DARFUR, THE NATION OF ISLAM & THE SILENCE OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
There is a disinformation campaign being directed at the African-American community on the genocide in Darfur, the aim of which is to keep us ignorant, mis- and disinformed, silent and on the sidelines. The chief purveyors of this steady stream of logorrhea are Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and his minions. Over the years, Farrakhan has become little more than a shill for the regime of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, completely rejecting all evidence of its ongoing, aggressive Arabization campaign against other, non-"Arab" Sudanese blacks through marginalization, disenfranchisement, displacement, cultural aggression and violence, of which the Darfur genocide is merely the most recent and appalling example.
I am a charter member of a group called Black Voices for Darfur, organized by black people in the Darfur advocacy community, because we are fed up with the propaganda and the silence, but also because we see a need to reach out to others of the African-American community and our brothers and sisters on the Continent and in the African diaspora, wherever they may be, to address the Darfur crisis and issues related to black genocide in general. We here in the Washington, D.C. area are uniquely situated to do this. The region hosts large expatriate and first- and second-generation immigrant communities of Ethiopians, Nigerians, Somalis, Ghanaians, Kenyans, Egyptians, Sudanese, West Indians, South Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asians, etc. If you can name the nation, and its citizens are members of the African diaspora, they're represented here among our population.
Below for your consideration is a statement by a member of BV4D, approved by its members, in reaction to one of the latest columns disparaging the Darfur advocacy movement by a writer named Askia Muhammad, who is published in a number of black newspapers around the U.S. and who writes for The Final Call, published by the Nation of Islam.
In struggle -- deeceevoice.
PROPAGANDA, DISINFORMATION AND SILENCE: WHAT THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT SUDAN & DARFUR
What Askia Muhammad offers readers instead of a reasoned analysis of the Darfur situation in "Darfur and the Sudan ‘Hustle'" (Washington Informer, Thursday, June 7 http://www.washingtoninformer.com/OPEDAskia-2007Jun7.html ) is far from convincing. It causes me to wonder, "Who's hustling whom?"
I am an activist, what many would call a "leftist." I am inherently distrustful of U.S. foreign policy objectives, generally, but particularly as they relate to people of color - and this is true in spades on the African continent. I also am a Darfur activist.
But I'm not Jewish. I'm not white. I am a pan-Africanist, a student of history, an anti-Zionist African-American. And I have not, to use Muhammad's words, "been duped."
Muhammad's arguments are all over the place and completely miss the mark. How can one, after all, propose to address honestly the matter of Darfur with barely a mumblin' word about Khartoum's devastating and appalling record of human rights abuses, on a massive scale, against its marginalized populations?
The Save Darfur Coalition
I won't respond to Muhammad's column point by point; however, I will say, first, two things about his utterly disingenuous comments about the Save Darfur Coalition. Muhammad must know it is grossly unfair to castigate an education and advocacy organization for not delivering direct aid. It isn't "hustling" to use funds for education, outreach and lobbying instead of for humanitarian assistance, which clearly is not Save Darfur's mission. In its own words, the organization solicits contributions to fund "crucial awareness and advocacy programs that play a critical role in building ... political pressure ...to end the crisis in Darfur."
And about David Rubenstein: he likely would not have felt the need to place full-page ads in the black press if there weren't so many misinformed and disinformed black folk demagoguing the issue of Darfur out of opposition to the Zionist lobby, Muslim solidarity, or some misdirected sense of common cause with Arabs, ostensibly because they are Third World people of color and because of the plight of the Palestinian people.
The Nation of Islam and Muslim Solidarity
Props to the Nation of Islam for its work with the black underclass and working class when many "respectable" black churches didn't care, and for advancing black consciousness and our struggle for justice for more than 75 years. But when it comes to the sometimes mind-numbing, facile polemics of anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, leftist political correctness, NOI spokesperson and minister Louis Farrakhan has few, if any, peers. In recent years, he opportunistically has forged working alliances with the likes of Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church and Lyndon LaRouche, both of whom, not coincidentally, are stinking rich and have mounted well-funded recruitment efforts aimed at making inroads into the African-American community. And Farrakhan has been cozy with oil-rich Khartoum since at least his "World Friendship Tour" in 1996. Sudan's president Omar Hassan al-Bashir addressed the Nation's annual Founder's Day gathering this year in Chicago via satellite, at one point taking questions from the faithful; and the minister and at least one of his lieutenants, at Bashir's invitation, helped wrangle a delegation of African-American journalists to fly to Sudan to get the "real scoop" on Darfur.
Anybody remember the often co-opted reporting of the embedded press during the 2003 Iraq invasion?
The Destruction of Black Civilization
Bashir is just one in a line of Sudanese heads of state whose stated purpose has been the Arabization of Sudan, with a history of marginalizing and denying government services to Sudanese who do not self-identify as Arab. He has no use for them - only their land.
In the West, the people of Darfur have been victimized by all manner of depredations and threatened with literal extinction. In the South, the death toll is officially and undisputedly at 2 million non-"Arab," black Southern Sudanese, the victims of a bloody civil war when some of their number finally rose up and said "no more." Presently, while the Government of Sudan continues to reap millions in oil wealth from the oil-rich South, it spends less than ½ of 1 percent of its total GDP there. That means no roads, no schools, no hospitals, no water projects, no electricity - nada.
The only attention Darfur receives from Khartoum is of the unwanted kind: helicopter gunships, Antonov bombers and government troops on the ground, who soften up civilian targets for government-armed and -funded Janjaweed militias, who in turn burn and ransack villages, poison wells, rape, mutilate and murder innocents at will. There are highly credible accounts going back several months that the Sudan government has painted planes to masquerade as UN and African Union aircraft while ferrying arms and military hardware to Janjaweed militias. Thus, Bashir fuels the existing conflict, using these "devils on horseback" to do his dirty work of obliterating the people of Darfur. He then blames the mounting death toll, the massive displacement on "rebel conflict," disavowing any involvement or responsibility - until earlier this year, when the evidence was so irrefutable, Bashir himself had to admit that the government had bombed "rebel" villages in Darfur. For him, this shell game is a threefer: advancing Arabization, removing any possible political opposition, and consolidation of control over the region's land and oil wealth.
The Nuba in the North have long been victimized by a government Arabization campaign and now are at risk of losing, to hydroelectric projects at Meroe and Kajbar, their homelands, as well as the ancient archaeological treasures of a culture that gave rise to Egyptian dynastic civilization. The proposed dams not only would obliterate ancient Nubian archaeological sites, they would grow dramatically the population of displaced Sudanese - already estimated at about 2,150,000 from the Darfur genocide alone - and threaten to cause water wars in neighboring nations.
The situation in Nubia is eerily reminiscent of what happened in Egypt in more ways than one. The Aswan High Dam was built and went online in the 1964. It flooded much of lower Nubia, destroyed untold archaeological treasures and displaced over 90,000 people. Even more profoundly, however, and farther back in time, Arabs conquered Egypt in 700 A.D., more than 3,500 years after the foundation of dynastic Egypt was laid with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt - by a black king. And now, a little more than 1,300 years later, Egypt is the seat of the Arab world, its population and much of the rest of the world in complete and utter denial of its black African heritage. I cringe at the possibility of what Sudan might look like even 40 years hence, given the accelerated pace of the assault on the non-"Arab" blacks of Sudan.
In fact, were he alive today, noted historian Chancellor Williams could write a sequel to his masterwork The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race Between 4500 B.C. and 2000 A.D. focusing alone on the 21-year conflict in the south of Sudan, the Darfur genocide, and the hydroelectric projects in the North that Muhammad so glibly and irresponsibly touts in his column.
Should the ongoing campaign to Arabize Sudan succeed, with the marginalization, slaughter and displacement of non-"Arab" populations by the Bashir regime left to continue, Sudan will become, like Egypt, an Arab nation, more closely aligned politically with the Middle East than with Africa. So much for Muhammad's specious contention that "Sudan has the potential of being a bridge between Islamic Arab North Africa and Bantu Black sub-Saharan Africa." Khartoum repeatedly has responded to the indigenous, black, Bantu peoples of its own nation with marginalization, exploitation, cultural aggression, displacement and genocide. There is no reason to believe - or even hope - that its response to sub-Saharan Africa will be to extend the hand of brotherhood.
Still, an African-American population traditionally provincial when it comes to international affairs; a cynical disinformation campaign - nonsensical as it is - that targets our community and panders to long-standing ideological hostilities and a well-earned distrust of U.S. foreign policy objectives has turned Arab "I Ain't Black" Bashir into Soul Brother Number 1 in some quarters.
And why not?
The Godfather of Soul is dead and buried - finally - and Michael Jackson is white, tragically confused and living in Bahrain. So, I guess the title is up for grabs.
The Judgment of History
Curiously, what is common knowledge around the world seems to carry little weight among too many in the African American community - that Bashir is a lying, murderous scoundrel and a war criminal. Chad threatened to quit the organization if Bashir became head of the African Union, and other African nations protested vociferously until the baton was passed instead to the president of Ghana earlier this year. And Bashir is a racist. After all, black self-loathing and denial is nothing but anti-black racism internalized, and like many of our black and Muslim brothers and sisters in East Africa, Bashir self-identifies as Arab - not as black. That these "Arabs" couldn't pass the paper bag test, as Muhammad correctly asserts, doesn't change the fact that Bashir and his henchmen are targeting and ruthlessly exterminating non-"Arab" blacks like vermin. It is true that the historically accurate stereotype of Semitic Arabs victimizing black Africans is not the case in Sudan, but as African-Americans, we should be especially sensitive to, and wary of, the discounting of black-on-black violence, or of people who use it to justify the profound and shocking silence on the part of much of the African-American community on Darfur.
We, the descendants of slaves, should know better. Human life is human life.
So, what will we tell our grandchildren should the non-"Arab" peoples of Darfur, the South and the Nuba Mountains recede into history as victims of ongoing warfare and cynical neglect directed at them by their own government, as casualties of the first genocide of the twenty-first century? If their once thriving villages and cultures disappear into the dust, the drifting, uprooted survivors left to subsist in miserable refugee gulags dotted throughout Chad and the rest of the region? How will we, as African Americans, explain our failure to speak out, to act, to stand with the people of Darfur? What will we tell our grandchildren when they ask, "Grandpa, Grandma, why didn't you do something?"
What will be the unblinking judgment of history and our progeny?
It will be one of ignorance, apathy, laziness and astounding gullibility in the face of smarmy, lying, unctuous demagogues spouting the flimsiest of rhetoric in defense of a ruthless tyrant. It will be that our inertia, suspicion of the U.S. government and our opposition to the Zionist lobby were greater than our moral outrage at preventable human suffering; greater than our sense of duty to the sacred legacy of struggle, overcoming and humanity bequeathed to us by our ancestors - and, tragically, shamefully, far greater than the love we possessed for our own people.
Kathleen Holt Wills, Black Voices for Darfur - Washington, D.C.
