I don't want to take this topic too much further off-subject, but I need to correct a misperception in your post.
buzzsaw writes:
About two million in the Sudan alone in the last decade. The Muslims are dealing in slave trade bigtime exactly as the prophet Mohammed did in the 7th century. They raid villages, kill the men torture and enslave the rest of the family. Some Christian organizations have bought back thousands of slaves to free them, but that just feeds the fire. Many have even been crucified.
I think you would be extremely hard pressed to make the case that the civil war in Sudan is a religious war directed by Moslems against Christians. In the first place, only roughly 40 percent of the population is Arab (northerners) although some 60 percent is Moslem. Roughly 60 percent overall are African. There are close to 600 ethnic groups and over 100 languages spoken in the South alone. (Metz, Helen Chapman
ed., "Sudan, A Country Study", Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1991). While it's true that both Arab and Islamic groups prevail in the north, and African and Christian groups in the south, it's a gross over-simplification to reduce the conflict to the equation "Moslem vs Christian".
There are quite a few scholars and historians who tend to support this view. For example,
quote:
Since the firing of the first bullet in 1983, the reappearance of the war between northern and southern Sudan has generally been interpreted as a typical ethno-religious conflict emanating from differences between Muslims and Christians, or Arabs and Africans. While this categorization may have served well as a description of the earlier conflict in the 1950s, and still has some bearing on how the war is being conducted and perceived, our opinion is that the nature of the conflict has changed. Conflicts are processes, not static events. Over the last five decades developments in the Sudan have gradually but consistently changed the nature of the conflict between the North and the South from being a classic ethno-religious conflict to one primarily over resources, with the economic and resource crisis in the North emerging as the driving force in the Sudanese civil war. (Suliman, Mohammed, 2001, "18 Years of Civil War in the Sudan", Center for Security Studies, ETH Swiss Federal Institute for Technology)
Moreover, this ludicrously simplistic view of the conflict utterly ignores the fact that armed opposition to the current regime in Sudan also arises from Moslem groups in the north, lending further support to the intertribal and economic basis for the conflict.
quote:
The conflict in Sudan is considerably more complicated than the simple north-south, Muslim vs. Christian, Arab vs. African duality many of those now lobbying the administration present. Most northern Sudanese are Arabized Africans, not ethnic Arabs. Most southerners practice traditional religions, not Christianity, though missionaries operating there hope to change this. Many Muslims are deeply engaged in armed opposition to the regime, as well. The second largest armed group in the NDA after the SPLA is that of the Beja Congress, based among impoverished Muslims in northeastern Sudan, and there are others from the north in the opposition coalition. (Dan Connell, Rethinking Sudan, Foreign Policy in Focus, Aug 2001).
About the only part of your post you got right was the figure of "millions" of casualties. The best estimates I've read indicate some 1.9-2 million dead in the past 20 years (since the start of the current civil war). Most of the dead, however, are from famine and disease (as would be expected given the environment). Only some 100,000-200,000 have died as direct results of the war. Still quite an atrocity. Massacres have been carried out by both sides. However, I will grant that the "religion" card has been used more heavily by Khartoum to further it's political, social, and resource control aims(notably arming of the
marahileen paramilitary groups - impoverished Arab nomads displaced by economic development and granted freedom of operation under a declared
jihad). I would argue that this is cynical manipulation by Khartoum to achieve political ends rather than arising from any religious belief. (See, for example, Burr, Millard 1998 "Quantifying Genocide in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains", US Committee for Refugees
special report).
Attempting to paint a multi-ethnic, multi-religious regional conflict as some kind of Christian martydom exercise merely demonstrates that the person making the claim has no clue about the actual facts and history of the conflict.
When it's the Christians the UN (pro Muslim) looks the other way. But in places like Kosovo and the Baltics where the Muslims were being whipped, Nato and the UN came to the rescue.
Actually, if you dig into the conflict, you'll find that the UN made a deliberate decision to not try and send troops to the area (although they had some observers on the Ethiopian border) because (at least ostensibly), the UN didn't have the accession of both parties (and thus it would have been logisitically and militarily impossible). The UN has tried on numerous occasions to get food and medicine to the south, with mixed success. IIRC, the Bush administration pledged $30 million in non-military humanitarian aid for souther Sudan in 2001(?), but has AFIK not delivered as yet, most likely due to other more pressing problems that arose in the interim.
Read some actual history. You might find it more interesting than the pablum spouted by the likes of Fox News.
[This message has been edited by Quetzal, 05-19-2003]
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