Religion feeds Sudan’s fire
By MARC LACEY, The New York Times
FURBURANGA, Sudan, Aug 22, 2004 – In the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan, the killers pray toward Mecca. The million displaced people do as well. Marauding men on horseback, the women raped by them, the rebels who incited the fighting and the politicians, soldiers and police officers who have failed to control it, nearly all are Muslim.
There was the man from one of Darfur’s African tribes who walked into an empty field near the refugee camp he now calls home and prayed – for life to return to normal, for his family’s suffering to end, for his fear to dissipate. He stood, then knelt, then touched his forehead to a small mat, and the despair around him faded, he said, if only for a moment.
But at some of the burned-out villages that now scar Darfur’s landscape there are signs of disregard for religion – charred pages from Korans scattered in the rubble, makeshift mosques leveled.
Sudan has a history of Christian-Muslim frictions and war. A rebel movement in the south, dominated by Christians, has fought the Islamic government in Khartoum for decades, largely over religious freedom. That conflict now appears to be petering out, partly because of involvement of the United States.
But instead of peace, Sudan is now mired in a grievous conflict in Darfur. Political rivalries, ethnic strife and poverty have fueled the clashes – but that has not stopped combatants from invoking religion and challenging the devotion of their rivals.
In the long history of the Muslims, “it is not uncommon for people to question each other’s version of Islam,” said Arif Shaikh, a representative of Islamic Relief U.S.A. who visited Darfur in April. “But this is really a political, not a religious, dispute. So much animosity has built up, and that’s why it’s gotten to this level.”
While the Muslims fight, many Sudanese revert to their historic grudges, directed against Christians, the United States and foreigners in general.
Inside the mosques of Khartoum, which follow the Sunni branch of Islam, there has been plenty of discussion about Darfur but little success at finding a way to end the bloodshed. No religious leader has yet publicly chastised the combatants, either Arab or African. But America-bashing, long a theme at Friday Prayer, is as fierce as ever.
“We caution our people in Sudan and our people in western Sudan against trusting the U.S.A., that it wants to help them,” an imam, Abd-al-Jalil al-Nathir al-Karuri, said in a sermon broadcast on television in early August. “What is being done now is for the interests of one country – Israel.”
Another imam, Isam Ahmad al-Bashir, in a sermon translated from Arabic by the BBC, urged his followers at another Friday Prayer service to resist foreign intervention.
“We must all say, irrespective of our different affiliations and leanings, races and groups, a resounding ‘no’ to foreign intervention, which is lying in wait for our people,” he said. “This is an issue that requires no bargaining. Divinity, morality and humanity is required in denouncing all forms of foreign intervention or we will be committing treason against God, religion and country.”
Sudan has much experience with religious war. The continuing conflict with the Christians began in 1983 after the president at the time, Gaafar al-Nimeiry, began a campaign to make the country adhere more closely to Islamic law; his effort included amputations as punishments for theft and public lashings for alcohol consumption.
The current president, Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir, took over in a coup six years later. He replaced non-Muslim judges in the south with Muslims and applied Shariah penalties to many non-Muslims in Khartoum and parts of the north. He also characterized the government’s battle with southern rebels as a jihad.
The questions remain today: should Shariah, the Islamic legal code, apply to southerners who are not Muslim? Or should the government, dominated by Muslims, accommodate varying faiths?
Peace negotiations for the south that have been under way in Kenya have reached compromises: Shariah would remain in effect in Khartoum, under the tentative deal the two sides have signed, but the south would have its own legal code. Another agreement would give southerners the ability to hold a referendum for self-rule sometime in the future.
Some trace the conflict in Darfur to a power struggle among top Muslim leaders in Khartoum.
In 1999, Mr. Bashir stripped his rival, Hassan al-Turabi, an Islamic hard-liner, of his positions as speaker of the Parliament and leader of the governing party. Two years later, Mr. Turabi was arrested and charged with being a threat to national security for signing a peace deal with the southern rebels.
After his release, Mr. Turabi founded the Popular Congress Party and reached out for support to the Muslim black African populations of Darfur. Before being jailed again in March, he acknowledged supporting the rebels of Darfur. “We support the cause, no doubt about it,” he told the United Nations news agency in December. “I didn’t say I’m involved with the fighting,” he added. “I said we have relations with some of the leadership.”
Those rebels attacked the government, igniting the outburst of violence in Darfur. The government responded by unleashing militias, known as Janjaweed, on the rebels. Political analysts said it was Mr. Bashir’s vice president, Osman Ali Taha, who was instrumental in developing the government’s military strategy in Darfur. He was also given the task of striking a peace deal with the southern rebels. Once a protégé of Mr. Turabi, he is now a rival leader among Sudan’s hard-line Islamists. “The personal rivalry between Vice President Taha and his ex-mentor Turabi for control of the Islamist movement and the country is being played out in Darfur, with civilians as the main victims,” said a report published by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research center that has studied the origins of Darfur’s war.
Here in Furburanga, a village just six miles from the Chad border, about a dozen sheiks gathered recently to explain their view of the violence. The Africans sat on one side and the Arabs clustered on the other.
An Arab sheik spoke first, saying the conflict could be resolved without outside involvement if everyone would simply follow the principles of Islam. “Prophet Muhammad says in the Koran that Muslims should talk and discuss and solve our problems,” he said. “The Islamic religion has as its principle to love and be peaceful.”
He then questioned the religious conviction of some combatants, particularly the black African rebels.
An African sheik spoke next. He questioned the devotion to Islam of those in the government-backed militias who attacked his people. He said he searched for a divine reason in all that had occurred.
“God has punished us,” he said. “We just have to figure out why.”