Newsgroup: it.cultura.religioni.cristiani
Titolo: [Sudan] il vergognoso silenzio "censured" sul Darfur

A differenza di quanto fatto dall'ottima Julie Flint, avrei corretto il
titolo mettendo vergognoso silenzio arabo al posto di mussulmano.
Dell'esistenza di un islam moderato, specialmente quello nero africano, non
ci sono dubbi.
http://www.sudan.net/news/posted/8460.html
The shameful Muslim silence on Darfur
News Article by The Daily Star posted on May 11, 2004 at 19:56:51: EST (-5
GMT)
The shameful Muslim silence on Darfur
By Julie Flint
Special to The Daily Star
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
The mosque in the village of Urum was packed with people mourning Yahya
Abdul Karim, 80, when armed men on horseback rode in, firing
indiscriminately. The village imam, Yahya Warshal, ran out of the mosque to
try to protect his orphaned grandson. Some of the attackers rode into the
mosque, where they killed 16 mourners. Others chased the imam into his grass
hut and killed him there, along with the 3-year-old boy he was trying to
protect.
Before leaving the village, the attackers, driving over 3,000 stolen animals
before them, tore up Korans found in the mosque and set the building on
fire.
Barely a week later, the horsemen returned with soldiers from the regular
Sudanese Army and in a four-day rampage killed 80 more people, including
women and children. "The soldiers stayed on the edge of the village," said a
37-year-old man. "But they saw everything."
In the village of Sandikoro, soldiers and horsemen tore up Korans and
defecated on them before burning the mosque, with its imam inside. In
Kondoli, they killed another imam, Abrahim Durra, as well as a second imam
and the muezzin.
The story is the same across Darfur, Sudan's westernmost region. In 25 days
of research there and among refugees on the border with Chad, Human Rights
Watch documented 62 attacks on mosques in Dar Masalit, the homeland of one
of Darfur's three main African tribes. Several of them were accompanied by
murders inside mosques, often during prayer time. Korans, prayer mats and
other symbols of Islam were routinely desecrated.
The Western world, reluctant to take the focus away from peace negotiations
between the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), has
been shamefully late in acknowledging the atrocities in Darfur. But the
Muslim world, even more shamefully, has yet to speak out.
The war in Darfur is in many respects a replay of the war in southern Sudan,
waged with weapons that include ethnic militias, scorched-earth tactics and
denial of humanitarian access. Both wars pit Sudan's Islamist,
Arab-dominated government against African rebels demanding equal rights and
an end to decades of neglect. In the south it is the SPLA that is doing the
fighting; in Darfur it is the similarly named but quite separate Sudan
Liberation Army (SLA).
But there is one big difference between the 21-year war in the South and the
15-month war in Darfur. The ethnic Africans of Darfur, unlike those of the
South, are Muslim. And not just Muslim: deeply, devoutly, unshakably Muslim.
Theirs is not the shrill, extremist Islam of the fundamentalist generals who
seized power in Sudan in 1989, but a quiet, tolerant Islam that has
characterized Sudan for most of its recent history and that still
characterizes most of its citizens - Arab or African.
"Our Islam is good," says Izhaq Abdullah Adam Saber, 65, the imam of Kudumi
village. "We pray all the time. We read the Koran all the time. It is they
who are bad Muslims. Not us."
UN human rights investigators have accused the Sudanese government and the
Janjaweed, the horse- and camel-riding Arabs who are fighting side by wide
with the regular armed forces, of unleashing a "reign of terror" in Darfur.
Senior UN officials have described the suffering there as "one of the worst
humanitarian crises in the world." Some have gone so far as to draw
comparisons with the genocide in Rwanda. The US Agency for International
Development has warned that unless Khartoum breaks with past practice and
grants full and immediate humanitarian access to the region, 100,000
war-affected civilians of African ethnicity could die in Darfur within the
next 12 months
The government's swift and bloody crackdown on the rebellion in Darfur
reflects the unique importance of the SLA rebellion within Sudan. For the
uprising is not only proof of Muslim opposition to the country's
totalitarian rulers. It is, perhaps even more importantly, a war that cannot
be depicted as a rebellion against Islam. The rebels cannot be condemned as
"infidels" as they were in the South. And so they are vilified as "thieves
and robbers" - thieves and robbers, however, who have proved capable of
mounting a formidable military challenge to a government that has the
advantage of air power and the added punch of the Janjaweed.
The war in Darfur has laid bare the racial animus that has always underlain
the war in Sudan. The killing there is not about religion. It is about race
and ethnicity. In Darfur, the government's drive to "Arabize" a country that
is made up of myriad ethnic groups has found a full and willing partner in
Arab nomads whose search for new water and grazing land for their herds has
led them into conflict with the majority population of settled African
farmers.
When the SLA took up arms in February 2004, protesting government inaction
in the face of increasingly violent encroachment by Arab nomads, the
government responded by increasing its support for the nomads - reincarnated
as Janjaweed - and embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to
lay waste the countryside and starve the rebels of support.
"The government wants to kill all African people, Muslim or not Muslim, in
order to put Arabs in their places," says Izhaq Abdullah, unwittingly
echoing the conclusion of many analysts. "We Africans are good Muslims. We
pray all the time. We read the Koran all the time. It is they who are bad
Muslims."

 ha
scritto nel messaggio news:2gr5m1F...@uni-berlin.de...
http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/darfur/index.htm