muslim agianst muslim vilolence is usually ignored
Muslims vs Muslims
Dr Farrukh Saleem
The writer is an Islamabad-based
freelance columnist
Five hundred Muslims are being slaughtered every day. Some two hundred and eleven thousand have already been massacred. A total of three hundred and twenty thousand could die by the end of 2004, irrespective of international intervention (Source: Congressional Research Service; Foreign Press Centers - United States Department of State).
Arab militias armed by the Central Government of Jumhuriyat as-Sudan are starving, raping and murdering non-Arab residents of Sudan’s Darfur Province. Arabs, one can readily guess, must be Muslim. Who are these Arabs starving, raping and murdering? What is the religion of the victims? Answer: The victims are all Muslim as well; black, non-Arab, ethnic African Muslims. African Muslims of Darfur are not just Muslim but they are “deeply, devoutly, unshakably Muslim.” Jumhuriyat as-Sudan has some 30 million Muslims spread over a landmass of 2.3 million sq km (more than 3 times the size of Pakistan). Of the 30 million, close to 17 million are black, non-Arab, African Muslims while the remaining 13 million are Arab Muslims. Jumhuriyat as-Sudan got its independence on 1 January 1956. Since that day, military regimes - espousing an Islamist platform-have ruled Sudan. Over the past two decades, “war and war-and-famine-related effects have led to more than 2 million deaths and over 4 million people displaced.”
In 1989, there was a coup. The Constitution of 10 October 1985 was suspended. Lt Gen Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir “assumed supreme executive power … and retained it through several transitional governments … before being popularly elected for the first time in March 1996.” A new constitution was implemented on 30 June 1998, and then partially suspended by al-Bashir. The Council of Ministers is appointed by the president. Al-Bashir’s current cabinet is dominated by the National Islamic Front. According to the World Factbook, the current “ruling regime is a mixture of military elite and an Islamist party.” Lt Gen Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir is both the chief of state and head of government.
The Darfur human tragedy began in February 2003. By mid-2003, the National Islamic Front had started arming the ‘Janjaweed’ (Janjaweed: literally, ‘Arab horsemen clutching AK-47s’) the increasingly violent Arab militia pursuing a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing.
The Arab-dominated ruling military junta deployed the Popular Defence Force (PDF) in support of the Janjaweed. The Sudanese Air Force then began an extended bombing campaign targeting non-Arab villages. According to the Human Rights Watch, “Hundreds of villages in Darfur have been totally or partially burned and destroyed by bombing and ground attacks. More than a million people have been forced from their homes and more than 158,000 people have fled Darfur for neighbouring Chad.”
Fatimah Yousef Mohamed is black, non-Arab ethnic African Muslim. Fatimah lives in Darfur in the village of Kilek. Arabs of Darfur refer to non-Arab Africans as ‘zurga’ or ‘black’ more a slur than anything else. Exactly five months ago, the Janjaweed, supported by the soldiers of the Popular Defence Force, attacked Kilek. Fatimah was abducted and taken to another village 3 km from Kilek and according to The Scotsman, Scotland’s national newspaper and raped. The baby is due in exactly four months. Fatimah has decided to keep the baby but a "part of her will always think of it as her Janjaweed child. (http://thescotsman.scotsman. com/index.cfm?id=912692004).
Amnesty International’s report on Darfur is titled “Rape as a Weapon of War”. According to Amnesty, “Arab militias in Sudan are gang-raping and abducting girls as young as eight and women as old as 80, systematically killing, torturing, or using them as sex slaves.” Amnesty’s report has documented “gang rapes, public rapes, killings of those who resist rape, abductions for sexual slavery, and cases where women and girls have had their legs broken to stop them running away (http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engafr540762004)”
The Government of Sudan claims to be a “fundamentalist Islamist government”. The non-Arab African Muslims of Darfur have historically practiced a more quiet rather tolerant interpretation of Islam. African Muslims are now being exterminated. Darfur’s mass rapes and mass murders are war crimes and crimes against humanity. Muslims are being starved, tortured, raped and murdered by other Muslims. The United States has killed at least 12,721 civilian Iraqi Muslims and Muslims around the world condemn the United States for the killing of non-combatant, innocent Iraqis. Arab Muslims of Darfur have now killed more Muslims than has America. Why are Arab leaders hesitant in speaking out against the terrible humanitarian tragedy in Darfur? Why should Muslims be allowed to kill other Muslims?
God’s gift to Arabs-Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Libya and Qatar — stands at 500 billion barrels of oil (www.opec.org). At $40 a barrel that gift is valued at some $20 trillion. How much of that has gone into saving African Muslims? For the record, over the past 15 years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has put over a billion dollars in humanitarian assistance into Sudan.