[5] Famine, drought and the struggle for the region's natural resources sparked peasant revolts and encouraged ethnic conflicts between the nomadic Arab camel herders of Sudan and Chad and the more sedentary native Furs.
That year a group of Arab tribal leaders from Darfur, using the rubric Tajammu al-Arabi, addressed an open letter to Sadiq al-Mahdi denouncing an underrepresentation in regional government.
The drought and famine of 1983–84 caused the pastures that the Baggara nomads traditionally grazed to dry up, forcing them to settle on land where no one wanted to work as day laborers in the towns.
Many Baggara fighters who served in the Islamic Legion and who used to cross the Chad–Sudan border returned to their lands with military experience, radicalized and armed to the teeth, ready to face the Furs and the Regional Government.
Under this agreement, the Arab and Furs militias pledged to lay down their arms and disband in a process overseen by the government, then under a newly created military junta.