Policies, economics turned Muslims against Muslims in Sudan’s Darfur
BY SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN, Knight Ridder Newspapers
MOSBAT, Sudan, Sep 21, 2004 (KRT) — Shrapnel holes pock the green and white mosque of this battered village. Its black African residents had practiced Islam for generations, but in the eyes of their Arab attackers they weren’t true Muslims.
Islam once was the glue that held everyone together in the western Sudan region of Darfur, but African Muslims now speak of the desecration of mosques; the burning of Qurans, Islam’s holy book; and the murders of religious leaders.
Human rights groups and diplomats say the attacks on black African Muslims by the pro-government Arab militias, called Janjaweed, add weight to allegations that genocide is occurring in Darfur. Under international law, genocide is defined as intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic, racial or religious group.
What’s striking here, though, is that both victims and killers are Muslims, from the same Sunni sect, who intermarried for generations, who prayed in the same mosques.
But two decades of competition for scarce resources amid a state-sponsored, divide-and-rule policy of “Arabization” have eroded these religious bonds while sharpening ethnic tensions. The violence, now fueled partly by an Arab sense of being superior Muslims, underscores the racial hatred and the obstacles to reconciliation.
“It’s like killing your own child because you believe he is so inferior even though he’s your blood,” said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert with the Congressional Research Service. “It shows you the extent of the animosity towards African Muslims.”
Religion has infused Sudan’s long history of wars. The Arab-dominated regime, led by ideologues who preach a fundamentalist brand of Islam, has labeled its conflict with southern Christian rebels a jihad, or holy war.
It also has targeted African Muslims in the Nuba Mountains and attacked mosques and religious schools of the rebellious Beja people in the east.
In Darfur, as many as 50,000 have died and 1.2 million have been driven from their villages in a conflict that’s more racially based than religious. The conflict pits the government against black African rebels seeking political power and economic benefits for their region.
The regime recruited the Janjaweed to fight the rebels, but the Janjaweed also attacked black African civilians who were tribally associated with the rebels. U.N. officials say the attacks are continuing.
Sudanese officials, who deny they control the Janjaweed, say they are defenders of their faith – not its assassins.
“The Quran in Darfur is something sacred,” said Mohamed Bakhiet Mahmoud, the chairman of the defense and security committee in Sudan’s parliament.
“They burn the Quran in places where Muslims against non-Muslims fight. But in Darfur, if the Quran had been burned, or rapes, or something like this has happened, don’t believe it all.”
But in several dozen interviews across this sandy Texas-sized region, survivors repeatedly described such atrocities.
Mustafa Mohamed, 80, an imam, or cleric, from the town of Umbaru, said government planes bombed his mosque earlier this year. Two days later the Janjaweed destroyed what was left. Mohamed fled to Oure Cassoni, a refugee camp along Chad’s border with Sudan.
“Muslims are forbidden to kill other Muslims,” Mohamed said. “They are Muslims in name only. They want to wipe out our black roots.”
People once came from all across the region to pray at the towering mosque in Mosbat. In March, government planes dropped eight bombs, spraying it with shrapnel.
Three months later, Janjaweed militias on horseback raided the village, stealing cattle and torching huts. Then troops of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army arrived.
“The Janjaweed were closing in on the mosque, but they fled,” said Kamal Iman, a villager.
Once 4,000 villagers lived in Mosbat. Now only a few dozen people can be seen, most of them boyish rebel soldiers who protect the area. The mosque is shrouded in silence, except for the wind blowing sand against its walls.
Jan Pfundheller, a retired police officer from Brewster, Wash., interviewed Sudanese refugees in Chad for a State Department survey that Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on to conclude that genocide is taking place in Darfur.
This is some of what she heard:
– Nineteen men were killed while praying in a mosque.
– An imam and his son were raped with sticks.
Then, there was the imam and a tribal sheik who were tied and forced onto their knees before a high-ranking uniformed Sudanese officer with two stars on his epaulet. He ordered them to reveal where the rebels were hiding. They replied they were only religious leaders and didn’t know. So the officer ordered Janjaweed militiamen to pile straw around the pair and burned them alive.
Mosques tend to be places where men gather to pray and discuss communal matters, so killing imams wipes out leaders who wield great influence and who teach the youth their history and culture.
“They had this idea the blacks or the so-called slaves cannot be equal to their masters, even in terms of religion,” said Bahar Ibrahim, a senior adviser to the rebels. “So if it is a slave mosque they can always destroy it.”
Today, Mohamed’s mosque is his tent. He no longer teaches the Quran to youth.
Dagne, the Africa expert, said the intent of the attacks was to “humiliate and dehumanize African Muslims … to the point they don’t exist as a cohesive community.”
He added: “This is all about political survival and the methods they use is more vicious than any other regime in Africa.”
This was not always the case. Darfur embraced Islam in the early 1800s, and Arabs and black Africans lived mostly in religious harmony through Darfur’s days as an independent sultanate, then during British colonial rule and after independence in 1956.
Mohamed, sitting inside his tent, remembers better days over cups of sweet tea. Whenever Arab traders and nomads passed through the area, they would pray at his mosque and give donations. Sometimes, visiting Arab clerics would give sermons.
Mohamed said he was friends with the father of Musa Hilal and had been a guest at his house. The United States now accuses Hilal of being a senior Arab Janjaweed leader who’s committed war crimes.
“There was no animosity between us,” said Mohamed. “We had good relationships with Khartoum.”
That changed in the 1980s. Successive Arab governments, in a divide-and-rule plan to maintain power, manipulated rivalries between Arab nomads and black African farmers, polarizing them racially.
The regime combined this with a policy of discrimination and neglect of Africans, while arming Arab tribes against them. The emergence of a shadowy alliance called the Arab Gathering, which professed the supremacy of the Arab race, further shattered Islam’s unifying role.
Generations of intermarriage, which made Arabs and Africans nearly physically indistinguishable, were ignored. Soon, being of Arab lineage – determined by one’s father’s ethnicity – took precedence over being Muslim.
Arabs stopped visiting Mohamed’s mosque and began to challenge the devotion of black Africans to Islam. “Now, in the days of this government, they look at us like animals,” he said.