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Date Posted: 13:27:25 07/04/04 Sun
Author: Weird_Engima
Author Host/IP: 172.163.150.93
Subject: Sudan attacks rooted in slavery

Sudan attacks rooted in slavery

Attitudes established through subjugation cited as cause of violence

ELLEN KNICKMEYER
Associated Press

DAKAR, Senegal - Along ancient Saharan trade routes, 1,300 years of shared history that have mingled the faiths, cultures and skin tones of Arabs and Africans have left another, more vicious legacy.

Arab-African slavery has endured as long as the two peoples have been together, leaving black Africans fighting perceptions of themselves as lesser beings, and of Arabs as the civilizing, conquering force.

The old roles are playing out at their most extreme in Sudan's Darfur region. Arab horsemen clutching AK-47s raze non-Arab African villages and drive off and kill the villagers, in what rights groups call an ethnic cleansing campaign backed by Sudan's Arab-led government.

In Sudan, experts say similar racism is the spark setting fire to Darfur. Up to 80,000 black African villagers are believed to have died. Many have been slain by Arab Janjaweed nomads competing with them for a fertile zone shrinking under desertification, and by a minority Arab government accustomed to keeping power by killing opponents.

With more than 1 million displaced, U.S. officials project that 300,000 of Darfur's non-Arab Africans will die by the end of the year.

"You, the black women, we will exterminate you," Amnesty International quoted one 20-year-old black African woman as telling them, repeating the words of the Janjaweed who abducted the women of her village in September 2003 and raped them for days.

Washington Post interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Janjaweed were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women.

"They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, `Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,' " said Sawela Suliman, 22, who was raped and beaten. "They said, `You get out of this area and leave the child when it's made.' "

The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and their fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child's ethnicity attaches to the ethnicity of the father.

"It's systematic," an aid worker said. "Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture. They want more Arab babies to take the land. The scary thing is that I don't think we realize the extent of how widespread this is yet."

With power and land at issue, Sudan's central government "is stoking racial and ethnic animus more than it ever has been in Darfur history," said Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and a leading academic expert on Sudan.

In southern Sudan, the common word for non-Arab Africans among the Arab elite is "abid," or slave. The general word for non-Arab Africans in Darfur, in western Sudan, is "zurga," whose meaning is "closer to `n-----' than `colored,' " Reeves said.

Across the Sahara and its edges, the Sahel, most of the co-existence is peaceful, linked by shared cultures and by Islam.

Arabs and most Western academics agree that the Arab form of African slavery, dating back at least as far as the 6th-century Arab conquest, generally has been less brutal and more open to advancement by slaves than the Western version.

African slaves largely have labored as servants in Arab households rather than farmhands on plantations, making for easier lives and less submerging of identity. They often ate and slept side by side with their masters, sometimes married into their families -- and occasionally even came to rule a Muslim kingdom.

But slavery ended in the West more than a century ago. It persists in the Arab world, in the West African nation of Mauritania and in Sudan, human rights groups and Western governments say.

Arab-African differences have boiled up in recent years in places other than Sudan.

In the 1990s, Mauritania's current leader oversaw a bloody purge of black Africans from the Arab-dominated nation's military.

In Mauritania today, some Arab officials routinely refer to even educated black African professionals as "slave people."

Sudan long has been one of the anchors of the Arab-African slave trade. Its appetite for slaves remains such that in neighboring Uganda, a group calling itself the Lord's Resistance Army is alleged to trade African children to the Sudanese for an automatic weapon each.

Ironically, in Darfur and elsewhere, intermarriage between Arab and non-Arab Africans over the centuries has become so common that physical differences have ebbed or disappeared. The skin of the Arab Janjaweed militiamen is as dark as the African villagers they hunt down.

"They would say these are not real Muslims ...," said Richard Cornwall, at the South Africa-based Institute for Strategic Studies.

"Many generations of intermarriage have ensured there's not really a physiological difference," Reeves said. Often, however, the Janjaweed "clings to the notion of Arab racial identity. It's racism where there is no racial difference."

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The WASHINGTON Post and AP reporter Nafi Diouf contributed.

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