For years now, Sudan has not only been the locale of the planet’s bloodiest exercise in mass violence, but also the West’s most neglected front in the War on Terror. We have resisted understanding the ongoing massacre in Darfur for what it is — not some impenetrable tribal rivalry, but rather a prolonged irruption of Islamist terrorism in its most unapologetic form. Abdel Whaid Al-Nur, chairman of the Sudan Liberation Movement wrote an opinion piece for today’s Wall Street Journal that should go some way in changing this misperception.
In 1989 Gen. Omar al-Bashir’s National Islamic Front seized power in a military coup, established Islamic law and went about prosecuting a “brutal jihad against the African population in South Sudan, in the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains regions:”
Over 400,000 civilians, including women and children, have been slaughtered, raped or robbed. Millions of people were chased from their land to make space for Arab settlers. By using Arab militias, the Janjaweeds, to perpetrate most of the massacres, Khartoum hoped to be able to avoid international condemnation. It was a rather transparent ploy to misrepresent the conflict as some sort of civil war beyond the regime’s control.
It must be understood that the National Islamic Front bears every last telltale sign of Islamist terrorism: an authoritarian power structure, a commitment to slaughtering innocents, the institution of sharia, intolerance of secularism, cooperation with other Islamist organizations and, above all, Qur’anic justification for violence. Al-Nur writes:
Some Western “realists” believe rather cynically that the “stability” Khartoum could bring about by force is preferable to our continued fight for freedom. What these people are really saying is that democracy is a Western prerogative and that we Sudanese should feel grateful for merely being allowed to live.
This is not an African civil war. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is a struggle between freedom-loving citizens and their Islamist oppressors. Here’s Al-Nur on the stakes :
We must prevail to eliminate the presence of terrorist groups, such as al Qaeda and Hamas, which are guests of the regime in Khartoum. We must prevail to stabilize the region and spread democracy.
We must prevail to help Sudan return to its natural, legitimate geopolitical place — which is the African continent and not the Arab or Muslim world. At the same time, we must forge new alliances, no longer based upon race or religion, but upon shared values of freedom and democracy. This is why we opened a representative office in Israel last February.
Can there be any doubt that Darfur is a criminally neglected front in the War on Terror and that the U.S. needs to support the Sudan Liberation Movement in every way possible? The SLM is a formidable fighting force that once nearly brought the NIF to its knees. The Sunni Awakening in Iraq has demonstrated that a native population eager to throw off the yoke of Islamism can be America’s best ally. What are we waiting for?