The invocation of race in Darfur demonstrated its full wrath in the war that began in 2003.

An invading SPLA force of Dinka under the joint command of Abd al-Aziz al-Hilu, an ethnic Maslati and the man who now leads the northern faction of the SPLA/M in South Kordofan, and Dawoud Yahia Bolad, an ethnic Fur and disaffected Islamist, was rapidly crushed by a force of locally recruited Bani Halba in 1991. The SPLA/M’s attempt to open a front in Darfur among the Fur and the Masalit was not as successful. It was exactly in the terms that Prunier now advocates that the Khartoum regime portrayed the confrontation with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in the 1983-2005 round of the Sudanese civil war fought predominantly in southern Sudan but with lasting extensions in the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile of northern Sudan, areas where the SPLA/M found similarly aggrieved allies among the Nuba and the Ingessena. Race has been and continues to be invoked by Khartoum’s rulers and their rebel contenders in the Sudanese peripheries. He, I suppose, would have the privilege to observe, count the dead, and eventually publish a bestseller. What Prunier is advocating for, without reservations, is a race war where the Sudanese fight it out to redemption as Africans and Arabs. “War is a tragic affair, but the brave Sudanese men who have chosen it as a last resort deserve to be allowed to find their own way toward a Sudanese Spring, even if it is a violent one”, he opined. From this premise Prunier arrived at the conclusion that the way ahead is to support the African Muslim rebels fighting the government in alliance with the southern Christians. That left fully one-third of the Sudanese people - the African Muslims - without a political leg to stand on”. The CPA, wrote Prunier, “was signed by only two sides: the Muslim north and the Christian south.

In his mind the ills of Sudan stem from an essential racial conflict between Arabs and Africans, one that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) could not resolve since only religion was considered in its fashioning. Prunier presented his readers with a Rwandan history of Sudan as it were. Gérard Prunier, the prominent French historian of East Africa, published a piece in the New York Times on 5 May under the title ‘ In Sudan: Give War a Chance’ reposted on Sudan Tribune.

Darfur by Gérard Prunier