The Fanonite

While the 20th century mostly saw wars being fought around energy sources, especially oil, there are already indications that the focus of conflicts in the coming century would be water. Contrary to popular belief, water is a finite resource, and increasing population coupled with Climate Change will ensure that demand goes higher even as resources keep depleting. We are already into the fourth year of the 21st century’s first Climate Change war — Darfur — and Julian Borger of the Guardian deserves credit for highlighting this fact. (More on the Darfur)

Less than a generation ago, Arabs and Africans coexisted peacefully and productively in Darfur, Sudan’s arid western province which is more than twice the size of the United Kingdom. African farmers had allowed Arab herders to graze their camels and goats on the land, and the livestock had fertilised the soil.

The coexistence was so natural, in fact, the tribes of Darfur did not even think of themselves as Arab or African…Only a few years ago, it was just nomads and farmers…

Something fundamental has changed in this part of Africa, and it happened within a generation. From a state of sectarian innocence in which the dividing line between Arab and African was meaningless, something made people pick sides, and hardened their new sense of identity into ethnic hatred, all in the past two decades. What changed, the evidence suggests, was the climate.

The current conflict began in 2003. It was triggered when Darfurians launched a revolt against the central government, which fought back by unleashing the Janjaweed.

But the real roots of the disaster stretch back to the mid-1980s when a ferocious drought and famine transformed Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa. It killed more than a million people and laid waste livestock herds. Whether they maintained their way of life or tried to take up settled cultivation, the pastoralists of Darfur clashed repeatedly with its farmers. A string of conflicts broke out as both sides armed themselves, and those conflicts created the template for today’s disaster.

Alex de Waal, a researcher and writer on Darfur, tells the story of meeting a nomadic leader, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985, at the height of the drought. The desert was visibly advancing as the Saharan winds blew sand into the more fertile hills where the sheikh’s clan, the Jalul, were grazing their camels. He tried hard to keep up appearances but it was clear his world was falling apart. Many Jalul who had lost their camels and goats tried their hands at farming, but as latecomers with no ancestral land rights, they had to make do with rocky semi-barren terrain, and could only look with envy towards the rich alluvial soil belonging to the long-established African tribe, an offshoot of the Fur people. Darfur means literally the Land of the Fur…

But Khartoum would never have found willing partners in Darfur if the conflict over land had not been made so acute by the drought. Tellingly, those Arab tribes who had land ownership rights - mostly in the south of Darfur - chose not to join the government’s counter-insurgency. Those who were prepared to kill, rape and pillage were drawn from the ranks of the desperate, ripped from their traditional way of life by a catastrophic change in the weather. Global warming created the dry tinder. Khartoum supplied the match.

Back in the 1980s, the failure of the rains was widely blamed on the people who lived in the region. Their over-grazing, it had been thought, had led to soil erosion, replaced green cover with bare rock and sand, reflecting more heat into the atmosphere and diminishing the chance of rain.

More recent computer modelling has suggested that rain patterns over Africa are influenced rather by ocean temperatures, and those in turn reflect global warming, and the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, droughts in Africa may be caused less by its hapless inhabitants and more by oversize cars and cheap flights in Europe and the US…

There is endless potential for more climate-driven conflicts all across the broad Sahel region that stretches from Sudan to Senegal, where the competition between herder and farmer is often reinforced by more entrenched tribal differences, as well as the fault line between Muslim and Christian. In decades to come, Darfur may be seen as one of the first true climate-change wars, and those wars to come may be every bit as vicious because the adversaries will be fighting for their lives in a suddenly unfamiliar world.

It is a doom-laden scenario but it is not inevitable. Most scientists agree that climate change, of one degree or another, will happen, and that it will diminish the amount of fertile arable land and pasture across vulnerable regions like the Sahel. What is not inevitable is the descent from competition to armed conflict. That is a political leap. It requires that national governments choose to exacerbate conflicts rather than resolve them, and it requires that the international community fails to act when national governments do not protect their own citizens.

“The real problem here is moral, it is not a question of climate,” Said Ibrahim Mustafa, the sultan of the Chadian border region of Dar Sila, says. “It’s not just a lack of water that makes a man kill his brother.”

At the moment, people such as Mustafa are losing the battle. After criticising the N’Djamena government for handing out guns rather than attempting to defuse border tensions with Sudan, he was obliged to hand over formal authority to his less outspoken son…

The rebels and the government came close to a deal last year but by the time a deadline for the negotiations expired, only one rebel faction had accepted the terms Khartoum was offering. The Darfur groups are in disarray, but if they were to reassemble around a common platform they may find Khartoum - facing mounting sanctions - willing to make a better deal…

There are ways that Darfur’s tragedy can be contained and mitigated before its neighbours are pulled into the downward spiral. The alternative could be a chain of conflicts across the continent and beyond, in the struggle for survival on a changing planet.