Outrage over the dictator poised to lead Africa
Telegraph
16/01/2006
Sudan's military dictator is likely to become chairman of the African Union and the continent's face to the world despite waging war in Darfur, it emerged yesterday. President Omar al-Bashir, who seized power in a coup and harboured Osama bin Laden for five years in the 1990s, will host a meeting of African leaders in Sudan next Monday. They are due in Khartoum for a summit of the African Union, an alliance of all 53 countries in the continent. They are likely to outrage human rights groups by electing Mr Bashir as their chairman and Africa's most prominent statesman for the next 12 months.
...
Mr Bashir is expected to be elected even though his Arab-dominated regime is conducting a brutal campaign against rebels in Sudan's western region of Darfur, where almost two million people have been forced into squalid refugee camps. ... Some 300,000 people, about five per cent of the population, are believed to have died in Darfur since the onset of war three years ago.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/30/wturab30.xml
Man who harboured bin Laden is lodestar for terrorists
Telegraph
30/01/2006
Interview with the founder of the Sudanese Islamist state, Hassan al-Turabi. An interesting study in repulsive hypocrisy.
My god, the UN is a crock of shit.
Silent terror of the Darfur refugee
Telegraph
06/02/2006
Yet as long ago as July 30, 2004, the UN Security Council passed resolution 1556 giving Sudan 30 days to disarm the Janjaweed. Since then, nine more resolutions have been passed on Darfur. When the 30-day deadline was set, Darfur had 1.4 million refugees and the number of dead stood at about 70,000. Today, another 600,000 refugees fill the camps - 1.8 million inhabit those in Darfur and another 200,000 have fled into Chad. Estimates for the total killed have reached 300,000 - five per cent of Darfur's population.
Massacres suspect let into Britain
The Sunday Times
March 12, 2006
A SENIOR Sudanese security official blamed for massacres in the Darfur region of the country was allowed into Britain for medical treatment last week. Salah Abdallah Gosh, director of the national security and intelligence service in Khartoum, obtained a British visa even though a United Nations panel has recommended that he and 16 other officials be banned from travelling abroad.
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The British government’s willingness to allow Gosh into the country has astonished critics of the Sudanese regime. “Mr Gosh has had treatment while thousands are dying and getting access to no medical treatment at all,” said Malcolm Bruce, the Liberal Democrat chairman of the Commons select committee on international development.
Nobody else seems to care about Sudan. Maybe this story will inspire more.
Sudan man forced to 'marry' goat
BBC News
24 February 2006
A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal. The goat's owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders. They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi. "We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together," Mr Alifi said.
Mr Alifi, Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat.
"When I asked him: 'What are you doing there?', he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up". Mr Alifi then called elders to decide how to deal with the case. "They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife," Mr Alifi told the newspaper.
Well it's about time someone took a stand in favour of family values. It's better than lots of unwed goats living off welfare!
At the risk of sounding like Senator Palantine claiming to have "learned more [...] from riding in taxi cabs than in all the limos in the country" (I can never remember is it, 'We are the people', or 'We are the people'?) I'd like to share the thoughts of a Sudanese minicab driver who recently ferried me home.
When he told me he was from Sudan I replied with something rather weak and general like 'Hmmm, there's a lot of problems there as I understand it.' He surprised me by saying that in his opinion things had improved dramatically in recent years. Yes, the situation in Darfur was bad, but he seemed to see it as a small regional conflict. (By the way, I'm not saying that is the case, just reporting his attitude.) Now, comes the interesting part. You know how we tend to think no one gives a shit about Sudan? Well, his attitude was that the West (and China) do give a shit, but only because of large oil reserves. The cabbie pointed to Uganda and Zimbabwe (not literally as I'm not sure either of us knew in which direction they lay from the A104) as countries with real problems that the West would not get involved in because there were no valuable resources, or at least no oil.
I'm not really making a point here. It's just a sketch of one conversation. The man might have been insane (though he seemed rational enough.) I offer it merely to share an alternative perspective.
Incidentally, we went on to talk about slavery (as you do) and I tentatively put it to him that slavery was still ongoing in Africa and that Africans had a long history of enslaving each other before (and after) any Europeans or Americans got involved. He took my point, but said that what I failed to understand was that slavery between Africans still allowed for the possibility to become more than a 'slave'; you could effectively become part of the family, part of the tribe. In a way it sounded a bit like the 'freedman' of Ancient Rome. Anyway, no point as such here either (I'm begin to worry about the frequency with which I use that phrase). Just thought the exchange was worth passing on.
So the African record on slavery (it still goes on, but you might get emancipated) scores over the Western (and especially the British) record (we gave it up and forcibly stamped it out as morally reprehensible where we could)?
Such a comment might put your cab fare up though.
To be fair to the cabbie, I don't think he was a fan of inter-African slavery, but I do think he felt that Euro/US slaves were worse treated than African slaves. I have no idea if this was the case, but I got a sense that he wasn't very comfortable with any kind of moral equivalency. It was almost as if his view on inter-African slavery was that it was 'between family'. Anyway, I'm making a lot of assumptions.
His fare was very reasonable.
JSL's view of life as a African slave rings much truer than that of the cabbie, but that's not to say conditions were that great as a Western slave, at least until the Royal Navy's activities choked off slave supply and made their treatment more important.
For an entertaining and informative account of what it's like to be both slaver and slave, I can only recommend Flash for Freedom!. You will *not* regret reading this book. Brilliant stuff.
By the precedent of the Somerset case (which ruled that since Parliament had never established slavery in England, all slaves who set foot there should become free).
I didn't know about the Somerset case. That's very interesting. Here's a nice quote I found from that same case (all the way back in 1569):
"The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it."
I find this quote very, very moving.
Personally, I always wondered why England doesn't do more to celebrate the achievement of abolishing slavery and the slave trade (the very first country to do so as far as I know).
If anyone's interested in the cabbie's comments about China and Sudan then this is probably worth a look:
The dragon and Darfur
Sanou Mbaye
[...]
Sudan, which supplies 7% of China's total oil imports, has benefited from the largest Chinese investments. The China National Petroleum Corporation holds a 40% stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Company and has invested $3 billion in refinery and pipeline construction. Moreover, 4,000 Chinese People Liberation Army troops are deployed in southern Sudan guarding an oil pipeline.
Read on...
It's got Islamism and cabbies in it, so in what other impdec thread could this possibly belong?
Don't Bring That Booze into My Taxi
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
October 10, 2006
Follow up to the cabbie-booze story:
No Islamic Law in Minnesota, for Now
by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
October 16, 2006
The Fink alerts us to this from Harry's Place. It's not the main post so much or the Tatchell article I'm directing you to; it's the comments - read them and find out who is really responsible for Darfur hitting the headlines.
I particularly admire this bit: "Sudan's regime ... has denied that rape is even possible in Muslim societies".
Militia 'free to rape in Darfur camps'
By David Blair
11/12/2006
Sudan's authorities have not convicted a single man for rape in Darfur despite a "systematically conducted" campaign of sexual violence, human rights groups said yesterday. Women living in refugee camps scattered across the war-torn region of western Sudan are vulnerable to assault, often carried out by the pro-regime "Janjaweed" militia. Gunmen lurk on the outskirts of the camps, frequently raping women who venture away from their shacks in search of firewood. But Sudan's regime, which has denied that rape is even possible in Muslim societies, has failed to convict a single offender since the Darfur's war began four years ago.
Sudanese goat wife pops her hooves
Tragic death ends marriage made at the point of a shotgun
The caprine wife of a Sudanese goat molester has died suddenly after more than a year of marriage, the BBC reports. ... Rose reportedly died "after choking on a plastic bag she swallowed as she was eating scraps on the streets of Juba". She leaves one kid, a 100 per cent goat male, suggesting infidelity may have played a part in her ejection from the marital home.
This is a deeply shocking and profoundly important article that you should try to get everyone you know to read. I'd love to hear what the MCB, for example, have to say in response.
Acknowledgements to Dan for finding it, and for being too lazy to blog it himself.
Muslims seek a haven in Israel after their exodus from Darfur
The Times
By Yonit Farago and Stephen Farrell
June 6, 2006
IN 2000 Sanka, a 30-year-old Sudanese Muslim, fled his village in Darfur after the infamous Janjawid — Arabs loyal to the Khartoum Government — arrived on horseback with machineguns, killing his father and stealing camels and cattle.
Sanka rode on a tobacco lorry to the town of Niala, where he waited in vain for his family. He then headed east, looking for work, but was rounded up and beaten by the Sudanese police. He scraped together the money for a one-way airfare to Egypt, and he spent the next four years drifting around Cairo and Aswan, until he was arrested in late 2004.
Facing expulsion to Sudan, he bribed his way out of custody and took a bus to the Sinai Desert bordering Israel. He wandered lost for 24 hours, un- til he stumbled across the blue-and-white flag of an Israeli military border post. “I expected to get shot in the head. If that had happened I would have said to them, ‘God bless you’. Everything was so hopeless for me,” he told The Times yesterday.
Sanka was not shot. The Israelis patched him up and held him for a month before attempting to send him back to Egypt. The Egyptians refused to take him. He spent a year in an Israeli prison before being sent to a kibbutz, while his fate was decided. “Sudan is the enemy of Israel. You are a citizen of that country, so we can’t release you,” a judge told him.
Sanka — not his real name — is not alone in his extraordinary five-year odyssey from an Arab state to a Jewish one, and from a country in the grip of one genocide to a nation built on the ashes of another.
He was merely a pioneer, and ever more Sudanese — Muslims and Christians — have followed in his footsteps, desperate to escape the conflicts in Darfur and southern Sudan that have cost more than two million lives.
There are 220 Sudanese refugees being held in Israeli prison cells, army bases and remote kibbutzes. The Israeli Government believes that many more may have entered the country undetected, using Beduin smugglers to take them across the unfenced border. The influx has accelerated sharply since December.
Technically the Sudanese are citizens of what Israel deems an enemy state and cannot stay. But their cause has been taken up by Holocaust campaigners and civil rights groups, who argue that Israel, of all countries, should give refuge to people fleeing genocide. “We cannot ignore refugees of the Darfur genocide when they knock on our door,” Avner Shalev, the director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, said. He has written to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, comparing their plight to Jews who in vain sought sanctuary from European countries during the Second World War.
Indeed, their Sudanese passports are stamped “all countries except Israel”, and they face execution if their Government learns that they have even visited the Zionist state. Civil rights groups have filed High Court petitions and cite on their letterheads the Biblical injunction: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus XXII, 20). They accuse the Government of violating international law prohibiting discrimination in asylum policies.
Michael Bavly, representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Israel, said that the law should distinguish “between an enemy citizen who is a perpetrator and an enemy citizen who is a victim”.
Mark Regev, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that there was no question of the Sudanese being sent back to a regime that could kill them. But Israel was not their first country of refuge, and the small Jewish state could not cope with a flood of asylum-seekers. “Israel has no desire to send these people back to the terrible place they came from,” he said. “We are working with the UNHCR to try to find a humanitarian solution for these people. In the meantime . . . we are trying to make the conditions of their stay in this country as pleasant as possible.”
As the debate rages, many of the Sudanese sit in the Maasiyahu prison or army bases. Others, such as Sanka, have been released to isolated kibbutzes, where they are free to work but their movements are restricted.
Sanka whiles away the time working as a gardener and reading Great Expectations. “The Israeli Government should understand that we are not the people they should be afraid of,” he said.
“We are not the people who hate others because of their religion or race. But because of the way the Government of Sudan behaves, everything is about Islam.”
40 lashes or 6 months in prison, apparently.
Sudan arrests UK teacher for teddy bear blasphemy
CNN
26/11/07
Sudan has arrested a British teacher for insulting faith and religion, the British Foreign Office said Monday. Gillian Gibbons, 54, is being held by police in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, and has not been charged, British officials said.
Numerous media reports say Gibbons was arrested after allowing her class of 7-year-olds to name a teddy bear "Mohammed." That could be seen as an insult to the Prophet Mohammed, the reports said. Blasphemy is punishable with 40 lashes under Islamic Sharia law, Britain's Press Association news agency reported.
Gibbons asked the children to pick a name for the bear as part of a lesson on animal habits at Unity High School, PA said. A British Embassy spokesman in Khartoum was quoted as saying the naming of the bear did not cause immediate trouble. "The children chose the name because it is very common here," the spokesman told PA. "This happened in September and the parents did not have a problem with it."
Unity director Robert Boulos told Reuters news agency that Gibbons was arrested Sunday at her home on school grounds after a number of parents made a complaint to Sudan's Ministry of Education. He said she had since been charged with "blasphemy," an offense he said was punishable with up to three months in prison and a fine, Reuters.com reported. Gibbons left the northwestern English city of Liverpool for Sudan in July, PA said.
A family spokeswoman told the agency: "I have spoken with her children and they do not want to say anything and aggravate the situation over there." Boulos told Reuters he had decided to shut the school until January for fear of reprisals. The school on its Web site calls itself a "British international school" teaching children aged 4 to 18. "This is a very sensitive issue," Boulos was quoted as saying on Reuters.com. "We are very worried about her safety," he added. "This was a completely innocent mistake. Miss Gibbons would have never wanted to insult Islam."
Very interesting to hear Ed Husain on the Teddy Bear story.
Radio 4 Today Program
29/11/07
0810 Gillian Gibbons, the teacher arrested in Sudan over the name of a teddy bear, appeared in court this morning.
Listen - report begins at 8'48, Ed Husain at 14'46 | Permalink
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Not Child's Play - the teddy-bear intifada
An NRO Symposium
December 3, 2007
There is rioting in Sudanese streets calling for the death of a woman over a teddy bear named Mohammed. What can we in the West possibly do with this — nationally, individually? How do we help? What must we learn from it? National Review Online asked a group of experts and commentators.
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Daniel Pipes' Weblog
Not Child's Play: The teddy-bear intifada
December 3, 2007
Darfur militia leader joins Sudan government
Guardian Unlimited
Monday January 21, 2008
A tribal sheikh described as "the poster child for Janjaweed atrocities in Darfur" has been given a senior government position by the Sudanese authorities.
What a truly awful place Sudan is.
Sudan women 'lashed for trousers'
BBC News
13 July 2009
Screaming woman publicly flogged by laughing policemen in shocking video from Sudan
Daily Mail
14th December 2010
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