On Darfur and elsewhere
[ More email archaeology: sent to John Scheinman in September 2004 ]
Sudan/Darfur has been a shithole for some time now. The Janjaweed militias have been rampaging for more than a year, butchering civilians in bunches, burning wholev illages, raping non-arab black women so they'll have arab children -- it's unthinkable. We, and the world, are coming late -- too late maybe -- to this understanding. Of course the UN should have troops there.
I think you have to be careful just saying it's some sort of rampant arabism. I don't know if the Janjaweed represent a tide of arab ethnic cleansing that's going to overwhelm Africa. They filled a void presented by an outlaw regime in Sudan that welcomes radicals. If there's a building cross-border tsunami, it is Wahhabism, Islamic fundamentalism in several countries, and we already knew that. Our strategic relationships with places like Egypt and Saudi have basically defanged our ability to insist on much there. The power of the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran spreads Shia fundamentalism all over the place-- even Zanzibar, the island Christina and I visited a few weeks ago. Fundamentalists have won the past 2 elections there, but the government declined to step down.
I was in Africa for three weeks last month and asked around frequently about the violent tribalism in places like Rwanda and Darfur. It doesn't exist in mainland Tanzania because of the common Swahili culture, where christian Chagas can marry Muslim coastal people with no problem -- just put a few cows in the deal. Where a country has no tradition of commonality despite ethnic/tribal differences, you'll have problems if the central government is weak or unstable. Tribalism generally has been a huge global problem for years now and no solution. Look at Yugoslavia, Chechnya, now the Kurds. It may be that countries that were phony agglomerations of unmixable tribes, like Iraq, will just have to break apart the way Yugoslavia did. But the Turks aren't going to sit back and watch a new Kurdistan rise up on their southern border, I can tell you that.
I agree that the world, and especially the Middle East and south Asia, is looking at some serious trouble. Obviously I believe you cannot tuck the Palestinian situation into its own box away from the broader problem of Islamic fundamentalism, and worry about it every other Tuesday. The occupation is a cancer that makes everything else worse, it's like a daily recruitment party. Muslims all over the world, even college-educated moderates, talk constantly about it. In the Muslim world, the occupation and our complete identification with it (along with the Iraq invasion) has utterly neutralized any U.S. ability to pose as a bringer of democracy or even an honest broker of global problems. Our policy in the past four years has attempted to ignore the deep, festering fractures worldwide that are caused by the Israeli occupation, and there is just so little political courage here to move aggressively to fix it.
To believe these two problems can somehow be resolved separately is fantasy. Last week Sharon said Israel had basically abandoned the road map and that they could be in the West Bank for years and years to come, and the U.S. had no response to this. Then Shaul Mofaz said they would go after Arafat again -- in response to something Hamas did. AIPAC, the neocons in the Bush administration and the Likudniks who prevail in Congress have put us into a box in the Middle East that we cannot get out of. No one will defy them -- no one has the balls. So we will be eating shit from Islamic fundamentalists for years. Bon appetit.
Sudan/Darfur has been a shithole for some time now. The Janjaweed militias have been rampaging for more than a year, butchering civilians in bunches, burning wholev illages, raping non-arab black women so they'll have arab children -- it's unthinkable. We, and the world, are coming late -- too late maybe -- to this understanding. Of course the UN should have troops there.
I think you have to be careful just saying it's some sort of rampant arabism. I don't know if the Janjaweed represent a tide of arab ethnic cleansing that's going to overwhelm Africa. They filled a void presented by an outlaw regime in Sudan that welcomes radicals. If there's a building cross-border tsunami, it is Wahhabism, Islamic fundamentalism in several countries, and we already knew that. Our strategic relationships with places like Egypt and Saudi have basically defanged our ability to insist on much there. The power of the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran spreads Shia fundamentalism all over the place-- even Zanzibar, the island Christina and I visited a few weeks ago. Fundamentalists have won the past 2 elections there, but the government declined to step down.
I was in Africa for three weeks last month and asked around frequently about the violent tribalism in places like Rwanda and Darfur. It doesn't exist in mainland Tanzania because of the common Swahili culture, where christian Chagas can marry Muslim coastal people with no problem -- just put a few cows in the deal. Where a country has no tradition of commonality despite ethnic/tribal differences, you'll have problems if the central government is weak or unstable. Tribalism generally has been a huge global problem for years now and no solution. Look at Yugoslavia, Chechnya, now the Kurds. It may be that countries that were phony agglomerations of unmixable tribes, like Iraq, will just have to break apart the way Yugoslavia did. But the Turks aren't going to sit back and watch a new Kurdistan rise up on their southern border, I can tell you that.
I agree that the world, and especially the Middle East and south Asia, is looking at some serious trouble. Obviously I believe you cannot tuck the Palestinian situation into its own box away from the broader problem of Islamic fundamentalism, and worry about it every other Tuesday. The occupation is a cancer that makes everything else worse, it's like a daily recruitment party. Muslims all over the world, even college-educated moderates, talk constantly about it. In the Muslim world, the occupation and our complete identification with it (along with the Iraq invasion) has utterly neutralized any U.S. ability to pose as a bringer of democracy or even an honest broker of global problems. Our policy in the past four years has attempted to ignore the deep, festering fractures worldwide that are caused by the Israeli occupation, and there is just so little political courage here to move aggressively to fix it.
To believe these two problems can somehow be resolved separately is fantasy. Last week Sharon said Israel had basically abandoned the road map and that they could be in the West Bank for years and years to come, and the U.S. had no response to this. Then Shaul Mofaz said they would go after Arafat again -- in response to something Hamas did. AIPAC, the neocons in the Bush administration and the Likudniks who prevail in Congress have put us into a box in the Middle East that we cannot get out of. No one will defy them -- no one has the balls. So we will be eating shit from Islamic fundamentalists for years. Bon appetit.
posted by Will @ 2/03/2005 04:47:00 PM
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