August 15, 2007
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Oh Darfur!
By Hussain Abdul-Hussain

WASHINGTON: We Arabs seem we just don’t care about Darfur.

Politics aside, most of us have been raised to value the importance of arriving at a fair peace solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We believe Israel has oppressed the Palestinians, no matter who started it, and that’s why we went to wars with the Jewish State. Palestinian rights have always been a debt we owe, not only to our Palestinian brethren, but also to humanity at large.

But inasmuch as Palestinian rights dominate our thought, media and politics, we just fail to notice the atrocities that our rulers – the Arab regimes – have committed against the minorities that live among us. Darfur is just a case in point.

So far 200,000 people have perished and close to two millions displaced in Darfur while Arab diplomacy seems unable to prevent any of the atrocities of Khartoum, just like the Arab world remained silent as the Saddam Hussein regime massacred Iraqi Shiites of the south and the Kurds of the north, killing some 200,000 Kurds in the late 80s and early 90s.

In Syria too, the Arab regime has oppressed the Kurdish minority. Names of Kurdish villages are being Arabized while Kurdish lands are being settled with Arabs as Syrian Kurds have been stripped of their proper citizenship rights.

In Algeria the ruling Arab dictatorship has so far withheld the rights of the Amazigh often forcing the Arab language and culture on them.

In Egypt, the Muslim population – more than the ruling regime – has been oppressing the Christian Copts, who have been living in that country since ancient times. For its part, the Egyptian regime is oppressing both communities.

In other Arab states where the population is ethnically and religiously homogenous, like in Tunisia, the ruling autocrat has displayed utmost tyranny by strangling the press and oppressing the opposition.

In the Arab world, of the 22 states member of the Arab League, only one, Mauritania, has recently transformed itself into a democracy while Lebanon strives to protect its embattled democracy under pressure from its neighboring Syrian autocracy.

In Iraq, the population seems to have failed to grasp the concept of democracy. Four years after having been given their once-in-a-lifetime chance to get rid of their tyrant, Iraqis today look preoccupied with settling scores amongst themselves over their never-ending sectarian feuds.

The rest of the Arab countries simply live under autocrats, or to put it mildly, under regimes whose tenures are open-ended. Thankfully, the tyranny of these regimes varies from the more merciful “enlightened despots” to the merciless military dictators thus giving the peoples of some Arab states, under the more gracious rulers, the opportunity to escape the seemingly never-ending domestic genocides.

But the Arab world has hit the bottom since in nearly no one of these states there seems to be a viable alternative. Whenever an Arab dictator is deposed like in Iraq, or his influence over his neighboring country diminishes like in the case of Syria over Lebanon, these countries plunge into civil wars. At best, the Arab dictator would be replaced like in the case of the Palestinian Authority, or is ready to be replaced like in Egypt, by even more intolerant Islamic radical regimes fashioned after the notorious Taliban and Iranian rules.

Who to blame and how to get the Arabs out of their Ages of Darkness? Successive US administrations and a number of American intellectuals have been fascinated with the idea of blaming the Arab peoples for this “civilization” failure. The majority of the Arabs and some of their regimes, on the other side of the globe, blame colonialism and imperialism – that is the European world powers and their succeeding American superpower – for causing and sponsoring all of the Arab troubles. Only a few on both sides of the globe realize that none of these accusations are completely true. It is rather a complex combination of these two ideas that has taken the Arab countries to where they stand today.

Accordingly, the way out of Arab misery is not simple. But from an Arab perspective, it should certainly start from “knowing thyself.”

It should start with us, Arabs, apologizing to our Kurdish minorities for the suffering Saddam once caused them.

It should also start from the point where we Arabs admit to the atrocities happening in Darfur now and therefore rally to end them.

It should start from the point where we, the Arab Muslims, realize that our countries belong to their citizens of all faiths and ethnicities whether Christians, Jews, Pagans, Kurds or Amzigh.

Yet as we strive to reconcile ourselves to the values of tolerance, we should keep in mind that Darfur is a genocide-in-the-making and that we better act before it’s too late. History has given us so many chances for redemption and we have so far missed all of them. Let’s start with saving Darfur so that we rescue what is left of our Arab humanity.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a freelance journalist.