Independence For The Sudan's South...The Story Within

The Sudan…The Story Within The Story
by Gerald A. Honigman

As I write this, I cannot help but cringe at what has transpired over the almost five decades that I have been actively involved in the history and politics of the Middle East and North Africa.

At long last, it now seems that the non-Arab/non-Arabized south of the Sudan will get some semblance of justice.

After millions were slaughtered just in the last half century in the name of Arabism and the Dar ul-Islam (ignoring even more earlier victims), it appears that the oil-rich south will gain independence from the Arab and Arabized north.

Memories…

As a card-carrying member of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society for years, I had access to appalling information. But what was going on was no secret--even though it was treated as such in too many circles.

Here's how the Arab north viewed all of this…

Ex-president, Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiry proclaimed " The Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into... black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission ("Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics," Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1973, pp. 177-7 Cool

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Now, while many folks are quick to identify Rudyard Kipling's late 19th-century poem, "The White Man's Burden," as typifying Western colonialist and imperialist attitudes towards the Third World, why have such Arab racist attitudes and mindset in the Sudan and elsewhere throughout the region been routinely ignored?

Is it that the Arab Man's Burden is deemed kosher but the White Man's is not?

While I was doing my own undergraduate and graduate studies, it was commonplace, for example, for Israel to be placed under the high power lens of scrutiny in the classroom, yet not a word was ever mentioned about the slaughter, enslavement, and so forth that were being perpetrated in the name of Arabism and the Dar ul-Islam in places such as the Sudan.

This continues to this very day. While I won't dwell on the more obvious Jihadi apologist Rashid Khalidi-types, the Juan Coles in the Ivory Tower frequently indulge in this duplicity and hypocrisy as well.

Ever since I can remember, the Anaya Nya and other tribesmen were struggling for basic human (let alone political) rights in the Sudan's south, yet one would never know that they even existed if the typical course curriculum was relied upon.

And outside of academia, until recently, the situation has been as bad or worse.

The same countries which have demanded that the sole, miniscule nation of the Jews do all but slit its own throat for the sake of creating Arab state # 22 have also stood by and watched the subjugation and murder of millions of black Africans by Arabs for decades.

And the sin has been even worse than it initially appears…

While the south of the Sudan was non-Muslim, the western province-- the Darfur region-- had been converted and was part of the Dar ul-Islam…so there was no religious reason for the slaughter that has also been waged by the Arab and Arabized north against it.

Indeed, the violence in Darfur has perhaps even a more disturbing and revealing twist…

Back on June 15, 2006, an AP article by Nick Wadhams dealt with the findings of an UN-backed court, finally prodded into action, probing war crimes in Darfur. In the middle of the article (a small blurb on page nine…after all, this wasn't Jews being forced to go after Hamas murderers in Gaza, so forget about the front page), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor, stated that eyewitnesses spoke of Arab perpetrators of the atrocities telling black victims such things as, "we will kill all of you blacks and drive you out of this land."

So, while earlier Arab violence against the south could largely be seen as "merely" a modern extension of the fourteen century-old murderous clash between the Dar ul-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the atrocities being committed in Darfur (as those in Arab-occupied Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan, much of the rest of heavily non-Arab, Amazigh--"Berber"--North Africa, and elsewhere) are mostly about Arab racism and chauvinism, pure and simple…and being conducted by those very same folks who like to lecture the rest of the world about “racist Zionism.”

And that, dear readers, is the despicable story within the story. It is the on-going saga of the quest for justice throughout the region…relative justice, since the perfect variety is not attainable in the realm of man.

It is the justice, for example, which demands a state for thirty-five million largely subjugated, used, and abused truly stateless Kurds before Arabs (who want Israel dead and call any and all negotiations with it merely a "Trojan Horse") get their second--not first--state in "Palestine." Recall that Jordan was created in 1922 from some 80% of the original April 25, 1920 Mandate's territory. And that second state would bring the Arab total to twenty-two--most having been created by the conquest and forced Arabization of other non-Arab peoples' lands.

Arabs twenty-two, Kurds (and everyone else in Arab eyes) zero. That's not how relative justice is supposed to work, and it is indeed the same story in other parts of the region as well--besides the Sudan's south and west.

My own new book, The Quest For Justice In The Middle East…The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective (http://q4j-middle-east.com), is validly documented to the moon and contains several chapters dealing with the Sudan. It was specifically created to tell this and the related, more general story in a broader, more accurate perspective--one which has been ignored in far too many other sources.