Drawn from Darfurian and Chadian Arab tribes, the Janjaweed are a militia that became notorious for massacre, rape, and forced displacement in 2003–2004. “Janjaweed” means “hordes” in colloquial Arabic; there is no evidence for an etymological connection to “jinn” (devil), “jim” (“G” as in G3 rifle), or “jawad” (horse).
The 1988 Janjaweed began after the Chadian president Hissène Habré (b.1942), backed by France and the United States, defeated the Libyan army, thereby ending the territorial designs of Muammar al-Qaddafi (b.1942) on Chad. Libya's Chadian protégé, Acheickh Ibn Omer Saeed (b.1952), retreated with his Arab militia forces to Darfur, where they were hosted by Sheikh Musa Hilal (b.1960), the newly elevated chief of the Mahamid Rizeigat Arabs of north Darfur. Hilal's tribesmen had earlier smuggled Libyan weapons to Ibn Omer's forces. A French-Chadian incursion destroyed Ibn Omer's camp, but his weapons remained with his Mahamid hosts, along with an Arab supremacist ideology associated with the Libyan-sponsored Arab Gathering.
The Mahamid were an obscure camel-herding Arab subtribe for most of the twentieth century, one whose chiefs repeatedly tried and failed to be recognized as paramount chief of the camel-herding Rizeigat. Lacking access to good land, their members were impoverished by drought in the 1980s. Through alliances with Chadian Arab kin and the patronage of the closely related Ereigat subtribe—several of whose members obtained high positions in Sudan's armed forces—the Mahamid became the best-armed Arabs in northern Darfur.
For ten years the Janjaweed were an amalgam of Chadian and Darfurian Arab militiamen, tolerated by the Sudan government, who were pursuing local agendas of controlling land. The majority of Darfur's Arabs, the Baggara confederation, were and remain uninvolved, although some of them were mobilized as “Murahaliin” and “Fursan” militia to fight the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in southern Sudan as early as 1985. In 1999–2000, faced with threats of insurgencies in western and northern Darfur, Khartoum's security armed Janjaweed forces. The insurgency escalated. In February 2003 the Darfur rebels announced a political manifesto, took the name Sudan Liberation Movement, and together with a sister organization called the Justice and Equality Movement launched bold military attacks. In response, the Sudan government further upgraded the military capability of the Janjaweed and used them as the main force to overcome the insurgency. The Beni Halba “Fursan” militia also joined. An estimated twenty to thirty thousand militiamen attacked alongside the Sudan air force and military intelligence. The Janjaweed were implicitly encouraged to take over the land of non-Arab ethnic groups, and they were instructed to conduct a scorched-earth campaign of mass atrocity targeting civilians. Leading Janjaweed commanders including Musa Hilal were named as suspected genocidal criminals by the U.S. State Department in 2004. The UN Security Council has called for the Janjaweed to be disarmed, and the Sudan government undertook to do this when it signed the Darfur Peace Agreement in 2006.
By early 2007 many Janjaweed had been absorbed into the Sudan Armed Forces. Others, distrustful of Khartoum, were quietly establishing contacts with the Darfur rebel movements. Still others were actively engaged in the escalating civil war in Chad. None had yet been disarmed.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. © 2008
Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved.
