[Marxism] Arab and African in Sudan

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, October 3, 2004
In Sudan, No Clear Difference Between Arab and African
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

KHARTOUM, Sudan — ABDALLA ADAM KHATIR, 50, is from Darfur, in western Sudan.

His grandmother was an Arab, her grandfather was a member of an African 
tribe. He calls himself an African.

As a boy in Kabkabiya, deep in the heart of Darfur, he traveled three 
days by camel caravan to reach the nearest town with an intermediate 
school. The caravan was led by an Arab, but at no point did he or his 
family feel unsafe.

As a student here in the capital in the 1960's, he took up the banner of 
Arab-African unity, led by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But today, Mr. Khatir finds himself wrestling with the gut-wrenching 
fact that, in the past two years, 102 of his relatives have been killed 
in Darfur by those he calls Arabs.

Yet in the end, Mr. Khatir, a writer and a member of the Darfur Writers 
and Journalists Association, does not view this as a war between Arabs 
and Africans. He blames it squarely on the government in Khartoum. Its 
leaders, he says, have deliberately inflamed nascent ethnic divisions in 
a bid to stay in power.

War broke out in western Sudan in early 2003, when a rebel insurrection, 
frustrated by what it called the Sudan government's marginalization of 
Darfur, demanded economic and political reforms.

The government swiftly struck back, deploying Arab militias across the 
region.

The violence has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 
1.5 million.

Across Darfur, it was largely the villages of Africans that were 
torched, and with some exceptions, it was largely tribes that call 
themselves African that crowded into refugee camps or fled across the 
border to Chad.

The United States and others have accused the attackers of committing 
"genocide," the systematic destruction of a national or ethnic group.

Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of 
Genocide, has said that crimes against humanity and war crimes "probably 
occurred on a large and systematic scale."

The question is how does race or ethnicity fit in. For generations, race 
itself has not been all that significant in Darfurian society.

People regularly referred to themselves by their tribe affiliation, and 
rarely as just "Arab" or "African."

Arabs have been in the region for almost 1,000 years, and the term has 
been used mostly to describe those who speak Arabic, as opposed to one 
of the dozens of local languages, or to those who lead nomadic, not 
agricultural, existences.

"The implication that these are two different races, one indigenous and 
the other not, is dangerous," said Mahmood Mamdani, director of the 
Institute of African Studies at Columbia University.

But the Darfur crisis has laid bare an unspoken Arab-African fault line 
that runs across this arid belt of Africa - from Mauritania in the west, 
to Sudan in the east.

Racial consciousness is, in fact, embedded in the history of central 
Africa.

Sudan, for example, was once a center of the Arab slave trade.

In Mauritania, in West Africa, blackness, which was associated with 
slavery, is today associated with servitude.

Referring to underlying racial division, Breyten Breytenbach, the South 
African writer, said, "It is one of the most ambiguous problems and 
greatest taboos on the continent."

What may have surprised everyone in Sudan was that as soon as the 
rebellion in Darfur began, divisions were drawn. By and large it was 
Arab tribes in Darfur that rallied to the government's side (some say in 
exchange for promises of land and power), while the government's 
political opponents raised the African banner and declared allegiance 
with the rebels.

Those lines could harden even more.

The racial character given to the fighting in Darfur by the government 
and the rebels has found many willing listeners - and the appeal to 
racial solidarity could extend itself to Chad or further afield to Niger 
or Mali, where the competition between farmers and nomadic herders could 
turn even uglier.

"There's been a long-running effort to suppress recognition of racial 
tension," argued Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, a 
Washington-based advocacy group. "It is something the continent has to 
grapple with."

But racial chauvinism, once let loose in a society, can be hard to put 
back in the bottle. And its effects can be murderous.

It is foolish, said Mr. Khatir, for any Sudanese to consider himself an 
Arab.

"We are not Arabs, not Sudanese - not even those who are telling 
themselves they are Arabs," he said.

"I am an African," he added, "who has absorbed Arab and Islamic culture. 
The way I see it, our people, Arab tribes and African tribes, are 
victims of the national policies of this government. We are all victims."


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