Within hours of reporting its discovery, BBC news reported that the giant underground lake in North Darfur probably dried up years ago. Further revelations notwithstanding, it was a cruelly false hope for the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Darfur’s 30-year drought and the resultant violence. Still, the article ends optimistically - while drilling begins to extract water from the possibly phantom lake, a geologist working on UN water-mining project in South Darfur believes that enough water may well be available there to end the conflict.

This speculation may seem bizarre to those following mainstream media coverage of the Darfur “genocide”. Isn’t it a matter of evil Arabs massacring helpless Africans, best brought to an end through the intervention of righteous powerful states in the West? In fact, most neutral observers (including the UN) completely reject the “genocide” label. A more accurate picture would be of insurgency and counter-insurgency, and its not as simple as Arabs vs Africans either. Identity politics in Sudan are complex, and these terms do not identify racial or cultural groups (all concerned are dark-skinned Arabic-speaking Muslims) so much as political affiliations - and while the ‘Arab’ communities tend to be with the government forces and the ‘Africans’ with the rebels, there are many exceptions.

Inaccurate as it is, the genocide myth resonates with what we’re used to being told about geopolitics in general. Arabs, of course, are violent and intolerant, and it is up to our soldiers and planes to civilise them. Africans, on the other hand, are poor and helpless, and it is up to our soldiers and planes to save them. These broader myths reinforce the genocide story, and part of its purpose is doubtless to reinforce them in turn. It’s also a good excuse to elbow Khartoum (and, more importantly, Beijing) away from Sudan’s natural resources (oil, and that).

A quick glance at the people involved in the SaveDarfur campaign, though, as well as the timing of its most intense lobbying, suggests that distracting public opinion away from Iraq and Palestine is the main idea. The sanctions and no-fly-zones decried by the aid groups actually helping to cope with the crisis were largely the work of this campaign, whose supporters include John Bolton and Hilary Clinton, and which doesn’t actually spend a penny on Darfur. Some - if not most - of its donors are doubtless unaware of this fact, just glad for a chance to do good and shake off their messy, complicated Iraq guilt, but SaveDarfur doesn’t fund relief camps or aid packages for Darfuri refugees, nor did it contribute to the African Union mission that, until it collapsed due to lack of funds, was starting to bring security to the region.

All of SaveDarfur’s millions go into promoting sanctions, no-fly-zones and the possibility of an invasion. A popular slogan in America’s colleges is “Out of Iraq, Into Darfur” or, to phrase it slightly differently, “We’ll Never Learn!” For as we’ve seen in Afghanistan, Iraq and, more recently, Somalia, we can’t save a country by bombing and invading it. It just doesn’t work - although, once you start to belief that it’s a battle between the evil and the helpless, it’s easy to imagine that violent intervention is the only solution. To get out of that, you need context.

From the British Empire to the modern Khartoum regime, Darfur has always been politcally and economically marginalised, distant from the far more interesting regions nearer to the Nile. From the 1960s, the central government were already using the region’s “Arabs” as a scapegoat - for these were mainly the nomads, the poorest of the region, while the “Africans” were the more prosperous landowning peasants. For a long time, the two communities lived together well enough, but the 1980s saw the onset of harder times. Drought.

Where once they had allowed their land to be used for grazing, the peasants now had to close their territory off to nomads in order to feed themselves, making the latter poorer and more desperate still - and, ultimately, more envious. By the turn of the century, a popular uprising spread among the peasant villages against the regime that both oppressed and neglected them. Sudan’s army was ill-equipped to crush the rebellion - not to mention ill-motivated, as many of the Darfuri soldiers’ loyalties were seen as likely to waver - so it did the easy thing. It armed the poorest of the poor, and unleashed them on the slightly-less-poor. The Janjawid (the term means “camel-herders”) needed little encouragement, and their appalling actions in driving the villagers’ from their lands are now pretty much universally known (though it should be pointed out that the UN accuse both sides of crimes against humanity).

A good analysis of the Darfur conflict and the way it is spun comes from Colombia University’s Mahmood Mamuni: see this essay of his and/or this interview on Democracy Now, both entitled The Politics Of Naming. But what of the environmental catastrophe that started it all? From the Guardian:

Back in the 1980s, the failure of the rains was widely blamed on the people who lived in the region. Their over-grazing, it had been thought, had led to soil erosion, replaced green cover with bare rock and sand, reflecting more heat into the atmosphere and diminishing the chance of rain.

More recent computer modelling has suggested that rain patterns over Africa are influenced rather by ocean temperatures, and those in turn reflect global warming, and the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, droughts in Africa may be caused less by its hapless inhabitants and more by oversize cars and cheap flights in Europe and the US.

In fact it’s a bit less either-or; with more than a little help from rapacious foreign capitalism, the hapless inhabitants of many a Third World country continue their departed colonial masters’ work of smashing up the ecosystem. Darfur is no exception, but in its case climate change is doing more to dry the place out than the locals ever could. England isn’t the only place where the rains have been diverted, and the Guardian article goes on to speculate that similar wars could well break out all along North Africa’s Sahel belt and, ultimately, the world.

It’s a pretty grim scenario, and to avert it will take a great deal of political and economic will to both slow down the destruction of our environment, to feed and shelter those whose environments are the first to go, and to mediate fairly when the new scarcities do, inevitably, lead to new conflicts. For the almost half million Darfuri killed (by starvation and disease, as well as by violence - notice it’s still about half the current estimates for Iraq), we’ve already failed, but there’s another 6.5 billion of us to go.

Anyway, this is probably a good time to bring up the fact that next month (after leaving Surrey forever hahahahahahaha) I will be swimming across Lake Windermere to raise money for WaterAid, a charity that specifically deals with providing safe, clean and - crucially - sustainable drinking water for some of the world’s poorest countries. Their website highlights a Darfuresque environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Zambia, and is unusually frank in pointing out the flaws in the neocolonial aid system. Please give generously.