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Darfur Elders Say United States Demonises Sudan to Hurt Islam
By Sudan Tribune
August 28, 2004
Kano, Nigeria, Aug 28 (AFP) -- A group of tribal chiefs from the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur on Saturday told Nigerian Islamic leaders that the United States was using the conflict in their homeland to demonise Muslims.
The 11 elders were brought to Nigeria as part of a pro-government delegation to African Union peace talks aimed at resolving the bloody 18-month conflict between Khartoum and Darfur's two main rebel groups.
The United States has led international condemnation of the violence and US lawmakers have branded the attacks by the Janjaweed Arab militia on black African tribes regarded as rebel sympathisers a genocide.
But the chiefs, who were escorted to the northern Nigerian city of Kano by the Sudanese junior minister for social development Marghani Mansur Badawi, called such a stance an attack on the Muslim world as a whole.
"Its the United States that is fuelling the crises in Darfur, telling the world that the Arabs are commiting genocide against blacks," Badawi said.
"The target is not Sudan but the target is Islam although Sudans reputation has been defamed by this propaganda," he claimed.
Kano is the commercial centre of mainly-Muslim northern Nigeria
- which is home to more than 40 million black African Muslims -- and Badawi's party was met by some very senior local Islamic leaders.
"The Janjaweed is a group of criminals that have been operating since 1993, they are a bunch of bandits that have been robbing people, stealing herds from nomads and causing confusion in Darfur," Badawi said.
"When war started between the government and the rebels they seized the chance offered by the war to cause the damage they are now causing but the government has no hand in the atrocities they are committing," he insisted.
The United Nations, the United States, international rights groups and Nigeria's own President Olusegun Obasanjo, chairman of the African Union, have said that the Janjaweed were armed and sponsored by the Sudanese government.
Kano and Sudan have a relationship that dates back centuries to when Sudan served as a transit route for northern Nigerian pilgrims going to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage, crossing the Sahara on donkeys, mules and on foot.
Many of the pilgrims settled in Sudan on their way home, and it is widely believed in Nigeria that there are now more than four million Sudanese of Nigerian descent.
Badawi said the crises in Darfur is as a result of water shortage caused by a drought in 1993, which led to clashes between farmers and nomads over grazing fields as nomadic herdsmen encroached on crops.
"The tribes living there are all Muslims and Islam came to unite humanity and doesnt differentiate between races and tribes," said Badawi, who is a mamber of the Masalik tribe in western Darfur.
"Where there is war there is destruction because war causes havoc, pushing people to leave villages to cities where they can find safety," he said.
"But television footage from Western media depicts these displaced people as victims of ethnic cleansing to ridicule Islam," he continued.
The minister's thesis won a sympathetic ear in a region in which anti-US sentiment runs deep.
Magaji Abdullahi, Kano's deputy governor, accused the West of instigating the conflict in Darfur in order to "Balkanise the Sudan as they did in Bosnia and Afghanistan, with the motive of destroying our sacred religion."
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