Showing posts with label Sudan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sudan. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Sudan’s Aerial Bombing Aims at Churches in Nuba Mountains


After Khartoum denied that it had bombed civilians earlier this month, Sudanese aerial strikes last week were aimed at church buildings and schools in Kauda, South Kordofan state, a humanitarian aid worker said.

Antonov airplanes dropped bombs on Thursday and Friday (March 22 and 23), destroying some houses and cattle near the church buildings and schools but causing no casualties, he said.

Humanitarian agencies consider the Islamic government’s targeting of civilians in the Nuba Mountains, which has a large Christian population, an “ethnic cleansing” against non-Arab peoples in the multi-ethnic state, with the added incentive of ridding the area of Christians, he said.


Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Sudanese Bishops warn of a return to Civil War


Sudan's Catholic bishops have issued a formal warning about the threat of a return to full-scale civil war and have appealed for urgent food and medicine, stating that thousands of people are being terrorised by aerial bombardment.

Referring to spreading violence in different regions in central and eastern Sudan, and newly created South Sudan, the bishops' statement urges the international community to intervene to stop the fighting.

Friday, November 4, 2011

A letter to President Obama: Help Free Blind Boy's Mother and Eradicate Slavery in Sudan


Christian Solidarity International (CSI) urged President Obama to address the persistence of slavery in Northern Sudan. The appeal – conveyed in a letter from CSI-USA's CEO, Dr. John Eibner – follows testimony given to Congress by a former Southern Sudanese slave, Ker Aleu Deng, on October 4.

Ending Arab slavery


My life has been profoundly changed by a blind teenage boy. His name is Ker Deng. He belongs to the Dinka tribe in southern Sudan.
Arab raiders from northern Sudan enslaved Ker in his infancy. His mother later told him how they were captured and forced to leave their home in southern Sudan. Many of their relatives and neighbors, especially men, were killed. Homes were burned. Cows and goats were stolen. Ker and his mother were tied to a camel and taken to the north as booty of war.

Ker will always be haunted by the vivid memories of abuse meted out by his sadistic master: frequent beatings and death threats, racial abuse, forced conversion to Islam and, of course, ultimate denial of his humanity.

His meals consisted mostly of horse food. At night, he slept with the goats.

His mother faced indescribable abuse as their master’s sex slave. I’ve spoken to dozens of freed Sudanese slaves, who have told me that rape and beatings are frequent, and that most women’s genitals are mutilated.

Christians face increasing hostility in North Sudan


Constructing worship buildings more difficult since secession of South Sudan

Emboldened by government calls for a Sudan based on Islamic law since the secession of South Sudan, Muslims long opposed to a church near Khartoum have attacked Christians trying to finish constructing their building, sources said.

The Sudanese Church of Christ (SCOC) congregation in Omdurman West, across the Nile River from Khartoum, has continued to meet for Sunday worship in a building without a roof in spite of opposition from area Muslims and local authorities, the sources told Compass. Claiming that Christianity was no longer an accepted religion in the country, Muslims in the Hay al Sawra, Block 29 area of Omdurman West on Aug. 5 attacked SCOC members who were constructing the church building, the sources said.

“We do not want any presence of churches in our area,” shouted members of the mob as they threw stones at the Christians, the sources said.


Monday, October 31, 2011

Shar'ia advances as Sudan's constitution is rewritten

WORTHYNEWS

Sudanese leader Omer Hassan Al-Bashir is rewriting his country's constitution in order to implement shar'ia (Islamic) law.

"This new law is going to affect a significant number of Christians who live in places like Khartoum," said Jonathan Rach, International Christian Concern's North Africa specialist. "There are still a significant number of Christians in Sudan ... If Al-Bashir introduces this shar'ia law and if he's going to go ahead and adopt an entirely Islamic constitution, Christians and other non-Muslims who live in Sudan will be treated like second-class citizens; they will be dhimmis and they will not have full rights in the freedom of religion."

Racho said Al-Bashir's move towards shar'ia shows that the government of Sudan hasn't learned anything from its recent loss of the South.

"The government of Sudan should realize that the reason the South seceded ... was because of the shar'ia law, and now they're repeating the same mistake."

"Bashir has always embraced shar'ia as good government," said Global Response Network Founder and President Tom Zurowski. "Shar'ia has been the very ethos of Bashir and the North for a long, long time. People on the ground in the South have known this right along (that) the Islamization of Sudan has been the goal of Bashir's government for years."

Zurowski said al-Bashir is now facing the realities of having a new Christian neighbor while having to deal with its other African Islamic countries.

"If Bashir wants the backing of neighboring Arab nations, he must fully embrace shar'ia, or be seen as a weak leader among other Arab countries," he said. "His ego and arrogance will not allow for that."

South Sudan's independence took a major portion of Sudan's oil revenues, so Al-Bashir is now facing a new economic reality. The Sudan Tribune reported Al-Bashir told government officials that spending reductions are now a priority so as to relieve mounting economic pressures, but Racho is asking the international community to put even more pressure on Sudan to ensure safety for its Christians.

"We (ICC) want the international community to put pressure on Sudan," he said. "One of the important things about Sudan is its reliance on the international community. We also want the American Christian community to know that the secession of the South doesn't end the plight of Christians, so they should continue to advocate on behalf of the Christians in Sudan."

Monday, July 11, 2011

Jihad In Sudan Redux

On July 9, the mostly Christian South Sudan will legally and officially separate from the Muslim north and become a new, independent and free country. Fearing loss of its iron clad grip of other non-Arab regions in the north, whose people likely envy the freedoms won by the South, Arab/Islamist leaders in Khartoum have launched a military assault on the Nuba Mountains, a mixed Christian, animist and Muslim region. Reports from the area are gruesomely reminiscent of the decades-long assault Khartoum waged on the South. These include forced conversions to Islam, mass displacement, bombing of civilians and mass slaughter.
 
Anticipating the effects of Christians winning freedom from his rule already in December of 2010 Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity, laid out a vision for the future of his nation:
 
"If south Sudan secedes, we will change the constitution and at that time there will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity... Sharia (Islamic law) and Islam will be the main source for the constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language", he told a group of supporters.

Al-Bashir made his statement as the people of Southern Sudan were preparing to vote in the referendum that secured their imminent independence. With less than a week left before South secedes, al-Bashir is determined to fulfill his promise not by changing the constitution, but through murder and ethnic cleansing.
 
After concluding a military occupation of the disputed border region of Abyei,  which resulted in the expulsion of more than 100,000 (non-Arabs, mostly from the Dinka tribe), Sudanese army and government-sponsored Arab militias attacked the African tribes of Nuba Mountains, a region situated in the Northern state of Southern Kordofan. Reports indicate indiscriminate bombings of civilians and a systematic killing of the black-skinned Nuba, which forced estimated 100,000 to abandon their homes. One report described "door to door executions of completely innocent and defenseless civilians, often by throat cutting."  Another suggested the government might be using chemical weapons. The Bishop of Nuba Mountains described the events as genocide: "Once again we are facing the nightmare of genocide of our people in a final attempt to erase our culture and society from the face of the earth." A well-respected Sudan analyst concurred.
 
Nuba embody the diversity of culture and religion that al-Bashir wants to destroy. Numbering some 1.5 million, Nuba people are Christians, Muslims and the followers of traditional faiths. It is not uncommon to find the adherents of all faiths within a single family. Comprising from more than fifty tribes and speaking an equal number of languages, the Nuba have an incredibly diverse culture.
 
Just like the Africans of the South, the Nuba have faced racial discrimination from the Arab governments and elites of the North, which led them to join Sudan's People Liberation Army (SPLA) at the beginning of the second outbreak of Sudan's Civil War (1983-2005). The government's response, especially after the Islamist regime of Al-Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi seized power in 1989, escalated into the campaign of annihilation. The Nuba people lost their lands; they were murdered, starved and enslaved.  In what some  called genocide in the name of Islam, all Nuba-Christians, animists and even Muslims-were targeted for eradication; estimated 200,000 perished.
 
In the crackdown that reach the Nuba Mountains even before the outbreak of the war, Christian clergy was murdered; churches burned, while Christian children were abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and often forced to join the Sudanese army to fight against their own people. In the current attack Christian places of worship are also being destroyed.  In January 1992, South Kordofan governor, Lt. General al-Hussein officially declared the war a "jihad." Shortly after, in 1993, the religious leaders of Southern Kordofan issued a fatwa that legalized it:
 
"The rebels in South Kordofan and Southern Sudan started their rebellion against the state and declared war against the Moslems. Their main aims are: killing the Moslems, desecrating mosques, burning and defiling the Koran, and raping Moslem women. In so doing, they are encouraged by the enemies of Islam and Moslems: these foes are the Zionists, the Christians and the arrogant people who provide them with provisions and arms. Therefore, an insurgent who was previously a Moslem is now an apostate; and a non-Moslem is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them."
 
Following this religious ruling, Sudanese soldiers and allied militias began killing Nuba imams, burning mosques and desecrating Korans. Today, the same actors praise God as they kill the innoncent.
 
To destroy the social fabric of the Nuba society the government forces and the Arab militiamen systematically raped thousands of Nuba women, including girls as young as nine. The raping took place during abductions, in military camps, and in so-called "peace camps." One victim, a 17 years-old girl named Fawzia Jibreel, told African Rights:
 
"After dark, the soldiers came and took the girls to their rooms, and raped them. I was taken and raped... When you have been taken, the soldier who has taken you will do what he wants, then he will go out of the room, you will stay, and another one will come...Every day the raping continued... It is impossible to count the men who raped me. Perhaps in a week I would have only one day of rest. Sometimes one man will take me for the whole night. Sometimes I will be raped by four or five men per day or night; they will just be changing one for another."
 
The policy of rape is being used in the Nuba Mountains once again.
 
On July 1, during Friday prayers in a mosque in Khartoum, al-Bashir said that he ordered his soldiers to continue "cleaning" South Kordofan.  As history shows all those who care about the plight of Nuba and other Africans of Sudan must take his words seriously and act to stop his religious genocide.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Sudan orders UN out of restive south

Sudan has ordered the official termination of the UN's north-south peacekeeping mission on July 9, the date the south will declare full independence, Khartoum’s official news agency said.

“Sudan has officially notified the United Nations of the end of the term of the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) on July 9,” Suna said in a statement late on Saturday.

Violence in the contested border region of Abyei following the occupation on May 21 by Khartoum’s troops and tanks have raised fears the two sides could tip back into civil war.

Heavy fighting has forced thousands of people to flee southwards.

MORE

Monday, May 23, 2011

The Jihad in Sudan enters a new phase: North Sudanese troops seize South Sudanese border town of Abiye

'It comes weeks before the South is due to become independent and follows fierce fighting between the government's Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the rebel's (sic: that should be "rebels' " - but why is AFP still calling them rebels in any case, given that within weeks they will be the lawful armed forces of an independent nation? - CM) Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).

"The SAF have entered Abyei, there is still fighting but they have come with tanks, they are shooting and shooting", SPLA spokesman Philip Aguer said.

"Our police have been fighting but the SAF have sent many soldiers in", he said, speaking by phone from Juba, the capital of South Sudan.

The United States condemned the Abyei offensive and called on Sudan's armed forces "to immediately cease all offensive operations in Abyei and withdraw its forces from Abyei".

And if they don't?  That condemnation, and that call, had better be backed up by the wielding of a great big stick, with force and with precision.  We are confronted by Muslim North Sudan, in an act of brazen aggression, testing the non-Muslim world, to see whether it [North Sudan] can get away with murder and robbery in broad daylight against the new nation of South Sudan, as once it got away with mass murder and robbery when those South Sudanese were within its jurisdiction. It is in South Sudan, not in Libya or Afghanistan or Iraq, that the resources of non-Muslim nations such as France, Britain and the USA stand a real chance of halting and rolling back the advance of the Global Jihad.

What matters in Africa most of all is that the Ummah, or Mohammedan mob, is steadily grinding its way southward into majority-Christian and animist black Africa, killing, enslaving, corrupting, destroying good things and making bad things worse.  And that the free nations - many of the unfree are backing the ummah - should desire to see it stopped, and muster the will to assist the non-Muslim Africans to do so.

Abyei's furture is the most sensitive of a raft of issues that the two sides in Sudan are struggling to agree on before the south is recognised as an independent state in July

News of the Sudanese army breakthrough came after reports of an increase in fighting.

'Shooting broke out late Thursday as UN peacekeepers escorted 200 northern SAF troops out of the contested area, with both armies accusing each other of having started the fight.

When dealing with incidents like this, where you have one party's word against the other's, on balance it would be wisest to trust the non-Muslim South Sudanese account of events, given that their opponents are Muslims who have a demonstrated track record of lying, cheating and fighting dirty and one of whose special tricks is a sleight-of-hand by which they start a fight and then pretend that the other guy started it.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

10 south Sudanese killed at north border

AFP

Armed Misseriya Arab tribesmen killed 10 south Sudanese civilians and wounded 18 near the border as they were returning from the north, southern internal affairs minister Gier Chuang said Tuesday as the landmark independence vote went into a third day with large crowds again forming outside polling stations.

"A convoy of returnees coming from the north to the south were ambushed on Monday by armed Misseriya. Ten were killed and 18 were wounded," Chuang told a news conference, according to AFP.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Sudan's Bashir sees Islamic law, defends flogging

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir said on Sunday that the country's north will reinforce its Islamic law after a referendum expected to grant independence to the south, in a speech in which he also defended police who were filmed flogging a woman.

"If south Sudan secedes, we will change the constitution and at that time there will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity," President Omar Hassan al-Bashir told supporters at a rally in the eastern city of Gedaref.
"Sharia and Islam will be the main source for the constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language," he said.

Southerners are now three weeks away from the scheduled start of a vote on whether to declare independence or stay part of Sudan -- a plebiscite promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of war between the Muslim north and the south where most follow traditional beliefs and Christianity.

That 2005 accord set up an interim constitution that limited Islamic sharia law to the north and recognised "the cultural and social diversity of the Sudanese people".

Bashir also defended police shown lashing a woman in a film that appeared on the video-sharing website YouTube.

"If she is lashed according to sharia law there is no investigation. Why are some people ashamed? This is sharia," he said.

The case of Sudan

Sudan presents a religiously divided / pluralistic society. It is estimated that more than 70% of the Sudan’s present population are Sunni Muslims. About 11% belong to indigenous African religions and about 19% are Christians. The Muslim population is concentrated in the north, while the Christians and the practitioners of traditional indigenous religions live in the south or in the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile areas in central Sudan. An exception to this spatial ordering are the long established Coptic Christians who share urban space with Muslims in the North. Growing adherence to Christianity is reported among southerners, Nuba and other groups in Sudan. Such growth could have been at the expense of the traditional indigenous religions. At least two million southern Christians have settled in northern semi-urban areas as internally displaced resulting from the civil war.

Islam and the state structures have been closely related in Sudan – even since long before the time of the Mahdiyyah of the late 19th century. The Muslim groups in Sudan made efforts to enforce an Islamic state on Sudanese society. Through their conceptualisations of an Islamic state, they have been crucial to the definition of the Sudanese political system. At present, these Muslim groups share the objective of creating an Islamic state, but they have radically different views on the strategies and the socio-economic and political structures of this state.

Since the installation of a new “islamic order” (nizam islami) under President Jaafar Nimeiri in 1983, every civil or military government has had to deal with public discussions about shari’a. In an political atmosphere ripe with allegations of heterodoxy and even apostasy shari’a as the will of God had assumed a highly legitimising function in political debates. The National Salvation Government, which has been the outcome of June 1989 military coup, has formally opted for Islam as its system of government and followed the previously existing Islamic model since its introduction in September 1983. Within this government, there is strong support for the rule by means of the Islamic shari’a laws in all aspects of public life all over the country.

Importantly, the Sudan’s Constitutional Decree No. 7 in 1993, while affirming that “Islam is the guiding religion for the overwhelming majority of the Sudanese people,” states that “revealed religions such as Christianity, or traditional religious beliefs, may be freely adopted by anyone with no coercion in regards to beliefs and no restriction on religious observances”. Although the laws recognise Sudan as a multi-religious country, in practice, the government treats Islam as the state religion. More and above, an important part of the government’s political agenda has been to act as an Islamic model-state in the region and to gain ideological influence in other African states with substantial Muslim populations.

Christians have struggled against both the Islamising effects of the Khartoum governments and the perceived Arabising policies of the north. The initiatives of the various governments both elected and military have been seen as anti-Christian. The Nimeiri regime’s introduction of shari’a for all people, not just Muslims was resented by Christians. Making Arabic the language of education even in the South was viewed as a way of both de-culturing people and cutting them off from Anglophone education. The attempts at dialogue by Hassan al-Turabi were viewed with suspicion by both Christians and Muslims and seen as a political manoeuvre. The recently completed peace accord between Khartoum and the SPLA is again viewed with some perturbation.

Shari’a versus secular state has been a central issue in the civil war from 1983 to the present and, as such, an important topic in the Naivasha peace conferences. It will remain a fundamental issue in the constitutional debate following the peace process.

With the possible exception of Afghanistan and Iran Sudan presents the most vivid example of extreme societal regulation through the application of shari’a. Legislation in every field has been inspired by this state interpreted form of shari’a. Socio-cultural groups who had for generations taken for granted that they practised shari’a in their daily dealings with land law, personal law or the law of inheritance for instance, have been confronted with this new shari’a legislation which renders their traditional legal ideas illegal and against the will of God.

The introduction of shari’a law and the implementation of the Islamic state may be regarded as decisive moves in the Arabo-Islamic “civilisational project” which aims at cultural hegemony of the central Nile Valley over the peripheral regions of the Sudan and the construction of a Sudanese Arabo-Islamic nation within the global umma of which Sudanese Islamic leaders view themselves as the avantgarde. The project of hegemony has met with varying responses throughout the Sudanese society ranging from overt rebellion to hidden resistance and strategic appropriation to wholehearted acceptance. An important aspect of these struggles about shari’a is the fact that beyond the articulate claims and counterclaims of the audible debate there is a largely hidden “debate” expressed in rituals, bodily performances and everyday social negotiations that tend to escape the attention of the scholar who concentrates on the public, articulate aspects of shari’a but which nevertheless constitutes a very real contested domain of contest.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

The Plight of Sudanese Christians

THE CHRISTIAN POST

When he was seven years old, Francis Bok, a Christian from the southern part of Sudan, was captured and sold into slavery by Arab raiders. Bok spent the next ten years as a slave before escaping.

Eventually, with the help of Christian groups, Bok emigrated to the United States, where he has devoted himself to telling his story and the plight of other Sudanese Christians. Now he is telling an updated version of the tale, one whose ending is yet to be written.

The story concerns a referendum scheduled for January 9, 2011. On that day, the people of southern Sudan will vote on whether to remain a part of Sudan. Even if the run-up of the election had gone smoothly, which it hasn’t, there would still be ample reason to fear what happens after the vote.

One government official has hinted that the government “may not recognize the results” of the referendum. Its stated reason is that the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement hasn’t fulfilled its obligations under the 2005 agreement that ended a 22-year civil war.

That civil war killed at least 2 million people in the south and caused another 4 million to flee their homes. It followed an attempt to impose Shari’a law on Sudan’s Christians and animists. Those who weren’t killed or turned into refuges were often, like Bok, enslaved.

Given this eliminationist history, southerners are expected to vote for independence, and the Sudanese government is expected to balk at letting them go. Not because it’s had a change of heart about its Christian population, but because that population is living atop Sudan’s oil reserves.
That’s the real reason Khartoum won’t recognize the results: If the south goes, it will take Sudan’s economy with it.
The Sudanese government has already proven, both in the south and more recently in Darfur that it is willing to repeatedly commit crimes against humanity to get what it wants. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has already been charged with genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

That’s why Bok is crisscrossing this country warning audiences about the likelihood that catastrophic violence will follow the January 9th referendum. He’s not alone: Secretary of State Clinton has called Sudan a “ticking time bomb.”

More ominously, Dennis Blair, the National Director of Intelligence, told Congress that southern Sudan was the most likely candidate for “a new mass killing or genocide.”

Despite the rhetoric, Bok says that he and his countrymen are worried, and it's right that they are. Because the only way the U.S. will protect Bok's people is if the American people, especially Christians, make it clear that standing by and doing nothing is unacceptable.

That’s why I need you to become informed on this issue-we’ll link you to a few articles at BreakPoint.org; just click on today’s BreakPoint commentary.

You and I have an obligation--after all, for two decades, we've been fighting against the persecution of Christians Southern Sudan. And we were successful under the Bush Administration in getting a peace agreement in 2005. So, I want you to be prepared now to tell your representatives and the Administration they must do the right thing.

Sudanese Christians like Francis Bok are determined not to be enslaved again. The question is: Are we willing to help them safeguard their freedom?

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Sudan police arrest models after fashion show

REUTERS

Sudanese police briefly detained more than 20 models, make-up artists and designers after a rare mixed-sex fashion show in Khartoum, participants said Saturday.

Amateur models taking part in the "Sudanese Next Top Model Fashion Show" told Reuters they were rounded up late Thursday by Sudan's public order police, a body known for its crackdowns on indecent dress and drinking in the Muslim north.

Police were not available to comment on Thursday's arrests outside a club in the capital's Khartoum 2 district.

All of the detainees were released Friday but at least six were told to report to the police Sunday to face unspecified charges, said one participant.

"They came to the club after the show and arrested between 20 and 30 people -- not just models, but people doing the make- up, the people who provided the clothes," said the participant, who asked to remain anonymous.

"There was nothing bad about the clothes. There were wedding dresses, traditional Sudanese clothes, suits, clothes from local shops and tobs (traditional Sudanese wraparound dresses)."

Other participants said there had been fashion shows before in Sudan, many of them held in private. But Thursday's event was thought to be one of the first public events to feature male and female models sharing the catwalk.

Friday, February 5, 2010

When we need money we go to a mosque, but, when we need God we go to a church

Sudan is the microcosm of Africa’s unacknowledged Arab problem, a problem of racism, colonialism, enslavement and an Arab-Muslim agenda of religious, cultural, political and territorial expansion at the expense of Eastern Africa.

In Sudan, Black Africans (The Afro-Sudanese in South Sudan, Darfur, Nubia, etc) are fighting against an Arab settler minority regime, ruling from Khartoum. They are fighting against a racist, Arab supremacist rule that is worse, much worse, than the ill-famed South African Apartheid. The Sudan situation has many of the features of Apartheid and, to make things worse, the raiding of black African villages by Arabs who sell black captives into slavery in Northern Sudan and other parts of the Arab world, is still going on there today in the 21st century. Slave raiding was not even part of the loathsome evils of Apartheid.

The South Sudanese, after a 50years war of liberation (1955-2005)—the longest war in Africa-- finally got Khartoum to sign the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, CPA, in 2005. The CPA has the backing of the International Community. It grants the South Sudanese limited autonomy through the Government of South Sudan, and provides for a Self-Determination referendum in 2011. The referendum will give the people of South Sudan the chance to decide whether South Sudan will remain within Sudan or secede and become independent.

In a replay of how Khartoum unilaterally abrogated the 1972 Addis Abeba peace accord that ended the Anya-Anya phase of the Afro-Arab race war in Sudan, [an accord that, like the CPA, also granted regional autonomy to South Sudan], Khartoum is determined to kill the CPA, and is maneuvering to resume war on South Sudan and prevent the referendum.

Khartoum claims that its war on the Afro-Darfurians is just a counter-insurgency operation, and that its war on South Sudan is a jihad, a religious war to Islamize the Christians and polytheists of South Sudan.

Vice-President Taha has recently (2007) called on the Muslims in the South to take up arms as he ‘was ready to put the oil revenue in Sudan to support the war in South Sudan to liberate the South from the infidels backed by the Israelites’.

He declared that time had come for the people of Sudan to unite against the ‘infidels’. He remarked that the war in South Sudan took 21 years but that the new crusade to liberate the South would only take 21 days.

Sudan, it has been noted is “a front of a fresh wave of Arab conquest and Arabization of Black Africa”

“We don’t want these black slaves . . . what we want is their land.” – Arab Sudanese General Hassan Beshir Nasr, 1962

“Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission” –President Nimeiry, 1969

“Sudan is geographically in Africa but is Arab in its aspirations and destiny. We consider ourselves the Arab spearhead in Africa, linking the Arab world to the African continent” – Prime Minister Mahgoub, 1968

“We want to Islamise America and Arabise Africa” – Dr Hassan El-Turabi, chief ideologue of Jellaba-Arab minority rule in Sudan, 1999

“The third of the Arab community living outside Africa should move in with the two-thirds on the continent and join the African Union ‘which is the only space we have” – Col. Mouammar Gadhafi of Libya, at the Arab League, 2001

“Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long as there is Islam.” – from a 2003 lecture by Saudi Arabian religious leader Sheik Saleh Al-Fawzan

“The south [Sudan] will remain an inseparable part of the land of Islam, God willing, even if the war continued for decades.” – Osama bin Laden, 2006

In Sudan one is classified as an Arab if one is Muslim and speaks Arabic, and especially if one has the light (red) skin of the part-black hajin. Most of these Sudanese Arabs are actually Nubian-Arab mixed breeds (hajins) who are culturally Arabized. For being part-African, these hajins from Sudan are held in contempt by the true Arabs. These despised black wannabe Arabs are so desperate to earn acceptance by the white and true Arabs that they have become fanatical agents for Arab expansionism into black Africa. The white Arabs, for their part, though despising these wannabe Arabs, gladly use them as monkey’s paw to advance Arab expansionism.

Khartoum’s project is the Arabisation of Sudan. Khartoum is determined that Sudan will eventually become wholly an Arab land with all its diverse African peoples converted into Arabs. Sudan is Khartoum’s pilot project, backed by the Arab League, in the Islamisation and Arabisation of Black Africa.

The Arab civilizational project formulated by the President of Egypt Gamal-Abdul Nasser in the 1950s is called “el Tawaja el Hadhariya”.

Nasser said: “ We certainly cannot, under any conditions, relinquish our responsibility to help spread the light of knowledge and civilization to the very depth of the virgin jungles of the [African] continent . . .. Africa is now the scene of a strange and stirring turmoil . . . We cannot . . . stand as mere onlookers, deluding ourselves into believing that we are in no way concerned. .

The following are some of the Arab expansionist ambitions in Africa:

1.To bring the entire Nile headwaters under Arab rule

2.To conquer, enslave, Islamize and Arabize black Africans, as through the war on South Sudan

3.To annex black African lands, as in Libya’s long campaign to annex Chad’s Auzou strip

4.To ethnic cleanse and change the demographic character of black African lands by importing Arab settlers, as in Darfur, Nubia and Mauritania today. Arabs would civilize black Africans by inflicting on them war, gang rape of boys and women, genocide, and land expropriation.

The deAfricanisation campaigns of Islamisation-Arabization was, of course, not confined to Sudan, but has been done wherever Arabs spotted an opportunity to exploit African weakness, such as Mauritania, Chad, Somalia, Eritrea, Uganda. In the past 40 years, Libya’s Gadhafi has been particularly active in sponsoring chaos, anarchy and civil wars in Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire etc., and in trying to Islamise Uganda, Rwanda, the CAR etc. For example, in a live broadcast on Rwanda Radio on 17 May 1985, Gadhafi said:

“First you must stick to your Islamic religion and insist that your children are taught the Islamic religion and you teach the Arabic language because without the Arabic language we could not understand Islam. . . You must teach that Islam is the religion of Africa. . . You must raise your voice high and declare that Allah is great because Africa must be Muslim. . . We must wage a holy war so that Islam may spread in Africa.”

Christian children in South Sudan are systematically forced into Islamic dhmmititude by being denied education and career opportunities unless they change their faith and names. It's common these days that a Christian South Sudanese attends Muslim prayers on Fridays and Christian congregations on Sundays. I asked one of these “dual-faith” Sudanese how it is possible for a Christian to attend a Muslim place of worship. The Christian Sudanese immediately answered: “ When we need money we go to a mosque, but when we need God we go to a church”.

Recent pressure on the part of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to question the old Nile treaties with Egypt, which has extensive interests in Sudan, is a very good sign of a farsighted ambition. Ethiopians should continue following the situation in South Sudan very closely, they should wait anxiously wait for the planned Self-Determination referendum in 2011. South Sudan needs the brotherly Ethiopian help to ensure a lasting and just peace and freedom.