Why African Union Must Debate Darfur
Nigeria and the World
ike okonta
It is a measure of the low regard with which Khartoum holds the Obasanjo government that even as the three parties - the Arab-dominated government, Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) were holding talks in Abuja, General Umar al Bashir, head of the Sudanese junta, was orchestrating more attacks on the African inhabitants of Darfur.
The implicit understanding was that all parties would cease offensive action to allow Obasanjo hammer out a lasting political solution to the disagreements between them that has degenerated into bloody civil war, replicating the three decades blood-letting in southern Sudan. But the Janjaweed militia backed by Khartoum was still murdering people in Darfur last week even as Obasanjo basked in the television spotlight, affecting the image of an international statesman.
Faced with this in-your-face- insolence, JEM and SLA did the honourable thing and walked out. This effectively spelt the end of the talks in Abuja, at least for now. I never held out much hope for the talks as I made clear in this column two weeks ago. Obasanjo does not have the moral standing, or indeed the economic and military clout, required in a game of power politics which is clearly what the Darfur crisis has boiled down to.
Khartoum has consistently rejected all calls from neighbouring African states to cease its genocidal attacks on the people of Darfur. Faced with looming UN Security Council sanctions at the end of August, the Arab junta appeared to back down; but as the threat of sanctions receded as the US, China and other big powers dilly-dallied, Khartoum became emboldened again and accelerated its assaults on the people of Darfur. Indeed, a UN report issued last week stated clearly that the Janjaweed was still very much active in the region, killing and looting.
Attention is increasingly shifting to the African Union now that it is clear that a Security Council consensus to impose sanctions on Khartoum is not likely to emerge in the nearest future. But is the young organization equipped to take on the Sudanese junta? Indeed, is the African Union united in its conception of Africa as a single entity, inhabited by people of shared history and culture, and working together as one to liberate the continent from the shackles of poverty, disease and external manipulation?
It is significant that Al Jazeera and other Muslim-Arab television networks have played down the atrocities in Darfur while bombarding the rest of the world with the travails of Arabs in Palestine and Iraq. The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Arab League (AL) have also been playing the ostrich, pretending that people are not being gang-raped and killed in Darfur.
And yet the majority of the people of Darfur are Muslims. This begs the question: why are Arab organizations like Al Jazeera treating the travails of the Palestinians and Darfurians differently? Some have argued that Al Jazeera and the Arab League do not want to wash their dirty linen in the street since the Khartoum junta is led by fellow Muslims. But this position flies in the face of the fact that Arab television stations routinely report the atrocities committed by other Arab governments against their own people. So why make an exception in the case of Darfur?
The real reason is that the Arab League and such other institutions see Sudan as an Arab, not an African country, and have never bothered to hide their ambition to see the country annexed into a Greater Arabia. Although the people of Darfur are fellow Muslims, they are nevertheless black Africans, and have historically resisted attempts by Khartoum to turn them into 'African-Arabs' as it has successfully done to the Janjaweed.
The Janjaweed are as black as the people of Darfur. Yet the former now represent themselves as 'Arab' to secure economic and political advantages over their Darfurian rivals. The Janjaweed are nomadic herders who occupy arid land increasingly made uninhabitable by irregular rains and desertification.
They are migrating west and south in search of fresh grazing for their herds, and are seizing land from the people of Darfur in the process.
Seizing its moment, Khartoum is arming the Janjaweed to enable them secure and garrison this stolen land, thus furthering the Arab expansionist project.
Besides its 'Greater Arabia' designs, Khartoum also has its eyes on the burgeoning oil fields of southern Sudan, and sees a possible military and cultural alliance between the peoples of Darfur and southern Sudan as a potent threat to its intention of seizing these oil fields.
It is these calculations, part racial, part economic, and part military-political that informs the resounding silence emanating from the Arab League and Al-Jazeera with regard to Darfur. All of which point to a looming crisis at the heart of the new African Union. How can the organization seriously represent itself as a union of African states when such states as Sudan, geographically located in the very heart of Africa, openly declare itself as Arab and indeed is a paid-up member of the Arab League of countries? Can a house divided against itself stand?
Kwame Nkrumah, former President of Ghana and founder of the Organisation of African Unity which has now metamorphosed into the African Union fought shoulder to shoulder with such Arab stalwarts as General Abdul Nasser to consolidate African-Arab unity on the continent as their countries battled Western imperialism in the 1950s and 1960s. It was in practical demonstration of this project that Nkrumah took an Egyptian wife, and Frantz Fanon, an African from Martinique, gave his life fighting for the liberation of Algeria in the early 1960s.
In Algeria today nobody remembers Fanon. There is not a single monument to the name of this writer and intellectual, who more than any other person, Arab or African, internationalized the cause of the Algerian people with his classic work, The Wretched of the Earth. Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, is increasingly exerting himself to take Nkrumah's place as the 'founder' of the new African Union. This is after he financed a band of thugs all over West Africa, including Charles Taylor and the late Foday Sankoh, to murder their fellow country men and women in furtherance of his pet project of an Arab-Libyan empire in the heart of Africa.
Arab and Muslim analysts, when they do deign to comment on the Darfur genocide, lay the blame on the doorsteps of the United States and other 'Western imperialists.' But the West is a convenient scapegoat in this instance. I am not saying that the West has not plundered Africa. But it must also not be forgotten that it was the Arabs that led the way, destroying African peoples and civilizations from the 10th century on. And they have not stopped.
While the debate about the atroticities Europe and the United States perpetrated on Africa, and what reparations are commensurate, is now seriously going on in the West, Arabs have not even acknowledged their own share of these evils. It is a debate that some of us are now insisting must take place, and the place to commence it is at the African Union Parliament that has now moved to South Africa.
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