Sudan: Failed state citizen, a badge of little honour
By Mohamed Ibrahim
August 6, 2007 — In Malabo newspapers don’t go to print .The people who always die before they make their way to the age of fifty years are depending on an FM radio station which told them one day in a program ironically called (Bidze-Nduan) or (burry the fire) that his Excellency President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo can kill anybody without being held accountable and without going to hell “for he is God himself and he is in permanent contact with the almighty” tells Mohamed Osman Ibrahim…
The quietly spoken God of Equatorial Guinea who makes you kneel your neck down in order to hear his soft voice is a (God) in charge of the third African oil-producing country after Angola & Nigeria .He is the head of state of a country which its citizens are (presumed) the most wealthiest people in the Black Continent .They are ranking second of the worlds most earners of GDP income per capita amounting to $ 26,000 per year but alas they are living in his Excellency’s Glory on one single dollar a day.
This country is not in the first 35 failed states declared by the influential Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace organization.
The country’s self proclaimed (el jefe) or the boss who lives in agony himself has silenced an unrecorded number of his fellow citizens but never considered qualified to appear in the (prestigious) Parade magazine’s annual list of top 5 world dictators.
The less than 50kg weighing man wearing an extravagant blue suit ,white royal shirt and a striped red and blue neck tie made a glorious show in the Capitol Hill in Washington with the strongest woman on earth. At 10 o’clock of the morning of the April 12th last year, Dr Condoleezza Rice accompanied the Great General of Alifanfaron Army Division & The lord of the Great Islands of Bioko to meet the press .She greeted the audience and said “I’m very pleased to welcome the President of Equatorial Guinea, President Obiang ……thank you very much for your presence here. You are a good friend and we welcome you” .She was absolutely right when she called him a friend because more than 80% of his country’s black gold is going to her oil craving country and he is importing 24% of his country’s needs from the far US.
He didn’t miss the appearance in the Capitol Hill .In Spanish he stated that “Our country has had good relations with the US for a very long time and my visit here is simply in order to consolidate and also to establish further ties of co-operation with your country”. I assume Dr. Rice gave him a big grin in heart as he asserted his willingness to further co-operation. None of the journalist asked a single question about the human rights situation in the country dubbed the Kuwait of Africa nor any of them spoke about Equatorial Guinea at all. Two questions had been allowed and they were promptly seized by some one(s) who asked about Iran and the nuclear threat. It’s obviously that the Capitol Hill correspondents don’t know about the grave human rights violations by the (corrupt & rotten regime) as described by a former US ambassador to EG, for they would definitely raise it as the US media proved to be very concerned about human rights around the globe.
While Obiang was exercising his short strides in the building of the US State Department, his Colleague of Sudan Omer el-Bashir has been confined with his delegation to 10 kms only from the UN tower in New York when he visited the city to attend the UN General Assembly some two years ago.
The white House, the Capitol Hill & the Pentagon of course were the right places to be visited by dictators from all over the world; Musharraf, Mubarak etc on the footsteps of their great ancestors Omar Torrijos, Papa Doc, Somoza, Numeiri, Marcos, Alfredo Stroessner and many others from different ages whose names are triggering hundreds of blood-stained results when they are put on any of the internet search engines.
It’s not always about the oil but it is always far from being ethical.
The western (or the white) civilization spearheaded (now) by the US proved to be dangerous, immoral & revenging, I read once to the Foreign Policy magazine founder Samuel Huntington.
It’s a risky business trying to defend for your own homeland which is wrongfully & bad-intently been stigmatized as a Failed State without being perceived as playing defense for the Government. This is something I’m not willing to do as a victim of a harsh & tyrant dictatorship forced me to flee the country 11 years ago.
Around twelve years ago I was in Omdurman’s El-bashir El-rayah public library reading the Arabic version of The Orientalism .I remember the criticism I was developing to the way the West was looking into the East when I was passing by the pages. At the end I still remember the shocking conclusion Edward Said put on his masterpiece. He said (I hope that the response to this book will not be another book called The Westernism) as I can recall.
I’m borrowing this now to say that trying to tear out the badge of failed state from my country’s chest does not necessarily mean that it has to be sticked to the US chest .This is unfair , it could simply be thrown out.
The FP magazine designated 12 criterions to determine whether the state is a failed or otherwise. They are as follows in brief:
– Mounting demographic pressures.
– Massive movement of refugees or internally displaced persons creating complex humanitarian emergencies.
– Legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievance or group paranoia.
– Chronic and sustained human flight (brain drain, emigration and growth of exile communities).
– Uneven economic development along group lines (group based inequality or impoverishment).
– Sharp and/or severe economic decline.
– Criminalization or delegitimization of the state.
– Progressive deterioration of public services.
– Suspension or arbitrary application of the rule of law and widespread violation of human rights.
– Security apparatus operates as “state within state”.
– Rise of factionalized elites.
– Intervention of other states or external political actors.
While those criterions could arguably been interpreted in many different ways and be applied to many different states including the US but this is none of our intention at the moment.
In his acclaimed work (Failed States, the abuse of power and the assault on democracy) Noam Chomsky or (the most important intellectual alive) as the New York Times called him, has his own criterions.
In his book Chomsky argues that the US is beginning to resemble a failed state that cannot protect its citizens from violence and has a government that regards itself as beyond the reach of domestic & international law.
Another American figure from the opposite side of thinking & politics tackled the issue of the Failed States. In his book (State Building ,governance and world order in the twenty first century) Francis Fukuyama wrote (weak or failing states ,provoke humanitarian disasters, drive massive waves of immigration and attack their neighbours….shelter international terrorists ).I assume that the repented neoconservative hasn’t identified this criteria to fit his beloved country but he will soon discover that the US proved to be the most dangerous country in the world .The media would show that Washington could kill hundreds of thousands of people, drive millions from their homes, attack any spot of the planet without showing a single gesture of remorse.
We are not arguing that US is a failed state .It just happened to be fitting in Dr Fukuyama’s criteria. In terms of sheltering terrorism it has never been secret that the leader of the free world is providing hospitable shelter for leading terrorists like Orlando Bosch & Posada Carriles as (the most useful American citizen) mentioned them in a brilliant interview published on :
http://www.democracynow.org/print.pl?sid=06/03/31/148254
In that interview Chomsky accused the US administration of being dangerous and fuelling the possibilities of a nuclear war.
When Chomsky or Fukuyama speaks, every one listens.
But let us try the same game with some different criterions:
– More than half of the population believe that their government is deceiving them and operating to the contrary of their interests.
– The majority of the state nationals are feeling less safer when they are asked to identify their nationality in an uncontrollable situations.
– State personalities and figures are plunged in scandals in courts, media and community perception.
– Most of the citizens believe that the government is operating in a secretive way putting them in the dark from the real debate and using pretexts and scapegoats to justify its propositions & positions.
– Government is desperate to gain public approval for most of its exercises.
– State is considered dangerous, arrogant tyrant and totally unpredictable by its citizens and other countries.
– State lives in a state of fear. Government capitalizing on citizens’ fear.
– Increase in State’s social troubles (drugs, AIDS, alcohol abuse, unemployment, chronic disease sufferers, aging population, illegal migration, etc..) and decrease in government operated social services.
– State is behaving very fiercely against opponents.
– Application of high taxes which may force bigger corporations to manipulate the economic and finance systems or move offshore.
– The list could be much longer and every one with little interest could make one and claim that his criteria is honestly following a strict academic methodology without intention to include x or y from the disobedient countries.
Let us stay for a while with the FP index .It shows five important institutions as core state services, namely; Leadership, military, police, judiciary, civil services.
The FP magazine index shows that Sudan is better than Chad in Leadership and as weak as Iraq. Could any sane body agree that Sudan & Iraq has the same quality of leadership?
Some months ago the Chadian Opposition decided to overthrow Idriss Deby’s regime. With the backing of the Sudanese authorities the militia men spent most of that day in front of the Parliament Building in the capital Ndjamena. Only France (the permanent member of the UN Security Council) was able to save Mr. Deby .The magazine portrayed the Iraqi & the Chadian armies as better than the Sudanese military, could you believe?
The Sudanese Police is similar in strength to the Iraqi one and weaker than the one serving the Chadian people. The civil service and the judiciary of Chad are better than the Sudanese ones, the magazine –shamelessly-stated.
Months before the ending of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s trial, some Arabic commentators talked about assurances that the Iraqi PM Nouri el-Maliky made to the Kuwaiti leadership during an historic visit to the wealthy Sheikhdom. He told his hosts that the new Iraq is no longer greedy about its wealthy neighbour. In addition he told them that Saddam Hussein will be executed very soon. How did he knew ?He is not a member of the judiciary in the Middle East new model of democracy .The trial is still going on , how did the PM came to that tragic conclusion?
The index is showing 23 countries between Sudan and Sri Lanka although news are coming from that area for at least 25 years telling about insurgents who are using gunships and aerial bombardment against the government.
US is a heterogeneous, diversified community. It is a liberal country accommodating a wide range of views. This is a fact of life but it’s unfortunately under threat.
We mentioned the parade magazine’s annual list of dictators earlier so let us move ahead.
When we look at the CIA fact book about Sudan we find quite abundant information about it covering most aspects of life in the vast country. On the contrary we find very little coverage about most important things in the friendly Equatorial Guinea except a couple of lines read as follows” Despite the country’s economic windfall from oil production resulting in a massive increase in government revenue in recent years there have been few improvements in the population’s living standards”.
The Sudan is not a Failed State but it’s a country with no friends for a very simple reason; poor governance.
We are not going very much back, but since the 1989 military successful coup, the successive ruling Islamic elites ran the country in a pretty much tit for tat way following the banner (disregard the people, their rights & their aspirations). Sudanese people would always need to remember what George Orwell once wrote “one does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship”. Both NCP, SPLM/A & other members of the Government of National Unity competed to prove that Mr. Orwell was right. Since the days of Hassan el-Turabi in power the Islamists sought little approval from the masses. Not only did they ignore the public opinion but they looked at it with an apparent disgust and disdain .More than a decade ago General el-Taib Ibrahim Mohamed Kheir better known as el-Taib Sikha, then one of the strongest power-brokers responded to ZHILAL (shadows) TV program host in an arrogant and disgraceful manner when he asked him about his message to the opposition. Smiling with his famous tooth-gap he said ( with the exception of god every one who claims that he planted us may come and (try) to uproot us).He used the proverb to clearly state that they are not dealing with people or seeking their approval, he stood short from saying that they are in direct contact with the almighty.
After Turabi was sidelined, his successor Ali Osman Taha followed the same way of his predecessor and took the authoritative nickname (Sheikh Ali).Nowadays Dr. Nafie Ali Nafie is no exception. With less influence than his predecessor he proved to be less considering, more aggressive, power-thirst and hard to deal with.
On the other hand the SPLM/A gave very little attention to the entitlements of their power sharing deals with Khartoum not to mention their internal disagreements soap opera. They behaved as they are dividing power and rule of the country rather than sharing it. Every party is safeguarding his share of power for his own party.
The negligence of the public support by the Government of National Unity made the country more vulnerable to the world pressure.
Let alone Libya & Eritrea, even Hollywood deserted its children’s molestation’s, drugs’ and other scandals to talk lame politics about Sudan.
Not many people are caring about what is happening to the Sudan because the government monopolized the country. The only way for the government to get public support is to return the country to its owners .This doesn’t mean return of power to the peoples. This could simply be decided over in free & fair elections.
Without that we will be watching the country to resemble a real failure and then, we wouldn’t be proud.
* The author Sudanese activist and journalist based in Australia. He posts regularly articles on the political situation in different Sudanese Arabic language websites and his blog. He can be reached at [email protected] . Blog http://mohamed-ibrahim.blogspot.com/