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Darfur As a Battlefield Between Hassan al-Turabi and Omar al-Bashir
From Slate, an article by Lee Smith... [Sudan] President Jafaar an-Nimeiri's decision to impose sharia, or Islamic law, throughout the country in 1983 renewed tensions ... and war broke out again. Nimeiri's Islamicization project was urged on by Sudan's Muslim Brotherhood, including its leading ideologue and the country's attorney general, Hassan al-Turabi. The man who would later become known for inviting Osama Bin Laden to make his home in Khartoum in 1991 has long been a central figure in Sudanese politics. Turabi's brother-in-law Sadeq al-Mahdi ran the country from 1985 until 1989, when the NIF and current ruler Lt.-Gen. Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup that Turabi supported. Indeed, as the one-time spiritual guide of the NIF, Turabi was said to be the power behind the throne and thus most likely supplied the government with its additional rationale for continuing the war—jihad. ... As the NIF exploited sectarian lines in its siege against the south, Hassan al-Turabi has manipulated ethnic divides in order to wage war against his former protégé, Omar al-Bashir. "There is a power struggle within the NIF, and Turabi is using Darfur to undermine the Khartoum government," Sudanese law scholar Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na'im told me. "This is part of a palace coup." Turabi was arrested in March for allegedly plotting against Bashir and, for reasons that remain unclear, he is expected to be released soon. Four years ago, Turabi was put under house arrest and formed the Popular Congress. When the PC was looking for allies to bring down the central government, writes Danish aid worker Anders Hastrup, "The marginalized region of Western Darfur, with its Islamic tribes and its ambivalent and, occasionally, rebellious attitude towards Khartoum was an obvious place to look." The PC made common cause with the Darfur rebels and also circulated The Black Book, a pamphlet that, Hastrup writes, documented "Khartoum's neglect and ostracism of the western tribes in the decision-making process, and showed that the great majority of important positions in the country were filled by figures from a northern Arab background." Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian writer and rights activist whose Tharwa Project Web site documents the status of minorities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. He explained to me that "there is a very serious issue of racial discrimination, of Arabs against non-Arabs, in Sudan," which Turabi turned to his advantage. "He was reaching out to non-Arab elements in his struggle against Bashir," says Abdulhamid. "And he's become the rebels' spiritual guide." It's worth remembering that, as the NIF's chief ideologue, Turabi played on the other side, against Africans, when he boasted of wanting to "Arabize Africa." Over the last several decades, this spiritual guide for hire has not only determined most of Sudan's political and military battlegrounds, he also helped turn the country into a well-known international jihadist resort: Bin Laden, who reportedly married one of Turabi's nieces, and Ayman al-Zawahiri both spent part of the '90s in Sudan. .... ... An-Na'im, a liberal Muslim thinker who teaches at Emory Law School [and] An-Na'im, who advocates a reinterpretation of Islam in accordance with human rights, was a disciple of Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, the Sudanese Muslim religious leader and political activist hanged in Khartoum for apostasy in 1985. Taha understood that the biggest problem facing Islam was its historical treatment of women and non-Muslims, and his work is a powerful argument against the forced Islamicization and sharia that have plagued Sudan for 20 years. If there's a positive side to Sudan's troubles, an-Na'im contends, it's that Taha's legacy has been partly realized. "The Islamist idea, Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood project are totally discredited. Not just for the Sudanese, but throughout the Muslim world." .... Sudan's Islamist experiment has been exposed as a murderous authoritarianism. ... Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-08-07 |
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