While that history is dense and complex, Prunier manages to effectively convey the point that the current “Arab vs. Prunier examines the history of the Darfur region, going back to the 17th century, as he describes just how the current situation came to pass. Prunier notes that the United Nations and the rest of the world quickly passed the responsibility for the situation off to humanitarian organizations on the ground, expecting them “not to complement political action but themselves to be substitutes for what the politicians should have done.” They have, in essence, succeeded in creating an “impression that something is being done without that ‘something' being political.” Whereas a political crisis would require a political response, a humanitarian crisis requires merely a humanitarian response. When Darfur first began to receive media coverage in 2004, politicians around the world sought to portray it as a “humanitarian crisis” as opposed to the “political crisis” it truly is. While certainly a worthwhile goal, the distraction it has created and the leverage it granted to the genocidal regime in Khartoum has generated a situation where, according to the international aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières, millions of lives are now “dangling by the thin thread that is humanitarian aid.”Īs Prunier explains, this is no accident.

While an estimated 400,000 people have died, the world has focused its efforts elsewhere, primarily on reaching, and then implementing, the Naivasha peace agreement in hopes of ending the two-decade-long war between Khartoum's National Islamic Front (NIF) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. The fact that his book is being published while the genocide is still going on speaks volumes about the international community's ability and willingness to effectively deal with the death and destruction occurring in western Sudan. Just one year after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Prunier published The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide now, 10 years later, while Africa is experiencing yet another genocide, Prunier is again the first out of the gate with his analysis, this time Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Gérard Prunier, a professor at the University of Paris, has performed an unusual feat: He has managed to produce the earliest book-length analyses of two African genocides.

Darfur by Gérard Prunier