Blood Brothers (Sudanese Identity Crisis: Vasagar, Kimani, Wax, Smith)

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Bringing together some commentary by well-informed journalists who have recently been in Sudan.

Blood Brothers

Only a genuine division of power in multicultural Sudan can put an end to the country's bitter sibling rivalries, argues Jeevan Vasagar

Sudan is sometimes described as "Egypt's little brother". The phrase is meant to give a sense of the kinship between the two nations, but "little brother" also seems an apt personification of the country: if Sudan were a single human being, it might well be someone's troubled younger sibling - an overgrown teenage boy with floppy, uncontrollable limbs and a violent identity crisis.

Sudan is Africa's biggest country. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the border of Egypt in the north down to lush, tropical jungles in the south, encompassing hundreds of tribes who speak more than 100 languages.

The north is Muslim, speaks Arabic and shares a culture with north African countries such as its neighbour Egypt - though many of Sudan's Muslims are black, rather than Arab, and speak an African language as their mother tongue.

Blood Brothers....

The madness in Darfur is 25 years in the making

“The first major displacement of non-Arab Sudanese to Kenya and Uganda was in 1958”. “Dar” means homeland, and Darfur refers to the homeland of the Fur people”. In this third part of our five- part syndicated series on the Darfur conflict, Peter Kimani traces the genesis of this complex crisis

Sudan’s latest crisis in the western Darfur region is only part of a wider and complex conflict that has dragged on for generations, taking various forms as religious, ethnic or cultural struggles.

While the human suffering in the South has received international attention for the last 30 years — and the atrocities in Darfur now demand even more urgent attention — what has not been well covered are the “unseen” players who have fanned the conflict in several ways.

To begin with, the humanitarian disaster in Darfur is man-made, partly fanned by political intolerance, and partly by the contest for Sudan’s natural resources. Yet, the simple but persuasive narrative that presents the Sudan problem as “Arabs” against “Africans” doesn’t tell the whole truth.

The madness in Darfur is 25 years in the making....

Find more of Kimani's articles here: Monitor: Features

A Family Torn by Sudan's Strife

by Emily Wax

BAHAI, Chad -- His gut was twisted into a knot, his head pounding, his leg searing in pain from a gunshot wound. Ibrahim Mohamed Doud, a village elder in an African tribe, remembers the day an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed attacked his village.

He had been hit in the left leg. His two wives knelt by his side to soothe him as he twitched in the burning sand. But in his moment of agony, he recalled that his deepest concern was not about the wound, but about one of his wives. Aisha Haroon Mohamed, 29, his Arab wife with the almond-colored eyes, is from the same ethnic group as the attackers. Her uncle was a Janjaweed commander.

Doud begged her to flee. He was fearful that African villagers would turn against Aisha. She stood frozen, her eyes watering with tears. She refused to leave his side. In the end, they all escaped, fleeing the village in western Sudan's Darfur province in an arduous, month-long journey through the desert sands of the Sahara.

Today, Doud sits in a tent at the Oure Cassoni refugee camp here, 15 miles north of the Sudanese border. His two wives are safely at his side, but his anxiety from that day still runs deep. "I just kept shouting at her to leave. It hurt me to do that," he recalled of the day of the attack, in January. "At first, I confess, we were all scared of hatreds brewing."

A family torn by Sudan's strife....

Wax's piece is long, but worth reading to the end. What divides Aisha from her husband Ibrahim? Certainly her worthless excuse for an uncle has betrayed her, but what of the people who gave him a gun and a wad of money and orders to kill the blacks? Could they have genuinely understood the ramifications of their deeds? It's tragic.

Sudan: Eyewitness to Crisis, Part 3

by Gayle Smith

....

Meanwhile, in encouraging Darfur's tribal militia to defend what they call "public security," the Sudanese government has let a treacherous genie out of the bottle. By authorizing the Arab militia to rape and pillage at will, Khartoum is exploiting a cleavage that extends across western Sudan, into neighboring Chad and all the way to Mauritania.

Much of sub-Saharan Africa's northern belt is characterized by division, with the Sahelian zone populated largely by Muslims and home to more nomads than the more settled, non-Muslim lands to the immediate south. North-South schisms, often mirrored by splits between Arabs and Africans, and pastoralists and settled farmers, have increased as desertification has pushed the borders of the Sahel further south. Traditional land tenure arrangements have not kept pace with growing poverty and environmental degradation, and nomadic and settled populations are frequently forced to compete for land and water.

By employing Arab militia as its proxy, the Sudanese government has exploited local tensions to unleash a cycle of violence that threatens the lives of millions and, ultimately, the viability of the Sudanese state. While ethnic and tribal tensions are nothing new, the government's deliberate manipulation across Sudan - of Arabs against Africans, of tribe against tribe, of northerners versus southerners, and Muslims against Christians – is destroying the fragile unity that has held this diverse country together.

Few believe that center can hold, unless the policies change or the government does. It is only a matter of time before violence erupts in eastern Sudan, where the Beja people – who like many Darfuris are Muslim but not Arab - have suffered decades of marginalization. As in the south, and now Darfur, the government's response will more likely be to attack rather than to accommodate.

Sudan: Eyewitness to Crisis, Part 3....

Cutting right to the middle of Smith's piece. Policy wonks especially will want to read the whole series, and see more from the Center for American Progress: Sudan: A challenge for us all.

Brookings recently hosted another roundtable with Deng, Corzine and Holbrooke: The Crisis in Sudan: A Report from the Region. If they have a page devoted to the Sudan, I can't find it. Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Clinton, was with Brookings and is now advising John Kerry. She has spoken intelligently about Darfur, but I'm not aware of any archives of her material--just google if you're interested.