‘Genocide in Darfur’ (by Samuel Totten, Eric Markusen) Racist ideology plays an important part of the story, as it has in the history of other twentieth century genocides. And the psychology of “genocide” has become familiar through the sorry repetition of genocidal acts that the last century has witnessed. In 1987, Libya used the northwestern Darfur corner as a backdoor to attack Chad. It had equipped and sent out the so-called Arab legion, an Arab supremacist militia, to pursue Arab expansion in the mineral-rich sub-Saharan regions it bordered and to drive out the African tribes. Libya was not orchestrating a simple border raid on a poor country; it was pursuing a new strategy of pan-Arabism, couched in an emotionally charged ideology.
The Sharp distinction between Arabs and Africans in the racially mixed Darfur region had not been drawn until the ideology of pan-Arabism that came out of the Libya made itself felt… when the GoS tried to impose Sharia Law in 1983, it triggered civil war in the South. This marked the first use of government-backed militias… some of the cattle herding… of Darfur were employed in a strategy of brutality, starvation, rape, and pillage that was to be visited upon Darfur two decades later. Complaints of Arab militia harassment in Darfur surfaced in 2003….
http://books.google.com/books?id=S2a9bDb0qesC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30
