Darfur Genocide Tells of Climate Change as Recipe for Wars
This week, world leaders of the G8 Club and their colleagues from the regional blocs of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are gathered in Hokkaido, Japan for yet another round of talks in which climate change will ultimately feature.
Apart from parading their own theoretic short and long term goals and how best to approach this growing problem while clouding their own best national interests, making concessions for climate change may prove harder than committing to curb global carbon pollution.
As the main players at the Hokkaido summit, were the G8 Club, and China, Brazil and India, to pose and think about climate change issues as possible recipe for wars, the plight of the millions of victims of the conflict in Darfur, Sudan would connect with their jostling for the best breathing space.
It has emerged that the Darfur genocide has a lot more to do with climate change and its ripple effects on the local ecology than has been thought before and aid workers there are warning that a similar environmental situation elsewhere is a recipe for war.
(This subject has been covered in this forum before, with a caution that the Darfur conflict inflicts even more damage on Sudan’s environmental degradation with nearly two million internally displaced people putting pressure on the fragile environment as they clear land and source ground water to survive. See: The Animals are Innocent, Blame the Local Ecology)
Amy Chilla, a spokesperson for Tents of Hope, a public awareness campaign that rallies communities to respond to the crisis in Darfur, Sudan by creating tents as focal points for learning about the Darfur genocide said: “There is a greater picture to what is happening to the environment and how it affects different regions and taking Darfur as a cautionary tale is important.”
Aid workers have chronicled how climate change led to the genocide - the spawn of numerous enmities created by fights over more than two decades between herder and farmer communities for access to land and the continuing scarcity of resources.
The progressing of desertification as these fights begun to take toll on the environment and increased competition for limited land resources meant that farmers, generally considered Africans, began fencing remaining arable land while camel herders, considered Arabs, lost access to grazing grounds.
Between 1987 and 1989, thousands were killed in land battles that cemented ethnic lines and hatreds. United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, says: “Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s… the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming. It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought”.
Local ecology indeed plays an important role in conflicts as a source of wealth and as a precursor of death for innocent millions of people. In Africa, these are mostly camouflaged as political, religious or ethnic.
A critical lack of fuel for cooking drives women to leave the safety of the refugee camps and walk farther and farther every day in search of firewood, subjecting them to attacks and rape by the Janjaweed raiders.
The vastness of Darfur, about the size of France, makes it difficult for any effective peace keeping efforts. The land near the camps has been so stripped of firewood and trees that a one-way journey of three hours is now the norm for most women gathering firewood in South Darfur.
In North Darfur, the wood is well outside the reach of a walking journey from many camps, and refugees are selling their food rations to townspeople or middlemen to earn cash to purchase wood fuel, again from middlemen, to cook what little remains.
Ki Moon on Monday repeated his fears again before the gathered G8 leaders thus: “We tend to think of climate change as something in the future. It is not. We see now, most of all in Africa, that drought and changing weather patterns are compounding the challenges we face in attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”
It is worth noting that in the larger Sudan, the boundary between semi-desert and desert has shifted south an estimated 50-200 km since 1930, according to the UN Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment conducted by UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
Disorganized and poorly managed mechanized rain-fed agriculture, which covers an estimated area of 6.5 million hectares, has been particularly destructive, leading to large-scale forest clearance, loss of wildlife and severe land degradation, UNEP says.
This, coupled with unsustainable explosion in livestock, from 28.6 million in 1961 to 134.6 million in 2004 and deforestation in which between 1990 to 2005, Sudan lost 8.8 million hectares or about 11.6% of its forest cover, is a cause for worry.
It may seem far away but the era of climate change wars is here with us. With the race for total food security and energy independence dawning, it may only be a matter of time before it gets to the very heart of the United States, perhaps sooner that we ever thought.
No wonder Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, says: “Climate change, energy security and food security are interlinked, and require an integrated approach.”
Image credit: HDPT-CAR at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
Good article. Most people don’t see the connections between the impact of environmental changes on the region and its people. It’s good that it is finally gaining international attention. Hopefully this will mean that people will start paying attention to this area as well as other parts of the world that are seeing major changes in the way people are having to live.