Explaining Death and Atrocity in Darfur

American Bar Foundation, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Statement of Purpose & Importance of Research Plan We propose to code and analyze 1,136 survey interviews with refugees from Darfur conducted in an $800,000 Atrocities Documentation Survey (ADS) undertaken by the Coalition for International Justice for the U.S. State Department in 10 camps and 9 settlements in Chad. The interviews mix witness narratives with a crime victim survey and have only partially been coded for a preliminary State Department report. The data from this survey constitute the most comprehensive information about violence in Darfur, including detailed event histories of deaths, rapes, abductions, missing persons and property theft and destruction. The mortality data alone include 360 nuclear family members, 2,703 extended family members and 9,300 villagers. The ADS data are rich in information about the location and timing of specific events: violence and property victimization are retrospectively dated and located, allowing a detailed temporal and spatial mapping of death and atrocity in Darfur from February 2003 to July 2004. We use these data to document the extent of war crimes in Darfur and the pattern of these events, for example, assessing the extent to which they conform to the classic stages of complex humanitarian crises, from onset through peak mortality and arrival of assistance to stabilization. The data from the ADS are further combined with external sources of information on rebel activity, arable land and water resources. The data arrayed at three levels: by individual respondents, incidents, and places of occurrence (i.e., villages) and are analyzed using event history analysis, linear hierarchical modeling and qualitative comparative analysis. Explanations of the violence in Darfur differ in the responsibility they assign to state officials. A patrimonial domination theory (PDT) regards the Sudanese governing elite as a criminal source of domination and subjugation, while a counter insurgency theory (CIT) explains their actions as self-defense. We use the Atrocities Documentation Survey (ADS) to assess hypotheses derived from these theories. A key hypothesis of PDT is that the Sudanese ruling elite imposed its power by joining its government troops with Arab Janjaweed militias to attack African villagers and to bring arable land holdings under its control. PDT further hypothesizes that racial ideology expressed in racial epithets during attacks on villages was a key motivating and mediating mechanism in how and when the violence in Darfur occurred. Implicit in PDT is the idea that attacks on villages were organized in a way that systematically diffused terror in a process of ethnic cleansing across Darfur. The challenge for PDT is to trace the joint movement of expressed racial ideology alongside not only the killing, but also in the forms of rape and agricultural property destruction, including the capacity for food production and the prevention of famine, which is as much a part of the domination and destruction of a people as killing itself. We show that rape is diffused in a systematic pattern alongside the racially driven killings and property destruction. This suggests clearly that rape is used as an important war crime tactic. Meanwhile, the Sudanese government and CIT insist that its military efforts in Darfur are simply self-defense efforts. To credibly make this case, CIT must be supported by evidence of linkage between the activities of rebel groups and targets of attacks. Alternatively, when attacks are not tied to rebel activity, CIT must counter evidence of coordination between government troops and militias in order to maintain its contention that in such circumstances the Arab militias act beyond its control. Perhaps the ultimate thesis of this proposal is that the rebel provocation offered as a self-defense claim in CIT is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation of war crimes in Darfur, while factors emphasized in PDT, such as arable land and racist ideology, are necessary if not sufficient to explain the violence and atrocities in Darfur.