The Animals are Innocent, Blame the Local Ecology

There is no recent conflict in Africa that has elicited so much debate around the world and in the United States, in particular, as Darfur. Not even the post election political skirmishes in Kenya drew so much attention. Kenya, once the darling of the continent, the erstwhile adversaries are today sharing a cup of tea as well as power, something unthinkable only two months ago.

In a 2007 newspaper article, UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said: “Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand - an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.”

What does this mean? 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.

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Local ecology is increasingly playing center stage in such conflicts. More and more people, including celebrities, scholars, politicians, community leaders, peasants and students, believe that although inequitable resource distribution (or national cake as we call it in Kenya), anti-poor economics and skewed political representation are important, they are not as potent as what the local populations expect to get out of their immediate environments, if allowed by the state. Call it environmental security.

Historical marginalization in many conflict ares in Africa have been explained from political, ethnic or even religious perspectives but the environment is an old component that has long been ignored in the analysis of conflicts.

Numerous conflicts have been centered on the environment; like those of oil-producing areas in Nigeria, Southern Sudan and Angola — or the diamond and other mineral rich areas like Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and the agriculturally rich areas like Ivory Coast (read cocoa - the raw ingredient for making chocolates).

Ecological aspects of the conflict in southern Sudan is one case in point. Ecological issues have been found to be intricately linked to the historical political context of the Sudanese civil war after decades of environmental and human resource exploitation by the West and the East.

Interactions between people and their environment in Africa have illustrated how local ecological systems have shaped conflicts on the continent; often resulting to millions of deaths of innocent victims of war, mostly women and children, according to the humanitarian news and analysis service, IRIN.

In Sudan, for instance, the ecological diversity of the south has been found to have acted as a “decentralizing” factor, partly contributing to the region’s historical marginalization by the north, further reinvigorated by ethnic competition along the banks of the Nile, the world’s largest river, which passes through the country.

This has been camouflaged by the elite on both sides as an ideological war but in reality is a fight to control natural resources in the area. The war has since ended but the questions are yet to be conclusively resolved.

But there is still another problem. Egypt, Sudan’s neighbor to the north east, depends on the Nile as its lifeline and is opposed to any lasting peace efforts that would divide Sudan in to two countries in case the south opts to secede.

Then there is the discovery of oil in the south. Like elsewhere, oil revenues have been used to sustain armed conflict complicating efforts towards lasting peace. The story is always the same. The discovery of oil assumed critical importance in the Sudanese conflict, adding a new dynamic that had even more severe humanitarian consequences, with civilians forcefully removed from their homes to pave way for oil exploration.

No environmental assessment of the oil exploration activities in the Sudan has ever been done; and what’s worse - the Chinese have already arrived on the scene, too blinded by their quest to tap additional energy resources from Africa to see any possible environmental degradation happening there.

Lack of adequate land as an issue of ecological scarcity has been found to be an indirect source of conflict in Somalia and Rwanda, which resulted in the 1994 genocide. But ecological abundance has not spared Africa either. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a case in point, where abundant natural resources such as gold, diamonds, and coltan, have resulted in the deaths of millions of people for decades.

But ecological conflicts between people and their governments also have been sustained by foreign elements, which exploit them for maximum profits as in blood diamonds, break back coffee in Ethiopia and cocoa in Ivory Coast. There is no doubt that environmental degradation and resource distribution play an increasingly important role in conflicts in Africa.

Resources: African Center for Technology Studies and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Photo credits: USAID via Wikimedia Commons

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