NCJ Number
211124
Journal
Criminology Volume: 43 Issue: 3 Dated: August 2005 Pages: 525-562
Date Published
August 2005
Length
38 pages
Annotation
Using findings from a victimization survey of survivors of racially motivated attacks on residents of the Darfur region of Sudan and drawing on the tenets of conflict theory, this report presents evidence that the Sudanese Government has directly supported violent killings and rapes under a strategy of genocide.
Abstract
In 2004, then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell commissioned interview-based research in the refugee camps of Chad, where more than 200,000 displaced Darfurians were receiving United Nations protection and assistance. By the end of August 2004, the survey team had completed interviews with 1,136 randomly sampled respondents. The findings of these interviews were the basis for Secretary Powell's testimony before the Congressional International Relations Committee on September 9, 2004. More than two-thirds of the refugee households reported that the attack on their home or village involved combined Sudanese and Janjaweed forces. Refugees reported hearing racial epithets in 16.5 percent of the cases involving Sudanese forces acting alone, in 31.9 percent of those involving Janjaweed forces acting along, and in 44.3 percent of those involving combined forces. Many attacks involved airplane and helicopter attacks, precluding the hearing of racial epithets by the attackers. The Sudanese Government has argued that its attacks on the Darfurian farmers and villagers were counterinsurgent self-defense; however, there was no correlation between where the attacks occurred and the evidence of where rebel activity was occurring. Because respondents reported that Arabs in Darfur were spared in the attacks, the authors of this paper theorize that the Arab-dominated Government advanced its interest in power and control of Sudan by empowering local Arabs while destroying and dislocating local African groups, using racist ideology as a divisive and destructive motivating means to accomplish this goal. This analysis also includes a discussion of the slowness of modern American criminology to advance the study of genocide. 9 tables and 58 references