Sudan's Osama: The Islamist roots of the Darfur genocide

[reorg]

highlighting an aspect that in most articles is overlooked - but needless to state where the author is coming from, and it troubles me where he is getting at (not quoted here). There is a sense of mission in some US Americans that seems to fit in quite well with the imperial designs of their masters.


Sudan's Osama
The Islamist roots of the Darfur genocide.
By Lee Smith
Posted Thursday, Aug. 5, 2004, at 3:27 PM PT


(...)

... even if the Sudanese government wanted to solve the Darfur crisis, it couldn't do so within a month. (...)

... Nimeiri's Islamicization project was urged on by Sudan's Muslim Brotherhood, including its leading ideologue and the country's attorney general, Hassan al-Turabi. The man who would later become known for inviting Osama Bin Laden to make his home in Khartoum in 1991 has long been a central figure in Sudanese politics. Turabi's brother-in-law Sadeq al-Mahdi ran the country from 1985 until 1989, when the NIF and current ruler Lt.-Gen. Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup that Turabi supported. Indeed, as the one-time spiritual guide of the NIF, Turabi was said to be the power behind the throne and thus most likely supplied the government with its additional rationale for continuing the war—jihad. After all, Khartoum was fighting to protect Islam and sharia against non-Muslims. Many of the Christians and animists who resisted sharia and refused to convert to Islam were killed, with the death toll from two decades of fighting recently estimated at around 2 million.

While most Western press accounts have avoided the word jihad, they've sketched out the ways in which the government's current western campaign differs from its earlier southern war, now ended under a fragile peace accord. That was a religious conflict pitting Muslims against Christians and animists; this time around, when Arab Muslims are fighting black Africans who are also Muslims, it's ethnic cleansing. However, given the fairly fluid sense of ethnicity and the complex relationships between nomadic and agricultural tribes in Sudan, that scheme doesn't entirely hold up. As the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator told Al Jazeera, "The same tribes are represented both among those who are cleansed and those who are cleansing." Indeed, the ethnic cleansing explanation has obscured what appears to be at the root of the conflict. As the NIF exploited sectarian lines in its siege against the south, Hassan al-Turabi has manipulated ethnic divides in order to wage war against his former protégé, Omar al-Bashir.

"There is a power struggle within the NIF, and Turabi is using Darfur to undermine the Khartoum government," Sudanese law scholar Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na'im told me. "This is part of a palace coup."

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Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian writer and rights activist whose Tharwa Project Web site documents the status of minorities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. He explained to me that "there is a very serious issue of racial discrimination, of Arabs against non-Arabs, in Sudan," which Turabi turned to his advantage. "He was reaching out to non-Arab elements in his struggle against Bashir," says Abdulhamid. "And he's become the rebels' spiritual guide."

It's worth remembering that, as the NIF's chief ideologue, Turabi played on the other side, against Africans, when he boasted of wanting to "Arabize Africa." Over the last several decades, this spiritual guide for hire has not only determined most of Sudan's political and military battlegrounds, he also helped turn the country into a well-known international jihadist resort: Bin Laden, who reportedly married one of Turabi's nieces, and Ayman al-Zawahiri both spent part of the '90s in Sudan.

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2104814/