I suppose we should be pleased and relieved that such a wide range of forces across the world is taking up, so seriously, the issue of the massacre of Muslims in one part of the world. One would certainly be hard-pressed to find the international Zionist movement to be so passionately against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians or the Christian right calling for a UN force to prevent the massacre of Iraqis.
But Zionists and the Christian right have not only jumped onto the Darfur bandwagon, they have even eclipsed the left in their passionate support of the people of Darfur (and their calls for military intervention). Suddenly, one sees huge campaigns organised by such groups about Darfur. Even the South African Union of Jewish Students is now focussing its attention on the massacre of Muslims in Darfur.
What is it that has resulted in this outpouring of support for an oppressed Muslim community? Where are Muslims in all of this? And what is really happening in Darfur?
Apart from these usually anti-Muslim groups, leftist organisations, activists and intellectuals have been speaking about the Darfur crisis for the past few years. They have taken up the issue variously from the perspective of a human rights catastrophe, (which it is), as a genocide (which it isn’t), with an eye on imperialist objectives in the region (which are substantial), as a racist war by Arabs against Africans or a combination of the above.
The Muslim response, however, has been quite muted – internationally, with few exceptions (including a protest outside the Sudanese embassy in Pretoria organised by the Muslim Youth Movement and supported by the Palestine Solidarity Committee). Most Muslims in South Africa are generally ignorant about what is happening, don’t buy into the usual media spin about the issue but don’t bother to find out for themselves what the truth is and have a knee-jerk reaction to the news that Muslims might be committing any kind of atrocities. Thus, because the issue is framed as a Muslim government massacring other people, South African Muslims either prefer to remain silent on the matter or to defend the Sudanese government.
Since when are we able to believe and defend a Muslim military dictatorship? Undemocratic, dictatorial governments exist across the Muslim world. They all, without exception, deserve our scorn, derision and active opposition. And there really is no reason to believe them when they defend themselves against charges of human rights abuses. The Sudanese government, for all its pretence of being some kind of an ‘Islamic’ government, is no exception.
As regards the Darfur crisis, Muslims should be in the forefront of the campaign in support of the unarmed and brutalised masses in that region. Darfur, once a great Muslim empire, today is being raped and its people are battered and tormented as pawns in a political battle. And its assailants are all Muslims. The Muslim enthusiasm for Darfur should be no less than the Muslim enthusiasm for Palestine or Iraq. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
And the pretended uncertainty that some Muslims have about Darfur, based on the fact that Zionist and Christian right groups are campaigning on the Darfur issue is, at best, a smokescreen for ignorance and apathy and, at worst, an excuse for being silent in the face of Muslim human rights violations and crimes against humanity.
Yes, these groups have their own agendas for supporting the Darfur cause. The Zionists, for example, have long insisted that the Palestinian solidarity movement around the world should also target the various Arab regimes for their human rights violations (as if the argument that “my neighbour is as bad as or worse than I” makes my oppression ok). Having failed to distract the movement in that way, Zionists have now chosen to take up their own campaign against a Muslim regime so as to divert attention away from the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.
There is also a strong American imperialist agenda behind the sudden concern for African victims of gross human rights violations: oil! Sudan, it has been established, has the largest oil reserves in the world. But, that oil has been promised to the Chinese by the Sudanese government. Darfur is a convenient entry point for a soft occupation and establishment of foreign military bases in Sudan.
So the historically-known supporters of oppression and dictatorship do have their own agendas. But, that should not cause Muslims to ignore the very real suffering of the people of Darfur. As an aside at this point, I should point out that the reason I refuse to call the crisis ‘genocide’ is because ‘genocide’ implies an intention and an effort to wipe out an entire group of people based on their religion, ethnicity or other such characteristic. Such an intention and effort does not exist in Sudan. The Fur people (from whom Darfur gets its name) are not being attacked because they are Fur. Indeed, I have met Fur people who live undisturbed and, sometimes, happily and comfortably in Khartoum.
There are complex reasons for the Darfur crisis (and the allegation of Arab vs. African is not one of them). Primarily, as with many other wars and battles, the crisis is caused by a battle of elites: Fur elites and Northern Sudanese elites – who have ruled together for many years, sometimes tenuously – have fallen out among themselves because they could not agree on the sharing of power. The former then decided to win their demands through insurgent action. The government retaliated with the kind of barbarism and brutality that makes one ashamed to be human. Conveniently for Khartoum, there was another factor that assisted it in prosecuting its war: increased desertification in the North West had intensified the competition for land between the agriculturalists in Darfur and the pastoralists further north. The government mobilised this competition, armed certain groups within the pastoralist community and led them into a brutal war.
The victims – the people of Darfur – are those who are not part of the elites in battle and who, in fact, benefit little from any of these elites. And so their lives have been made miserable, tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of people have been massacred in the most terrible ways, livelihoods and homes have been utterly destroyed, war crimes have been committed, villages have been bombed from the air by government forces, rape has become commonplace. The once powerful empire of Darfur is virtually a waste land. And innocent, struggling people are – as usual – the victims.
The perpetrators – Muslims, all of them – intransigently refuse to account for their actions. The Sudanese government has just agreed to allow UN forces into Darfur. We wait to see whether that is an agreement that will be honoured on the ground. And we wait to see how the imperialist forces might use the UN involvement for their own ends. And so, while the Zionists and the imperialists and the UN argue and debate about how best to resolve the Darfur crisis and argue about whether it is a genocide, the people of Darfur continue to die and to suffer and to become refugees and to become miserable. And all of us who remain silent – whatever excuses we use for our silence – will one day be accountable for not speaking out.
