Thread: On Racism, On Ignorance, On Laziness and just plain stupidity

collounsbury ([info]collounsbury) wrote,
@ 2004-08-09 13:09:00

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Darfur - On Racism, On Ignorance, On Laziness and just plain stupidity (and Arab responses)

First, to avoid the typical miscomprehensions from the ignorant twits who lack in reading comprehension, let me say that what is happening in Dar Fur is a disgrace, and terrible. Ethnic cleansing (not genocide, ethnic cleansing, let's keep the word genocide for... well genocide and not yet engage in another namby pamby debasing of meaning for shock value to mobilize the sensitive) is never a good thing, and the Arab supremacist government in Sudan deserves scorn and pressure. Perhaps even getting a good spanking with an oil blockade and

This aside, Western commentary - whether in "blogs" or ordinary media has been remarkably ignorant and frankly often racist in a lazy and stupid sort of way falling into stupid "Black" versus "Arab" idiocies.

Let me first refer readers to this article, thanks to Charles Stewart: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17326

It is a serviceable article and far better than the piss-poor stuff I have generally seen. I'll return to comment on it after some comments I began before finding this.


On the first hand, there is the issue of characterizing the events in the context of 'black on white' (or actually vice versa) violence and "Arab" "racism" versus "Black Africans"

We can stipulate from the beginning the following:


1. There is certainly color prejudice in the Arab world, despite the pretension on the part of Muslims that Islam makes for equality and harmony (it does, that is the religion is surprisingly egalitarian in theory, practice is an entirely different matter, human beings being human). For a frame of reference, Arab world attitudes towards "race" or color and physical type are analogous to Brazilian ones. There is a quite different history and a lot of variability - as one might expect in a region where an "Arab" (an ethnicity claimed by anyone speaking Arabic as a more or less mother tongue and even weirdly by some bilingual non-Arabs. North Africa/the Maghreb is particularly slippery here as many Berberophones will slide between Berber and Arab identification depending on the context) can anyone from an essentially pale southern European looking Libano-Syrian, to a dusky but still southern Mediterranean, to the classic Arabi look of the Gulf, to the very African.... All are "Arabs" - but internal to Arabs those with sub-Saharan African looks do face discrimination, or in the case of Sudan, those who don't have the upper Nile Valley look since everyone in Sudan is (as the name says in Arabic) 'black'.


2. There is certainly an existing prejudice among Arab communities that Arab Muslims are the "real" Muslims and virtually everyone else are at best second rate Muslims. Nothing new in this, it's an ancient thing (and I add it seems to exist among some Arab Xians proud of their supposed status as 'first' Xians) and largely pedestrian and predictable ethnocentrism.


3. There is certainly an extent prejudice in particular against non-Arab African Muslims as quasi-polytheistic backsliders. To be frank, from a religious point of view the... "flexible" Islam prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa often does include some rather suspect (theologically speaking) elements. Of course so does Arab region Islamic practices, although they are more "normalized.' Always a good Hadith kicking around to give cover.


4. Arab-African Muslims (Arabic speaking Muslims in Africa) certainly also have a tendency to distance themselves from Africa. Causes are multiple - given Africa has such shitty press (for real and not so real reasons), one can hardly blame a certain mefiance although there is the uglier history of prejudices that emerged from the history of the slave trade - above all to my reading during the Turkish period. But that history, which I am hardly an expert in we can lave aside, although I have read some interesting articles tracking the emergence of color references in Arabic literature and it could be an interesting if largely masturbatory discussion.



All this to say, that the framing of "African versus Arab" has a certain source in reality, and that there are tensions between "Arab" and non-Arabs in Africa that have some skin color basis.

At the same time, writing the Dar Fur conflict as "Arabs" attacking "Black Africans" - with the implication of "light" skinned Arabs attacking blacks is a rather serious distortion and a complete mischaracterization of the Fur-Arab conflicts.

Primo, the Sudanse Arabophones are, with few exceptions of Sudanese citizens of Turkish or Northern Egyptian extraction, are largely every bit as dark as the Fur and others, or close enough to make the differentiation as it might be understood by your typical North American or European reader absurd.

Now in addition to color, while the physical type of some percentage of the Arab nomads and the Nile Valley Arabs differs from that of the Fur, as the New York Review article notes, there is a good thousand years of population mixing, and of course further, the Arabs of the Fur region are hardly a bunch of characters newly imported from the Arabian peninsula, but a mixture of Arabized (often of long date) locals, Arab immigrants (of an ancient date, that is hundreds of years). Dar Fur's history is that of being a key point on the great trans Saharan caravan routes and it was long integrated into the Islamic world's commercial network, unlike the south of Sudan whose real substantial contact only came in the 19th century. I note by the way that Lapidus A History of Islamic Societies, a conservative and standard reference, places initial Islamization of the Fur sultanate in the 1600s, far earlier than the 1800 date the author cites.

Indeed most Sudanese Arabs (Arabophones) are more likely to descend form Nuba, from Funj, from Fur, indeed from any of the pre-Arab ethnicities than from actual immigrants from the Arabian peninsula. Lapidus notes the Arabization of the Sudanese began well before any Arab state existed, coming from elites opting for Arab identities for prestige reasons, and the slow spread of Arabic as a lingua franca. There is little rational basis (despite Arabized locals pretensions, and non-Arabized locals pretensions) to view the Sudanese Arabs as anything but... Africans.

While I suppose if I were feeling fair minded I might cut journalists who slop down both the Arab pretensions to be of actual "Arab Peninsula" origin and not locals who opted for Arab identity over the centuries and the non-Arab use of the same discourse to pretend the Arabs are actually less local than themselves.

Accepting for the moment that the lazy idiots covering this, if I can be needlessly abusive for a moment, should get some slack for not cracking a quick standard reference (like Lapidus) to find out if the spin the locals feed them matches what even keeled historians can tell them, or for falling into sloppy stereotypes, I do not see a reason why the racial angle should get any slack.

Anyone with eyes and the ability to think for a moment can see rather clearly the Arab nomads of Sudan are hardly physically distinguishable from the non-Arabs of the center West and East - certainly not in the sense of racial conflict as being pimped in Western media, insofar the physical range between baggara arabs and non-Arabs of Western Sudan is hardly great as compared to say variation within or between "blacks" in North America - even eliminating the palest. Which is to say that whatever the Arab supremacist blather the idiots in Khartoum or the chief of the "Janjaweed" (a word by the way that is very clear not at all Arabic, which rather tells you, given it is a self-appellation, how 'Arab' these "Arabs" are) may be using to create ... to manufacture in fact, a murderous form of ethnic hatred and to divide potential groups that might otherwise see common cause against the Nile Valley elites. Or mobilize an Arab centric nationalism of some kind out of otherwise anarchic nomads.

Of course, the tensions between the "Arab" nomads and the non-Arab settled groups have as much to do with limited water resources and the ancient tensions between settled and nomad.

Now, the article:

Disaster in Darfur
By John Ryle

First this paragraph is of interest:
The administration's present difficulty is the result of a policy that has been shaped not by any analysis of the long-term problems of Sudan but rather by domestic US considerations. The impetus behind the decision to revive the peace process in the south was the need to satisfy two opposing points of view in the Bush administration: that of the evangelical Christian lobby, which regarded the civil war as an attack by an Islamist dictatorship on the Christian population of southern Sudan (most southerners are non-Muslims), and that of the State Department, where officials saw a chance to do business with a regime that, while remaining Islamist in name, had purged itself of the hard-core ideologues that had guided it up until the late 1990s (along with such official guests as Osama bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal), and thereby to deter Sudan from cooperating with international terrorism.

Of course there would a certain novelty value in having American foreign policy shaped by an analysis of long term issues of any given country, but it seems rather much to expect. There is something to be said for ad hoc policy. In any case, the evangelical Xian connexion in re the policy is the one that is rather more problematic. The entire story sold to the gullible believers was always rather overdone - given the penetration of Xianity in the South is not quite what they think it is... although perhaps to be fair I suppose the evangelicals get all excited about new fields of potential converts.

The incoherence that emerges here is rather tied to the partially faux religious angle, insofar as the Sudanese civil war has long been one of non-Arabs (Muslim, Xian and animist) against the Arab (with all the caveats noted supra) Nile elite.

This comment is of interest in that connexion:
The agreement is a diplomatic achievement. But it does little to tackle the wider political problems that have afflicted Sudan since independence: the neglect of areas like Darfur that lie outside the central zone of the Nile valley, the decay of the judicial system, and the subversion of administration by the security agencies. The price of the agreement in the south has been the exclusion from the peace process of all but the two warring parties, the government and the SPLM, both of which came to power by force of arms. Other political forces and regional interests in Sudan and other conflicts, north and south, have been sidelined, including those in Darfur.

While I doubt one could expect a very different agreement, it is, I suppose fair to reproach the fact that it does not address the non-southern and "Xian" (again the Xian angle is every bit as dodgy as the Arab angle, neither is as clear as the fairly simplistic tales being told by both sides and by Western reporters lapping up the slop - or Arab reporters for that matter).

This note is also important:
In this respect, the timing of the insurgency in Darfur is related to the Naivasha Agreement. Low-level fighting among communities in western Sudan (all of which are Muslim) has been endemic since the late 1980s, when a war broke out between the Arabs and the Fur, two of the ethnic groups involved in the present conflict. During the 1990s, the apparent impunity enjoyed by Arab militias in Darfur and the growth of their political influence confirmed anxieties on the part of the Fur and the other non-Arab groups that they were losing political ground. In particular, they feared that a peace agreement in the south would strengthen the government in Khartoum domestically and internationally and lock them out of the national political process altogether. In early 2003 two loosely allied armed groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM, not to be confused with the SPLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), mounted a series of attacks on government posts in Darfur. The government response was to rapidly escalate its support to the Arab militias —bands of horsemen known in Darfur Arabic as Janjawiid—with the results to be seen in Darfur today.

Likely it would be helpful to understand this as an ancient nomad versus settled population conflict being... morphed into an ethnic-nationalist conflict with all the murderous modernity that implies.

The crisis is connected to the war with the SPLM in another key respect. In the harrowing of Darfur there is a clear continuity with the government's earlier military strategy in the south. Darfur has been described as "Rwanda in slow motion." But more significantly, it is southern Sudan speeded up. For two decades in the south successive Khartoum governments have employed the same counterinsurgency techniques as in Darfur today, with similar results. During the 1980s and 1990s Arab militias from Darfur and neighboring Kordofan, similar to the Janjawiid but known to the southerners by the derogatory term "Murahaliin" (nomads), were deployed against communities in SPLM-controlled areas of Bahr-el-Ghazal, the province to the south of Darfur. The famines that afflicted Bahr-el-Ghazal in 1987–1988 and 1998–1999 were the result of these attacks. Mortality figures can only be guessed at, but they were in the hundreds of thousands, comparable with those projected for Darfur today.

While I personally suspect the comparisons with Rwanda are overdone, of interest is the Khartoum Nile elite exploitation of tribal militias for plausible deniability and likely as well to get fire power on the cheap while distracting unruly and dangerous nomads from other problems.

By the way, the term Murahaliin means something like wanderers, and is not the usual term for nomads in most Arabic - that would be Bedou. I have no sense of it being pejorative per se, but probably it is ... I would note that the root is associated with camels - although the core meaning is to travel or wander. For context the usual term for a 'trip' is a "rihla' which is a base form of the same verbal root.

This being simply color commentary rather than conveying any real item of importance. At least the author did some homework.

These attacks were coordinated by military intelligence and sometimes accompanied by aerial bombardment, as in Darfur. And an ideology of Muslim religious and Arab racial superiority was used to justify them. Similar tactics, including mass rape, were used against the Nuba of Kordofan, another group involved in the southern rebellion. And as recently as last March, well after the cease-fire in the south, government-backed militias launched systematic attacks on villages in SPLM-controlled areas of the Upper Nile.

I am not sure I would call Arab supremacism a racial superiority ideology - color and physical type while not irrelevant to Arab identity as I noted supra, are not the key components. It's certainly a ethnocentric ideology, and potentially an ugly one, but physically Arabs -that is the range of folks accepted by Arabic speakers as Arab- is already too incoherent for it to be racial. Whatever the apparent form of the language as translated (the ugly putting down of "blacks"), I would say given my experience that culture and language trump skin color and physical type - at least within the range found in central Sudan.

Here I differ with the author:

In the case of the south, where the victims were non-Muslims, the official rhetoric justifying the attacks used the vocabulary of holy war, of jihad. Murahaliin were transformed into Mujahideen. But the unofficial rhetoric of the conflict was racial, employing the terms abid (slave) and zurga (literally "blue," meaning black, i.e., not Arab, in Sudanese language), words that bear the weight of a history of discrimination and exploitation in Sudan, where ethnic groups claiming Arab descent assume a superiority over others. In the case of Darfur, the inhabitants are all Muslim, with the exception of some displaced southerners, but the province is a patchwork of Arab and non-Arab groups, of which the Fur are one of many. In the present conflict, in the absence of religious difference, it is racial rhetoric that has come to the fore. Adherents of the two rebel movements, the SLA and the JEM, are drawn, in varying proportions, from the three major non-Arab or "African" groups in the province, the eponymous Fur, the Massaleit, and the Zaghawa, while the Janjawiid are drawn from a number of pastoral Arab tribes who move in the same territory and compete for natural resources and political power.

Again, racial? No I think not, Zurga of course is bedouine Arabic form of Zurqa ("blueness") and an old Arabic usage for dark skin color. But perhaps that is splitting hairs, certainly in my opinion it is not racial in the way North Americans understand race. I would also say that the appellation Zurgah would not necessarily mean non Arab (see below).

This aside, the paragraph conveys important points, although the following highlights why calling the rhetoric racial is troublesome;

It is only recently, however, that the division between "Arab" and "African" has achieved its present level of political significance in Darfur. The distinction is not straightforward. The Islamic presence in Sudan as a whole originates from the Arabian peninsula: over centuries of Islamization many indigenous peoples in the Nile valley came to claim Arab ancestry, to speak Arabic rather than their own languages, and to embrace Arabic culture. Thus about half the inhabitants of northern Sudan (a term which includes western provinces such as Darfur) are, by their own definition, Arabs. Non-Arabs—who are generally physically indistinguishable—retain their indigenous languages, although Arabic is the lingua franca of the country. From this point of view Sudan can be said to be an Arab country in something like the sense that the United States is an Anglo-Saxon country.

Emphasis added.

Of course the author is wrong, the Islamic presence in Sudan does not originate from the Arabian peninsula, except insofar as Islam started in the Arabian peninsula. The major vectors were really Egyptian and pan Islamic trade, not Arab tribes coming over the Jazeera. Nevertheless, he does correctly identify the fact most Sudanese are Arabized locals not Arab "immigrants" in the vision of Arab tribes sweeping across the Red Sea to invade Sudan. Pity he manages to imply Arabization derived from invasion, insofar as the Arabization of the elites of Funj (located in the region of Khartoum south along the Blue Nile) came before any Arab conquest - rather from conversion and slow Arabization after that as Funj opted by their own intention for Arab identity... prestige one would say. Arab rule only came with the collapse of the Funj sultanate in the late 18th century and Egyptian conquest in 1820. That's right. 1820.The Sultanate had emerged by around 1520.

The object of the history lesson (as brief and over generalized as it is) is to put context to Arabization.

And here we have a very important paragraph.
The nomadic Arabs of Darfur, who provide the recruits for the government-controlled militias, are a world away from the settled Arab elites who control the state. They are closer, in most ways, to their non-Arab neighbors, even in the Arabic they speak. (The word "Janjawiid," for instance, by which the militias are known, and which has achieved global currency in international coverage of the crisis, is unknown elsewhere in the country.) In Darfur, moreover, ethnic distinctions are changeable: nomads and farmers share the same territory; they may intermarry even as they compete for land and water; Fur and others who acquire cattle can be incorporated into Baggara families, becoming Arabs within a generation.

As I noted, Janjawiid (Janjaweed, whatever) is hardly an Arab word. Makes absolutely no sense to me, I can not discern any Arabic in it at all.

Another note, the Baggara is Baqqar(a) in formal Arabic and it means "cow herder(s)" ... Or cowboy(s). Essentially cattle herders. Again to keep to a theme, as I recall, the groups called Baggara are thought to be Arabized cattle herding groups from the area of modern Ethiopia/Eritrea. Certainly cattle herding is not a typical Arab bedouine activity. I note, in the connexion to the word Zurqa noted supra, that one of the phrases for the Baggara is... Misiri Zurga (or something along those lines), A phrase meaning roughly "blue [black] Egyptians."

I also very much like this paragraph as it hits on the key points, the creation of a queer sort of Arab supremacism by the Khartoum elite (ah ye who forget your non-Arab roots) for rather pedestrian reasons of power and exploitation:
A doctrine of solidarity among Arab groups throughout Sudan is increasingly invoked to link the pastoral Arabs of the west to the Arab-dominated central government. The rebel groups in Darfur, however, prefer to stress a history of discrimination against the region as a whole as the cause of the war, rather than the ill-treatment of non-Arabs per se. The internal history of conflict and cooperation between ethnic groups in Darfur is one of Balkan complexity and, as in the Balkans, differing interpretations of this history become part of the conflict.

The reference to the Balkans is a good one.

Darfur was an independent sultanate that controlled the desert trade route between West Africa and Egypt. It embraced Islam in the early 1800s. Though named for the dar (homeland) of the Fur people, the sultanate drew its administrative elite from a number of ethnic groups that included Arabs. In the 1880s, embroiled in resistance to the revolt led by the Mahdi, a millenarian Islamic religious leader, against Turco-Egyptian rule, the sultanate was overrun by Baggara (cattle-keeping Arab pastoralists) allied with the Mahdist forces. (This period of Sudan's first experiment with radical Islam, which ended with the British invasion and defeat of the Mahdi's successor in 1898, bears comparison with the present day.)

This is simply bad history, sadly. The Islamization of Dar Fur (dar is of course home in Arabic, in this context meaning homeland) dates several centuries earlier, although it is probably true that the process took centuries as well. In addition the comparison of the Mahdist revolt to modern Islamic radicalism is just... well I think misconceived although not perhaps inaccurate.

An interesting point hidden in this paragraph:
The current military regime of General Omar al-Bashir, which is known as the Ingaz (Salvation) government, came to power in a military coup in 1989, after overthrowing the elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, grandson of the Mahdi. The power behind the throne in the Salvation government, until a split in 2001, was the Islamist thinker Hassan al-Turabi, who is Sadiq's brother-in-law. Turabi was the architect of a new Islamist program that reached beyond the Arab elites to include Muslim African peoples in Darfur and elsewhere. But Turabi now languishes in Kober prison in Khartoum, accused of links to one of the rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement. The Salvation government, like its civilian predecessor, seems to have reverted to an Arabist agenda, attempting to control the west of the country, as it attempted to control the south, by divide and rule.

I should say that I think the point of interest is the connexion between more or less abandonment of Islamism a la Turabi for Arabism.

Here the author appears to agree with my analysis:
Control of the peripheral regions of Sudan has come to depend on a strategy that combines administrative neglect with ethnic polarization and the clandestine, state-sponsored violence of the Janjawiid and other government-backed militias. The present government's indiscriminate use of this strategy—its deliberate disruption of the balance of enmity maintained between pastoralists and settled people—combines with the indiscriminate spread of weaponry to make great tracts of the region ungovernable. In the south and the west guns are now ubiquitous. "Kalash au bilash; kalash begib al kash," runs a catchphrase from Darfur, "You're trash without a Kalashnikov; get some cash with a Kalashnikov."

First, by the way, the translation is not quite right, it's "Kalash or nothing, Kalash brings in the cash." I note that the transcription reflects Cairo Egyptian Arabic pronunciation, presumably his source on this phrase was an Egyptian from the north. I doubt Dar Fur Arabic follows Cairene Arabic patterns.

Second, emphasis added supra, it strikes me Khartoum, rather than see a united West break away (one would suspect the Westerners in general in purely objective analysis have more in common with themselves than with the Nile elites), prefers to follow a plan of deliberate 'balkanization' to protect its interests.

Finally:
What is to be done about a regime that visits such evils on its citizens? In the short term international aid agencies must be given free access to all areas of Darfur, across the lines between government and rebel-controlled zones. This should be the immediate focus of donor and UN pressure. Beyond this, it is essential to establish an effective international monitoring regime, in order to ensure the protection of civilians and unimpeded access to them. A team of military observers from the newly born African Union is being deployed in Darfur, but their number is too small and their mandate too limited. To prevent more killing—and the concealment of crimes already committed— the international presence in Sudan requires an information network in the field that can match that of the Sudan government's own security forces. Short of a serious threat of external military intervention, it will be difficult to achieve this. Even now, with evidence of war crimes mounting by the day, there is no international unanimity in condemning the government of Sudan. A general UN arms embargo would be opposed, for example, by China, which, in return for oil from fields in southern Sudan, has, in recent years, provided the Sudanese government with three new arms factories. An embargo would, in any case, do little to stem the flow of weapons within Sudan. An international tribunal on the Rwandan model is something to be pursued, but this is a long-term project that will not resolve the immediate crisis.

And
The United States and the European Union have both demanded the disarmament of the Janjawiid and said that they will impose sanctions and travel restrictions on militia leaders and the government military officers who control them. In the case of the Janjawiid, though, as a former governor of Darfur, Ahmed Diraige, has pointed out, an international travel ban is meaningless: these are not people who have cause to leave Sudan. And in the case of the Sudanese military, where does responsibility stop? The government of Sudan, purged of hard-line Islamists, is now in thrall to its security forces. The proxy militias that are used to devastate civilian lives have become the means by which the government remains in power.

Correct analyses on one level. I find the travel bans and freezing of bank accounts for Janjawiid leaders amusing actually, insofar as these guys largely don't even have goddamned bank accounts. Symbolic I think it was called, I would call it comically misplaced. Applied to the Sudanese government, well that has a bit more meaning although given Sudan's not particularly strong integration in the global economy, this is pretty trivial.

The ruthlessness of the government's response to the Darfur insurgency is a sign of fear: any hint of weakness is liable to encourage other insurgencies in the east, where rebels already control an enclave on the Eritrean frontier. To limit responsibility for military strategy in Darfur or the south to specific officials in the internal security agencies or military intelligence is not plausible. If anyone is guilty it must be the highest authority, the commander in chief, the head of state himself.

Emphasis added. The most important note here is the issue of fear and the note regarding the Eastern rebels - who are actually rather more dangerous to Khartoum, being within striking distance in theory of the oil fields.

I am less convinced overall of the ability of the government to actually reign in the Janjawiid but abstracting away from this, the real issue is what to do. I very much doubt any intervention will occur with either African or Western ground forces. The rather more realistic option is to enforce a no fly zone over Dar Fur and threaten Khartoum with the specter of the Dar Fur movements being armed in the same manner as the Janjawiid. Of course that is likely to be a rather bloody way of moving things along, but the reality is that nothing else is going to happen, and only after quite a bit of blood is spilled will any of the sides tire of killing.

Moving to comment and reflect on another aspect, the Arab side of the equation, and this interesting FT article which I reproduce in large part.

Arab fears of another western intervention as Sudan crisis deepens
By William Wallis
Published: August 3 2004 04:00 | Last updated: August 3 2004 04:00

The article's theme is:
The crisis in Sudan's remote Darfur province is drivinga fresh wedge between the Arab world and the US and its allies.

While western media and politicians rail against inaction in the face of a human rights catastrophe in the region, Arab media and intellectuals express a very different view, based on ingrained suspicion of western motives. Many Arabs believe that talk of United Nations sanctions and military deployment to protect Sudanese civilians masks a new offensive against yet another Arab regime: "Sudan Next" in the words of an editorial in Egypt's state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper.

My first reaction to this was frankly to put their reaction down to pure childishness, however one has to confess that in the context of the degree to which American Sudanese policy has been driven by the fantastical visions of the Xian Right in the United States (and their equally delirious visions of Coptic - Muslim tensions in Egypt (as a side note I recall when I was in Egypt Baba Shenoudah, the ballsey Coptic Pope refused to meet an American delegation sent to 'investigate' 'atrocities' against the Copts) that Arab paranoia is in part understandable. Not well-founded per se, but understandable.

Of course the connexion with Iraq in the overheated rhetoric in certain Arab quarters is hardly well thought through - although the existence in Eastern Sudan of oil fields gives some pretext.

Hassan Abu Taleb, deputy director at the Al-Ahram centre for political and strategic studies in Cairo, said US failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had fuelled doubts about the west's credibility and broader motives in the Middle East. "The tendency is to see anything that comes from the US as a big lie. Some even doubt the [veracity of] catastrophic images of Darfur because they come from the western media," he said.

Well, I would say that the Iraqi angle is a pretext, insofar as a generalized doubt of Western media is in no way supportable. American media, well, sadly yes, but others, no.

The generalized paranoia and distrust, although augmented by Iraq, was not created by it. Long years of shitty state media and a generally conspiratorial political life are the origin.

Of course, one has only to go to the fringes of American political commentary (left or right) to see that the paranoid delirium is hardly unique to the Arab world, we should recall that there are only matters of degree here.

Arab governments are taking a more conservative position on Darfur than their western counterparts, urging restraint. The Arab League has been attempting to win a more prominent mediating role over Darfur, where more than 1m people have been displaced, and thousands killed since the Sudan government made common cause with nomadic Arab militias to counter a rebellion last year by black African groups.

I note the faux contrast between "Arab militias" and "black Africans."

This aside, the Arab League is a farce and shouldn't be given a role given their own penchant for Arabism... well rather the role has to be associated with other efforts. It could be helpful to have them be less obstructionist than their usual habit, although this presumes a degree of coordination they are not likely to achieve. Nevertheless, in watching in part the live al-Arabiyah coverage of the Arab League meeting on the issue - with Alpha Oumar Konore speaking - I was modestly encouraged although it is largely a question of posture and the program as I left it was clearly image.

Hossan Zaki, the league's spokesman, last week criticised the tough approach of the US and the European Union to the crisis, and threats of military deployment by Britain and Australia, saying they were "antagonising" Khartoum while "achieving little on the ground".

Tough.

Although on a level true insofar one has to suspect that the tough words will be followed by inaction, making things perhaps worse.

The league has been upstaged by Friday's UN Security Council resolution threatening the Sudan government with diplomatic and economic "measures" amounting to sanctions if they fail to disarm the militias, known as Janjaweed.

On his return from a visit to Darfur, Aboul Gheit, Egypt's foreign minister, appeared on Sunday to refute the UN's evidence of widespread atrocities. "To talk about grave violations of human rights or massacres or other such accusations, I don't think it is that way," he said.

Well by Egyptian standards perhaps he's right.

Bankrupt Arab foreign policy. Never lose a chance to get behind a morally questionable and politically silly position rather than getting out in front of an issue.

Washington, which put forward the UN resolution, believes the government will only act to disarm the Janjaweed and engage in genuine negotiations with the rebels, if forced. But the Arab League and Egypt, which has strategic interests in its southern neighbour, fear a heavy-handed approach could precipitate chaos at a time when the government has already been weakened on several fronts.

Here we have the reality behind the Arab League (i.e. Egyptian) position, Egypt is paranoid regarding Sudan. Water politics. Complicated issue, but Egypt has almost limitless paranoia regarding Sudan due to the Nile issue.

"What we want to see is encouragement and support from the international community to a political process that will resolve this crisis and deal with its root causes," says Mr Zaki. "The Sudanese government in this whole process is extremely important. Yes, it should be held accountable to the promises it has given to the UN secretary-general but it should not be cornered."

Arab governments may also fear popular anger at a time when further foreign interference in the region's affairs is virulently opposed.

Sentiment has partly been inflamed by controversy over whether a "genocide" has taken place in Darfur, as the US Congress asserted in a vote last month. The suspicion in parts of the Arab media is that the term was used as a device to justify intervention and seize control of Sudan's oil or to sully the reputation of fellow Arabs.

Ironically, however, Arab organisations have done more than their western counterparts to publicise the conflict in Darfur. Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite TV channel, broke the story when it brought back footage of the devastation in the region last year, inspiring the wrath of Khartoum which later closed its office.

al-Jazeerah, you should note, and if one will reflect a bit one should understand how stupidly ignorant the smear campaign against the station by the American right (that is that section of the right that I like to call the Know Nothing Right).

Arab paranoia, while perhaps vaguely understandable, in this context is more than slightly overblown or rather overdone. As for sullying Arab reputation... well the Arabs are so bloody skilled in pissing on themselves it hardly seems necessary to sully their reputation.

It was the Arab League too, that produced one of the first official reports on abuses in Darfur after a fact-finding mission in April recommended a raft of measures including the disarming of the Janjaweed and the rebels they oppose. That report also prompted angry reactions from Khartoum.

But if there was mounting concern within the Arab world about events on the ground in Darfur, where Muslims have fought, killed and raped fellow Muslims, it now appears subsumed by even greater popular alarm that the west might intervene.

I should say that it never ceases to amaze me how the Arabs can collectively botch things on such a consistent basis. They had a chance to get out ahead (and I note that the Sudanese government is not well-loved by anyone really) and claim moral high ground, but manage to piss it away.

Now in closing, what would I suggest doing?

No flight zone over Dar Fur, and let the French play a Chadian game. Or threaten Khartoum with that, they know well the French can play dirty pool in that region - the Libyans learned it well enough. Of course, dress this up in nice language, but the late unpleasantness between the Libyans and the French, in large part through proxies, although humanitarianly unpleasant was a nice object lesson. I don't believe there is any stomach for a real intervention force, so the only real threat to present is one of arming and doping the Fur and related opposition forces. Of course the Legion with its fine Chadian experience could be helpful.


(Post a new comment)

[info]exmoor_cat
2004-08-09 04:46 am UTC (link)
Hi,
I appreciate your posts as a good source of info, but please could you use lj cut more often???

(Reply to this) (Thread)
What?
[info]collounsbury
2004-08-09 05:28 am UTC (link)
I have no idea what lj cut is.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: What?
[info]lno
2004-08-09 05:48 am UTC (link)
lj-cut is a way to hide some or all of a given entry's behind a hyperlink. Pasted from the helpfiles; replace [] with proper html tags.

This can be used in a journal entry to hide part, or all, of an entry. When the entry appears in your journal or on someone's Friends page, everything after an [lj-cut] tag and before a closing [/lj-cut] tag will be replaced by a link to the Read Comments page. The Read Comments page always displays the entire entry as well as any comments made on it. When the [lj-cut] is closed with [/lj-cut], any text placed after the closing [/lj-cut] tag will also display on the journal, instead of just on the Read Comments page.

By default, the link will say "Read more...", but if you want it to say something else like "Cut off here", you can write the tag as [lj-cut text="Cut off here"]

Thanks for your analysis and commentary.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: What?
[info]collounsbury
2004-08-09 01:28 pm UTC (link)
Welcome although in re this lj rubbish, I fail to see the utility, but then I have not bothered to learn anything about lj either.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: What?
[info]exmoor_cat
2004-08-09 05:54 am UTC (link)
It's an HTML tag they've got to hide large chunks of text behind a hyperlink within a post. I can't remember the actual method of inserting a title into the html - it is in the FAQ section. It looks like this = [Unknown LJ tag]Text here - only with an underscore instead of a space.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: What?
[info]collounsbury
2004-08-09 01:25 pm UTC (link)
And the value to me is what?

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: What?
[info]exmoor_cat
2004-08-09 02:01 pm UTC (link)
It is of no value to you, but is friendlier to your friends and those who read your updates.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]timur_i_lang
2004-08-09 09:58 am UTC (link)
Nice piece, Coll. Really, onbe has only to look at pictures of former president Nimeiri, an early Sudanese pan-Arabist in the 1950's and 1960's, to dispel any notions of Sudan's Arabs being lily-white.

I have to admit that when framing the conflict for others I've repeated the line about "Arab vs. non-Arab racism" being a possible contributing factor myself ( while nonetheless emphasizing that this conflict has economic roots resulting from pressure on suddenly scarce resources and locally is primarily a seperation along cultural lines, i.e. pastoralist vs. settled agriculturalist ). You're right - that's a wrong choice of word in the American sense. But there does seem to be an element of "cultural racism" - Arab elistism or supremacism. There is something of that sort at play here, if not on the part of local militias themselves, at least on the part of the central government. Their obvious partisanship in favor for the pastoralists is otherwise somewhat inexplicable.

Afterall groups like the Fur seemed to have largely supported the war in the south and provided plenty of cannon-fodder for it. It is not an area that can be described as a hotbed of secessionism. Even the main "rebel" group that has formed has explicitly rejected a partition of Sudan. While they now represent a threat to central authority, that is very recent. Khartoum quiet support for the pastoralist militias seems to pre-date this.

So while racism in the sense of skin-color may not be a large issue and the Arab vs. non-Arab thing might be a little overblown ( I consistently see the conflict in Darfur related to the struggle with "black Christians and animists" in the south, when the two are obviously almost completely unrelated), it I think it is fair to say that while not the driving issue, notions of Arab superiority might be AN issue.

- Tamerlane

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Absolutely
[info]collounsbury
2004-08-09 01:27 pm UTC (link)
Racism is not the word, ethnic supremacism.... Not a felicitious phrase though.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2004-08-10 08:41 pm UTC (link)
But there does seem to be an element of "cultural racism" - Arab elistism or supremacism. There is something of that sort at play here, if not on the part of local militias themselves, at least on the part of the central government. Their obvious partisanship in favor for the pastoralists is otherwise somewhat inexplicable.]

Sudanese politics is something I don't entirely understand (and something that has mutated through cycles of democracy, dictatorship and consociational oligarchy) but it has always depended heavily on clientage, and regime changes in Khartoum affect the level of pull that provincial groups can exercise in the capital. For most of the period that Sudan has existed as a state, the pastoralists in Darfur have had more pull than the farmers; the Fur's clientage relationship with Turabi helped them during the 1990s but has hurt them since Turabi broke with Bashir. To some extent, the JEM and the janjaweed are currently proxies for Turabi's and Bashir's factions in Khartoum.

Don't get me wrong - from what I know of the situation, ethnocentrism plays a large part - but part of what we're seeing (and have been seeing since the 1950s) is Sudanese domestic politics in action.

Jonathan Edelstein (http://headheeb.blogmosis.com)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2004-08-10 08:21 pm UTC (link)
Nice article.

Now in closing, what would I suggest doing? No flight zone over Dar Fur, and let the French play a Chadian game

In the short term, sure. Once the immediate crisis is dealt with, though, someone's going to have to deal with the underlying Cain v. Abel conflict. It seems to me that the only long-term solution is to increase the size of the pie - to provide the infrastructure and training necessary to enable more efficient use of the land and reduce the pastoralists' and farmers' need to expand. That's going to require a costly, sustained, intensive (did I mention costly?) commitment by multiple donors, made even more difficult by the fact that the ethnic hatred genie has been let out of the bottle. If it doesn't happen, though, they'll be at it again in another ten years, particularly if Khartoum continues to blow hot and cold on regionalism as it has done since the inception of the state.

BTW, some speculation here (http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/025751.html), from me and Cairo-based journalist Issandr el-Amrani, about what Egypt might want from all this.

Jonathan Edelstein (http://headheeb.blogmosis.com)

http://www.livejournal.com/users/col...ry/203329.html

These are some interesting points in the issue of Darfur.

Not only the artcle is an interesting one, but also the comments.

It indicates others viewpoint that is worth noting.