Darfur – A Conflict between Arabs and Africans?
University of Jena, Faculty of Theology, 2nd Summer School “Sub-Saharan Africa between Conflict and Reconciliation” (18th – 28th July 2011)
Panel 3 – Tuesday, 26th July, 10.00 a.m. – 12.30 p.m.
(Diesen Text, den ich gelegentlich noch übersetzen werde (denn nicht Wenige können nicht Englisch lesen und verstehen usw.. lieber Thomas !!) HaBE ich bei steinbergRecherche herauskopiert :
http://www.steinbergrecherche.com/sudan.htm#Conflict
Es lohnt sich immer wieder dort nachzulesen, weit mehr als nur bei mir -ehrlich! Und über AVAAZ steht bei HaBE jede Menge, aber die FAU Münsterland hat noch bviel besser recherchiert: das alles steht am Ende dieses Artikels!!)
Dear participants,
I have never been to Darfur before, neither have most of my compatriots. But most people in this country believe what was written in a German review last year:
Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Khartum … since about 2003 … has been conducting a bloody campaign in the West-Sudanese province of Darfur with the aim of systematically exterminating it’s non-Arabic (black African) population.
If there is, or was, a genocide taking place in Darfur: Which were, or are, the peoples involved? According to widespread understanding in Germany, the United States, Israel, and other parts of the world, there are two peoples, or groups of peoples, in Darfur: Arabs, who kill; and Africans, who are killed.
This framework suggests a conflict between people who speek Arabic and people who speak an African language. But people who have spent much of their lifetime in Darfur actually agree that: both Arabic and non-Arabic speaking peoples were (or are) standing on both sides of the conflict line. And: The tribes and ethnic groups in Sudan are all black, almost nobody looks like a person from Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
On the other hand, Sudanese often use the words “Arabs” and “Africans”. What do they mean?
Mahmood Mamdani, Professor at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, and at Columbia University, New York, explains:
[..] both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’.
Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth;
regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast.
The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.
‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies.
The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see.
In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. (1)
How then can it be explained that in large parts of the “Western World” people believe that the Darfur conflict is racial in nature?
According to Mahmoud Mamdani (2) the Save Darfur Coalition – mainly financed by US-American Jewish and Christian organisations and their donors – spread the word that “Arabs” were chasing and killing hundreds of thousends of “Africans” in Darfur.
Read (p.64 – 65): “When Save Darfur advocates … has been integrated into the contemporary War on Terror.”
So what were the real causes for the mass killings and the huge number of deaths in Darfur? In short:
1. Many dry years; the lack of water led to migrations of nomads, who could not feed their camels resp. their cattle;
2. The assignment of parts of the Dafur terroritory to specific peoples during the British-Egyptian mandate in Sudan which excluded the nomads, and this situation even continued when Sudan became independent.
The conflict is about water and territory, and, of course, about political power. “Race” is used as a means to detract people from the real causes.
References
(1) Mahmood Mamdani: The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency. London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 5 dated 8 March 2007 [My emphases, T:I:S]
(2) Mahmood Mamdani: Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, Kapstadt, HSRC Press 2009. The whole book can be downloaded here, .pdf-file, 406 pages, pages 64 ff; reviews here.
Die Hamburger Edition Nautilus hat das Buch auf Deutsch herausgebracht: Blinde Retter. Über Darfur, Geopolitik und den Krieg gegen den Terror. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Maren Hackmann. Großformatige Klappenbroschur, 384 Seiten, € (D) 29,90, € (A) 30,80 / sFr 47,90, ISBN 978-3-89401-736-1
T:I:S, 21. Juli 2011
URL dieses Beitrags: http://www.steinbergrecherche.com/sudan.htm#Conflict
Noch viel-viel-viel besser als ich hat FAU Münsterland über AVAAZ recherchiert. SIEHE http://www.myspace.com/muenster_prollt/blog/541217375
oder hier am Ende des Artikels..
Mit MISEREOR-AUGEN für den nächsten “Befreiungskrieg” werben: Lang noch vor der Mongolei ist der Sudan, und dann Iran
genauso dran wie jetzt schon das Kongobecken, wo sie das Coltan verstecken, Ruanda sitzt auf dem Tantal, alles totes Kapital.
rund um China seltne Erden müssen demokratisch werden:den Chinesen geht es schlecht
AVAAZ bringt das Menschenrecht!
AVAAZ sammelt wieder für den nächsten Befreiungskrieg:
An die Mitgliedsländer des UN-Sicherheitsrates:
Wir bitten Sie, entschieden zu handeln, um die brutale ethnische Säuberung, die im Sudan in Gange ist, zu stoppen. Dazu zählt, alles Mögliche zu tun, um Präsident al-Bashir und andere, die vom Internationalen Strafgerichtshof angeklagt sind, zu verhaften, strenge Sanktionen gegen diejenigen zu verhängen, die für die Massenmorde verantwortlich sind, und Ihrer Verantwortung gerecht zu werden, das sudanesische Volk zu beschützen. Die Welt hat al-Bashir schon zu lange bei der Ausübung schwerer Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit zugesehen und diese immer nur mit Worten verurteilt. Es ist Zeit zum Handeln.