Routledge
Genocide in Darfur: Investigating the Atrocities in the Sudan
Key Metrics
- Samuel Totten
- Routledge
- Hardcover
- 9780415953283
- 9.1 X 6.32 X 1.08 inches
- 1.42 pounds
- History > Africa - North
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In response to the ongoing mass murder of Black Sudanese groups in the Darfur region of Sudan by Sudanese government troops and Arab militias, the US government sent the Darfur Atrocities Documentation Team to various points along the Chad/Sudan in order to interview refugees from Darfur. Based on their investigation, US Secretary of State Colin Powell formally announced that 'genocide has occurred in Darfur and may still be occurring.' The United States officially accused the government of Sudan of perpetrating genocide - the first time that any government has officially and publicly accused another government of genocide. As a result the United States played a key role in pressuring the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution calling for several measures, including an official UN Commission of Inquiry to conduct a genocide investigation in Sudan itself. This was the first time that any signatory of the Genocide Convention actually triggered provisions of the Convention requiring a UN Security Council response while genocide was occurring.
This book is comprised of essays from contributors who were involved in designing the project and hiring and training investigators, interpreters, and support personnel; US government and nongovernmental organization (NGO) officials involved in the genesis of the project as well as the analysis of the data; and numerous scholars, not all of whom were directly involved with the project, who critique aspects of the documentation project as well as its significance.
Author Bio
Samuel Totten is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is a longtime scholar of genocide studies. In 2004 he served as one of 24 investigators with the U.S. State Department-sponsored Atrocities Documentation Project, interviewing refugees from Darfur in refugee camps along the Chad/Darfur, Sudan border.
The data collected in the interviews were used by then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to ascertain whether genocide had or had not been perpetrated in Darfur. On September 9, 2004, acknowledging the work of the ADP team, Powell informed the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Sudan had perpetrated genocide in Darfur and was possibly still doing so. On his own over the next five years Totten continued to interview refugees from Darfur.
The results of that research is delineated in his book An Oral and Documentary History of the Darfur Genocide (Praeger Security International Press, 2011). From 2010 through today, Totten has focused on both the genocide by attrition perpetrated by the Government of Sudan against the people of the Nuba Mountains (late 1980s/1990s) and, more recently, the current war in the State of South Kordofan.
Thus far, two books have resulted from the latter research: Genocide by Attrition, Second Edition (Transaction Publishers, 2015), and Conflict in the Nuba Mountains: From Genocide by Attrition to the Contemporary Crisis in Sudan (Routledge, 2015). He holds a Doctor of Education degree from Columbia University in New York City.
Source: TheConversation.com
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