How to govern Darfur?

Morton, James

Abstract

In 1934, William Luce went on his first ever trek as Assistant District Commissioner, Nyala. A young man, he was looking for good horses, and he was keen to shoot his first lion. But there was business to attend to as well. South-east of Idd al Ghanam, he spent two days in lengthy talks with a group of „discontented Gimr chiefs‟. The chiefs were complaining about their omda - the next rank up in the hierarchy through which the colonial government ruled Darfur under the system known as Native Administration – and they had sworn that they would no longer serve under him. The meeting followed a common pattern.1 The chiefs‟ complaints were heard, not very sympathetically. Some of the omda‟s worst misdemeanours were corrected, and the chiefs were allowed to name a „chief of chiefs‟, to represent them separately at the Tribal Court. At the same time, they were threatened with prison if they continued to refuse the omda‟s leadership. To reinforce the message, the meeting was followed by a demonstration of machine-gun firepower against a mock „Dervish Village‟. The dummy dervishes were riddled with bullets, their water pots exploded noisily and their tukls, or grass huts, went up in flames. „Wallahi, hukuma shadida‟, was the public verdict: „By God, the Government is strong.‟ 2 This episode summed up the colonial answer to the question „how to govern Darfur?‟: with a combination of listening and compromise, backed up with a crude but credible threat of overwhelming force. The aim of this paper is to look at how the question has been answered at different times during Darfur's history, in the hope that this may lead to some ideas about how it might be answered in the present day. My starting point is that the current situation in Darfur is not solely, or even largely, the result of exploitation, injustice and political struggle. Instead, the most important factor has been the Sudanese state‟s failure to find an effective form of regional government. My end point is more worrying: that neither the Government of Sudan nor the international community have a clear idea of what their answer to the question of my title might be, or how it might be implemented.

Citation

Morton, J. (2011). How to govern Darfur?

• Publication Date: 2011
• Deposit Date: Aug 16, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 16, 2016
• Series Title: Durham Middle East Papers; Sir William Luce Fellowship Paper
• Publisher URL: http://www.dur.ac.uk/sgia/imeis/lucefund/