Belying the DarFur’s Crisis (2/2)
Insights of a Brethren’s Pro-Government Mind
By Mahgoub El-Tigani
September 18, 2004 — It must have been a painful experience for Dr. Mohamed Saleem al-‘Awa and his colleagues, including al-Sheikh Yousif al-Qaradawi, to suppress spiritual consciousness as educated Muslims in the effort their Muslim ‘Ulama International Union (MUIU) exerted in the Arab public media, especially the Jazeera T.V., to belie the DarFur’s Crisis, not only with flat negation of the horrors of genocide, ethnic cleansing of thousands of men and rapes of a great many innocent women or children; but also negation of the largest nationally, regionally, and internationally recognized liability of the Sudan Government and her Janjaweed militias for the tragic escalation of the DarFur’s Crisis.
While it might be reasonably stated that a heavy burden would certainly plague a conscious human, regardless of any specific religious, ethical, or philosophical obligation towards mankind when they fail to sympathize with the million plus innocent Africans of DarFur – being ruthlessly displaced to perish by the Sahara drought if not by the warring parties’ death squads – many Muslims hopefully imagined that a greater sense of shame based on a heavier sense of responsibility would perhaps motivate the MUIU jurists to sympathize with the victims of the 21st century biggest crisis, criticize the Arab Muslims’ silent complicity with the Sudan Government, and announce unrestricted supportive stand with the innocent victims of DarFur.
An Ethical Crisis
Nothing was far from the truth! Antagonizing the qat-‘i [irrefutable] teachings of Islam that demand in tens of Qur’anic verses or the authentic Hadith immediate fair prosecution of armed robbery and the other transgressions as punishable criminal acts with definitive sanctions upon the guilty ones, whoever they might be, the MUIU Secretary General was unsurprisingly the first to accuse the African transgressed Muslims, the last to condemn the Arab Muslim transgressors. Frustrating a large Muslim audience that watched the Jazeera interview, the MUIU further advised the victimized people of DarFur, rather than the assaultive government/janjaweed unsacred alliance, to show proper obedience to the Sudan Government as the legitimate awlia al-amr [legitimate leaders] of the Islamic republic!
So long as al-Bashir/Taha/Turabi syndrome goes on and on poisoning the political life and fate of the country, the Muslim Brethren’s hijackings of the state and religion in Sudan will struggle by all means possible to maintain the same demagogic status and role for simply the golden chance the Brethren gained seizing political power of the Sudanese state with all its armies and treasuries, including the promising “DarFur’s richness in iron ore, uranium, and oil, etc. (which was equally portrayed “the gate of Islam to Africa,” with no regard to the hundreds of millions West African Muslims along the same latitude) will not stop until the Sudan Government’s sold-out regime would be fully replaced with a purely reestablished all-Sudanese for Sudanese ruling system.
The interview conducted by Ustaz Ahmed Mansour of the Jazeera T.V. (September 15, 2004) with the MUIU Secretary General, Dr. Mohamed Saleem al-‘Awa “who just returned from a trip to DarFur,” aroused as many reasonable doubts about the real intentions of the hosting program as much as it did affirm the most unreasonable stands of the MUIU political agenda towards the massacred country and its condemned rulers.
Today, the whole world is aware of the realities of DarFur as documented in the literature by dedicated academic analysts, legal jurists, journalists, or human rights activists that the conflict is deeply rooted in administrative, political, and developmental failures. It was such a flawed handling of this complex situation, however, for the Brethren jurist to negate the ethnic motive of the conflict which, formally decreed by aggressive state powers, was the spark that burnt the whole region.
All in all, the interview’s substantive material unfolded the blindness of the Brethren’s ideological dogmatism that tarnish, irrespective of the ‘Ulama’s academic, juristic, or professional credentials, the simplest yet purest claims of spirituality that supposedly value the human life, being the very basic essence of natural law – the one meticulously phrased in all sources of secular and sacred texts as the right to life and its twin right of self-determination to ensure the meaningful pursuit of the good life by peaceful existence along constructive cooperation between all peoples and human societies of the planet.
It is true DarFur “is completely inhabited by Muslims who are all African peoples.” Still, it was over-simplistic for al-‘Awa to ignore the clearly implied identification mechanism in his own statement: “they were all relatives, the same people, unless they identified themselves in tribal terms.” Here, the least to say about these “tribal terms” is that they have accommodated for centuries the whole social structure and interrelationships of the region.
For all purposes, the DarFurian society has been identifiably structured across a traditionally marked system of hawakeer [land tenure] by the sedentary indigenous African non-Arab populations of the region with whom the Arab migratory Bedouins throughout the Sudanic belt co-existed in accordance with socially recognizable “tribal” agreements – an established reality that prevailed centuries before the Sudan Government’s most recent selective war willfully enforced a state-made ethno-administrative plotting against the region to aggrandize the ruling Brethren’s ethno-ideological preferences for specific political and economic goals. A state-decree Dr. Hassan Turabi issued to this effect has been accurately documented by Ustaz Suliman Hamid al-Haj (see al-Midan, August 2004).
Who else is a government lawyer?
One purpose of the Jazeera program was obviously meant to agglomerate the MUIU effective partnership with the ruling Brethren: like all top privileged diplomats, Dr. al-‘Awa, Sheikh Yousif al-Qaradawi, and the other ‘ulama met with the top officials of the Sudan Government. Additionally, the Brethren International Secretary General met with President al-Bashir. He “personally met with Hassan al-Turabi for long hours too.” That the mission aimed to reconcile the two warring factions of the NIF ruling junta was not a closed door for the local press, which caricatures sarcastically portrayed the Brethren’s rejected patronage over government affairs. How many victims or politicians concerned for the victims the MUIU cared to see was nevertheless awfully ignored.
The Sudan Government is squarely responsible?
Despite persistence negation of the government’s responsibility, the MUIU Secretary General correctly criticized “mischievous behavior from the part of the DarFur rebels” as well as “the government’s reaction” besides the government’s failure “in one case!” to enforce due reparations to the Zagawa African Sudanese injured party. “The government’s reaction” that al-‘Awa considered, however, was nothing but the President-led massive attack on the whole region by the Sudanese Armed Forces, Peoples’ Defense Forces, and the Arab Janjaweed militias – the state-war that killed thousands, displaced a million plus, and allowed the savage rapes and the other unabated crimes against humanity, all over the place.
Moreover, the MUIU Secretary General was never able to release the Sudan’s Brethren regime from the guilt of escalating the humanitarian crisis of DarFur. Dr. al-‘Awa had to affirm: “DarFur is a humanitarian tragedy since people were forced to leave their homes. The government is blamed for this humanitarian tragedy, as well as the Muslim nations and the international community.” Insisting in “material evidence” such as cemeteries of the murdered citizens from the HRW to “prove the acts of genocide,” the Muslim ‘Ulama, nonetheless, contradictorily ascertained: “the Sudan Government did not do any wrong. All allegations are false!”
No Janjaweed militias! No Genocide! No rapes!
“There wasn’t a Pagan-Christian alliance warring against a Muslim Arab alliance.” Rampant with this insinuating remark about the Sudanese legitimate struggles in the South and in DarFur to enjoy the right to life, self-determination, and good governance, Dr. al-‘Awa exclaimed: “We, the Muslim ‘Ulama Union, are sure that the Sudan Government did not recruit or armed the Janjaweed. There were not any militias attacking other groups in DarFur! When did the genocide take place? Where were the killed people buried? There wasn’t any genocide! We interviewed many women in DarFur who said there wasn’t any rape ? responsible Oxfam employees said they did not witness any occurrences of the sort.”
Dr. al-‘Awa juristic expertise, however, would subsequently realize that “the women of DarFur would not talk about rape to [the former Chief Justice Yousif Presidential Committee] whose female members were not able to get a single reported rape from the interviewed women.” The bare fact is that a raped human, as all law trainees understand, would naturally need the highest level of privacy to help redress the broken dignity, let alone a publicized sham by a government-selected committee in an orthodox Muslim society.
The non-appreciative formulation of the Yousif Committee to the urgent need to include indigenous women from DarFur to deal with the complexities of the heinous attacks on their counterparts, as well as the necessary inclusion of international human rights specialists has certainly contributed to the poor performance of the committee. Understandably, the negligence of these facts, besides the blind eye the MUIU offered to the ethnic dimension of the crisis, rushed al-‘Awa to allege, in turn, that “these cases were basically alleged to defame the government and the people of Sudan to allow foreign intervention in the country.”
Sudanese struggles or Western conspiracy?
“Only the sources influenced by Americans repeated the accusation of genocide,” Dr. al-‘Awa announced in the Jazeera T.V. With this, the MUIU pursued the Brethren’s well-known false division of the world into two antagonistic camps to which the well-to-do Brethren rarely adhered since their best living standards, children’s education, and bank deposits are delightfully enjoyed in the non-Arab non-Muslim West.
The division, anyhow, included the Brethren fact-owning believers who “wrongfully” belied the occurrence of the DarFur’s Holocaust by the ruling Brethren regime of the Sudan on the one hand versus the whole DarFur’s genocide condemning Sudanese-International Community on the other hand with no regard to the national consensus on the government’s guilt, the African Union’s strong reprimand of the ruling regime, or the Arab League’s painstaking statement on the Sudan Government’s responsibility for the Crisis.
To be fair, Ustaz Ahmed Mansour tried to alert his guest to remember this entire national, regional, and international consensus about the crisis. The MUIU doctrine, however, would have to stress: “What is going on in Palestine and DarFur is a part of the conspiracy. The Zionist enemies are working against DarFur.” At this point, it is important to say the same allegation has been mainly raised with respect to Iraq by the Brethren groups. What seemed new in al-‘Awa speech was his generalized alarm: “all the Arab Region will be destroyed if the DarFur’s Crisis remains without resolve.”
Needless to say, the Palestinian crisis is tragically unabated due to the escalated warring practices between Israeli and the Palestinian armed groups, which continue to paralyze the Palestinian-Israeli international peace endeavors to solve the problem. The activities of Muslim armed groups in Iraq, however, are not directly moved by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as much as they have been motivated by deeply entrenched religious conflicts to challenge the active presence of the American-led international forces. Far from these cases, DarFur is strictly a Sudanese-Sudanese affair that has to be handled in the first place by and for the Sudanese themselves.
The speaker, furthermore, did not explain which of the Arab States would be most destroyed other than the Sudanese peoples themselves, as the Arab States silently witnessed the South Sudan’s and the DarFur’s ongoing destruction by the Arab State of Sudan. Listeners were thus demagogically urged to believe, with one strategic leap, that the African Sudanese non-Arab people of DarFur are now sharing the danger of Zionist enemies with Palestine and Iraq, instead of the overdue condemnation of the state managers/militias overt guilt in the chaos they recklessly enforced in DarFur.
The MUIU incorporation of the DarFur’s Crisis unto the Palestinian- and the Iraqi conflicts is another politicized cliché to mystify the state-awakened Arab-African cleavages in DarFur with an overused ill-suited Arab nationalist doctrine for the African societies of Sudan, as well as inciting a Jihad slogan to prolong state violence in the whole region.
The Brethren’s inconsistent manipulations of these tensions is well-reported: Sheikh Yousif al-Qaradwi most recently belied the Jazeera T.V. which in the midst of the Iraqi invasion had him challenging a fatwa [scholarly decision] issued by Dr. Tantawi of the distinguished Azhar University that “attacking civilians, even for war purposes, is a very serious violation of Islam.” The same ‘ulama issued an emphatic appeal (2000) to Ahl al-Sudan decrying the split of the NIF terrorist factions and calling on the People of Sudan to support their unification!
Related to the chewed cliché about a Zionist-Western full-time planned conspiracy against the Arabs (who in the case of DarFur might have been non-existent as all DarFurians were firmly considered the same and one African Sudanese people, according to ‘Awa), which acts as a ready-made eternal explanation for all Arab state-militia-incited violence or any government-made failures, the MUIU leader emphasized: “DarFur is the gate of Islam to Africa. The unified Muslims of DarFur are a threat to the west. That is why DarFur is a target.” Here again, the sophisticated Islamist jurist would not refrain from preaching the Jazeera Arab-speaking audience with another over-simplistic view moved by his serious intention to avert the Sudanese International condemnation of his beloved Brethren regime.
Dr. al-‘Awa would never forget, however, to appeal for more funds to increase humanitarian assistance for the region from the same ‘Zionist West’ since “the Sudan Government is not responsible for the crisis (!); and there are Islamic organizations working in DarFur with limited resources.” What a complaint by the Brethren’s 15 years’ flourishing businesses and financial monopolies of the Sudanese national economy! It is hoped, ‘Awa further complained, “The major powers would pour more assistance to the region!”
The Jazeera Media and the Brethren Solution
The MUIU correctly reiterated, “If the rain falls with massive floods in the plains, the million plus displaced DarFurians would perish.”
This authentic fact, however, was never taken by al-‘Awa to its full logical length, namely conferring, above all, the overdue obligations of the Sudan Government to disarm the militias, put them and all others involved to judicial prosecution and fair trials, return the displaced population to their misappropriated lands with full compensations, and head up at the same time with these confidence-building measures for a permanent political solution of the crisis within a comprehensive political settlement of the Sudan’s Crisis.
Instead of these vital obligations, MUIU insisted: “There is a plan [by the Zionist-West] to subjugate Sudan to the west. Sudan is targeted with a division plan although the government gave its consent to all divisions imposed on it by the west concerning the South.” Thus rejecting the Sudanese historic consensus about the Nivasha Agreements, including the Brethren-controlled Sudan Government, the MUIU curiously called “on a conference for all Sudanese parties in Saudi Arabia.” Dr. al-‘Awa did not elaborate the agenda of his proposed conference, or how far it might push the Brethren regime to comply with the Sudanese will.
It is true, the Saudi Kingdom contributed generously with Egypt to ease the suffering of DarFur. It is equally evident, however, that the Sudanese pursuit of democracy and human rights has been materialized into a possible reality under the auspices of the IGAD-sponsored America-led United Nations blessed agreements, which further obligate the Sudan Government to convene a national constitutional conference with all Sudanese parties and civil society groups on the basis of the broadly-framed Nivasha Peace Agreements.
Ustaz Ahmed Mansour concluded his interview: “we have been given a factual picture of the situation in DarFur.” The absence of the Sudanese aggrieved voice from his hour’s interview, however, was clearly reflected in the MUIU boosted partnership with the catastrophic governance of Sudan throughout the program.