| Open letter to Hodari Abdul Ali
Tears of Blood Oil
Libyan leader reveals outcomes of his encounters with African leaders
The falling Elephant
POST-CONFLICT SUDAN CONFERENCE
Memo to the Arab League
Declearation of Jihad war against Africa
Soon coming
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Libyan Leader Reveals Outcome of His Encounters With African Leader
By: Dr Kenneth Okeny
In the past few days, the often mercurial Libyan leader Colonel Muammer Gadafi reportedly made some outlandish remarks regarding meetings he had with three African leaders - Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. According to the SUNA news report of July 18, 2001, the three presidents allegedly expressed their views on aspects of the Sudanese civil war.
1. They reportedly "blamed Garang for his insistence to continue with the war". In the absence of any direct quotes from communiques issued following the said meetings between Gadafi and the three presidents, such statements can't be taken seriously. All of these African leaders are involved in one way or another in attempts to negotiate peace and an end to the conflict in Sudan. It would be the height of diplomatic naivety for any one of them to make such one-sided statement and still expect the other side to consider them as being impartial in the conflict. Presidents Moi and Museveni are certainly intimately involved in the peace process via the IGAD peace mechanism; so too is Obasanjo whose interest in resolving the war goes far back to 1987 when he and other former Heads of States made strenuous efforts to try to bring the two sides to the negotiating table. All the three presidents are well versed with the root causes of the conflict and clearly recognize that the war has been imposed on the oppressed and marginalized
people of the New Sudan.
They know that what we have in the Sudan is a vicious system of religious apartheid by which the minority Arab-Muslim elite of the North keep the majority black African population in the country in the position of "helots" (serfs). Being cognizant of this fact, how could any one of them turn around and expect Dr. Garang to agree to a comprehensive ceasefire without any guarantee that our legitimate demands will be addressed to our satisfaction? Our recent history is so full of a litany of deceptions and deceits by our Arab rulers that it'll be foolhardy for us to fall into any of these old traps that are merely meant to preserve the status quo. To me it is apparent that it's Gadafi and/or the SUNA reporter, not the three African leaders, who are interested in painting Dr. Garang as a war-monger. And the urgent call for a ceasefire by the NIFers is simply a smokescreen designed to whitle away the real threat posed to the oil fields by the SPLA's recent spectacular military victories in the Bahr al-Ghazal and Western Upper Nile.
2. The same SUNA report quotes Gadafi as having said that "the African leaders are unanimously opposed to the partition of Sudan as such a move will promote separatist calls in their own countries". It is true that any of these leaders (particularly Obasanjo and Moi) might harbor some misgivings as to the potential effect on their countries of partitioning the Sudan. But that is no justification for denying a people the right to determine their future. Self-determination is an inalienable right just as are the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Every problem has its own unique history and internal dynamics, and the solution to one (such as self-determination for the South) need not be mimicked by others unless it is
appropriate to the particular circumstance. And the likes of Gadafi need to know that the entity referred to as the New Sudan is not an ethnic group; it is a "captive nation" comprising of various nationalities like those found in any of the sub-Saharan African countries. Certainly, its people should be as entitled as the people of the North were in 1955 ro exercise their right to self-determination, a right that was denied them by the colonial powers (Britain and Egypt) in collusion with the major political parties of the North.
And now because the SPLA has created facts on the ground, almost all the political forces in the Sudan (those in the NDA and the NIF) agree that the people of Southern Sudan should be allowed to exercize thier right to self-determination. It flies in the face of logic for outsiders like Gadafi and Mubarak of Egypt, purported peace brokers in the conflict, to be the ones insisting on denying this fundamental peoples right to the oppressed people of the New Sudan when most northern political parties now seem to acknowledge that this seems to be the only way to end the terrible conflict. Gadafi and Mubarak should not hide behind the moribund article of the OAU charter that calls for the maintenance of borders inherited at independence. The parties to the Asmara Declaration (1995) and the defunct Sudan Peace agreement (1997) all recognized the right of the South to self-determination and proceeded to append their signatures to the respective documents in spite of that provision in the OAU charter. If the Northern Sudanese political forces want to wriggle out of their commitment to self-determination, they should do so openly and without hiding behind Libya and Egypt. And for any of these countries to play a meaningful and impartial role in resolving the conflict, they should stop siding with their racial and religious kin. Otherwise, their peace initiative will be consigned to the dustbin of history even before they're out of power.
3. Gadafi reportedly described the demand for self-determination by the Southerners as "a plot against the African Union and would lead to the disintegration of the continent". The simple question to ask Gadafi, and Arab leaders in general, is: why is self-determination only a plot against union when demanded by black Africans like the long oppressed and marginalized people of the New Sudan, but not a plot to union when demanded by Palestinian Arabs? All of the Arab world, including some non-Arab Muslim countries, have spent billions of dollars and countless diplomatic time on trying to enable the Palestinians achieve just such a goal. And these same Arab and Muslim countries are spending consideralbe amount of their time, energy, and money to suppress the black people of the New Sudan to exercise just such a right. This is racism pure and simple. The Arabs feel that they're superior to us and that we the blacks of the Sudan must accept their legal, religious and cultural systems without any question. Succumbing to them in effect means accepting this underlying racist assumption that we are indeed inferior beings who should be thankful to our Arab masters for whatever supposed "benefits" that Islamization/Arabization, might bestow upon us.
No self-respecting person of any color, particularly blacks, should stand for this at the beginning of the new millennium. African leaders must wake up from their state of political inertness and realize what the Arabs are really up to for once the South is conquered, both its wealth and the new African Union will position the Arab world adequately to be the bridgehead of the forces of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa well into the next century! The other aspect of the above quotation is that Gadafi thinks that self-determination for the South will automatically lead to the
disintergration of the continent. This is simply fear mongering. Why did this not happen after Eritrea became independent nine years ago? The real threat to stability in Africa is dictatorship and globalization. Dictators like Gadafi and others seem to think that only they know, and can actualize, what their people want, and that this somehow entitles them to remain in power for life and to the absolute obedience of their fellow citizens. As long as such attitude continues into the new African Union, no one can rule out any future outbreaks of civil conflicts in Africa. Globalization is a threat to stability in Africa in so far as it tends to bolster dictatorship in certain cases (such as the oil companies in Sudan vis-a-vis the NIF regime) and undermines national sovereignty. It's, of course, spearheaded by multi-national business corporations which often have agents in such non-democratic multi-lateral organizations as the World Bank,
the IMF, and the WTO.
These institutions sometimes use arm-twisting tactics to secure acceptance of their policies by weak Third World governments, policies which promote the business interests of multi-national corporations rather than those of the common people of the host country. Now, no one can expect that the masses in such host countries, who usually suffer any adverse consequence of such foreign-inspired economic policies, to just sit idly by and not react. Perhaps, the only feasible solution to both threats is democratization. Any government that knows that it can be voted out of office will surely strive to ensure that the interests of its people are not trampled upon by foreign or domestic quarters, and thus have the guts to resist foreign pressures that seek to undermine national economic policies. Now, that's democracy working to preserve some semblance of stae sovereignty in this fast changing world of global interrelatedness. Gadafi and others like him should, therefore, stop using scare-mongering tactics in their ill-conceived
and ill-disguised attempt to stifle our march to freedom. A new entity in the South (e.g. the present New Sudan as defined at Chukudum in 1994) would be no more a threat to continental stability than any of the current member states of the African Union minus the unstable Old Sudan.
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