Journal Archives

Volume II, Issue 2

Perspectives on Terrorism -

Terrorism’s Fifth Wave: A Theory, a Conundrum and a Dilemma

By Jeffrey Kaplan

The Theory

When Professor David Rapoport gave me the opportunity to read an early draft of his groundbreaking four waves theory of modern international terrorism, I was immediately taken with it. [1] For a scholar trained as a cultural historian, how could it be otherwise? What Dr. Rapoport had done in essence was distill a lifetime of study into a single article that identified a unifying global zeitgeist that linking terrorist movements on a global scale which had in most instances never been in direct contact with one another. These organizations, cells or tiny “grouplets” or “groupuscules” as Roger Griffin would call the right wing version of these tiny terrorist bands [2] had previously been examined individually or reduced to the level of pawns in the hands of one of the global superpowers. [3] Rapoport’s theory called up memories of such cultural history classics as the lyrical Western zeitgeists that defined the waning stages of the medieval world in the writings of Johann Huizinga. [4] More recently, it echoed Arthur Schlesinger’s observations on the cycles of American history as each generation turned from public activism to private acquisition. [5]

Rapoport’s theory, first published on the web before finally finding a home in a printed anthology, posited four distinct waves of modern terrorism (anarchist, nationalist, 1960s leftist, and the current religious wave). Each wave had a precipitating event, lasted about 40 years before receding, and, with some overlap, faded as another wave rose to take center stage. Most terrorist groups would gradually disappear, a few (the Irish Republican Army for example) proved more durable. Rapoport’s theory was elegant, simple, inclusive, and had a high degree of explanatory power. In short, it provides a good academic model. I was sold when I read it in rough form, and am no less convinced today. I work with it in my research and I teach it to successive generations of my students. But there was something I still needed to know.

Something seemed to be missing—the theory was simply too elegant and inclusive. Then it struck me. David Rapoport is a brilliant theorist with a global vision. I admire his brilliance, but have never sought to emulate it. I lack the ability for one thing, but on a much deeper level, grand visions have always struck me as being altogether too grand, for they often miss the exceptions and the exceptional. The small minutiae that make the world such a diverse and interesting place. Rapoport can peer out over reams of data and form them into a brilliant theory—to use an arboreal metaphor, he can see a vast forest and make sense of its intricate patterns by peering over the treetops. I am more like the metaphorical turtle idealized by the Daoist sage Chuang-tzu who is happier by far sunning himself on his back by the lake and wagging his tail happily in the mud in the depths of the forest [6] in which, to further strain the metaphor, I could never tell the forest from the trees. I am by nature a fieldwork scholar, always in search of the most exceptional, most exotic, growths in the most distant depths of the forest. In this spirit, I started to look more and more closely at both Rapoport’s theory, and at the groups that comprised the various waves within that theory. In the course of this examination, I came up with some surprising findings—none of which contradicted the central theses of the theory itself—but which did suggest that at deeper levels of the undergrowth there was something interesting which Rapoport’s global vantage point had missed.

The discovery was simply this: the four waves is a theory of international terrorism, but it does not account for groups that begin on an international wave—indeed, some such groups may even be the creations of foreign patrons or the result of foreign educations or the influence of foreign ideas or religious beliefs on founders of groups—but which for some reason have turned inward, cut ties to their international benefactors or ideological/religious bedfellows and sought to realize a utopian vision of a radically perfected society on the local level. The goal of such groups is the creation of a new man and a new woman comprising an ethnicity or tribal society that is the reconstitution of a lost “Golden Age” model or an entirely new world in a single generation. There have been such movements emerging from the various waves of Rapoport’s theory, and ironically enough, despite their radical localism and rabid xenophobia, they share a sufficient zeitgeist to constitute a kind of wave of their own, thus I call them the Fifth Wave of Modern Terrorism. [7] They could, as the reader will see when the characteristics that comprise the fifth wave zeitgeist are considered, just as accurately be styled the undertow of modern terrorism. They are a much feared force in the modern world.

The precursor of the modern fifth wave was the Khmer Rouge in the era before they took power in Cambodia. The genocidal actions of the Khmer Rouge, once the instruments of state power were in their control, were predictably based on both their stated ideology and their activities in areas of the countryside under their control well before they marched into Phnom Penh in 1975.[8] This would establish the precise genesis of the fifth wave as 1963, the year that the mercurial Prince Norodom Sihanouk, giving in to American pressure, outlawed the Cambodian Communist Party. The Party splintered, and was taken over by a radical faction of foreign-educated intellectuals led by Saloth Sar, who under the name Pol Pot would become synonymous with the genocide in the renamed Kampuchea after 1975.[9]

In common with Rapoport’s theory, the fifth wave, like the four that preceded it, now had a precise origin and a catalyzing event. Technically, the Khmer Rouge graduated from being an oppositional terrorist movement to a full fledged practitioner of regime terror with their capture of Phnom Penh in 1975, and thus could no longer be properly analyzed as a terrorist movement. [10] With their defeat by the Vietnamese in 1979, the fifth wave, like Rapoport’s second wave, saw an almost two decade long time lag between the disappearance of the Khmer Rouge - who served as the early avatar of the fifth wave - and the emergence of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which was the first fully fledged modern fifth wave movement and the movement that remains as close to a pure case of fifth wave terrorism as we are able to document today.

What composes an ideal case of fifth wave terror? I argue that such a case would have all of the following characteristics:

Characteristics of Fifth Wave Groups[11]

1.	Radicalize and break away from established terrorist wave
2.	Born of hope expressed at the extremes: some emerge after all hope has been lost, others because the dream has been realized
3.	Physical withdrawal into wilderness areas
4.	Claim to establish some form of a new calendar (‘the Year Zero’)
5.	Radical quest for purity—racial, tribal, ecological, etc.
6.	Internal compromise impossible resulting in deadly schisms and constant internal violence
7.	Belief in human perfectibility and chiliastic utopia in this lifetime
8.	Emphasis on creating new men and women makes old models expendable; thus the logic of genocidal violence
9.	Obsession with creating new race places tremendous emphasis on women, who are both subject and object of fifth wave violence
10.	Children are the vanguard of the fifth wave as they are the least contaminated by the old society (not to mention the old STDs, HIV and other remnants of the old societies)
11.	Rape is the signature tactic of the fifth wave
12.	Violence is so pervasive in the fifth wave that it loses its message content beyond the simple assertion that ‘we exist’
13.	The effects of ritualized acts of rape and killing, especially for newly abducted ‘recruits’, has the liminal effect of binding the killers to the group while closing the doors for all group members to a return to family, the old society, and previous ways of life
14.	Fifth wave groups are localistic and particularistic, having turned their backs on the international waves from which they emerged
15.	Nonetheless, if needed for survival, foreign allies will be cultivated and fifth wave groups will often live in exile in neighboring states
16.	Authoritarian in nature with charismatic leadership patterns
17	Chiliastic in nature, deeply religious with eclectic or syncretic religious tropes assembled and interpreted by the leaders in support of a millenarian dream to be realized through a campaign of apocalyptic violence

But in the real world, ideal cases are hard to find and, in a closely related observation, not all variables are of equal importance. For the fifth wave, rape is the signature tactic and the most clearly identifiable characteristic. Rape thus serves the same function as suicide bombing does for the fourth wave. Why this should be is not difficult to explain.

One begins with geography and culture. The Lord’s Resistance Army emerged from the Acholi tribe which was in the midst of unprecedented crisis. Indeed, its more precise roots were in the highly idiosyncratic militia that was created by the no less idiosyncratic prophetess of the Acholi based Holy Spirit Movement, Alice Auma (who took the name Alice Lakwena in honor of the spirit for whom she claimed to speak). [12] The Holy Spirit Movement gave birth to a militia, the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF). The HSMF was formed from the remnants of earlier Acholi militias that, having failed in any military sense of the word, had turned feral and preyed upon their own unfortunate Acholi tribe. The HSMF, following its 20 biblically based safety rules, [13] succeeded for a time in protecting the Acholi from both internal and external enemies.

The Acholi, in common with tribal cultures throughout Africa and the Middle East, find rape a particularly shameful act for which the primary onus falls on the woman, and the secondary shame on her family, clan and tribe in that order. [14] The act of rape in tribal conflict carries multivocalic messages to its target audiences. It may be used as a tool of ethnic cleansing or it may be used as a form of genocide on the cheap. It may be used in the fifth wave to harvest babies just as it may be used to break a woman’s (or more often, a very young girl’s) ties to family, society and tribe. [15] Rape in the fifth wave thus becomes ritualistic and yet deeply utilitarian.

Women are at the center of the violence of the fifth wave as both actors and victims, and children are the prize over whom the fifth wave’s fight is ultimately waged. Accordingly, the Lord’s Resistance Army would cease to exist if not for children. An estimated 90% of its fighters are child soldiers, and child brides are the chief reward to trusted senior officers in the movement and the primary commodity of exchange between them. [1 6] In the Rwanda genocide, one of the first defendants to be convicted of rape as a war crime was a woman—the former Minister of Family and Women’s Affairs no less—Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. [17]

These children are born to fight or merely to be the physical embodiment of the superiority of one tribal or militia group over another. Or more grandly, they may be seen as the living symbols of the looming extinction of a rival tribe or race. In all cases however, they are the key to creating a new world in a single generation. It is they who are least contaminated by the corrupted ways of the old world and most open to the dreams of the charismatic visionaries who lead fifth wave movements.

The Lord’s Resistance Army so well fit the ideal case scenario of the fifth wave that it was clear that the task to come would not be so easy. For the LRA was well studied, and well documented. It had been long established that a number of escapees—ranging from children to senior officers—were able to provide international organizations and human rights groups of every description with well documented testimony of the inner workings of the movement and the words and actions of its leader/prophet, Joseph Kony.[18] Other militias and tribally-based fighters in Africa bear a strong family resemblance to the fifth wave as defined above. However, they are not nearly as well documented.

The Conundrum

Of these fifth wave-like groups, none so closely matches the model or so completely captured my attention as has the so-called Janjaweed fighters in the Sudanese province of Darfur. It was my immersion in the formulation of fifth wave theory that brought my research focus increasingly to center on the Janjaweed. This was in many ways a natural outcome of my long-time fascination with the country. After four visits to the Sudan, an MA thesis based on the findings of the first of these trips, and a good deal of travel throughout the country in good times and bad, I am something of a “Sudanophile”. This is a condition common to visitors to that country which will be taken up again in the conclusion to this paper. With this admission, I could not deny the fact that the Janjaweed seemed to follow the model of the fifth wave closely enough to merit using them as a test case for the theory. This led to the discovery of an interesting conundrum.

The conundrum lies in the fact that perhaps no conflict in modern times has generated such heated debate, such humanitarian passions, and most relevant to this study, such a mountain of literature. The sheer volume of available material on the Sudan case dwarfs that available for the Lord’s Resistance Army. The reports emanating from international agencies and NGOs alone, printed out, form a mountain of paper higher than one’s knees. Two quite good monographs have appeared on the subject, [19] as well as a host of lesser works written by impassioned activists who have been connected with aid work in Darfur of one sort or another. [20] The UN has weighed in with an excellent report and a film that has deeply impacted my own students, [21] and the Washington Post has done some first class video journalism available on the web that really brings home to anyone who has been in the Darfur region in better days the red, sandy world upon which the human tragedy of the conflict is unfolding as well as powerful interviews with victims of Janjaweed violence.[22] Hollywood actors and rock stars vie with each other to make filmed documentaries or to stage benefit concerts for the victims of the Janjaweed’s violent assaults. [23]

Here specifically lies the conundrum. Reams of papers, news articles, reports, interviews, television and internet documentaries, videos and films of very description record in minute detail the very real suffering of the victims of the Janjaweed. But from the Janjaweed themselves, with the exception of occasional high profile Janjaweed commanders such as Musa Hilal residing conveniently in luxurious abodes in suddenly oil rich Khartoum, there is a deafening silence. [24]

The Janjaweed are a ghost, or more accurately, a golem, who have been reified by the West into the quintessential manifestation of evil in the modern world. That no one has actually spoken to the Janjaweed rank and file at any length or in any depth, that no one has lived in their camps and sat around the evening fire with them, makes it all the easier to demonize them in this way.

This observation is hardly meant as an apologia for Janjaweed actions—which are well documented and unconscionable by Western or—of far greater moment in my view—by Islamic standards. Rather, it raises a much deeper set of questions. On the surface level of inquiry, what is it about the Darfur case which singles it out for such unique attention from the world community, from governments, from human rights organizations and from popular opinion makers?

Popular opinion may point to the extravagant violence of the Janjaweed and activists may focus more narrowly on the prevalence of rape as a Janjaweed tactic of choice. Scholars might point to the implications of the draught and the resultant drastic diminishment of natural resources in a fragile ecosystem which, with global warming, bodes ominously for other areas of the globe. Political scientists or area specialists might point to the number of state actors whose designs on the region made the Kalashnikov, in the redolent phraseology of the Musa Sadr, the Vanished Imam of another much penetrated polity, Lebanon, truly the necessary “adornments of men”. [25] And the cynic can dismiss the whole hubbub with a single word: ‘oil’. [26]

One could hardly go wrong by taking the safe and easy option and finding that all of these interests are in part what has driven Darfur to the top of the global human rights agenda. One might add that technology—the transmittal of the victim’s stories, the graphic vision of burning villages offered by Google Maps, [27] the well publicized (but technically inaccurate) claim by President George W. Bush that what is happening in Darfur constitutes a “genocide” [28]—all of these technology driven factors have brought the suffering of the Janjaweed’s many victims into our living rooms.

But at a much deeper level, and by far the more important question, is this: who exactly are the Janjaweed? Not as a collectivity, but as individuals. How did they become the much demonized “devils on horseback”? And at the deepest level of all: is there something we can learn from the answers to these questions that will help to minimize or prevent future Janjaweeds?

On the great scale of things, it doesn’t amount to much when weighed against such bulky issues as genocide, ethnic cleansing, or the massive physical and sexual violence that marks the Janjaweed case. But even if it is a small thing, it is a very meaningful issue to me. Are the Janjaweed in fact a fifth wave terrorist group, or are they something quite else? For all the mountains of material written about them, we can make no more than inferences—educated guesses—at this point. To find out with certainty, it will be necessary to actually talk to them.

To begin to approach these issues however, we must start with a history of the Janjaweed. What follows then is a brief history drawn from a wide variety of sources and written at a sufficient level of generality that neophytes to the issue will hopefully come away with a useful amount of background, while specialists will only wince a minimal number of times.

The Janjaweed: A Creation Epic

Two of the three crises that would eventually lead to the creation of the Janjaweed have already been noted. The first was the draught and environmental crisis which began to impact the lives of Darfurian tribes in 1985-1986 through the process of desertification in Northern Darfur. [29] With the sudden competition for resources that had formerly been more or less adequate to support both settled and nomadic tribes, came the opportunity for inroads by outsiders, and thus was born the infamous “Kalashnikov culture” of the late 1980s and early 1990s. [30] Then, inevitably, in 2003 there came the rebellion. The rebellion, based in the sedentary “African” tribes of Darfur in which the Fur played leading roles, was based on a discontent that was long brewing and which transcended Darfur.

It has never been much of a secret that since its independence in 1956, the Sudan has been ruled by, and for the exclusive profit of, a core group of reverine Arab tribes centered on the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers (i.e., in the modern Khartoum/Omdermann area). The injustices of the Sudanese system were most striking in the South, where for almost fifty years the southern Nilotic tribes fought government forces in a series of wars known as the Anya Naya wars. Their perseverance would eventually lead to the American brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which took effect in January 2005 which included a mechanism for oil revenue sharing between North and South and an autonomous Southern government, as well as a referendum on secession which will take place in 2011, [31] It is therefore not surprising that Darfur’s African resistance groups formed and used the arms that had flooded the region with the objective of securing a piece of the CPA for themselves.

The grievances of all parties, “African” and “Arab” in Darfur, were neatly encapsulated in the first volume of the anonymously written Black Book (kitab al-aswad). [32] Probably written by students of the Islamic scholar Hassan al-Turabi, the appearance of the Black Book had a seismic effect on its readers by demonstrating in dry graphs, facts and figures the degree to which the vast provincial regions of the Sudan had been marginalized to the profit of the ruling elite before the discovery of significant oil wealth in the country.

The dramatic appearance of the Black Book catalyzed a number of factors which were present in the so-called “African” communities. These included: 1) the appeal of radical Islam (al-Qaeda in a very real sense was born in the Sudan and radical Islam had a small but important following throughout that nation); 2) the success of “fellow Africans” in the South in their struggle with the “Arabs” of the North; 3) the availability of weapons and young fighters with no better choices in life than to wield those weapons; and 4) the all pervasive allure of the easy wealth of oil. The inevitable result was the birth of two major African liberation movements; the Sudan Liberation Army/Front (SLA/M) and the more Islamist oriented Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in 1993. With that, the Darfur conflict had its formal beginning.

Before moving to the Arab Bedouin tribes from whom the Janjaweed were recruited, it is necessary to pause and share one of Sudan’s “dirty little secrets”. It was actually no secret—nothing in the Sudan is really a secret—but its magnitude has been underestimated in the West. The core of the Sudanese Army has always relied on Darfurian tribes for its junior rank officers and much of its enlisted personnel. Young men in Khartoum and Omdurman have more promising careers to which to aspire, while young men in the South have been engaged for half a century in fighting the Sudanese Army. Many sources have noted the defections of elements of the Sudanese Army and Air Force, but in conversation with Sudanese Ambassador to the United States John Ukek Lueth Ukek, I was informed that the government of General Bashir decided by 2004, the height of the rebellion, to cashier no less than 26,000 Darfurian troops from the regular Army.[33] They of course had nowhere better to go than to the resistance. Worse, the decision left the Sudanese government with the unpalatable choice of moving troops from the critical Southern front to help quell the rebellion (many of whom were of course also Darfurian and willing to kill Dinka or Nuer, but not so willing to kill their own kinsmen), or negotiating with resistance leaders from a position of weakness. Instead, the government chose a fateful third course which, while militarily successful, has brought with it a very high political price. These were the birthpangs of the Janjaweed.

The young men who would answer the call to join the quasi-governmental militia that would be called (by its victims) Janjaweed, like the “African” rebels, had undergone their own period of radicalization. They too were aware of the Black Book’s contents, even if literacy was not among their strong points. Bedouin society remains, as it always has been, an oral culture. For the Arab tribes, as the competition for resources grew sharper, an intellectual discourse that came to be known as the “Arab Gathering” was what galvanized “Arab” passions.

The Arab Gathering left few documents save some newspaper articles and a few vitriolic and very hard to find pamphlets. The power of the spoken word in an oral culture is too often underestimated by Western observers. The Arab Gathering, which had more than a little backing from both Libyan sources and from the Sudanese government, was both a Da’wa (Islamic Call or Revivalist) ideology and, since it was the “African” tribes against whom the Arab Gathering expended considerable vitriol, it was an explicitly racist ideology as well. This brings to the surface another of those “dirty little Sudanese secrets” that has amazed and either amused or appalled generations of white visitors to what is truly the most hospitable country on the face of the earth.

The Sudanese are acutely conscious of the color of each others’ skin and use skin tone as a marker of status in Sudanese society. Students of Africa are well used to the overwhelming importance of tribal affiliation in African politics, and tribe is no less important in the Sudan. But to this tribal consciousness is added in many Sudanese minds a color consciousness which creates subtle but important status differentiations which the outsider is hard pressed to understand. Put bluntly, the differences in complexion are not all that great, and at times are, for outsiders, almost imperceptible. But the Sudanese have a finely tuned eye for these nuances and thus the often crude appeals of the Arab Gathering, given the sudden dearth of resources and the maximal competition for what was available in the face of the relentless process of desertification, fell on very fertile ground among young Arab males with few other options in life.[34]

Who were these young men who would respond to the Sudanese government’s call for volunteers to fight alongside (but significantly, not within) the ranks of the Sudanese Army against the rebel groups and their tribal kinsmen in Darfur? Gérard Prunier provides the best description of the early Janjaweed available:

…the Janjaweed seem to have been of six main origins: former bandits and highwaymen who had been ‘in the trade’ since the 1980s; demobilized soldiers from the regular army; young members of Arab tribes having a running land conflict with a neighboring “African” group—most appeared to be members of the smaller Arab tribes, common criminals who were paroled and released from gaol if they joined the militia; fanatical members of the Tajammu al-Arabi [lit. ‘Union of the Arabs’ or commonly Arab Gathering]; and young unemployed ‘Arab’ men, quite similar to those who joined the rebels on the ‘African side’.[35]

They also were paid handsomely for their efforts, often more than the regular Sudanese Army recruits. [36]

Some of these recruits fought under the leadership of their traditional tribal and clan chiefs. The case of Musa Hilal, the best known voice of the Janjaweeed in the Western press who, upon the death of Hilal Abdala became Nazir (Supreme Chief) of the Um Jalul clan, is paradigmatic. More commonly, recruits were thrown together regardless of tribe or clan, armed, and given some basic training at military camps. All published sources agree that the Janjaweed were originally armed and trained by the Government of Sudan (GOS), with units of the Army, the intelligence services and the Air Force deeply involved in the Janjaweed’s formation and early successes. [37] Early military operations were also conducted jointly with GOS military forces.

By 2004, the ferocity of the Janjaweed, backed by Sudanese air power, had turned the tide of battle. Indeed, “African” towns and villages were reduced to rubble and their inhabitants reduced to the status of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Early Janjaweed operations prominently featured very public examples of mass rape, following which the male relatives who had been forced to helplessly watch the shameful spectacle were massacred. [38] It was ugly, and the world turned against the Sudan in helpless disgust, but the GOS spearheaded by their Janjaweed militia allies had regained control of what was left of the province and have held it ever since. Indeed, for the next year and a half, an odd kind of stasis set in where IDP camps would be set up, while smaller more temporary camps of Janjaweed would be formed outside the perimeters of the IDP camps where Janjaweed could prey on women forced to leave the relative safety of the camps to gather water or firewood. Sudanese military bases would secure the perimeters of these inhabited areas to control the flow of refugees and the movements of NGOs or African Union peacekeepers, and the Arab nomadic tribes would continue to ply their seasonal migratory paths.

The Janjaweed after 2004 gained an increasing measure of independence, and with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in January 2005 there were definite signs of diminishing support for the Janjaweed by the central government. There were even reports of armed clashes between Janjaweed and GOS forces. Be this as it may, the Janjaweed continued to operate with virtual impunity and attacks on population centers began to take on a definite pattern as Janjaweed fighters began to take over abandoned settlements and claim them as their own. [39] With this, the logic of diminished resources, abundant weapons and a racist ideology which channeled age-old competition between settled and nomadic populations into a lethal hatred supported by the power of a modern state came full circle. The circle closed in 2007 as the relatively static situation dissolved into chaos on both the “African” and “Arab” sides. What is happening on the ground now in Darfur follows the deadly logic of African tribal conflicts enacted on a grand and bloody scale as they play out against the backdrop of global politics, the politics of oil, and the relentless politicking of the NGOs. It is, in a word, chaos.

For those interested in the fascinating minutia of the situation, both Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group have produced excellent, detailed reports on the subject. [40] For our purposes, suffice to say that all Arab belligerents have brought tribal kinsmen into Darfur claiming them to have historic rights to the abandoned lands under Janjaweed control (some from as far as the Central African Republic), while Chad has pushed vast numbers of Arab tribesmen who have rebelled against either the Chadian government or become embroiled with Chadian President Idris Déby’s Zagawa tribe (which has been at the center of the violence in Darfur as well) and has most recently followed them across the border with bombing raids and military strikes. [41] To add to the chaos, African Union peacekeepers were attacked, probably by JEM fighters or defectors (depending on whose story one finds credible). [42] Naturally, given such chaotic conditions, the Arab tribes have begun to fight each other, which has induced the Janjaweed to return to fight alongside their own clansmen and, in the resultant atmosphere of disappointment and betrayal vis a vis the central government, new and interesting linkages have emerged between “Arab” and “African” tribes at the expense of GOS forces. [43]

Meanwhile, a series of attacks on NGO aid workers (trucks were hijacked, 66 men were shot and women were raped by May 2007) caused the withdrawal of NGOs from the region. [44] Aid workers now come in only by helicopter and remain on the ground for only a few heavily guarded hours at a time. The “African” liberation movements, fueled by unlikely but pervasive rumors of an imminent breakthrough at the peace negotiations currently floundering in Libya, the even more unlikely dream of US$10,000 compensation to any family on the ground, and integration into the national army for demobilized militia fighters, have multiplied from a mere few to nineteen squabbling groupuscules, making the process of negotiation all the more impossible. [45]

As the New Year of 2008 dawns, Darfur is a bigger mess than ever. And after fifteen years of active war, we still know next to nothing about the Janjaweed rank and file. Darfur has only become more dangerous, and the situation has become more intractable.

The Dilemma

The core of the dilemma is this: not only do we know virtually nothing of the Janjaweed fighters, if truth be told we know precious little about what goes through the minds of such men anywhere in the world at the moment when they are actively involved in the act of genocide or ethnic cleansing (the difference, to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, is more in intent than in action in any case). This leaves us with controversial and often highly polemical reconstructions of events long past. [46] Or, equally unsatisfying to Western scholars ground in a tradition that reveres the peer reviewed written word, it leaves us at the mercy of the infinite malleability of memory, as reflected in the frustrations experienced by the those engaged in the current academic cottage industry of conducting prison interviews with those jailed for participation in the genocidal violence of such places as Rwanda or Sierra Leone.[47] In such interviews, almost to a man, the prisoners deny having themselves participated in the act of rape, although, with reluctance, some will admit to having witnessed “others” among their number commit such crimes. This historical revision would surprise no one who has worked with oral histories in any depth, nor would it come as a particular shock to anyone familiar with the repugnance for rape commonly held by African cultures. Given time, it is simply edited out of the perpetrators’ memories. And who is to say that this lapse of memory is not real? We often forget that which is too painful to bear in active memory.

If the memories of perpetrators in other African conflicts find gender based violence too problematic to deal with, how much more so must be the case of the Janjaweed? These after all are Muslims whose radicalization process included the rhetoric of radical Islam through the Arab Gathering and, if Flynt and De Waal’s brief fieldwork is to be credited, Islamic apocalypticism as well. [48] In the times of Jahiliyyah - the days of pre-Islamic darkness before the coming of the Prophet and the Revelation of the Qu’ran - gender based violence was the norm in Arabia. Young men proved their worthiness as men by participation in the gazwa or raid in which the kidnapping of a female of reproductive age was the highest prize. Female infanticide was a common practice among the poor. The Prophet gave women legal standing for the first time. He anathemized the gazwa when aimed at fellow Muslims and ended the practice of female infanticide. [49]

Not only the Janjaweed, but their victims too are Muslim. What prize, what dream, what desperation would move a man to act toward the destruction of his own soul? What earthly future does such a man have, given the African belief in the power of unrequited spirits who have the power to blight the fortunes of families, clans and entire tribes if the proper rituals are not performed to put their spirits to rest? Such is the magnitude of Janjaweed violence that the dead victims of the militia can not be accurately counted, much less laid to rest or propitiated. As to the women who have been raped and yet live, many have been quoted to the effect that they envy the dead, for their lives as members of their families, clans and tribes are over. Traditional married life, childbearing and the ability to fulfill the roles for which women in African societies are raised to idealize are closed to them. [50] They are ghosts who haunt their living kin as unbearable reminders of their own impotence to protect them.

These women may be ghosts, but they are unquiet spirits. Virtually the whole of the vast pile of reports and articles noted at the beginning of this article are victim testimonies. Victim testimonies are moving and powerful. They are vital pieces of history and need to be collected, both for their historical value, and for their evidentiary value as international law has evolved to the point where rape in wartime is no longer seen as an unavoidable form of collateral damage but a fully fledged war crime in itself. [51]

But for all the power and eloquence of victim testimony, what a victim can never tell you—and what we must know if policies are to be crafted to prevent future Janjaweeds; future Darfurs—is the answer to the most basic question of all: Why? Why do (note the present tense) you do it? What are you thinking? What do you see and what do you dream? What pictures are in your mind when you close your eyes to sleep and what do you see at first light? How did you get here and where do you go from here when the conflict ends? There is no going home for your victims, but for you too the door to a normal life seems to be closed. Has the militia replaced or does it in some way exist uneasily alongside your tribal identity?

And having asked these, what are the questions which would prove or disprove with certainty the hypothesis that the Janjaweed are a fifth wave terrorist group? These would include:

1) Localism. Are the issues contested purely local, tribal and thus regional? Or, in keeping with the Islamic discourse in which Janjaweed rhetoric is couched, is there a global dimension to the Janjaweed dream?;

2) Racism. Is the violence an expression of mere racial animus, or is there something deeper, or perhaps something more practical like acquisition of land or physical resources?;

3) Historical Continuity. Is the Janjaweed phenomenon simply a continuation of the traditional enmity between Arab nomads and African settled pastoralists, exacerbated by the drought of the 1980s, the onset of the “Kalashnikov culture” and the politically expedient decision to arm the nomadic tribes rather than trust the loyalty (or ability) of the Army to deal with the rebellion of 1993, or does the Janjaweed phenomenon represent more of a millennial or existential dream?;

4) Ijtihad [52] Have Janjaweed leaders used this forbidden form of exegesis (for Sunnis) to make Janjaweed actions compatible with Islamic text?;

5) Social Structure. What kind of social structures developed in Janjaweed camps, including the possible development of new or revived (and revised) religious rituals or the use of narcotic drugs prior to going into battle?;

6) Gender. Is the pervasive rape perpetrated by the Janjaweed intended as: a strategy of genocide, as a terrorist message aimed at the ethnic cleansing of the region; or is it mere opportunistic criminal violence—a matter of gender and power and profound social change?; and

7) What is the role of the Hakama, [53] female traditional singers, in exacerbating sexual violence in Darfur.

Given the situation on the ground in Darfur, such research would be much more difficult to conduct now than it would have been just a year or two ago. Moreover, the enterprise is fraught with ethical dilemmas for the researcher who would undertake such a project

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Note: Perspectives on Terrorism invites a diversity of opinions to be presented in articles. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Perspectives on Terrorism or the Terrorism Research Initiative.

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