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 Re: لافرق واضح بين العرب و الافارقة في السودان -مقال مترجم (Re: Khalid Eltayeb)
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THE NEW YORK 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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Khalid Eltayeb
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست