Ahmed Mohamed Haroun is one of the two named by the ICC as suspected war criminals involved in Darfur. Today for the first time I saw a picture of him.
Does he look Arab to you? He doesn’t to me. In fact he looks Darfurian. But is he really? If yes, it would mean he’s either an Afro-Arab or an Arabized African. “Darfur is a genocide perpetrated by Arabs against Africans” is an oversimplification of what’s really happening. I hope the picture above is more proof of this. Furthermore, in an interview with the Sudanese newspaper Akhbar al-Youm, Ahmed mentioned something which I found quite odd.
The minister, who is suspected of war crimes in Darfur while he was minister of state in the Interior Ministry, defended his work in the troubled region of western Sudan, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since 2003.
“The police operation that took place in Darfur, with the deployment of thousands of policemen, remains one of the greatest operations ever by the Sudanese police,” he said.
The aim was to secure areas populated by the Fur people, who give their name to the region. “(That is) contrary to the prosecutor’s claim that we incited what are referred to as the Janjaweed against our kin the Fur,” he added.
Why would he/they only want to secure areas populated by the Fur tribe and why does he only refer to them? What about other tribes? Could Ahmed Haroun be a Fur? I asked my father and some of my friends’ fathers the same question. They all told me that he’s a Darfurian but they’re not sure what tribe he’s exactly from. Various things about this conflict are indeed complex, sometimes a little too complex.
SudaneseThinker
SudaneseThinker
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So complex that I, at least, have more or less given up on trying to understand every last detail of it.
The biggest mistake of those who try to understand Darfur, and one I myself have made, is thinking of it in singular. That is, ONE conflict.
While in truth, Darfur is a field for many battles, many conflicts, with what seems to be dozens of interest groups pulling to their direction.
The plot thickens …
By the way, Drima, still waiting for something about the Arab colonization of Africa … given it any thought?
NC, I think my answer would have been quite predictable. Of course when the Arabs came in, they colonized. However they came in such large numbers and stayed for so long, that they’ve become part of “us”. It sounds funny to me when I call Arabs “they”. When I use the word “we” in my posts, most of the time I mean we Arabs, Africans or Muslims. Europeans don’t count as “we”. It’s surely “they”. Moreover I think the time factor makes a lot of difference. Europeans came and left, quite recently. That’s why it’s still fresh in our minds.
Drima, yeah, I know. It’s just that people like to forget Arab and Muslim colonialism. Colonialism, in most contexts these days, is only bad if it is white European and Christian. Or, more recently, if it is Jewish. The problem is that Colonialism has happened all around the world, throughout history. Peoples either benefited from it or they didn’t, but no-one ever got anywhere by whingeing about it.
Either way, I’m with you. 50 years have passed, if not more. Time to get over it already and move on.
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