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Abstract: Even though one cannot deny the importance of the ethnic dimension in the Darfur conflict, it cannot be argued it was the triggering factor of the conflict, but rather has gradually imposed itself more as a consequence of the prolonged conflict than a cause. While the conflict in Darfur is over-determined, and a complex web of triggering factors have contributed to its eruption, this paper argues nevertheless that the conflict which has been going on, with varying intensity, since the early 1980s in the region of Jebel Mara (north Darfur) is in fact an ecological conflict par excellence in which issues of race and ethnicity have been used by the warring parties-and unfortunately the mainstream western media also- as mobilizing tools although regrettably they have ended up being ends in themselves.
Keywords: ethnic conflict; climate change; Africa; Darfur; drought; desertification; political ecology
The environment makes up a huge, enormously complex living machine that forms a thin dynamic layer on the earth's surface, and every human activity depends on the integrity and the proper functioning of this machine, Barry Commoner (1974).
The on-going conflict in Darfur erupted when armed groups from Darfur rebelled against the government of Sudan after a complex web of grievances had been building up only to become, by the beginning of the present decade, increasingly violent and ethnically oriented. Throughout the 1980s, life in northern Darfur was deeply impacted by a protracted period of severe drought, which resulted in a mass movement of population fleeing the ensuing hardships and destitution. Nevertheless, most analysts and commentators in western media have perceived the Darfur conflict only as a racial / ethnic one. The line was hastily drawn between 'Arabs' and 'Africans'; settlers and natives. Indeed, International mainstream media turned Darfur into a place devoid of history and politics; one in which bad outsiders are identified as 'Arabs' and native victims as 'Africans.'1 The conflict was quickly framed as an essential clash between evil and innocence. In a remake of old colonial demarcation of tribal homelands in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa, it was assumed that Sudanese Arab tribes came from the Middle East and settled in Africa. The binary 'Arab' and 'African' identities successfully evacuated historical facts, which testify to the fact...