Darfur
Another of the many situations that people don't seem to pay a great deal of attention to. McClatchy has a good story up regarding the increasingly complex situation in the region.
The account of the clashes around Songa village on June 9 and 10, given by African Union peacekeepers manning a small mountain outpost here in central Darfur, illustrates part of an increasingly upside-down security picture in Darfur. With some janjaweed now fighting alongside rebels they once tried to kill - and with the rebels riven by disputes and attacking peacekeepers and aid workers - this is hardly the same conflict of four years ago.
As desperate as life has become in Darfur, the new complications could make things worse.
At least 200,000 people - and perhaps as many as 400,000 - have been killed in Darfur since 2003, when Sudan's Arab-led government armed janjaweed to quell an uprising by non-Arab tribes demanding more political autonomy. The government's proxy war - labeled by the Bush administration as genocide - has emptied Darfur's Texas-sized countryside into refugee camps and unleashed what aid workers describe as the world's biggest humanitarian crisis.
Now there's a new set of problems: Few people know who's attacking or why. Armed groups are breaking off and recombining according to the tactical advantage that day. Aid agencies and peacekeepers are at greater risk than ever.
"One of the problems with the security situation at this point - it is not two sides fighting against each other," Andrew Natsios, President Bush's special envoy to Sudan, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April. "It's anarchy."
Simplistic storylines are great, but they rarely reflect the reality. The disintegration of this conflict from one of government-backed "Arabs" versus rebel "Africans" to a free-for-all probably wasn't that big a leap. For one, the difference between the "Arabs" and "Africans" in the conflict was that one side were nomadic herders and the other farmers. Stand them side by side and I'm sure most of us in North America couldn't tell the difference.
The fighting has its roots in water rights, and a drought and desertification that has driven the herders and farmers into conflict over the vanishing resource. In that context, the shifting alliances and control difficulties make much more sense. The jangaweed isn't fighting for the government so much as its fighting for resourced, and the rebels in the area are fighting for the same thing. With multiple tribal links all around, alliances of convenience become common.
Not that this changes much. The region is too isolated and under-reported for there to be any real international involvement, and the simple fact remains that the water is going to remain scarce and the population is going to fight over the scraps, however they organize themselves.
Maybe that's why nobody covers Darfur much; its too depressing.
