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"Arabizing" Black Africa
The following statement, delivered on the floor of the UN Human Rights
Commission on Wednesday, August 11, 2004, concerns the abominable attrocities
taking place in Sudan. This situation does not make headlines in part because
their un-PC perpetrators are Arab Muslims, persecuting black Africans (non-Muslim
and Muslim alike). This situation deserves widespread publicity. FrontPage Magazine
is happy to call these injustices to the forefront of the civilized world's consciousness.
-- The Editors.
Sir, the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Darfour – over 50,000 people
killed and 2.2 million displaced from their homes, and in urgent need of relief
aid – includes the systematic rape of African Muslim women and girls, as
well as their enslavement. In her scathing Report to the Commission on the situation
in the Sudan, released last Friday, the Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killings
could not have been clearer on the motives. This is arousing an international
solidarity, a subject addressed by Mr. Dos Santos Alves in his working paper.
Ms. Asma Jahangir states: “A large number of people whom I met had a
strong perception that the Government was pursuing a policy of ‘Arabization’
of the Sudan, and, in particular, the Darfur region. Allegedly, those of Arab
descent seek to portray themselves as ‘pure’ Muslims, as opposed to
Muslims of African ethnicity.” She also reported that many people she interviewed
recalled the cries for help from Darfur had gone out for several years, and that
clashes between Arab nomads and sedentary African farmers since the droughts of
the 1970s and 1980s had been noted by a previous UN Rapporteur in 1997. It is
enough to reread his Reports from 1993 to 1998 to understand, then and now, the
present situation – and in Southern Sudan. Based on his full documentation,
we published a documentary article in the Sepember 1996 Middle East Quarterly,
entitled “The UN Finds Slavery in the Sudan.”
On this question, for over a decade here, we have insisted on calling a slave
a slave and have refused to accept the absurd taboo of those appeasers who willingly
accepted the term “abductions” imposed by the Government of Sudan
(GOS), which otherwise threatened to refuse the regular flights bringing in international
humanitarian relief. The NIF regime now carrying out this genocidal ethnic
cleansing, mass killings and slavery continues as a Member State of the Commission
on Human Rights– and will inevitably deny everything said here. (The
Sudanese representative did exactly that in a pathetic laconic “right of
reply.”)
In 1999, the Sudanese government denied irrefutable facts in a major report
on slavery by Human Rights Watch (updated in March 2002), and even succeeded in
ousting a Zurich-based NGO from the UN – Christian Solidarity International
(CSI). CSI had constantly denounced slavery in the Sudan since 1993, and had redeemed
tens of thousands of slaves.
Sir, Darfur is at the centre of the revival of government-sponsored chattel
slavery in Sudan. In the mid-1980s, GOS armed bands of Baggara (nomadic) Arabs
in Darfur and adjacent Kordofan and incited them to raid Black African communities
of northern Bahr El Ghazal (Southern Sudan). In the early 1990s, these Arab militias
were formally drawn into the government’s armed forces as units of the jihadi
Popular Defence Forces (PDF). In spring of 1998, the Sudanese government’s
Commissioner of Ed Daien, Abdelrahman Kidder, accompanied the Baggara slave raiders
into the South and temporarily occupied the Southern town of Nyamlel.
The GOS sponsored slave raids in the context of a genocidal jihad, resulting
in the loss of more than two million black African lives and the displacement
of over five million people. Tens of thousands of black women and children, possibly
more, were enslaved during two decades of such raiding. Most of the black slaves
were marched to the North and were forced to work for Arab masters in the towns,
villages and cattle camps of Darfur – Ed Daein, Abu Matarik, Abu Gabara
and Nyala are all towns in Darfur around which there is a heavy concentration
of Arab-owned black slaves. The number of slaves in these areas has multiplied
as a result of the rape of slave girls and women, as is constantly reported these
past months.
Slave raiding in Southern Sudan has been suspended on account of the current
cease-fire between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation
Army. In the meantime, however, Sudan’s Islamist (NIF) rulers have shifted
the focus of their jihad to the Black African tribes of Darfur, in particular
the Fur, Massalit and Zagawa. In December 2003, Sudan’s President Omer Bashir
openly declared a jihad against these tribes and ordered the mujahadeen
to eliminate resistance in Darfur. We are now seeing the results.
The current pattern of raiding in Darfur appears to be virtually identical
to what took place in northern Bahr El Ghazal. The enslavement of black Africans
is one of its common characteristics. NGOs and UN officials have reported
the widespread “abduction” of women and children. The term “abduction”
is the agreed code language between UN agencies and the Government of Sudan to
denote slavery in Sudan.
[One of these black “abductees” from Darfur is 12-year-old Adam
Erenga Tribe. Last April, he was on his way home from school to find his village
under attack by government-sponsored Arab militias. Unlike his murdered mother,
father and two brothers, Adam was enslaved and forced to look after his master’s
cattle. (Daily Telegraph, May 16, 2004). Last month, Sennah Abdelhamid
Hamad, a displaced black African mother from Darfur reported to Christian Solidarity
International the capture of her four children by Arab militias. She expects that
they have been enslaved, noting that she had previously seen children from her
tribe working as slaves in Arab cattle camps. (CSI Press Release, 14/07/04.)]
We call on this Sub-Commission – and all UN bodies – to act
urgently, not only to end the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the NIF regime in
Khartoum, but also to free the tens of thousands of slaves still held in bondage
in the North and in the Darfur region.
Sir, in conclusion, what better illustration of the continuity of this terrible
plague of slavery, ethnic cleansing and genocide than the description of the Sudan
by the young Winston Churchill in his first book, The River War, published
in 1899, 105 years ago:
The stronger race soon began to prey upon the simple aboriginals; some of the
Arab tribes were camel-breeders; some were goat-herds; some were Baggaras or cow-herds.
But all, without exception, were hunters of men. To the great slave markets of
Jeddah a continual stream of Negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years.
The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated
the traffic by placing the ignorant Negroes at a further disadvantage. Thus the
situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The
dominant race of Arab invaders was increasingly spreading its blood, religion,
customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time
it harried and enslaved them. The state of society that arose out of this may
be easily imagined. The warlike Arab tribes fought and brawled among themselves
in ceaseless feud and strife. The Negroes trembled in apprehension of capture,
or rose locally against their oppressors.1
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
ENDNOTES:
1 Winston Churchill, The River War, (London: Longmans, Green
& Co., 1899). 1st edition, Vol. I, pp.16-17.
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