Survivors Tell the Stories of Genocide in Darfur

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An Oral and Documentary History of the Darfur Genocide by Samuel Totten.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The suffering of black Africans in Darfur, Sudan, is far from over. The atrocities that started in 2003 and that have prompted multiple investigations into the crisis in the region continue. Samuel Totten continues to inform the public of the crisis in his new book, An Oral and Documentary History of the Darfur Genocide. In part, the two-volume book relates the stories of the east African men and women who have lost loved ones, homes and hope over the past eight years.

In these volumes, Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar from the University of Arkansas, not only documents the facts of the genocide but reminds the world of the fate of the 2 million internally displaced persons in Darfur and more than 275,000 refugees in Chad.

“Just because the issue of Darfur rarely shows up in the media these days does not mean that all is well there. It’s not, and it has not been for eight long, miserable years,” he said.

Currently, Totten is working to call attention to the latest crisis in Sudan, the recent and ongoing government attack on the people of the Nuba Mountains. He and others are issuing genocide early warning signals to the press and to nongovernmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience.

“I wish to impress upon people that just because most of the killing has stopped, the suffering of the survivors has not,” Totten said.

Totten was part of a team of 24 investigators who collected data in 2004 to enable the U.S. State Department to determine whether genocide had occurred in Darfur. Totten lived in a tent outside of the camp in Goz Beida, Chad. There, he and the other investigator at the refugee camp conducted face-to-face interviews with people who had lost everything. Homes, villages, family members and possessions were taken from them simply because they were black Africans instead of being of Arab descent. 

Upon analysis of the data collected, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and his team determined that what was occurring in Sudan met the definition of genocide. Genocide is committing acts such as murder, causing physical and mental harm, or imposing measures or living conditions that would lead to the group’s destruction with the intent of destroying the group, in whole or in part. In his history of the Darfur genocide, Totten provides documentation from the United States, United Nations and the International Criminal Court about the crisis.

Samuel Totten, University of Arkansas

Totten could not forget what he had heard during the interviews in the refugee camps in eastern Chad, so he went back in 2007.

“The face-to-face encounters with the people who had lost loved ones, their villages, tukuls (homes) and all worldly possessions prodded me to return to Chad and then to head into the Sudan to conduct further research into the genocide being perpetrated in Darfur by the government of Sudan troops and its militia, the Janjaweed.”

Between 2007 and 2011, Totten returned four times to interview refugees and internally displaced persons. He interviewed a diverse array of people, men and women, educated and uneducated, relatively young and extremely old, moderately well off to impoverished. They each spent between four and six hours with Totten and his translator telling their stories so the world would know of the actions of the Sudanese government.

Totten notes that as time goes on and the refugees remain in camps instead of their homes the once positive morale they held is fading, and they fear that their children and grandchildren will be living in refugee camps instead of the land held by their ancestors. In fact, Sudanese President Omar al Bashir has invited Arabs to settle on the land once owned by black Africans.

Totten is a professor in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. An Oral and Documentary History of the Darfur Genocide was published by Praeger Security International in December 2010.