Genocide in Darfur: investigating the atrocities in the Sudan - Page 30 Samuel Totten, Eric Markusen - (ISBN 0415953294, 9780415953290, CRC Press) 2006 - 284 pages
Racist ideology plays an important part of the story, as it has in the history of other twentieth century genocides... And the psychology of "genocide" has become familiar through the sorry repetition of genocidal acts that the last century has witnessed. In 1987, Libya used the northwest Darfur corner as a backdoor to attack Chad. It had equipped and sent out the so-called Arab legion, an Arab supremacist militia, to pursue Arab expansion in the minerall-rich sub-Saharan regions it bordered and to drive out the African tribes. Libya was not orchestrating a simple border raid on a poor country; it was pursuing a new strategy of pan-Arabism, couched in an emotionally charged ideology.
The sharp distinctions between Arabs and Africans in the racially mixed Darfur region had not been drawn until the ideology of pan-Arabism that came out of the Libya made itself felt. Some of the nomadic sheiks of the region came to see themselves as the avatars of Arabism, the authentic representatives of their Bedouin origins. They foisted a racial label on a farming people whose way of life they simultaneously distained and felt threatned by.
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