Posts Tagged ‘norms’

Interesting passage from Darfur: A New History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal:

The Kalashnikov rifle changed the moral order of Darfur. The Abbala had lived by an honor code that included loyalty, strenuous self-discipline when herding camels and communal responsibility for homicide. The principle of paying diya, or blood money, to the kin of an individual killed in a feud ensured that violence was a collective responsibility. In the era of spears and swords, and even the earlier rifles, a killing was a deliberate an individual act readily traceable to the man responsible. Fights rarely had more than a handful of fatalities. The AK-47 – capable of slaughtering an entire platoon, truckload of people, or family - swept this aside. Blood money for a single massacre could exceed the camel wealth of a whole lineage. The sheer number of bullets fired made it impossible to ascertain who had shot whom. Young men with gun were not only able to terrify the population at large, but were free of the control of their elders.