A peace of the past  Pieter Tesch
  Published 11 October 2007
    
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  Observations on Darfur
     

  On 27 October, Darfur's rebel groups are scheduled to meet in Tripoli to thrash out a peace agreement. Britain has so far been a key player in the peace process. (Pressure from the UK was instrumental in getting the Sudanese government to accept an expanded peacekeeping force in Darfur.) But Britain's colonial past in the Sudan threatens to wreck the Tripoli negotiations.
  Today the Arab militias supporting the Sudanese government, and accused of killing civilians, are nicknamed Janjaweed ("mounted demons"). They derive their name from the heavily armoured cavalry that ruled the high plains of the eastern Sahel. The Keira clan of the Fur people controlled the Janjaweed and dominated the area.
  The British and French saw in these warrior horsemen an opportunity to expand their vast colonial holdings; the Janjaweed were quickly branded a fanatical Muslim threat and a military campaign was launched, ostensibly to bring order to the region. The colonial armies marched through the Sahel, annihilating the Janjaweed, who were no match for modern rifles, and expanding their respective empires in the process.
  Ali Dinar, the last independent sultan of Darfur, and a member of the Keira clan, was killed in the fighting in 1916. A perpetual thorn in the side of the colonial powers, Dinar had survived General Kitchener's slaughter of the Mahdist forces at Omdurman in 1898 and become sultan because the British and French could not agree on the border between their new colonial possessions in this part of Africa. He answered the call to jihad against the European occupiers during the Great War but his uprising was short-lived: the first use of war planes in Darfur destroyed his army.
  Today, his last-surviving daughter, Haram, has become a powerful symbol of resistance for the Keira clan of the Fur people. At a recent clan gathering in the shaded gardens of the old palace in El Fasher, once the capital of Darfur, she was the guest of honour. Only a few years old in 1916 when her father was killed in the Jebel Marra, the mountain range that dominates central Darfur, Haram avoids discussing the current situation.
  Spears and warhorses are gone, replaced by AK47s and "technicals" (the ubiquitous Toyota Land Cruiser with a mounted machine gun) and the Janjaweed is back. The Fur feel that their time has come.
  Since the start of the rebellion in Darfur in 2003, the leading Darfuri rebel movement, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), has fragmented mainly on tribal lines between Zaghawa and Fur. 
  Some of the factions signed up to the African Union-sponsored Darfur Peace Agreement in May 2006. Most of the Fur factions, nominally under the command of Abdul Wahid al-Nur, did not. Currently living in exile in Paris, Wahid refuses to commit himself to the Tripoli talks. Britain has warned rebel groups that if they boycott the talks in Libya they will be permanently excluded from the peace process.
  If the Fur, vengeful and stung by past dealings with the French and British, refuse to come to the table then the peace accord is doomed and the 26,000-strong UN-AU joint peacekeeping force, Unamid, which is expected to take over from the 7,000 AU peacekeepers by the end of the year, will struggle to keep the peace. Observers fear that so many foreign troops could even act as a magnet for jihadists in the Sahara and Sahel.
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