By CAROLINE B. GLICK, The Jerusalem Post
On Sunday, the southern Sudanese began voting on a referendum to secede from the Republic of Sudan and establish their own sovereign nation. By all accounts, they will soon secede from the Arab, Islamic country and form an independent African, Christian and animist state.
The consequences of their actions will reverberate around the world.
This week’s referendum takes place in accordance with the US-brokered Comprehensive Peace Treaty between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed on January 9, 2005.
The CPT officially ended the second Sudanese Civil War that began in 1983.
The South Sudanese referendum will not settle the issue of control over all of southern Sudan. Numerous flashpoints remain. Most importantly, the disposition of the town of Abyei remains undetermined. Abyei is where most of Sudan’s oil deposits are located.
Unlike the rest of the south, its population is a mix of Arabs and Africans and its residents are split over the issue of separation from Khartoum. If there is war after independence, Abyei will likely be its cause.
Abyei’s residents were supposed to vote on a referendum to determine the disposition of their town at the same time as the rest of the south. But fuelled by their conflicting interests, they could not agree on how to run the poll, and so it did not take place.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is playing a contradictory role in the South Sudanese referendum. Al-Bashir has been indicted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur.
Last week he visited South Sudan’s capital city Juba and pledged to support the referendum’s results. As he put it, “I am going to celebrate your decision, even if your decision is secession. Even after the southern state is born, we are ready in the Khartoum government to offer any technical or logistical support and training or advice – we are ready to help.”
But then, last Friday, pro-Khartoum militias attacked anti-Khartoum targets in Abyei. By Monday, 23 people had been killed. According to South Sudanese military spokesmen, militiamen captured in Abyei said they were ordered to attack by Khartoum.
MUCH OF the international discourse on southern Sudan has centered on what South Sudan’s independence means for its citizens and for Africa as a whole. And this is reasonable.
In its 54-year history, Sudan has suffered from civil war between the north and south for 39 years. Some 200,000 south Sudanese were kidnapped into slavery. Two million Sudanese have died in the wars. Four million have become refugees.
But the fact is that with the West openly supporting southern Sudanese independence, a new war’s consequences will not be limited to Sudan itself. Therefore it is worth considering why such a war is all but certain and what southern Sudanese independence means for the region and the world.
There were two main reasons that Bashir agreed to sign the peace treaty with the south Sudanese in 2005. First, his forces had lost the civil war. The south was already effectively independent.
The second reason Bashir agreed to a deal that would give eventual independence to the oil-rich south is because he feared the US.
In 2004, led by then president George W. Bush, the US cast a giant shadow throughout the world. The US military’s lightning overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime frightened US foes and encouraged US allies. The democratic wave revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon were all fuelled by the world’s belief in US’s willingness to use its power to defeat its foes.
Bashir’s regime is closely linked to al-Qaida, which he hosted from 1989 until 1995.
When the US demanded that he accept the south’s victory, he probably didn’t believe he could refuse.
Today, the US is not feared or respected as it was six years ago. And according to a recent article in the online Small Wars Journal by US Army Lt. Col. Thomas Talley, Bashir’s current dim perception of the US makes war inevitable.
Talley argues that without Abyei, South Sudan will be rendered an economically nonviable failed state. South Sudan, he claims is too weak to secure Abyei from Khartoum without outside assistance.
According to Talley, the deterioration of the global perception of US power has convinced Bashir that the US will not protect Abyei for the south and so his best bet is to invade the town or at a minimum prevent the south from securing it.
As Talley notes, for Bashir, far more than oil is at stake. If Bashir agrees to cede southern Sudan without a fight, he will be discredited both by his fellow Arab leaders and by his fellow Islamic leaders.
Arab leaders as diverse as Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi and Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal have decried South Sudan’s independence. Gaddafi warned that southern secession would be the beginning of a “contagious disease.”
Faisal called it a “dangerous move” that no member of the Arab League should support.
THE FACT of the matter is that the Arabs have reason to be concerned about what is happening in Sudan. If South Sudan becomes an independent nation, it will be the first case of rollback of Arab imperialism since World War I.
One of the central aspects of Middle Eastern politics that is overwhelmingly ignored by scholars is Arab imperialism and the role it has played in shaping the region’s politics.
Both during the post-World War I breakup of the Ottoman Empire and with the breakup of the British and French empires after World War II, British and French imperial authorities colluded with Arab imperialists to guarantee the latter’s nearly uninhibited control over the Middle East.
For the Kurds, Shi’ites, Druse, Alawites, Copts, and other non-Sunni, non-Arab, or non-Muslim populations in the region, the end of Western rule meant the end of their relative freedom.
In the case of southern Sudan, during the half century of British rule, the south was administered separately from the Arab north.
But when the British withdrew in 1956, in their haste to leave, they placed the south under Arab rule. Fearing disenfranchisement and oppression, the south began the first Sudanese civil war in 1955 – the year before independence.
There were only two exceptions to Europe’s collusion with Arab imperialists – Christian- majority Lebanon and the Palestine Mandate. In both these areas, Western powers allowed non-Muslims to take charge of territory claimed by Arab imperialists.
As the post-independence history of both Lebanon and Israel shows, the Europeans eventually attenuated their support for non-Arab governments. The French have pressured Lebanon’s Christians fairly consistently to appease the Arabs. This pressure has caused continuous Christian emigration from Lebanon which has rendered the Christians a minority in Lebanon today. And the Lebanese Christians’ attempts to appease the Arabs, opened the door for Hizbullah to take over the country for Iran.
As for Israel, in light of its failure to convince the Arabs to be appeased by its concessions and the Arabs’ failure to overrun the Jewish state, since 1973 Europe has collaborated with the Arabs in recasting reality to suit the aims of Arab imperialism.
Whereas Israel was established and repeatedly defended by the Jewish national liberation movement against the wishes of Arab imperialists, with European assistance, the Arabs have inverted history. The current Arab-European claim is that the Arab imperialist war against Israel is a Jewish imperialist war against Arabs.
AGAINST THIS backdrop of Western perfidy towards the Middle East’s non-Arab minorities, the West’s support for South Sudanese independence is nothing short of miraculous.
Unfortunately, the West’s support for South Sudan probably owes to Western ignorance rather than a newfound Western will to defy Arab imperialists. That is, it is likely that West is doing the right thing today in Sudan because it doesn’t understand the ramifications of its own policy.
If the West doesn’t understand its policy, then it is unlikely to understand the significance of a challenge to that policy by Khartoum and its allies. And if it fails to understand the significance of a challenge to its policy by Khartoum, then it is unlikely to defend its policy when it is challenged.
Against this backdrop, it is important to recall Lt. Col. Talley’s claim that Bashir will attack Abyei because he does not believe that the US will defend South Sudanese control of the border town. The shallowness of Western support for South Sudan will lead to war.
But again, it isn’t just the Arabs that will force Bashir to go to war. He also has the pan-Islamic jihadists to consider. His erstwhile friends in al-Qaida have made clear that they will not take the surrender of southern Sudan to non-Musims lying down.
Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al Zawahiri has denounced Bashir for signing the peace agreement with the south. In an article Friday in The Daily Beast, former US National Security Council official Bruce Riedel wrote that in 2009 Zawahiri called on Sudan’s Muslims to fight “a long guerilla war,” because “the contemporary Crusade has bared its fangs at you.”
Zawahiri told Bashir, “to repent and return to the straight path of Islam and jihad.”
And it is not only al-Qaida that will feel disconcerted by the south’s secession. At a time when jihadist regimes and forces throughout the Arab and Islamic world are using violence to repress Christians and other non-Muslims and force the full implementation of Sharia law, the notion that the Dar el-Islam or Muslim world is shrinking in Sudan is widely perceived as unacceptable. Islamic attacks against the West for its support for southern Sudanese independence are highly likely.
None of this means that the West should end its support for South Sudan. The South Sudanese have earned their independence in a way that most nations never have.
They deserve the support of all nations that value freedom and decency.
But what it does mean is that as they move forward, South Sudan’s leaders must recognize that the West is likely to abandon them at the first sign of trouble. They must weigh their options accordingly.
More importantly, the all but certain results of South Sudan’s independence serve as yet another reminder to the West about the nature of power, war and friendship.
Power is inextricably linked to the perception of power. You are perceived as powerful when you show you can tell friend from foe, and stand with the former against the latter.
@ dan friedman “Coming from Africa, I am surprised that your identification of Imperialism omits the past. How about, British, French, Dutch, Belgium, Spanish,German,Russian, Chinese,Portuguese and Italian versions of imperialism or might it be best to forget all of that? Forget it even if it has an enormous bearing on what is happening in the world today.Why ruin a great party?”
I don’t know what dream-world you are living in, but I can guarantee you that ordinary non-Muslim Africans do not blame British and European past imperialism for what is happening in countries like the Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria today. British and European past imperialism has no bearing in what’s happening in Sudan either today or over the past few decades – it has been brought about through Khartoum’s policy of ethnically cleansing Sudan of non-Muslims. British and European imperialism came and went and lasted a couple of hundred years and was never accompanied by ethnic cleansing, but Islamic imperialism began in the 7th century, has been responsible for the oppression and slaughter of millions over the centuries, and lingers.
So you diverted attention away from the real problem by making accusations against Britain and Europe for its past imperialism – that is exactly what the leaders of Hamas do when they shout about Israel’s “occupation” of East Jerusalem. The real cause is Islamic imperialism. Wake up!
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Coming from Africa, I am surprised that your identification of Imperialism omits the past. How about, British, French, Dutch, Belgium, Spanish,German,Russian, Chinese,Portuguese and Italian versions of imperialism or might it be best to forget all of that? Forget it even if it has an enormous bearing on what is happening in the world today.Why ruin a great party?
Arab Imperialism, Persian (Iranian) Imperialism, Hizbollah (pardon the spelling), Hamas etc are just masks and vehicles for Islamic Imperialism.
The West’s liberals, to whose tune the West’s leaders dance to, don’t have the brains or the backbone to either recognise or to stop Islamic imperialism, or support Southern Sudan beyond shouting foul from the stadium seats (and shouting foul from the stadium seats regarding the Islamic Khartoum government’s treatment of the non-Islamic Sudanese, is a great deal more than what Israel gets from the West’s liberals).
Unlike the liberals whose tunes they dance to, the West’s leaders are indeed aware of Islamic Imperialism, but unless they regard any particular manifestation of Islamic imperialism as a sufficient threat to the West, they couldn’t care less – whether it’s Southern Sudan, Lebanon, Israel or any other nation which falls victim to it. They’ve proved over and over that Arab oil is more important to them than anything else.
I don’t know why anyone thinks the West’s leaders underestimate Arab attitudes toward the cessation of Southern Sudan. The fact is, the only reason the West’s leaders like Bush and others got themselves involved and started putting pressure on Khartoum, was because the West’s media suddenly woke up to the gradual genocide of non-Islamic Sudanese – and that after it had been going on for decades. In the case of Southern Sudan there was a knee-jerk reaction born out of a need to be seen to be principled enough to stand up against Islamic imperialism (the way they stood up to Soviet communist imperialism during the cold war).
But they don’t really care. Israelis put far too much trust in its “ally” the U.S, in my opinion. It’s only because of the need to continue to receive the vote of a strong Christian Zionist element in the U.S that they still pretend to be an ally of Israel.
But that’s just my opinion, and I’m born in Africa.
I meant, of course, “the return of Iraq [to the Arab camp] has been more than compensated for by the loss of Sudan”. The spam-bot cut me off before I could edit the post. The point is, of course, that this is not the beginning of the Arab decline but merely a continuation of it.
My comment was swallowed by the bot.
The Arab imperialist expansion ended around 1982. In 1975, the Spanish were forced to leave Western Sahara; the Brits had quit Aden in 1967, and the French Algeria in 1962. In 1979, the Israelis were compelled to quit Sinai. They suffered further losses in Gaza in 2005; but American occupation of Iraq and the Gulf states more than tilted the momentum against the Arabs. Israel was at its height in 1982, having captured half of Lebanon, and has been in territorial decline since then. Of course, the Americans are in the slow process of leaving Iraq, but the return of Iraq will, as Caroline Glick pointed out, more than compensate the West; and even Iraq might not revert to the Arabs, but could end up a puppet of Iran. Besides loss of sovereignty since 1982, the mainstay of the Arabs, namely, oil, has been leaking away from them. Most of the Arab oilfields operating today began producing before 1982; since then, exploitation of new fields outside of the area have been competing with them. Even in their own back yard, the Israelis are overtaking them in new petroleum finds.
On the military front, it could also be noted that whereas the non-Arab Iranians and Pakistanis have been advancing in nuclear weapons programs, the Arabs have had only setbacks since the 1980s — first, with the destruction of the Iraqi reactor by the Israelis, then with the voluntary dismantling of Libya’s nuclear program, and most recently with the destruction of the Syrian reactor. Most Arab states were supported by the Soviets into the 1980s; but now they, as well as the Israelis, are largely pawns of the US. The Americans are opposed by the Iranians (non-Arabs), and also by Al Qaeda. Whereas the Soviet Union propped up regimes in the area, though, Al Qaeda has been destroying them: In their wake, they have left desolate lands such as Somalia, Afghanistan and now Sudan.
Considering all the above, I would have to take issue with Caroline that the pending loss of South Sudan is some sort of BEGINNING of trouble for the Arabs: They’ve been in trouble for three decades now, and there is no end in sight. In the near future, the real troublers of the Middle East will not be the Arabs, but outsiders: The Iranians, the Turks, and eventually the Europeans and Americans, and perhaps others. I don’t expect the Arabs to lay down and die without a fight, though; and it is worth noting that the Jews have been in decline right along with them.