Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster (Updated 2008 Edition)

Images of the genocide in Darfur have shocked the Western world; upwards of 300,000 of its inhabitants have died, and another 2.5 million have become refugees. Those affected by the violence are estimated at almost 4 million, 700,000 of whom are now beyond the reach of humanitarian assistance. These are staggering numbers, and the fractious insurgent groups involved — Islamist Arab tribal militias against Christian black Africans and other militias made up of deserters of the Chad Army — were and still are supported to kill, rob, and terrorize by the governments of the neighboring states of the Sudan, Chad, and Libya.


 


J. Millard Burr is a former relief coordinator for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Operation Lifeline Sudan. He is the author of Sudan in Turmoil: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2003, available from Markus Wiener.

Robert O. Collins was a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Shadow in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1919-1956 and The Waters of the Nile: Hydropolitics and the Jonglei Canal, 1900-1988, as well as 24 other books. (For a full list of Collins’ titles featured by Markus Wiener, click here.)