Although there is a growing recognition of the importance of addressing land issues, assistance and programming rarely incorporate sufficient analysis of local land relations, instead focussing on the return and restitution despite the fact that these interventions are often inappropriate for the type of land issues involved.

Through the expertise of longstanding academics and practitioners, this edited volume by the Humanitarian Policy Group attempts to bridge the humanitarian and land tenure divide to highlight their mutually important relationship and instigate a process that seeks to understand how Housing, Land and Property (HLP) issues can and should be practically incorporated into humanitarian responses in conflict and post-conflict situations.

The book is divided into three parts:

* Exploring the theoretical nexus between land, conflict and humanitarianism;
* Discussing the architectural challenges for a more integrated response; and
* Presenting the findings from selected case studies undertaken during the research project. These include Angola, Colombia, the Great Lakes Region, Rwanda and Sudan.

The Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) is mandated to enquire into human rights violations, including community displacements, settlements, evictions, historical land injustices, and the illegal or irregular acquisition of land, especially as these relate to conflict or violence. access to land is often cited as one of the key structural causes of violence in Kenya. However, political figures have manipulated and misrepresented the ‘land issue’ in the country, to the extent that it often seems to be an excuse, rather than a valid grievance. How should the TJRC address the land issue, which is so easily instrumentalized and so deeply linked to problematic conceptions of ethnicity? In order to answer this question, we first have to ask: why is the land issue relevant today?

The British colonial regime in Kenya caused significant disruptions to landholding patterns in many parts of the country, which still reverberate today, at the level of ‘high politics’ as well as ‘folk politics’. Land held under customary tenure by Kenyan communities was treated as ‘vacant’ by the colonial regime and appropriated for ranching and farming by white settlers. Even when the colonial government created ‘native reserves,’ land remained under the control of the Crown and hence vulnerable to alienation by the state at any time. Large parts of the central highlands, historically home to the Kikuyu and other communities, were appropriated for settler agriculture. Former inhabitants of these areas were forced into farm labour elsewhere in the country. Parts of the Rift Valley were also greatly affected. During the war of resistance, the members of the Land and Freedom Army fought for a restoration of land rights as part of a wider liberation from colonialism.

Under the terms of the independence agreement negotiated at Lancaster House, the administration of President Kenyatta pledged to respect ‘private property’, without regard to the ways in which land had been acquired. Rather than returning the areas appropriated by white settlers to customary tenure, the government accepted a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ approach. Former farm workers, many of them Kikuyu, took advantage of the land-buying schemes offered by President Kenyatta to purchase plots in areas which remain a focus of discontent and periodic violence today.

Like the colonial Governor before him, the President held great powers over land distribution, with few checks and balances. Land owned under custom remains the private property of the government, and pastoralist land is supposedly held ‘in trust’ for local communities by the government. However, in practice Trustland is often sold-off, whether or not the sale is in the public interest. Official policy has always been to replace customary tenure with a freehold title system. This has left many communities, particularly pastoral groups in the Rift Valley, feeling that land customarily held ‘in common’ by their communities was vulnerable to alienation. Public land has been illegally distributed by the political elite in order buy the loyalties of their ‘clients’. Prominent families amassed huge farms and ranches under both Kenyatta and Moi. Government resettlement schemes were affected by corruption, leading to further inequality in landholdings. More generally, corruption became entrenched in the surveying and cadastral services, casting doubt on the validity of titles and creating serious land tenure insecurity which persists today.

Grievances over land access have regularly been manipulated by politicians in order to foment political violence. In 1992, KANU politicians organized violence against Kikuyu communities in ethnically-mixed areas to displace potential opposition voters. Some 1500 people died in 1992. Land-related grievances were used to mobilize mobs and justify violence, often wrongly described in the media as ‘land clashes’. Following incitement by KANU politicians during the 1997 elections, hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes. However, little was done to find long-term solutions to the resulting internal displacement problem. The Akiwumi Commission of enquiry into the violence recommended that the role of specific individual administrative and political figures in planning the killings be investigated. However, these recommendations were ignored.

Land issues are multidimensional: at the micro level land is an economic asset which benefits individuals, and land access becomes an increasingly important political issue as land-scarcity increases. At the meso level it represents an intangible ‘community territory,’ which perhaps explains why major land-owners are able to publicly articulate ‘communal’ grievances over land. It is undeniably linked with the calls for Majimbo, discussed by Daniel Waweru in his paper. However, it is not just about ‘sons of the soil’ controlling land. When land uses change – for example, when pastureland is converted to farmland, or vice-versa – there are real social and environmental repercussions for neighbouring communities.

So, land issues are clearly important, in the sense that they are both deeply-felt, and have been used to mobilize violence. How then has the government of Kenya addressed these problems? The National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) came into power on an anti-corruption platform. The new government expressed early support for a truth commission; however, it failed to establish one. Some of the alleged perpetrators of violence in the 1990s were incorporated into the NARC government. NARC also failed to adequately provide for those who had been displaced in political violence, and who continued to live in terrible conditions. The government created a Task Force on Displaced People, but its work has been very heavily criticized. President Kibaki’s government did establish the ‘Ndung’u’ Commission’ into illegal allocation of land, which recommended that ultimate responsibility for land rest with a National Land Commission, rather than the president, and that a review of land titles be initiated. The findings of the Commission were largely welcomed by Kenyan land specialists. However, few of the report’s recommendations were implemented. While the fundamental and systemic aspects of the land problems identified by the Commission’s report have been left to fester, evictions of communities from ‘gazetted’ (protected) forest areas such as the Mau Forest and Mt. Elgon Forest have been implemented with excess force and without resettlement of many of those evicted. In some cases, evictions exacerbated local ethnic and political tensions. Gains from illegal land acquisition have since been utilized to fund election-related violence.

The government also formed a Committee of Eminent Persons in 2006 to report on the key concerns of Kenyans and their implications for constitutional reform. This report was written, but has never been released.

To date, the establishment of ad hoc commissions of enquiry appear to have served as useful diversions, tying up the resources of government and other stakeholders in the development of recommendations which are rarely implemented. Despite these disappointments, the existence of those reports in the public domain does represent a basis for advocacy and debate. The issues are out in the open, and the major land-grabbers and the flashpoints of conflict are known.

Therefore, if the TJRC is to address land issues, will it just produce more empty recommendations, destined to be ignored? Several truth commissions in other parts of the world, such as Timor-Leste, have identified land-related inequality and human rights abuses as a root cause of conflict, but their calls for further action have not always been implemented. Those implicated in land-grabbing and other injustices are typically amongst the political elite, and able to block reforms.

However, despite Kenya’s history of ‘paper tiger’ commissions, there are glimmers of hope that the TJRC could go further than that: First, the national Land Policy, drafted in 2006, was finally approved in June 2009. The policy is seen by many as a progressive document providing protection for those communities using land under communal tenure systems, and calls for compensation and reparation for historical injustices. The country now has a practical framework for the implementation of the TJRC’s recommendations regarding land. Second, the Chair of the TJRC, Ambassador Bethuel Kiplagat, is an expert on the causes of conflict in Africa and is no doubt well-aware of the socio-economic dimensions of violence in Kenya, including land issues. He should be able to guide the TJRC towards the development of practical and far-reaching recommendations. Third, there are a sufficient number of skilled people, in government and civil society, who are committed to land tenure reforms. They should ensure that the TJRC does not turn into a gravy train for land experts, but results in clear outcomes. Fourth, it is reasonable to expect that international donors, who have supported the Land Policy development process, will use their leverage to ensure that land reform happens. Donors were united in the face of the 2008 violence; they should unite on the land issue, and refrain from letting their own ideological positions get in the way of Kenya’s much-needed reforms.

There are compelling reasons to address the land issue in a comprehensive way. Reform will reduce popular grievances, and take away one of the most effective rallying cries available to those inciting violence. Seizing ‘grabbed’ land will remove a source of revenue from corrupt politicians and businessmen who are willing to pay unemployed youth to engage in violence. Punishing those who have committed land-related crimes will be a concrete step towards reinforcing the rule of law for all and doing justice on behalf of all those who have struggled, since the pre-independence days of the Land and Freedom Army, to claim their rights. Applying legal sanctions against the major land-grabbers will also defuse the perceived ‘ethnic’ aspects of the land question. Those guilty of injustices around land are not, after all, entire ethnic communities, but specific members of the elite who abuse their economic and political power. The TJRC should prevent them from doing so, through recommending effective land tenure reforms.

*Chris Huggins was based in Kenya from 1998-2005. He is a specialist in conflicts over land and natural resources, particularly in Africa, and a PhD candidate at Carleton University, Ottawa. He recently contributed a chapter on “Linking Broad Constellations of Ideas: Transitional Justice, Land Tenure Reform, and Development” to Pablo de Greiff and Roger Duthie, (eds), Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2009)”

References

Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) (2005) Chega! The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor. Dili: CAVR. Available online at http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/chegaFiles/finalReportEng/07.9-Economic-and-Social-Rights.pdf

Kamungi, P. and J. M. Klopp. (2007). “Failure to protect: Lessons fromKenya ‘s IDP network”, Forced Migration Review, 28. 52-53 Available online at http://www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/FMR28/29.pdf

Republic of Kenya (2009) National Land Policy. Nairobi: Ministry of Lands. Draft version available online at www.ilegkenya.org/pubs/docs/DraftNationalLandPolicy.pdf

Southall, R. (2005) ‘The Ndungu Report: Land & Graft in Kenya”. Review of African Political Economy, , March 2005, pp.142-51. Available online at .oxfam.org.uk/resources/learning/landrights/downloads/ ndungu_report_land_graft.rtf

Wakhungu, J., and E. Nyukuri and Huggins, C. (2008) Land Tenure and Violent Conflict in Kenya: Consultative Conference Proceedings Report. Nairobi: ACTS Press. Available online at www.landcoalition.org/pdf/ACTS_LandConflict_report.pdf

We welcome links to this article and comments. Reproduction or redistribution of the above text requires the prior consent of the original source. Please contact lydiah-kemunto.bosire@politics.ox.ac.uk

It is not often that participants in ethnic cleansing confess to it openly, but William ole Ntimama has managed it twice: in a 1996 interview, and more recently. The brazenness of the impunity is revolting: it is natural to want accountability and reform, and equally natural to think we can have both. This, unfortunately, is a bit of a farce: stable reform and calling the violent to account are incompatible. The key is to see that the main strand of political violence in multiparty Kenya is unified by a stable and clear set of aims: majimboism, understood to mean the Kenyan form of exclusive ethnic federalism which finds its most fervent advocates in Rift Valley Province’s political class. In the 1990s, the violence was driven and supported by the majimboist-controlled state; it didn’t require mass mobilisation. 2007 was a genuine departure because the extent and intensity of majimboist violence demonstrated that communal mobilisation for violence is an effective substitute for state support. The beneficiaries have no incentive to give it up, and every incentive to avoid the consequences of past violence by holding onto power. Since their participation is necessary for reform, we can have either reform or accountability but not both.

My first job is to show that despite appearances (diversity of actors) the violence was actually unified in aim. The argument is simple: Rift Valley province is the centre of political violence in multi-party Kenya. The easy metric is deaths: even in 2007, when the violence is supposed to have been much better spread, 65% (744/1133) of recorded murders happened there (Waki: 309). We’re now eighteen years into the violence: it has broken out intermittently since 1991. Prolonged violence of this sort – locally-specific, ethnically-targeted, lethal, and carried out by a number of coordinated small groups – is organized and backed by some sort of ideological structure. That follows from the fact that most unplanned violence is difficult to start or maintain, tends to be brief, and is usually non-lethal (Collins 2008: 14-16). The exceptions to the rule of brevity (for small-group violence) occur where:

either (a) the fight is highly circumscribed, so that it is not really “serious,” or it is clearly understood that there are safeguards to limit the fighting; or (b) the type of exception described by the expression “hitting a man when he is down” (although the victim may well be a woman or a child), where in effect there is no real fight but a massacre or punishment (Collins 2008: 16).

Repeated bouts of this kind of sustained lethal violence require planning and preparation; planning and preparation for violence require coordination and justification, and hence institutionalisation. The justification is fairly clear: a middle-aged man interviewed by Al-Jazeera in Kibera, and Jason Kosgei in the Christian Science Monitor, gave almost identical answers: the violence was to end state-backed Gikuyu domination, which had begun with Kenyatta and never ended. As Lynch 2008 reports (Lynch 2008: 567), a significant portion of Kalenjin backed the violence, and have fairly specific reasons for doing so. Those reasons aren’t significantly different from those reported in Multiparty Politics in Kenya: In 1992, Biwott promised that non-Kalenjin trading licences would be revoked, and Lotodo demanded that all Gikuyu leave West Pokot (Throup and Horsnby 1998: 543). Then, as now, the immediate aims of the violence — to remove non-Kalenjin from the Rift Valley, and to place the remainder, if any, in a subordinate and dependent position –were clear.

The state did outsource violence in the 1990s; much less so afterwards. Why? In the face of the state’s significantly increased capacity for repression (Branch and Cheeseman 2008: 20), why was the violence so much worse in 2007? And why was violence was much better controlled in the 1990s than it was later? Most analyses of the violence have proceeded by identifying the actors, on the reasonable assumption that pinpointing the actor is a good proxy for pinpointing the motive. Going directly to motives, however, has some explanatory advantage: it promises informative answers to each of those questions.

Susan Mueller’s The Political Economy of Kenya’s Crisis may be the most comprehensive analysis of the underlying causes of the post-election violence. Her argument is pretty much that three factors – privatized, diffused, extra-State violence; ethnic clientelist parties; and the high-stakes prize of the Imperial Presidency – conjoined (with a very close election) to blow things up in 2007. The obvious response is to ask why nothing similar happened in 1997, and why all the factors she mentions are structural: the explanation, as given, would still work if the agents were switched. Every factor she lists was present then – if anything, the Presidency was even more imperial, the ethnic clientelist parties even more intensely ethnocentric. Yet there was relatively little violence around election time in 1997: most of the violence came well before or well after polling day. In particular, the announcement of the results in 1997 – results which in several cases were known to be entirely fraudulent – passed without incident.

This lack of specificity leaves the analysis less compelling than it might be; nowhere more so than her analysis of the state’s cession of its monopoly of violence. It is one thing to observe that the state outsourced violence; quite another to ignore the fact that the first Kibaki administration sought, very crudely, to re-establish the monopoly of violence. It is more accurate to attribute the cession of the state’s monopoly of violence to the Moi state – the state in the hands of the majimboist faction. That move – appeal to the motives of the faction in control of the state, rather than the state itself – explains why the state acted so differently either side of 2002, and it offers a direct explanation for the state’s choice and method of outsourcing violence. Moi’s outsourcing of violence in the 1990s is often explained as a pragmatic choice: irregular gangs and militias are untraceable; in employing them, the state got its extra-legal coercion done while minimizing its exposure. This is utterly unconvincing. A quick flick through the Akiwumi report demonstrates that civil servants openly participated in the violence. Nicholas Mberia – then the District Commissioner in Kericho – and 29 APs in his command violently evicted tenants from Buru farm on the morning of 13 December 1993. Not long after, he was promoted to Provincial Commissioner, Rift Valley Province. Several witnesses to the evictions in Enoosupukia testified that the Narok County Council wildlife ranger Johnson ole Punywa shot dead three residents. He too was later promoted. (Klopp 2001: 496). If the point of outsourcing violence was to conceal the state’s hand, then the state made a fearful mess of it. It’s likelier that the outsourcing of violence was driven, at least in part, by ideological motives – the drive to weaken and personalize the centre of the state, while strengthening the majimboist periphery.

Branch and Cheeseman account for the upsurge in violence by appeal to elite fragmentation. That’s a necessary rather than a sufficient condition. Remember that what’s wanted is an answer to why the violence crossed a certain threshold – why it escaped control of the state. Without an underlying capacity for violence, elite fragmentation need not have violent consequences, and it certainly need not have consequences so violent that the state struggles to control them. Appeal to a generalised diffusion of violence is nearer the mark, but it still underdetermines the quality of the violence in the Rift Valley: if elite fragmentation were sufficient to explain the escape of the violence from state control, then that would have happened in more than one place. It didn’t so, it isn’t. Capacity for violence matters; appeal to majimboist motives is sufficient to predict it.

After nearly 20 years or so of intermittent ethnic violence with zero consequences, with and without state support – and since much of the Kalenjin political class (and William ole Ntimama) is on board with the violence – it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the violence has communal approval and support (Lynch 2008: 566-7; Ashforth 2009: 16). Some significant proportion of Kalenjin opinion leaders outside the political class – the rural middle classes, in particular – have been radicalised. That has been a necessity: when the violence had state support, it did not need communal mobilisation, and there was no need for the ideological backing. Absent state support, communal backing is necessary: the violence has become more ideological as it has become more popular. The balance of power is such that Kalenjin opinion leaders who support ethnic violence, and the majimbo project which justifies it, lack effective internal constraints.

The view that majimboist violence is driven by elite incitement is false: rather, majimboist aims are now widely popular outside the political class, and are captured by it (Ashforth 2009: 18-19). Majimboists willing to resort to violence are well-mobilised because they’ve had to be: without state patronage, the fervour of their cause has had to cover for the organizational goodies the state would have brought. The underlying strategy of reform-by-coalition-government in Kenya is to get the big beasts of the political jungle into government, so that they’re all bought into the new constitutional order. If they are to feel invested, they must be free to manoeuvre; for majimboist politicians, that freedom of action is directed, as it must be, to avoiding accountability for the violence. There can be no new constitutional order without majimboist involvement; since most of the violence has been in majimboist areas, accountability and reform are incompatible.

*Dr. Daniel Waweru is the Chief Editor of KenyaImagine

The above article is available as a PDF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Ashforth (2009). “Ethnic Violence and the Prospects for Democracy in the Aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan Elections.” Public Culture, 21(1): 9-19.

Shashank Bengali (2009). “One year after the massacres, Kenya’s runners reflect.” The Christian Science Monitor, February 25, 2009 <http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0225/p25s11-woaf.html> (8 July 2009).

Bill Berkeley (1996). “An Encore for Chaos?” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1996. <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96feb/africa/africa.htm> (08 July 2009).

Randall Collins (2008). Violence: A Micro-sociological theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence (2008). Report of the Commission of Inquiry into post-election violence (“Waki”). October 15 2008. <http://www.dialoguekenya.org/docs/PEV%20Report.pdf> (08 July 2009).

Jacqueline Klopp (2001). “Ethnic Clashes’ and Winning Elections: The Case of Kenya’s Electoral Despotism.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 35(2): 17.

Gabrielle Lynch (2008). “Courting the Kalenjin: The failure of dynasticism and the strength of the ODM wave in Kenya’s Rift Valley province.” African Affairs, 107(429): 541-568.

NTV Kenya (2008). “William ole Ntimama War Monger or responsible minister?” 24 July 2008. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLIM9gPHq5s> (08 July 2009).

David Throup, Charles Hornby (1998). Multi-party Politics in Kenya. Oxford: James Currey.

Akiwumi Judicial Commission of Inquiry on Tribal Clashes (1999). Report of the Judicial Commission appointed to inquire into tribal clashes in Kenya: Rift Valley. Date of publication unclear. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/2204752/Akiwumi-Report-Rift-Valley-Province> (08 July 2009).

This article is part of a debate organized by Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) in collaboration with Moi University (Eldoret) and Pambazuka News. A selection of essays based on this debate will be published in an edited volume by Fahamu Books. For PDF documents of the debate please go to www.csls.ox.ac.uk/otjr.php.

Nineteen months have passed since Kenya’s contested 2007 election, when the rapid re-inauguration of President Mwai Kibaki heralded an outburst of post-election violence – characterised by targeted attacks on ethnic ‘others’, an overzealous state security response, and retaliatory attacks on ‘aggressor’ communities – which left over 1,000 people dead and more than 350,000 displaced. The violence ended in February 2008, when a coalition government was formed, but ‘deep peace’ remains elusive and reforms unlikely. What is left is only rhetoric differentiating this administration from post-Mau Mau amnesia and investigative committees without reforms, as after the ‘ethnic clashes’ of 1991-1993.

Bloated, divided, racked by corruption scandals and lacking a clear policy agenda, the coalition’s response to the immediate humanitarian crisis was inadequate. IDPs were moved to unmanned ‘satellite camps’ without concerted efforts to reconcile them with former neighbours, amid threats of violence and corrupt distribution of a paltry KSHS 10,000 ‘compensation’.

The government has responded to underlying causes by establishing four commissions: an Independent Review Commission to examine the electoral process (Kriegler Commission); a Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence (Waki Commission); a Constitutional Review Commission (CRC); and Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC).

In theory, such inquiries can play an important role, providing a public account and acknowledgement of the past, which may be cathartic and provide some solace. Thus, the Waki Commission has been commended for its criticism of state security services and politicians, and attention to underlying issues of impunity, poverty, underemployment and the ‘land issue’. Much more importantly, commissions can make recommendations – yet, while Kenya has held many commissions, successive governments have usually failed to introduce any suggested reforms. Unfortunately, this record continues. The most notable absence is of a Special Tribunal – recommended by the Waki Commission to investigate 10 individuals who may have incited, organised and/or financed the violence – with the threat that the ‘list’ would go to the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, in June 2009 the government agreed to a tribunal by July 2010, which renders any high-level prosecutions prior to the 2012 election campaigns extremely unlikely, while few citizens or police officers have been charged or even investigated.

Unfortunately, the CRC seems set to suffer a similar fate to its predecessor; especially its continued unwillingness to address why Kenyans are divided on certain issues, such as the benefits, dangers and meaning of devolution. Consequently, there is heavy reliance on the TJRC to solve underlying issues. However, the TJRC suffers from a paucity of resources and a massive mandate, which includes the need to establish an accurate, complete and historical record of violations of human and economic rights inflicted by the state between December 1963 and February 2008, a picture of possible causes, and investigate corruption and irregular acquisitions of land. The danger is thus that the TJRC will add little to the ‘truths’ established by earlier commissions, while their collective recommendations are delayed until after the next election or indefinitely. Added to this is a deteriorating security situation – with the police and military increasingly acting as a law unto themselves and spread of the mungiki model of gang crime and terror – while politicians seem blissfully unaware of seething resentments or, more likely, believe that they can use them to their own advantage.

The unfortunate consequence is that violence, while far from inevitable, seems increasingly likely. At the heart of the problem lies a corrupt and tarnished political system characterised by an ‘ethnic logic’ of political mobilisation and support. To understand local potential for violence one must recognise the interplay between: a highly centralised system in which real power lies with the Office of the President; a lack of faith in key institutions (such as the anti-corruption and electoral commissions, parliament, judiciary and security services); a perception that the post-colonial state is (and has been) ethnically biased; communal discourses of past injustice and marginalisation regarding ‘lost lands’ and political patronage; pressure on elites to present and further ethnic claims; the use of inflammatory and chauvinistic or defensive ethnic language by political candidates and local opinion formers; the use of violence as a political and economic strategy; a culture of impunity for corruption, ethnic incitement and organisation of violence; the subsequent normalisation of violence; and finally, but not least, high levels of poverty, inequality, and un (and under) employment especially among the youth.

Given this litany of interwoven factors and long-standing issues it is clear that far-reaching reforms are required. The most important of these are:

1) Institutional and constitutional reforms to reduce presidential powers and increase faith in key institutions. The colonial administration bequeathed a highly centralised system, which respective presidents have used in the name of unity and development. This has encouraged an obsession with personalities as the problem and potential salvation, and created a zero-sum game with all eyes on the presidency.

2) The government needs to end the culture of impunity for participation in violence by police and citizens, and the use of violence as a political strategy. Despite evidence that KANU politicians incited, organised and financed ‘ethnic clashes’ in the early 1990s, no investigations took place. This history has encouraged a normalisation of violence, such that it is increasingly part of political and socio-economic strategies, and has spiralled out of control – as the growth of ethnic militias (such as mungiki) prompts an increasingly violent state security response, and yet more militia activity.

3) Finally, the government must look beyond economic growth to realities of poverty and inequality along with perceptions of state bias and historical injustice. This requires much more than donor rhetoric of ‘poverty reduction’ and praise for impressive growth rates without noticeable trickle-down, but also a deep understanding of the link between perceptions of past and present injustice and the politicisation of ethnicity and the ethnicisation of politics. At present, there is a tendency to explain African politics by a simple ‘politics of patronage’, or the notion that politicians use ethnicity to mobilise support and reward supporters with state largesse. While important, this narrative ignores bottom-up pressures and the broader base of political accountability, and encourages a simplistic dichotomy between ‘bad’ politicians and ‘good’ citizens. More specifically, this approach ignores ways in which narratives of ‘shared pasts’ – of displacement, injustice, marginalisation and/or achievement – provide people with a means to lay claims to ownership and control of space, and rights to assistance. Too often ignored, this dynamic produces a complex political terrain in which politicians use ethnicity to mobilise support, and ordinary citizens use communal discourses to further claims to rights and resources.

To tackle all of these areas in a coherent and aggressive manner is clearly no small task, especially given the unwieldy coalition government, the worldwide recession, and competing claims to resources and representation. Nevertheless, the urgency for reform renders the government’s lacklustre performance in all these areas a source of considerable concern, as failing to deal with underlying problems and new layers of grievance raises numerous reasons to worry about future electoral cycles.

*Dr. Gabrielle Lynch is a Lecturer in Africa and the Politics of Development in the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, and has been conducting research on politics and ethnicity in Kenya since 2003.

The above article is available as a PDF

The handover of the names of the suspects behind Kenya’s post-election violence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an uncertain chapter in the country’s history of political violence. This development has generated a vibrant debate among Kenyans: What should accountable politics look like? What is the role of transitional justice in getting us there? Under what conditions might the current turn of events contribute to the country’s long term stability?

This forum offers a space where concerned Kenyans can come together with a range of experts, scholars, practitioners, and commentators to discuss fundamental questions about how Kenya got here, and the strategies necessary to move the country forward. This essay provides an overview of recent debates on violence and accountability in Kenya and summarizes the first set of contributions to this forum.

Any policy aimed at addressing Kenya’s current crisis necessarily assumes the existence of a clear understanding of what caused the violence in the first place. While some scholars explain the recent cycle of violence as a manifestation of the negative side of electoral democracy, where elites fight over control of the state in a context of zero-sum politics, others emphasize the trend of informalizing violence, where elites set up, control, or manipulate an alternative security infrastructure (which, among other things, can be deployed to coerce opponents). Others still find these explanations incomplete, and instead cite structures of inequality, with a particular focus on grievances over access to land and resources. Many of these explanations privilege the agency of the political class in manipulating ethnic cleavages.

Daniel Branch’s essay in this series disagrees with many of these accounts’ focus on elites, as they insufficiently interrogate the agency of ordinary Kenyans in the violence. Normalization of violence, Branch argues, is evidence of a society’s shifting moral landscape: Kenyans increasingly accept violence in a range of arenas as a means of exerting authority. Elite manipulation of that violence to reduce electoral uncertainty forms only one expression of a wider social phenomenon. Branch’s conclusion points to a question that continues to be debated in response to violence by state agents: is there moral and immoral violence? Or is it the case that (as with the dichotomy of political and apolitical violence that Branch finds unhelpful) in time the distinctions dissipate?

Daniel Waweru’s essay also discounts many of the common accounts for the post-election violence, and offers in their place an explanation based on the permeation of the majimboist ideology outside of the political class and into the community. This view carries implications for what is politically feasible in the current considerations of accountability and constitutional reform: Waweru argues that while President Moi informalized violence during his reign as a strategy of strengthening the ethnocentric majimboist fringe, his exit from power terminated state sponsorship for the majimboist project, leading Kalenjin opinion leaders to be more radicalized, and their project of ethnic cleansing more ideological and popularized. Consequently, the very majimboist elites who must come into the political fold for there to be effective constitutional reform in Kenya are the same ones who would be marginalized in processes of accountability. In what appears to be a variation of the ‘peace v justice’ debate that has characterized Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere, Waweru argues that Kenya can have either reform or accountability, but not both.

Nonetheless, Gabriel Lynch’s essay argues that both accountability and reform are essential for Kenya, although she sees little evidence that the state will act differently from previous episodes of violence. Highlighting that reforms to date have been largely superficial and procedural with little focus on how complex issues coalesce, she offers three concerns on which the state must focus: the presidency and its zero-sum politics, impunity and the informalization of violence, and the politics of ethnicity. Further, she points out that the manner in which Kenyan (and African) politics are framed and understood – as ‘good’ citizen v ‘bad’ politician, for instance – misses the different meanings of history, incentives and reciprocity in political processes.

Despite Lynch’s scepticism, the handover the Waki envelope to the ICC has generated a vibrant (and hopeful) discussion on the importance of historical clarification and transitional justice in general, and of prosecutions in particular. However, the Kenyan media is dominated by confusing descriptions of which mechanism is legally feasible or politically desirable. What happens when many Kenyans appear to prefer the ICC and have no trust in a national process; international NGOs prefer a domestic process because, they argue, Kenya has the institutional capacity that can deliver justice with some modifications (although an equally persuasive explanation for this preference from international NGOs may be the general reluctance among many ICC supporters to see the Court in yet another African case); prominent ODM parliamentarians declare their intention to actively sabotage efforts for domestic prosecutions; and cabinet members from both parties argue that the only way is a domestic tribunal because to do otherwise would imply that Kenya is a failed state? Which of these interests should matter more? Who decides? Is it possible for this discussion to emphasize objectives of accountability, leaving processes as secondary considerations?

In all the confusion, another important discussion is glossed over, as Tim Murithi emphasises in this forum: he makes intelligible the reasons why Kofi Annan handed over the envelope to the ICC prosecutor. While the three ministers who went to Geneva have oscillated between shock at an Annan ‘betrayal’ and (reluctant) praise of Annan’s ‘patience’, it remains unclear why Annan acted as he did. Murithi argues that Annan passed the envelope to the ICC because the coalition seemed oblivious to the fact that their disinclination for accountability placed Kenya in a high risk category in the framework of the Office of the Special Advisor of the UN Secretary General for the Prevention of Genocide. In their vacillation between doing nothing, paying lip service to prosecutions or expressing preference for a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, political leaders exhibited a lack of political vision for meeting the justice needs of victims, thus forcing Annan’s hand.

In thinking about lessons that we can draw from the past violence, the essay by Wanjiru Kamau-Ruternberg analyses how the performance of gendered violence in the form of forcible male circumcision plays into ethnic politics. She argues that circumcision offered a framework for Mungiki violence against Luo men because it was embedded in a narrative of feminizing ethnicities; a narrative was alive in the discourses of Kenyatta, found confidence in the period of the draft constitution referendum, and was ironically embraced by Raila Odinga himself. In this atmosphere, where the feminized could be violated, it was only a matter of time before the gendered ‘ecology of violence’ expanded to include feminized Luo men.

Sisule Musungu’s contribution focuses on the way forward. His summary of a 2000 report on possible future Kenyan scenarios emphasizes the need to avoid the maintenance of the status quo – what the project terms the ‘el nino’ scenario – as the outcome of such a scenario can only be fractured decline. He argues that, much like the late years of the Moi era, Kenya has reached another crossroads, and it might be time to dust off and reconsider the discussions that inspired change a decade ago.

Even so, the possible political outcomes from the current crossroads are not obvious. Might Kenya be the case where the heretofore weak ICC ‘deterrent’ argument gains relevance? For instance, to what extent are shifts in Kenyan political and ethnic alliances a response to a credible threat of prosecutions? Does the potential involvement of the ICC (and the subsequent excitement about prosecutions) have the capacity to de-ethnicize and de-collectivize the post-elections violence, to recast blame from communities to individuals in the political class? Or would prosecutions be inadequate for the multifaceted forms of violence experienced in Kenya? Beyond the ICC, how adequate or appropriate are the proposed transitional justice measures for the Kenyan context? What are the competing interests in Kenya’s project of political reform and accountability, and whose interests are likely to triumph?

These and other questions will be tackled in future essays in this forum. We welcome your reflections and contributions.

*Lydiah Kemunto Bosire is reading for her doctorate in politics at the University of Oxford, with a research focus on transitional justice in Kenya and Uganda. She is also the co-founder of Oxford Transitional Jusitice Research (OTJR). Previously, she worked at the International Center for Transitional Justice, the WHO and the UN.

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Dimingawi Fadul Seisi Mohamed Ateem, the most senior Fur chief in the historic province of Dar Diima, now known as the eastern localities of West Darfur State, spoke at length to the Panel. “We are Darfurians, we are true Africans.” He provided a history of how the war began in the late 1980s, and in many ways the discussions that followed showed how the conflict of twenty years ago was still unfinished business in the heartland of the Fur.

“The civil war started in Chad and led to the displacement of citizens to my area. They came and never returned back home. Our customs and traditions are different from theirs, our values are different. The political parties did not all care about the misery of individuals, they were just addressing the political aspect, and ignoring the citizens.”

“I represent all the eastern localities [of West Darfur]. I have been through it all. We sat and made agreements. I have a book, full of agreements, from 1989 onwards. I have all these agreements in writing. But they have come to nothing on account of those who are carrying weapons. Many of those who are carrying weapons are from Chad. The Janjawiid are paramount, they are beyond the law. We need to hold everyone accountable.”

An Arab Omda, Daud Dahab Abdu (from Nyertete) responded to the Dimangawi, and also to Shartai Ahmed Bakheit, who had presented the consolidated recommendations of the Native Administration, and spoken about how 600 Chadian Arab families had settled in his locality. Omda Daud said:

“The tribal wars began in the 1980s, all localities, Arab and Fur. The reason was that some began to claim that the nomads are not Sudanese. History tells us that all the tribes in Darfur are original and native, known from history from the time that the Arabs came to Sudan. When the war erupted in the 1980s, reconciliation was achieved in 1991. Then came the [SPLA] invasion of Daud Bolad and Abdel Aziz al Hilu…”

He had a different version of the history of the last twenty years. When he began to recount it, there was an outcry from the assembled chiefs, who encouraged him to go straight to his major points.

“With all due respect to the Shartay and the Dimangawi… On the issue of settlement, war led to a lot of displacement, a lot of movement of people from one place to another. Some people found empty lands and started using them and farming them. It doesn’t mean they are claiming ownership. We can all go back to our lands. This is not a crucial issue, it can be resolved. The concern for us is the conflict between the government and the armed movements, what is our role in that?”

After speaking, returning to his seat, Omda Daud made a point of stopping to greet the Dimangawi warmly, shaking him by the hand.

In several hearings, President Thabo Mbeki asked participants whether there was a problem with the hakura system of land tenure. The answers revealed differing interpretations of what the hakura system actually meant, and whether it should be reinstated, adapted, or even abolished. Some noted the importance of balancing citizenship rights with customary land rights. Others noted that a hakura is not, historically speaking, a tribal land grant, but rather a neighbourhood in which rights need not be granted on a tribal basis. In some cases, the issue was not so much the hakura system per se, but disputes over who has entitled to control which piece of land. Part of the disagreement arose because historically the hakura system was not monolithic, with different practices prevailing in different places. The interpretation of hakura as “tribal land ownership” is a recent re-invention of tradition. But arguments over historical interpretation should not obscure the massive violation of rights that has taken place with the forced displacement of millions of people from their villages.

The issue of land rights and citizenship interact in important ways. In the al Fashir hearings, Hassan Abdel Aziz of the Arab Coordination Council said “We shouldn’t be categorized as a part of society that is different. Don’t classify us as a segment that is not part of society.” That same day, Adam Mahmud, Omda of Salaam camp al Fashir, did not dispute the Arabs’ citizenship, but argued that recovering alienated land was an essential step: “We are in a prison, ten by ten [blocks], while others are living on our lands.”

Several nomad representatives made the point that historically, the nomadic communities had been disadvantaged, including under-representation on voting rolls. Some raised concerns about the implicit xenophobia that crept into some discussions on land. For example, Yousif Ismail Abdalla, of the Masar Organization (which provides services for nomads) spoke in the Khartoum civil society hearing, “Many tribes are nomads, and have different problems to those who are settled. Also those who are moving across borders to Chad and Central African Republic, they should have the same rights.” The issue of removing settlers who originated outside Sudan was raised—but no-one spoke on behalf of those settlers and their rights.

In the Geneina hearings, the issue of land alienation and occupation was particularly salient. Two inter-related issues arose: the alleged preferential award of citizenship to new settlers and the forced removal from land. One IDP said: “If I go to the Ministry of Interior to get an IDP card, I can’t get a document even with witnesses, but someone from Niger can come and get one even without.” And another spoke: “Some tribes are above the law, they behave like government. For us to be equal, justice must prevail.” The point about forced removal was emphasized by one IDP who said that the name of his former village had been changed and the trees that had previously been the boundary markers had been cut down, so the place could not be recognized. The IDPs had a practical suggestion: “We look forward to a mechanism to come to the IDP community to look into our claims and address our issues in an independent manner.” They said that they had all the evidence for land occupation, but a neutral body was needed to investigate and establish the facts.

In the final press conference before leaving Sudan, Pres. Mbeki outlined some steps that could be done immediately, without waiting for any agreement. Among them was a joint investigation by UNAMID and the government, with the involvement of IDPs, into the threats to IDP security, both in camps and on their return home. Examining the extent and nature of land occupation is part of this agenda.

Professor Mamdani throughout Saviors and Survivors rightly emphasises the importance of land issues in the internal conflict(s) in Darfur. Much of the discussion centres around the issue of hakura and what it means. Although I have tried to clarify the historical dimension in Chapter Seven of my The Darfur Sultanate. A History (London: Christopher Hurst & NY: Columbia UP, 2008), there still seems to be considerable confusion about the historical aspects of the hakura system, as is evidenced by Mamdani’s discussion of the topic.

Let me begin, as historians should, with the sources; there are approximately four categories, namely,

(1) accounts by visitors to Darfur (principally Muhammad al-Tunisi and Gustav Nachtigal [see bibliography at end]) and a Lebanese official, Na’um Shuqayr, who worked for British intelligence in Egypt and the Sudan and who wrote in 1903 a monumental history of the Sudan in Arabic.

(2) just under 400 Arabic documents issued by the sultans or their officials dated between c. 1700 and 1916 exist in photographic form. The majority were photographed by me in and around al-Fashir, Kutum and Mellit in 1970 and 1974 (a detailed catalogue can be found on my Website, http://www.smi.uib.no/darfur/). It is my intention to make the original photographs available on my Website in the near future. Later researchers like Drs. Lidwien Kapteijns, Joerg Adelberger, Ulrich Braukämper, and Michael La Rue were unable to find many more such documents, so the conclusion must be that I had a “window of opportunity” at the time. But there is also another explanation (see below). I list at the end all the articles by me and others that give the text and translations of Darfur documents from the sultanate.

(3) information I noted on hakura in the British Province Archives in al-Fashir and Kutum in 1970 and 74. The archives comprized about 600 files and I made some 250 pages of notes from them. Most of my notes will be given in annotated form in my forthcoming Darfur and the British. A Sourcebook (London: Christopher Hurst, 2009). Sadly, the original files were accidently destroyed some time in the early 1980s and I am the only researcher to have used them.

(4) oral informants: I interviewed the owners of the documents and others. Again I am preparing my fieldnotes for dissemination on the Web.

A note on language and terminology; generally the language, except for the two earliest items from about 1700, is unproblematic. The two earliest charters are written in a kind of phonetic Arabic that renders a reliable translation moot (I have read them with some of the Sudan’s greatest scholars, including the late Drs. M.I. Abu Salim and ‘Awn al-Sharif Qasim; neither could decipher them with any confidence). In the documents themselves the term, hakura, is rarely used; the commonest term is iqta’ from the Arabic root, qata’a, literally “to cut off”. Now, iqta’ has a long and complex history in the Islamic world and does not always mean “fief, feudal estate” (as it is translated in Wehr/Cowan Arabic-English Dictonary). Generally the transfer of terms from European historiography to the non-European world is a dodgy exercise. Incidentally, hakura is not a common usage in Arabic; Lane in his classic dictionary of Arabic defines it as “a piece of land retained and enclosed by its proprietor” for agricultural use, while ‘Awn al-Sharif in his dictionary of Sudanese Arabic simply refers to its Darfur meaning, which he may have got from me since he was familiar with my writings.

In Mandani’s book and in many other writings on the land tenure system in Darfur, there is an implicit assumption that the sultans applied the hakura system to the whole sultanate. Nowhere in my published writings have I clearly addressed the issue on how widespread the hakura system was, so here I want to make amends.

From the geographical distribution of the documents I and others have photographed and the information given in The Western Darfur District Handbook from 1936, it is clear that there were two geographical areas that were the principal beneficiaries/targets of the hakura system, namely,

(a) north/central Darfur around al-Fashir and Kobbei stretching northwards to Kutum and Mellit and some way into parts of Dar Zaghawa.

(b) southwestern Darfur, i.e. the Fur heartlands around Zalingei, the historical province of Dar Diima comprising twelve Fur chieftancies or shartayas, still ruled by the title-holder the Aba Diimang – the present holder of the title which can be translated as “lord of Diima”, Fadil Sissei, is about the twentieth of his name, as they say in Scotland and Ireland of clan chiefs.

This limited geographical localisation is not hard to explain; the area around al-Fashir was attractive by reason of its proximity to the sultanate’s capital from 1792, al-Fashir, while Dar Diima contains some of the most fertile and well-watered land in the Sudan, not to say Darfur. In other words, on the evidence we have, there is no reason (and there are some contra-indications) to say that the hakura/iqta’ system was co-terminous with the sultanate. There are few references to hakura in eastern Darfur and none south of Nyala, i.e. in the Baqqara Belt. Thus there is no evidence for the claims that the sultans gave hakuras to the Arab cattle nomads (Baqqara), but not to the Arab camel nomads (Abbala).

I see no reason here to repeat what I have written in The Darfur Sultanate and various articles (see at end), except to note a change from my 1980 book to the sultanate book of last year, namely in the latter I emphasise that these grants were never freehold or in anyway absolute in any Anglo-American legal sense. All such grants were given and could be taken away at the behest of the sultan; eminent domain applied in Darfur as else- where. The sultan was the state.

Professor Mamdani’s discussion is confused on several points, but he gives generally a not unreasonable account of what I wrote in my 1980 book, although he seems to have ignored or been unaware of the book by myself and Abu Salim from 1983, not to speak the many articles I and others have written over the years since. There are some problems; he begins his discussion with a typology of the Sudanic state based on the outdated generalizations of the Swedish ethnographer, Tor Irstam. In fact, Sudanic states are surprisingly diverse in their structures. Mamdani too easily jumps from the Sinnar Sultanate to Darfur; al-Fashir and Sinnar are a thousand kilometers apart and occupy very different ecologies. What Spaulding has illuminatingly written about Sinnar can not willy-nilly be transferred to Darfur.

Mamdani makes play with a thesis of detribalisation/retribalisation; thus the sultans were progressive and broke down tribal particularisms by means of the hakura system, while the British were racialistically addicted to tribalism. Frankly, both propositions are absurd. What the hakura or estate system meant in ethnic terms is almost impossible to decipher from the documents. That outsiders were granted estates in tribally-owned territories is well-documented, but that of course was the sultan’s prerogative. The immigration into such estates of settlers from elsewhere is well-attested and pace Mamdani sid al-fas does not mean an estate-manager, but rather a tenant who had been granted tenancy rights within an estate, as I thought I had made clear in my writings. Under a different aspect there was indeed a form of detribalization under the sultans; from about 1800 the sultans and those close to them increasingly recruited officials, slave and free, from all the peoples of the state. The Darfur Sultanate was no longer an ethnic Fur monopoly, although Fur remained the court language. One informant told me that the last sultan ‘Ali Dinar (reigned 1898-1916) dictated his correspondence in Fur which was taken down directly in Arabic (documents from his reign are very sophisticated productions), much like a French lord dictating a charter to be turned into Latin.

Mamdani attributes retribalisation to the British; whether this was the case in other parts of the Sudan can be argued, but in Darfur they simply tinkered with the boundaries they had inherited from the sultanate. Significant changes were rare; in the early 1930s the then Deputy Governor of Darfur, A.J. Arkell, confronting the administrative muddle in and around al-Fashir argues for the restoration of the administrative boundaries set out by Sultan Muhammad al-Fadl (1803-38), i.e. a hundred years before (the document is reproduced in my Darfur and the British).

Retribalization (I wrote a paper for the World Bank under that title in 2006) in Darfur and extensive attempts to redraw boundaries usually in favour of Arab groups (for example in Dar Masalit in the early 1990s) are phenomena of the 1980s to the present with the demand for mono-ethnic tribal dars, which is when the hakura idea seems to have come into the political mainstream. Historically, not even the most remote Fur shartaya, say Konyir or Wona in western Jabal Marra, was ever solely inhabited by Fur alone, let alone in the rest of Darfur. How hakura transformed itself from meaning estate in eighteenth and nineteenth century documents to “tribal landownership rights” (DPA, paragraph 158) is unknown to me. I may have inadvertently contributed through a translation into Arabic, al-Dawla wa’l-mujtama’ fi Darfur, of my 1980 book elegantly made by ‘Abd al-Hafiz Sulayman ‘Umar (without reference to me), a school headmaster (not Darfurian) who taught in Darfur for some years (published Cairo: Centre for Sudanese Studies, 2000). When in Abuja in 2006, I was struck by the number of Darfurians there who had copies of the translation with them.

Again in Abuja, I was struck by the way hakura was equated with the notion of a mono-ethnic tribal homeland with the dominant ethnicity having absolute freehold rights. At the local level, there are now many conflicts, Salamat versus Ta’aisha, Masalit versus Arab, Birged, Misiriyya versus Zaghawa around Ghor Abeshei, Fur versus Bani Halba, Fallata versus Habbaniyya etc. being fought out within the hakura paradigm.

Professor Mamdani is, of course, right to stress the importance of land as an issue. The Darfurians will have sort out among themselves a future land policy. Personally, I do not think mono-ethnic “racially pure” homelands is the way to go.

R. S. O’Fahey is Professor at the University of Bergen. His website contains the finest collection of online historical documents on Darfur.

Bibliography

See further O’Fahey, Darfur Sultanate, 311-36.

Below I list only publications that deal directly with pre-colonial Darfur documents.

J.O. Hunwick (2002), “A Mahdist letter from Darfur”, Sudan Africa. A Journal of Historical Sources, 13, 21-5.

Nachtigal, Gustav, Sahara and Sudan, transl. A.G.B. Fisher and J.H. Fisher, vol. 4. London, 1971.

R.S. O’Fahey (1972) (with Abdel Ghaffar Muhammad Ahmed) ‘Documents from Dar Fur’, fascicle 1. Occasional Paper no. 1, Programme of Middle Eastern and African Studies, Department of History, University of Bergen, 54 pp.

- (1973) (with Abdel Ghaffar Muhammad Ahmed), ‘Documents from Dar Fur’, fascicle 2, Occasional Paper no. 2, Programme of Middle Eastern and African Studies, Department of History, University of Bergen, 63 pp.

-(1979) ‘Two early Dar Fur charters’, Sudan Texts Bulletin, Coleraine, i, 13-17.

- (1981) ‘The case of Adam’s ear’, Sudan Texts Bulletin, Coleraine, iii, 44-53, but see L. Kapteijns, pp. 54-5.

- (1981) (with Jay Spaulding), ‘A sultanic present’, Sudan Texts Bulletin, Coleraine, iii,
38-43.

- (1986) ‘Dar Fur in Kordofan. The Sultans and the Awlad Najm’, Sudan Texts Bulletin, vii, 43-63.

- (1986) (with Sharif Harir), ‘Two husbands and a daughter from Dar Fur’, Sudan Texts Bulletin, vii, 30-42.

- (1990-1) ‘The Archive of Shoba: Parts One & Two’, Sudanic Africa: a Journal for Historical Sources, i, 71-83, & ii, 79-112.

- (1992) ‘A Prince and his Neighbours’, Sudanic Africa, iii, 57-94.

- (1983) (with M.I. Abu Salim) Land in Dar Fur. Charters and Related Documents from the Dar Fur Sultanate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 180 pp.

Shuqayr, Na’um, Ta’rikh al-Sudan al-qadim wa’l-hadith wa-jughrafituhu, Cairo 1903, 3 vols.

Eltounsy, Mohammed, Voyage au Darfur, Paris, 1845.

In the 1970s, Sudan sought to become the “breadbasket of the Middle East” even while it failed to tackle undernutrition in the provinces. The 1984 famine in western Sudan and the Red Sea Hills occurred while the Gedaref grain merchants exported food to the Middle East. Trains taking sorghum to Port Sudan to be shipped abroad passed relief convoys moving in the opposite direction, while the starving Beja—neglected in the early days of the relief effort—lined the roadside. Sudan recorded a record harvest in 1988, just as the Southern famine hit its nadir. And in 1990 there was a reprise of nationwide famine alongside food exports. Especially ironic, given the Islamist colour of the government, was the destination of some of the food exports—pig feed in Spain, Heineken production in Holland. And so it went on during the 1990s, albeit on a less egregious scale.

Of course there is nothing exceptional about countries or provinces exporting food during famines. It happened in Bengal in 1943, in Ethiopia’s Wollo in 1973, and on many other occasions. Hunger amid plenty is frequent and the result of how markets work. Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (1981) begins with the commonplace but nonetheless repeatable observation that “Famine is the phenomenon of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the phenomenon of there being not enough food to eat.” People starve if they don’t have sufficient resources to buy food or haven’t grown enough themselves. Merchants sell to those with money to buy, they don’t give away food to the hungry. If there isn’t enough food in the country, but there is enough purchasing power, traders import food.

Some relief agencies have tried to tackle this issue with cash grants to the poor and purchase of local surpluses. This is also an attempt to remedy the absurdity whereby food aid, tied to agricultural subsidies in wealthy countries, has to travel half way around the world when there are local surpluses available. The European Union moved its food aid programme to market-based purchase a decade ago, allowing it to buy locally. It has regularly bought food in Sudan. Four years ago, USAID tried to do the same for a proportion of its food aid, but was blocked by a combination of vested agricultural and shipping interests and the lobbying of NGOs which have guaranteed incomes from food aid disbursement (CARE was an honorable exception). (It’s an interesting question if the current U.S. embargo on trade relations with Sudan would allow USAID to buy food there if it wanted to.)

There are some good arguments in favour of not using exclusively market-based procurement for food relief. For example, market purchase may be slow in getting moving in response to a rapid-onset emergency, whereas the existing system means that there is usually enough food aid on the high seas for a ship to be in the vicinity of the disaster, ready to be diverted. But more common is the phenomenon of local surpluses remaining unsold, or being exported, while food aid is shipped from the mid-west.

Another set of issues is Sudan’s agricultural strategy and its relationship to land tenure laws, labour market regulation, commercial interests, counterinsurgency strategies, and international food aid. These were explored a decade ago in African Rights’ report, Food and Power in Sudan. Analysis of each of these five elements shows that Sudanese agriculture is subject to systematic distortion, through policy. Day-to-day commercial decisions—such as whether a supplier sells to the EU for local distribution or exports to Saudi Arabia—are based on market criteria. But long-established policy biases provide a huge subsidy to commercial agriculture, at the expense of smallholder farmers and their communities.

Since colonial days, Sudanese land tenure has failed to recognize customary land tenure. The resulting inequities were the focus of a debate on this blog earlier this year. Whatever are the merits and disadvantages of different approaches to addressing the problem of tenure security for smallholder farmers, there is no doubt that land dispossession is both a major reason for famine and an important motive for insurrection. Current land law facilitates expropriation by well-connected elites at the expense of rural people. It is particularly pronounced in Eastern Sudan, Blue Nile, Upper Nile and South Kordofan.

Sudanese commercial agriculture is labour intensive and suffers chronic labour shortages at peak times. Commercial farmers have always relied on a labour force which lacks full citizenship rights and is therefore cheaper to employ. In the colonial era the labourers on the Gezira Scheme were chiefly migrants from West Africa, notably the Nigerian-origin Fellata. In the late colonial period, large numbers of Masalit and Fur also migrated to central and eastern Sudan as agricultural labourers. Under the strict tenancy requirements of the Gezira, few could obtain land rights. It was easier to do so in eastern Sudan, as a result of which some Masalit migrants from Darfur’s far west cleared farmland on Sudan’s furthest eastern border with Ethiopia and Eritrea—and tried to escape the insecure livelihood of a casual farm labourer. In the late-1960s, Eritrean refugees swelled the ranks of farmworkers. And when the civil war resumed in 1983, Southern Sudanese and Nuba migrants replenished the labour force.

Today’s enthusiasm for agricultural investment by Middle Eastern companies is a reprise of the 1970s. Then it generated quick profits for commercial investors but was a social and environmental disaster. In 1986, the World Bank reversed its earlier support for expanding mechanized agriculture. This didn’t stop a continuing expansion of commercial schemes, many of them without formal registration. When backed by money and local policemen, the absence of proper documentation in Khartoum doesn’t matter too much. The CPA envisaged land commissions to examine this and other issues. They are not doing their job.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, counterinsurgency strategies in agriculturally-productive areas, such as the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile, involved forcibly congregating villagers in “peace villages” where they provided a cheap labour force for work on agricultural schemes. Military control converged with land expropriation and the commercial farmers’ interest. This hasn’t happened in Darfur because there are no commercial farms of significance. Although the soils in South Darfur are good enough, the area is simply too remote for commercial farming to be a viable option, at least for the time being. If Nyala city continues to grow and prosper, and the food aid subsidy to its grain market declines, then the incentives for commercial agriculture in South Darfur will certainly change.

Food relief plays an interesting role in this process of political-economic change. This was first analyzed by Mark Duffield (in several reports and two chapters of Global Governance and the New Wars). When large number of war migrants first began to arrive in South Kordofan in 1987 and 1988, the authorities were at first resolutely opposed to giving them any food aid. They saw the displaced as a burden and a threat and would rather that they disappeared. But the alternative of them finding their way to Khartoum was less attractive, so schemes to keep them in South Kordofan in aid-supported peace villages were put forward. For the government and commercial farmers, these served the purposes of maintaining a cheap labour force. For the aid agencies, they were presented as the beginnings of new settlements that would ultimately become self-sufficient. In pursuit of this, people were only given part rations, on the grounds that this would create incentives for self-reliance. Given that the displaced were denied land rights, what it did of course was simply to subsidize their employment as labourers. This arrangement persisted for many years—it still exists—creating what Duffield calls the “permanent emergency” on the frontiers of the areas of consolidated government control.

Thirty years of studies of Sudan’s agricultural sector have consistently recommended major reform in favour of customary tenure and smallholder production. In the commercial farming regions, very little has ever been implemented. (Ironically, Darfur did much better with the Western Savanna and Jebel Marra projects, which were supportive of smallholder agriculture.) If world food prices remain high, we can expect that commercial farmers will be the main beneficiaries of the bonanza, and in turn this will encourage more land allocations for mechanized food production, more expropriation of smallholders, and more rural distress and grievance. It’s time for these studies of Sudanese agriculture to be dusted off and their recommendations examined again.

Land has often been described as a key motivation for the Arabs and non-Arabs who actively participated in the “Janjaweed” in Darfur and southeast Chad (see my article “Darfur: a Conflict for Land” in Alex de Waal (ed.), War in Darfur and the Search for Peace.) One of the primary traits of the Darfur crisis (like the Dar Sila crisis in Chad) can be described as a split between those members of the population with territories (hawakir) due to traditional, mainly pre-colonial land rights and those who have none – a split which is not exactly the same as the ethnic divisions between Arabs and non-Arabs that are so often presented without nuance.

Land should be seen as a sign of political power – a vital distinction that James Morton has made in this blog – because it is intrinsically connected to the possession of paramount traditional chiefdoms. The Abbala Arabs and other groups deprived of land rights for historical reasons, a nomadic lifestyle and/or recent settling in a given place seem to have a perfectly logical position on the land problem: demanding land rights both by the use of force and through legal means, they want political power equal to other groups – even if the circumstances have shown that a land title is not necessary for gaining power.

Unlike the Abbala Arabs, the three main ethnic groups from which the rebels were recruited – the Fur, the Masalit, and the Zaghawa – have been presented as sedentary groups holding hawakir and defending a traditional land system. In fact, the Zaghawa, and especially some rebel leaders, often take an ambivalent stance on the question of land: of course they hold on to their traditional land rights and categorically reject the occupation of non-Arab lands by Abbala Arabs; but they also show concern for the preservation of ethnic diversity in some places where they live without holding the land. Their particular lifestyle and recent history are one explanation: in recent decades, this ethnic group from the far reaches of North Darfur and eastern Chad, a minority in both countries, has undergone an unprecedented dispersion throughout the Darfur region and beyond and has gone from the margins to the center of power. In power in Chad since 1990, they play a major role in the competing rebellions in Darfur and Chad.

In many ways, Zaghawa culture is closer to the Abbala Arabs than to the Fur and the Masalit. They see themselves primarily as breeders, and traditionally favored cattle; however, the recent desertification that has touched their region of origin has led many to favor camels. The main difference between the two groups is that the Zaghawa have traditional land rights. Their territories reflect the structure of the Zaghawa group and the history of its formation, which are distinct from the Arabs. The latter have different groups and subgroups present in Darfur and Chad that form patrilineal lineages where men transmit the Arab identity to their children regardless of the mother’s ethnicity. This type of lineage can also be found at the Zaghawa clan level. But beyond the clan level, Zaghawa identity takes a different shape: the Zaghawa appear to form a confederation combining “indigenous” clans as well as “newcomers” from various places: other nearby ethnic groups (Tubu and Goran), the groups that founded the great kingdoms of Sahel (Fur, Waddayans, Bornu) and even Arabs (although many non-Arab Muslim groups lay fictive claims to an Arab origin.) The “newcomers” often seized power from the “indigenous” clans, adopting some of their culture, like their language and pre-Islamic religion.

This combination is how the different communities that call themselves “Beri” – but that are more often referred to under their Arab names Zaghawa and Bideyat – were formed. The very fact that the Arabs did not perceive them to be a single group is proof of their dispersal, which can also be seen in terms of their territory. There is a Dar Zaghawa or “Zaghawa country” (the Zaghawa equivalent is Beri be or “house of the Beri”) just as there is a Dar Masalit, but using this single term in fact hides many different dar (here used in terms of territory.) Here a brief overview of these distinctions is needed.

The Beri are divided into three main subgroups (each speaking a different dialect):

1. The Kobe (Zaghawa) and other small close groups (in particular the Kabka.) They live primarily in Chad, while a few of them live on the other side of the border near Tina.

2. The Wogi (Zaghawa) live in Sudan, with traditional territories between Kornoy and El-Fasher.

3. The Bideyat or Toba live mainly in Chad, on the Ennedi Range or the surrounding plains in the Saharan zone. Their westernmost group, the Borogat, lives near the Goran and their members claim dual identity – Bideyat or Goran – as it suits their interests. At the other end of their territory, several Bideyat clans crossed the border, some many centuries ago, to settle among the Zaghawa Wogi.

These subgroups have many divisions of their own: none of them is united under a chief and one needs to go to the next level below to determine the largest chiefdoms. Historically, the chiefdoms received outside recognition from the rival sultanates of Darfur and Wadday, while remaining more or less independent depending on the area. Zaghawa chieftains later exploited similar rivalries between the French and British colonial powers. The French were more active than the British in trying to unify the traditional chiefdoms, but each of the two administrations maintained the principle of chiefdoms corresponding to specific territories called dar. Here is a brief overview of the current organization and affinities of the main subgroups:

1. Kobe: all of the Chadian Zaghawa were united under a single “Kobe” sultanate by French colonization, which caused the creation of two dissident sultanates on the Sudanese side of the border (the Kobe sultanate of Tina-Sudan and the Kabka sultanate of Tundubay.) The Kobe of Chad tend to favor the regime of Idriss Déby, while those in Sudan are the base of the JEM (Justice and Equality Movement), one of the two founding movements of the Darfur rebellion along with the SLA (Sudan Liberation Army). The JEM is now the largest in military terms.

2. The Wogi are divided into six chiefdoms: Dar Gala (Kornoy), Dar Tuer (Um Buru), Muzbat (independent from Dar Tuer since 1995), Dar Artaj (Um Haraz), Dar Sueini (Dor), Dar Beire (Hashaba). They were among the leaders of the Darfur rebellion, first as part of the SLA, then of Minni Arku Minnawi’s faction of (where today only members of his clan, the Ila Digen of Muzbat, remain), then in 2007 as part of the SLA-Unity, second largest military force of the rebellion.

3. The Bideyat were traditionally divided into approximately fifty independent chiefdoms corresponding to clans. The French united them in two chiefdoms, the Bilia and the Borogat. Idriss Déby, a Bilia, maintained the unity of his chiefdom through his brother Timan, who was named sultan, while dividing the Borogat into multiple clan chiefdoms. The Bideyat are the inner circle of Chadian power, but many, depending on their clan rivalries, joined Chadian rebel movements, notably the RFC (Rassemblement des forces pour le changement).

The subgroups (Kobe, Wogi, Bideyat) and the chiefdoms are not clans or lineages. One chiefdom can encompass people from several clans (and sometimes ethnic groups other than the Zaghawa: Fur, Tunjur, Arabs, etc.) and members of a clan can be dispersed into several chiefdoms. Each chiefdom, however, belongs to a “royal” clan that is often in conflict with other clans that once held the chiefdom. These royal clans, whose members have received more education, are the source of the Zaghawa political and economic elite. The members of other clans have often only been able to gain power using armed force. Thus the highest families have relatively little representation in the Darfur rebel groups, a situation that was heightened by Minni Arku Minnawi’s hostility towards them.

The territorial possessions and the particular geographic situation of the Zaghawa explain their diverse ways of life. Their position just below the Sahara allows them to raise camels nomadically, relying in particular on migrations to Saharan pastures during the rainy season. A landscape relatively rich in relief and water sources (in particular the Ennedi and Kabka ranges in Chad and, to a lesser extent, the plateaus of the Sudanese Dar Zaghawa) also allows them to have shorter transhumances with the possibility of returning to permanent water sources in the dry season. Possession of the land also explains the importance, despite the environment’s aridity, of agricultural activities: the Ila Digen of Muzbat, for example, place particular emphasis on growing millet although they live on the edge of the desert. Control of the trans-border areas where major trans-Saharan routes pass also explains the importance of commercial activities.

Historically based on mountains that offer protection from invaders and are considered sacred, people gradually concentrated around wells, establishing sedentary centers, the largest of which become chiefdom capitols. The main markets were established in these centers, and with colonization, schools allowed the Zaghawa earlier access to education (compared to the nomadic Arabs.) Throughout Muslim Africa, traditional chiefs at first rejected the schools of the Nasara (Whites or Christians) and sent the children of their slaves or serfs in place of their own children. However, some of the principal Zaghawa chiefs quickly recognized the advantages they could gain from these schools and sent their children, encouraging them to continue their studies abroad. Their education helps explain the current influence of the Zaghawa, especially those from higher-ranking families, in local and international commerce (Libya, Gulf countries). It also contributes to their political importance in both Chad and Sudan, although their influence owes much to their military success as well.

The Zaghawa have an undeniable attachment to Dar Zaghawa. From the colonial era, however, drought touched their region and forced them to move south in large numbers. In 1951, a British administrator noted: “no matter that life is hard, dogged by disappointment, and often lived under the somber shadow of famine, still they come back to the steppes and wadis which they know as home, and which they will not willingly abandon. Our problem is not to help the Zaghawa to leave their present country, but to help them to live a better and more prosperous life inside it” (from R. S. O’Fahey, Darfur and the British: A Sourcebook, forthcoming).

This program was never carried out, and as the cycles of drought became more intense, more Zaghawa took up life outside Dar Zaghawa than in their traditional territories. A large Zaghawa community (from Chad and Sudan) was established in N’Djamena after Idriss Déby seized power in 1990. Zaghawa workers and traders migrated to Khartoum and the Jazira in Sudan and formed a diaspora highly active in trade in Libya and the Gulf countries. Above all in Darfur, there are large Zaghawa communities in the Korma zone, the towns of El-Fasher and Kebkabiya in North Darfur, in the Geneina region in West Darfur and especially the eastern half of South Darfur in a belt that extends from Shangil Tobay to Bahr-el-Arab, including Sheeria, Khor Abbeshe, Muhajiria, Labado, Nyala, Ed-Duein, Buram, and Legediba.

These migrations were not necessarily caused by hunger and drought. The educated Zaghawa elite, while promoting the development of their region of origin, quickly saw the possibility of massive movements to the South. They were organized in the 1970s, in particular by Mahmoud Beshir Jama’a, a Zaghawa politician from Um Buru and a hydrologist by training. As he recalls, “in 1970, I was called on by the Nimeyri government to facilitate these population movements. People from the entire Zaghawa country agreed to leave. The army helped us. The emigrants went to South Darfur, to Nyala, then Gereida, then Buram, close to Bahr-el-Arab. My idea was that they would live in Hofrat-en-Nahas, far to the south, but most of them preferred to settle in a place called Legediba, southwest of Buram. They were very happy. The next year, they came to thank me; they had a lot of millet. The traditional chiefs were at first opposed to the project, but in the end they accepted it. The malik Ali Mohamedin [chief of Dar Tuer] went to Legediba himself and stayed there a while. He wanted to stay but finally had to return to Dar Zaghawa. In 1970, the shartay Tijani At-Tayeb from Kornoy [chief of Dar Gala] told me: ‘I must go to the hospital in Khartoum, but when I return, I will move to Legediba.’ Unfortunately, he died soon after. Legediba has since become very large and its fields are very productive.”

The traditional leaders initially opposed this emigration – in vain – because they knew it would inevitably make them lose power that was intrinsically tied to their land. And in fact, even though the emigrants kept ties to their original chiefdoms, the massive emigration helped weaken the chiefdoms of Dar Zaghawa, especially since it coincided with Nimeyri’s decision to abolish traditional chiefdoms. South of Darfur, the Zaghawa settled on lands belonging to chiefs of other groups – Fur, Masalit, Tunjur, Bergid, Berti, Dajo and Arab (in particular Rizeigat baggara and Habbaniya.) This context explains the often ambivalent position of Zaghawa intellectuals concerning the question of land: while attached to the lands of their origin in Dar Zaghawa, they know that the future of their community depends on lands that are not theirs.

At first, relations between the first occupants of the land and the new arrivals seemed to go well. The Zaghawa had particular success as traders, which put them in competition with other, older immigrants like the “Jallaba” traders from the Nile valley, instead of the local population. One Zaghawa leader from South Darfur recounts that “in the 1980s and 1990s, the Jallaba were in conflict with us because we taught the people of South Darfur to trade. A Jallaba told me: ‘These people were blind and deaf but you came and taught them things; you should pay for that.’ The Jallaba politicians and merchants were the first to target the Zaghawa, not the local population.”

At the time, the academic, economic and political success of the Zaghawa irritated the Jallaba but became a model for the Arabs in Darfur. In the 1980s, the Arabs supported Zaghawa politicians like Mahmoud Beshir Jama’a. As vice-governor of Darfur, he came into conflict with Ahmad Direige, the first Fur governor of the region, who represented the risk of a return to Fur hegemony in the eyes of both Arabs and Zaghawa.

Since the start of the current conflict, however, the Zaghawa are the ones that have been seen as hegemonic, especially by the first unhabitants of the areas they settled in South Darfur. In some places, the Zaghawa seem to hold a majority over groups that had paramount chiefdoms and therefore land rights. They have their own neighborhoods in some cities, and even their own cities; they gradually gained administrative chiefs (omda) but they remained dependent on the paramount chiefs (shartay, malik, nazir, etc.) who possessed the land. The latter, Arabs and non-Arabs, fear that the Zaghawa are trying to obtain independent chiefdoms and the lands that go with them – fears that strictly parallel the fears of non-Arabs in North Darfur in relation to the Abbala Arabs.

In 2005, a Rizeigat Baggara intellectual summed up his fears in this way: “Until now, the Zaghawa respected the Rizeigat hawakir. In 1986, we even elected a Zaghawa deputy. At the time, we lived as brothers. But the Zaghawa are a very active tribe, they work hard and have skills as traders and politicians. In 1997, the nazer of the Rizeigat gave an omda to the Zaghawa. Maybe the Zaghawa will want more in the future. They are already dominant in Hofrat an-Nahas, in the far south of Darfur. Now they want to create a Greater Dar Zaghawa.”

Conflict over land is accompanied by the fear that the Zaghawa, in power in Chad since 1990, will take power in Khartoum and create a Greater Dar Zaghawa stretching from Lake Chad to the Nile. The JEM raid on Khartoum in May 2008 only fed this speculation, which is based on an even more curious fact: the frequent mentions of the name “Zaghawa,” sometimes manipulated by the Zaghawa themselves, in the writings of Arab geographers in the Middle Ages. These geographers cite the Zaghawa as one of the largest tribes in Sahelian Africa and, from Al-Ya’qubi (before 891) to Ibn Khaldun (circa 1380), situate them in the Kanem north of Lake Chad or, like Al-Idrisi (1154), between the Kawar and the Air in Niger in an area now occupied by Tubu, Tuaregs and Kanuri. Nothing says that the name Zaghawa referred to the population now known by that name, nor that it only referred to that particular population. In reality, it seems that the name “traveled” before referring to part of the Beri.

On the ground, distrust of the Zaghawa was greatly increased by the violence inflicted by the troops of Minni Arku Minnawi, especially against non-Zaghawa civilians in eastern Darfur – in that area, the rebels have benefited from the importance of the Zaghawa communities that immigrated in recent decades. This distrust was clearly expressed during the Abuja talks, where some aspects of the agreement and the fact that only Minni signed it were interpreted by some as an attempt to form a new Dar Zaghawa in South Darfur. According to Alex de Waal (pers. comm., July 2006), “DPA provisions for ‘areas of de facto/respective control’ for the SLA were interpreted by both sides as a potential new hakura. The area where this mattered most was eastern Darfur where Minni’s control of Muhajiria and Haskanita was feared (by the Berti and others [in particular the Bergid and the Arabs]) as a new Zaghawa dar.”

Another aggravating factor is the Sudanese government’s propaganda, which employs unabashedly anti-Semitic rhetoric against the Zaghawa, calling them the “Jews of Africa.” The same epithet can sometimes be found in the opposition press in Chad for different reasons (the importance of Zaghawa in the government.); the opposition press is controlled by Christians from the South who often stigmatize the Zaghawa as “Sudanese” foreigners. The ambivalence displayed towards the Zaghawa (“rich and politically powerful but thieving, overbearing foreigners,” see also the quote from the Rizeigat intellectual) is spreading in Darfur and Chad and carries echoes of the dangerous concept of “Ivoirité” in Côte d’Ivoire or the anti-Tutsi diatribes preceding the Rwandan genocide. The apparent power of the Zaghawa should not mask the fact that they are a minority and that their positions (especially in South Darfur) are fragile. The temptation for the international community to resolve the Darfur conflict by means of a Fur-Arab alliance that does not take the Zaghawa into account could be very dangerous.

This temptation is based on demographic considerations: the Fur and the Arabs, if the latter can be considered a unified group, are the largest and second largest ethnic groups in Darfur, respectively. Many of them think that they should hold political power equal to their demographic weight. The danger is turning the competition for power into a demographic struggle. In that case, the equation “more education = more power” becomes “more children = more positions.” But increased birth rates also mean more poverty, less education, more conflicts over resources and more struggles for land.

The briefing I prepared for SSRC was commissioned as a short, non-academic piece for policy makers, and it therefore does not explore the multiplicity of land issues in their full complexity. The paper only aims to highlight key issues and dynamics, outline possible scenarios and offer broad recommendations. I am glad that it has generated so many in-depth and insightful responses on this blog, though I cannot fail to note that the majority of contributions have been focused on Darfur. The resolution of the land question is critical throughout the country and it is taking an increasingly urgent dimension in the South as a result of the arrival of such large numbers of returnees.

Of the various contributions, that of Michael Kevane has specifically called into question a number of issues discussed in the briefing and I would therefore like to offer a few thoughts on some of the points raised in his post.

1) It was not my suggestion that regional UN/NGO efforts should be discouraged in favour of national level leadership. What I am advocating for is greater coordination and harmonisation of approaches and objectives between different international actors and in support of national structures. The array of uncoordinated initiatives currently underway in Sudan has ended up compounding problems related to land in several instances, particularly in the transitional areas.

2) I maintain my judgment that registration of rural land is of paramount importance and, unlike what Kevane suggests, it does not require an army of surveyors. Simplified systems for legally entrenching customary rights without the need of formally surveying, demarcating and mapping parcels for registration are increasingly being experimented with in a number of African countries, e.g. Tanzania, Uganda and Mozambique. In Sudan itself, innovative initiatives focused on the adoption of simpler descriptive boundary recording linked to modernised community based systems of control and administration are being tested in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, albeit that this is a challenging area and experiments so far have met with mixed results. I believe that it is essential to continue to test and refine methods of recognising customary rights, including communally held land, to prevent further abuse and dispossession of the rural poor by the state and other powerful actors;

3) Cadastral records are critical in urban areas, where the absence of reliable records and data has generated a high volume of competing claims and allowed disturbing levels of misappropriation of property by land grabbers. Juba, where the land crisis is paralysing the administration of the town and the development of services and infrastructure, is a case in point.

4) I agree with Kevane that the National Land Commission may not be the most useful instrument to promote land reform, especially given the weak and unclear mandate it has been given in the CPA. However, this is the institution mandated by the agreement to arbitrate on land claims, enforce law and advice the Government of National Unity on land reform policies and its establishment is currently a precondition to making any progress on discussing and addressing land issues.

5) Last, public awareness campaigns are very important to educate people on how to protect their rights to land and can be promoted cheaply on the back of ongoing assistance programmes. People in Sudan may be aware that they should prevent ‘rich people from stealing their land’ but need to be supported to learn how they can enforce protection of their rights.