obama administration and a large majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress support a multinational protection force to stop the genocide. But words haven’t translated into real action yet. There is still no effective civilian protection presence in Darfur.

In July 2007, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1769, which authorized the deployment of 26,000 peacekeepers to Western Sudan. While this development offered a glimmer of hope to the people of Darfur, the resulting peacekeeping force has had to deal with a host of heavy challenges and crippling limitations. Among other things, UN peacekeepers in Western Sudan lack the helicopters and weaponry that they need in order to adequately protect Darfuri civilians, and they are brazenly and repeatedly denied entry into afflicted areas by the Sudanese government.

Western Sudan is home to the world’s largest humanitarian operation. Forced to work in an incredibly volatile environment, aid agencies in Darfur have repeatedly warned that they are hanging on a thread: if the delivery of humanitarian aid in Darfur is ever completely shuttered, then hundreds of thousands more will die from conditions of forced starvation and disease.

For more info on the Darfur genocide, see this backgrounder by the Genocide Intervention Network.
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