Word: arabism
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...sickening crash of bombs ripping through her neighbors' mud-and-thatch huts, gouging craters into the dry earth. When Abdulkarim, 25, ran outside, she was confronted by two men in military uniform, one wielding a knife, the other a whip. They were members, she says, of the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, which over the past 18 months has slaughtered tens of thousands of black Africans like Abdulkarim across the western Sudanese region of Darfur. Another man, rifle in hand, was standing over her husband's body while others set fire to her home. Two of the intruders...
...rights groups estimate that thousands more are displaced every week. Hundreds of women have been raped, including 41 in a single episode of gang rape last February in the town of Tawila. The vast majority of the atrocities have been carried out by members of the Janjaweed, an ethnically Arab militia of horse-mounted bandits who receive financial and military support from the Sudanese government, which commissioned them to put down an insurgency by the region's non-Arab Muslims...
...Janjaweed, the Bush Administration has so far failed to persuade the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Khartoum. After 18 months of atrocities in Sudan, the international community has yet to take a single punitive action against the Sudanese government. Opposition to sanctions has come from Arab countries that are sympathetic to Khartoum and from Security Council members, such as Pakistan and China, that are heavily invested in Sudan's emerging oil industry. That has forced the U.S. to scale back a resolution that would punish Khartoum should it fail to halt the killing. The new resolution--passed...
...million people are farmers and herders, who cling to the valleys where the soil is less sandy, or nomadic graziers, who migrate between the arid north and the south, which blooms green after the rains every August. Though most of Darfur's farmers are African and its nomads Arab, the two groups have mixed easily. Centuries of intermarriage have blurred the most obvious distinctions: nearly all Darfurians are black, Muslim and speak Arabic. Disputes between the two are traditionally settled using tribal laws as complex as the spiderweb of cattle routes and rivers that crisscross Darfur's plains...
Over the past two decades, though, persistent drought has forced the Arabs to move to more arable lands, straining relations with the Africans. In the late 1980s, competition for turf began to turn violent. Light arms poured into the region from neighboring Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leading to occasional massacres. Hostilities simmered for more than a decade. But the spark for war came in April last year, when, following two months of occasional raids on villages, African rebels from a group calling itself the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) swept into the tumbledown airport in the town...