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Inequalities 2001 PDF Print E-mail
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SUDANESE STATE OF FUNDAMENTAL INEQUALITIES
And the “SOUTHERN INFIDELS”

By James Yugu Yangkole  January 14, 2001

The ideal of equality of humans is as old as humanity itself and is derived from the Bible which affirms that man was created in God’s image and likeness and that men are therefore God’s children* and ought to be treated equally.

This ideal is clearly expressed in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789.  It has also been accepted and incorporated into national constitutions of various countries as a concept that is at once lofty, noble, grand.

In the Sudan, the 1973 Constitution provided in Article 14 that the Sudanese society is established. . . on the principles of freedom, equality and justice.  In Article 38 it provided that all persons in the Democratic Republic of the Sudan are equal before courts of law.   That means all Sudanese people have equal rights and duties irrespective of origin, race, locality, sex, language or religion.
But when most people of South Sudan think about equality in the Sudan, the first thing that come to their minds are the striking inequalities expressed in the squalid living conditions at the camps for the displaced around the capital and other towns; familiar sight of children and women turning up garbage heaps in the hope of finding something to eat; crowd of beggars around the mosques and the churches and the conspicuous non-representation of Southerners in such institutions as the military, police and prisons, colleges and other public institutions, etc.

A judge who hails from South Sudan once observed:

Given the divine nature of the Islamic law, the fairness of the provisions regarding non-Muslims can never be doubted.  Almighty God is omniscient and the very fountain of justice.  However political considerations [in the Sudan] demand that the Southerner, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, be left alone. (Chan Reec Madut; paper on Equality to the 2nd National Christian Women Conference, Khartoum, June 1996).

When the junta took power in the Sudan on June 30, 1989, the coup leader, then Col. Omar Hassan Ahmad el Bashir, declared that the war in the South was a holy war—jihad—against the “Communist infidels.”  He regretted that the jihad was being lost because of a weak politico-military leadership who were betraying Allah and the Arab Nation; but that a “National Salvation Revolution,” with the blessing of Allah, would reverse the trend of decay and defeat.

What Bashir called “Arab Nation” is made up of 67% of people of African stock—leaving the 33% to be those who claim to be Arab, because they are Muslims who speak Arabic and are largely Arab in culture and outlook.  This is a major contradiction of a minority rule in the Sudan which has warranted a major conflict witnessed in form of civil wars.

The first civil war started in 1955 and ended in 1972 following a peace agreement between the North and South of the country in 1972 in Addis-Ababa, Ethiopia.  The second started in 1983 and by 1989 the South, organized under Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA/M), had overrun all the territory and nearly all the towns in the South except for the Southern capital, Juba, the town of Wau in Bahr el Ghazal Province and Malakal in Upper Nile Province.  The SPLA/M also had an effective politico-military presence in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, both in the traditional North.

To the extent that the regime remains opposed to the fundamental changes in the Sudan, to that extent the political and armed conflict will continue.

The ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) is certainly not ready for a democratic and secular Sudan.  Having roots in the Muslim Brotherhood Movement in Egypt in the early part of the twentieth century, NIF is openly and unabashedly committed to building Islamic theocratic states throughout the Nile valley lands and further a field.  This project is not just an emotional or even religious construct as it seeks to “recapture and reconstruct the certainties and orderliness” of the theocratic state by “the Prophet of Islam and Messenger of God” several centuries ago.  The project remains Pan-Islamic, extremely serious and with several decades of unrelenting ideological, political and organizational work behind it.  This will remain the case until NIF goes out of existence or has a fundamental re-think of its ideology.

The Islamized Africans are part of the political North and are marginalized and oppressed, though they constitute the majority in the North in terms of population.  The Arab nationality is a minority in the Sudan, but they hide behind the cloak of Islamic religion in order to reinforce their inferior numbers and therefore their grip on power.  They use the fact that the majority of the Sudanese are Muslims to perpetuate an oppressive minority rule in the name of Islam.  Religion is therefore at the heart of the Sudanese conflict as a tool of political exclusion and domination.

el Bashir has declared several times over that in a fragmented polity like the Sudan, the only nationalizing ideology you can have is Islam—and to be achieved by force of conquest.   This necessarily begets resistance from the “Southern infidels” who are non-Arab, nilotic, nilo-hamitic and Sudanic groups numbering about nine million people out of the estimated population of about thirty million for the whole country.

* Editor’s note: technically, while humans are God’s creation, according to the Bible, we become God’s child through receiving Jesus Christ as our savior and God: John 1:12-13.  We are also adopted as God’s sons through Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:5).  Those not following God are following Satan (1 John 3:8-10). BACK
 
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