Revelations by Human Rights Watch May 26 that Darfur's Janjaweed have overrun villages in Chad. The rapidly shifting alliances are dizzying here. On the face of it, this is simple: Chad's government has backed the Darfur guerillas and this is simple retaliation by Khartoum's proxy force. Except (as we have noted), Chad's government is now divided, with rival factions of the ruling Zaghawa tribe in a violent struggle for power. The faction around President Idriss Deby accuses Sudan of supporting his enemies and is demonizing Sudanese refugees in Chad as subversives—even though they were cleansed from their lands by the Janjaweed, Sudan's proxy force. Meanwhile (as we have also noted), the Darfur rebels have also split, between factions led by the Fur and Zaghawa ethnicities. The Zaghawa-led faction is presumably closer to Chad—but to which faction in Chad? And does the report of "Chadian recruits" working with the Janjaweed indicate that Khartoum and its proxy force have made an alliance with the Zaghawa-led guerillas in both Darfur and Chad against the Fur and the rival (ruling) Chadian Zaghawa faction? HRW duly notes the claim—universal throughout the Darfur crisis—that this is just tit-for-tat violence over stolen cattle. This may, in fact, be the immediate and ostensible spark for the attacks. But, especially given the oil stakes in Chad, it is pretty disingenuous to argue that this war is about cattle-rustling.

A front-page story in today's New York Times paints an even more desperate picture of the deteriorating situation in Darfur than usual. Lydia Polgreen reports from Tina, a village that was overrun April 19 and the residents forced to flee to the overstretched and over-crowded refugee camp at Tawila. Only this time the armed horsemen who swept through, burning, looting, shooting and raping, were not Janjaweed, but a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, the major guerilla group resisting the Sudanese pro-government forces. The SLA has splintered, with the faction that signed the recent peace accord turning against the more intransigent faction which has held out, calling the accords a sham. The ostensibly pro-peace faction is now attacking civilian villages, mimicking the tactics of their Janjaweed enemies. Again, there is an ethnic dimension: the supposedly pro-peace faction is led by ethnic Zaghawa, who are traditionally semi-nomadic herdsmen, while the hold-out faction is led by sedentary, agricultural Fur, who are the big majority in Darfur ("Land of the Fur"). "It was the Zaghawa who did this," a Tina sheikh told Polgreen. "We used to fear the Arab janjaweed. Now we have another janjaweed."

Nine bombs exploded across Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa May 12, killing four people and wounding dozens. (AP, May 13) The Oromi separatists deny involvement. But Ethiopia has no shortage of ethnic separatist struggles, as we have noted. And also no shortage of reasons to suspect its own government. From the Sudan Tribune, May 13:

We can already anticipate the blame-the-victim chorus that will be raised by the oil companies, Nigeria's rulers and the global media. But when resource hyper-exploitation co-exists with dire poverty, such incidents are absolutely inevitable. From the Lagos Vanguard, May 13, via AllAfrica:

The April 30 march in Washington, organized by the Save Darfur Coalition, brought out some heroes of the left, like George Clooney, but also some that the hard left loves to hate, like Elie Wiesel and Samantha Power. While policy-makers equivocate, trying to sound tough against the genocide while actually doing not a thing to stop it, the radical left remains largely silent on Darfur: the atrocities there are not being carried out by US imperialism or its proxies, and the solutions most often proposed involve some degree of US military intervention. There is indeed a strong case that another Western military adventure would be a very problematic "solution" at best—but the anti-war left, afraid of losing popularity, doesn't even bother to make that case. As usual, it is being just as dishonest as the government it claims such moral superiority to.

With Darfur in the headlines, if not the minds of our policymakers, it is generally forgotten that armed attacks, forced deportations and even slavery continue against Black African peoples throughout the Sahel. On Tuesday, May 9, at 7:30 PM, the Libertarian Book Club's Anarchist Forum will present a discussion in New York's Greenwhich Village on "Ethnic Cleansing and Slavery in Contemporary Africa," with an emphasis on Mauritania, Sudan and Darfur. The featured speaker will be Abdarahmane Wone of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM), which has been attempting to resist and expose the system of slavery in that country for a generation.

We wonder how he feels to be briefly on the Reuters wire April 30?

Eritrea's last native Jew tends graves, remembers
58-year-old Sami Cohen has fond memories of friends, parents and families in the Horn of Africa. Now there's little left, apart from an empty synagogue
Tending graves knee-deep in dry grass and purple flowers, Eritrea's last native Jew clutches memories of a forgotten community.

From Newsday, April 23:

LAGOS - A militant group that has been attacking Nigeria's oil pipelines and helping to drive up world oil prices added a new tactic last week by detonating a car bomb in a major oil city to publicize its standing threat to shut down the country's entire crude output.