Darfur's environmental crisis

There's so much bad news coming out of the Sudan that nothing new is really surprising, but the scarcity of resources is becoming more and more apparent, meaning a total environmental collapse is nearing.

Women wait as long as three days for water, using jerrycans to save their places in perpetual lines that snake around pumps. A year ago, residents could fill a 5-gallon plastic can in a few minutes, but lately the flow is so slow it takes half an hour.

Water isn't the only endangered resource. Forests were chopped down long ago, and the roots were dug up for firewood. Thousands of displaced families are living atop prime agricultural land, preventing nearby farmers from growing food.

In short, the land is dying. Without water, what arable land is left can't produce food. If and when this conflict ends, there will be nothing for many people to return to. Darfur is a prime example of a resource conflict, and world leaders need to take notice of that before it becomes a problem in their own lands.

We Aren't Doing Enough

From the WP:

President Bush said Thursday that he had considered unilaterally sending U.S. troops to Darfur to stop the mass slaughter in that Sudanese region but decided against it in favor of a multinational response that he conceded has been "slow" and "tedious."

Bush did not explain why he rejected U.S. military action and pointed instead to economic sanctions that he has imposed against Sudanese leaders and companies, saying he is "trying to be consequential." Aides said they believe it was the first time the president had so explicitly disclosed that he contemplated U.S. military action in the region...

The president acknowledged frustration with the U.N. effort to press the Sudanese to halt what the United States has called genocide. "This is a slow, tedious process to hold a regime accountable," Bush said. "We're trying to say that, you know, 'Change, or there's consequences.' " He added that he was encouraged by the latest report from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon about progress toward bolstering an African Union force of 7,000 soldiers with three times that many international peacekeepers.

On the last point - UN efforts have been frustrating to put it mildly - I agree with President Bush. Of course, the U.S. acting unilaterally by sending troops would be, due to the Iraq war, both a bad decision and is basically impossible anyway. We don't have any troops to send and it would spark a furor in the Muslim world. U.S. forces couldn't alone establish control anyway without international support.

However, the U.S. should be taking the lead in pushing other nations to take real action (which admittedly would be easier to do, again, if it weren't for Iraq). The genocide in Darfur has seen many as half a million people have died from disease and violence, thousands of women raped, and 2.5 million displaced since 2003 at the hands of Arab militias know as the Janjaweed who are backed by the government in Khartoum. Sanctions are not enough. President Bush should leveraging Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir daily to demand aerial bombings end completely and the institution of a no-fly zone, that humanitarian workers and investigators are permitted free movement in the region, and arms supplies to the Janjaweed are terminated. Furthermore, we should have an American envoy in the Chad-Sudan border at all times. Such sustained pressure shouldn't cease until the killing and rapes are stopped.

But again, this will only be effective if it is multilateral. Our government should continue to work with the United Nations to expand the U.N./African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur and give the forces a stronger mandate, including more generous logistical support. The Bush administration should forget its qualms with the International Criminal Court and use European help to urge the Security Council to refer those militia accused of looting, rape and murder for punishment. Lastly, the U.S. should work with China to set up a front on there end, as they have an oil trade deal with Sudan.

All will be much more likely to help with a broad, international coalition behind action in Darfur, and if no one else will take the lead in putting that together we should. God knows we need something to re-elevate our standing in the world after Iraq. The opportunity to do just that is there, and if President Bush wants to even remotely save his legacy, this would be a good place to start.

Water in Darfur

It bears remembering that wars that are analyzed in the context of politics, are sometimes in fact wars over scarce resources. This is no less true in Darfur (via War & Piece), something Nat-Wu has discussed previously in regards to an Atlantic Monthly article on that topic.

Darfur is a "Water War"

In at least one previous post of mine, I alluded to the idea that conflicts in the age of global warming could possibly be linked to the availability of water. Xanthippas put up an in-depth post about global warming's threat to the United States. Even so, I didn't expect to see the conflict in Darfur analyzed as a "water war". In this article in The Atlantic Monthly (subscription required), Stephan Faris makes a strong case for it.

In 2003, a rebellion began in Darfur—a reaction against Khartoum's neglect and political marginalization of the region. And while the rebels initially sought a pan-ethnic front, the schism between those who opposed the government and those who supported it broke largely on ethnic lines. Even so, the conflict was rooted more in land envy than in ethnic hatred. "Interestingly, most of the Arab tribes who have their own land rights did not join the government's fight," says David Mozersky, the International Crisis Group's project director for the Horn of Africa.

Why did Darfur's lands fail? For much of the 1980s and '90s, environmental degradation in Darfur and other parts of the Sahel (the semi-arid region just south of the Sahara) was blamed on the inhabitants. Dramatic declines in rainfall were attributed to mistreatment of the region's vegetation. Imprudent land use, it was argued, exposed more rock and sand, which absorb less sunlight than plants, instead reflecting it back toward space. This cooled the air near the surface, drawing clouds downward and reducing the chance of rain. "Africans were said to be doing it to themselves," says Isaac Held, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But by the time of the Darfur conflict four years ago, scientists had identified another cause. Climate scientists fed historical sea-surface temperatures into a variety of computer models of atmospheric change. Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. "This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing," says Columbia University's Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate.

If we don't do anything about climate change, we have more of this to look forward to.

De Waal was traveling through the dry scrub of Darfur, studying indigenous reactions to the drought that gripped the region. In a herders' camp near the desert's border, he met with a bedridden and nearly blind Arab sheikh named Hilal Abdalla, who said he was noticing things he had never seen before: Sand blew into fertile land, and the rare rain washed away alluvial soil. Farmers who had once hosted his tribe and his camels were now blocking their migration; the land could no longer support both herder and farmer. Many tribesmen had lost their stock and scratched at millet farming on marginal plots.

The God-given order was broken, the sheikh said, and he feared the future. "The way the world was set up since time immemorial was being disturbed," recalled de Waal. "And it was bewildering, depressing. And the consequences were terrible."

In 2003, another scourge, now infamous, swept across Darfur. Janjaweed fighters in military uniforms, mounted on camels and horses, laid waste to the region. In a campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Darfur's blacks, the armed militiamen raped women, burned houses, and tortured and killed men of fighting age. Through whole swaths of the region, they left only smoke curling into the sky.