December 24, 2006
Salvaging Islam in Sudan
By Saleem H. Ali and Mahmoud El Zain (originaly published in The Daily Times, May 20, 2006)
Africa’s largest country has once again moved towards greater notoriety by being declared the most “failed” state in the world by Foreign Policy magazine in their latest ranking of nations in turmoil. The crisis in the Darfur region of the country is major reason for this latest epithet for the Sudanese regime. Hence the news of a peace agreement between the government and the largest rebel group in Darfur might be considered a promising sign of renewal, but we must hold the applause. The Sudanese government has equivocated on peace agreements before and the various factions are still not all on board.
There is, however, some reason for optimism in Sudan. The once obstinate religious leader of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Turabi is showing astonishing signs of moderation. In a recent interview to the London-based newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat, Dr Turabi spoke of allowing women to become imams, promoting greater allowances for inter-marriage between Muslims, Jews and Christians and even venturing to call for radical Muslims to seek penance for their indiscretions.
The Sorbonne-educated Turabi has been an enigmatic and somewhat chameleonic figure in Sudanese politics for the past 30 years. The 9/11 Commission report referred to him as “Sudan’s long time hard-line ideological leader” who gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden. He was a spiritual leader of the current Sudanese government until 1999 when he fell out with President Al Bashir and was imprisoned in March 2004 for fomenting a coup plot. He was released in the summer of 2005 and continues to command considerable respect in many parts of the Muslim world.
Turabi’s newly found moderation has left many Islamic scholars aghast and several Sudanese clerics have branded him an apostate. However, the mere fact that such clear calls for moderation and reinterpretation of Islamic texts is coming from such an old ideologue such as Turabi is very promising indeed. Even if we discount these proclamations as opportunistic attempts to seek help from the West, the call for reform emanating from one of Al Qaeda’s oldest friends is a dramatic change to consider. It is equally significant that this call is coming from Sudan, which has been at the crossroads of conflict at multiple levels.
The fault lines in the civil war in southern Sudan had been about religion and race — Christians Africans versus mostly Muslim Arabs. The conflict was used in the West to highlight the most macabre face of Islamic and indigenous cultural extremism, from slave trades to forced conversions. Accuracy of these accounts was disputed and conspiracy theories about oil greed and imperialism raged on for years. Thankfully, most of these came to rest following the peace agreement between the government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in January 2005.
More than a year has passed and this agreement has withstood continuing turmoil in Darfur as well as the death of the SPLM leader John Garang in a helicopter crash in August 2005. Hence extremists who had repeatedly concluded the incompatibility of Muslims and Christians to live together in Sudan have thus far been proven wrong.
However, the Darfur crisis has been far more vexing for Muslim clerics such as Turabi to understand. All sides in the conflict are Muslims of the same sect. Hence sectarian strife such as is the case in Iraq or Pakistan cannot be blamed either. There is not even a clear racial distinction to be drawn in the crisis since there have been Arab-African alliances during some phases of the conflict. In fact, historically, inhabitants of the region had experienced changing identities, where a Baggara (Arab) tribesman through access to the means of production and settlement in a Fur (African) village could acquire the Fur ethnic identity.
The perpetuation of the Darfur crisis has thus led to some soul-searching on the part of ideologues such as Turabi who now conclude that a culture of violence in many Muslim states is to blame for such conflicts. Inequality of resource distribution and competing land use policies, sparked by a cultural acceptance of weapons to resolve disputes are the key ingredients of Sudan’s predicament.
If there is a silver lining to this tragic tale, it would be that extreme elements such as Turabi have been forced out of their martyring determinism. The dogmatic chapters, which such clerics still hold from their defunct political ideology, are maintained merely to calm the remnants of religious militias that have not yet been demobilised. Whether the peace agreement in Darfur holds or not, the West should pay close attention to the way this conflict is transforming the vanguards of Islam in Sudan.
Saleem H Ali is associate professor of environmental planning and conflict resolution at the University of Vermont. Mahmoud El Zain is a Sudanese scholar currently on the faculty of the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica
Posted by Saleem Ali at 04:33 PM
December 23, 2006
At the Annual Earth Dialogues event in Brisbane, Australia with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and colleagues
Posted by Saleem Ali at 10:13 PM
December 22, 2006
Curing the Resource Curse
Countries that produce oil, metals and precious gems have recently come under scornful scrutiny by numerous public intellectuals. Phrases such as “resource curse”, “petro-politics”, and “conflict diamonds” are now common parlance. The war in the Middle East and the empowerment of Iran through petrodollars has brought this matter in the limelight again. The conflict in Balochistan is also claimed by many to be a manifestation of the “resource curse”. In a recent column Thomas Friedman of the New York Times claimed that “countries that get addicted to selling their natural resources rarely develop their human resources and educational institutions”. Such statements are neither well supported by facts nor offer much prescriptive guidance for resource-rich economies with no other significant endowments upon which to base development.
Countries that produce oil, metals and precious gems have recently come under scornful scrutiny by numerous public intellectuals. Phrases such as “resource curse”, “petro-politics”, and “conflict diamonds” are now common parlance. The war in the Middle East and the empowerment of Iran through petrodollars has brought this matter in the limelight again. The conflict in Balochistan is also claimed by many to be a manifestation of the “resource curse”. In a recent column Thomas Friedman of the New York Times claimed that “countries that get addicted to selling their natural resources rarely develop their human resources and educational institutions”. Such statements are neither well supported by facts nor offer much prescriptive guidance for resource-rich economies with no other significant endowments upon which to base development.
Most of the world’s major economic and educational powers have depended at some point in their development path on the exploitation of their natural resources — the United States, Canada and Australia being foremost among them. In many cases extractive industries have been necessary for the development trajectory.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, which had a landmark election last week, is a common example used by the resource pessimists. During my visit to Kinshasa five years ago, I was repeatedly told by development agencies that diamonds and coltan were to blame for much of the country’s woes. While the revenues from mining may indeed have contributed to rebel movements in the east of the country, let us not forget that neighbouring Rwanda had been scourged by civil strife a few years earlier without a scramble for minerals. Underlying ethnic tensions coupled with massive deprivation and perceived social injustice, are the root causes of conflict. What the people of Congo need now is not more doom and gloom from the resource curse theorists but rather an effective means of managing and monitoring the flow of their mineral revenues.
Such paths to development must, of course, be tempered with environmental performance, economic diversification, and a respect for the safety of those who toil so tirelessly to retrieve these resources for us. There has been considerable research on the economic performance of resource-rich countries by academics as well as by international financial institutions. Unfortunately, such studies do not consider the full spectre of alternative development paths and cannot account for the myriad intervening variables that may lead to poor economic performance or conflict. Some of the most remarkable success stories of development in recent years such as Botswana, Malaysia and Chile have been mineral producers, and must not be dismissed as outliers. In fact the causal connection in their turn of fortunes as a result of minerals being discovered is far more robust than the resource curse studies.
Other countries such as Chad or Equatorial Guinea were economically stressed and examples of poor governance and armed conflict long before oil was discovered there. If anything, minerals might bring the behaviour of these governments in the international limelight and force rogue regimes to improve their performance. The World Bank briefly cut off financial payments to Chad earlier this year because of its misuse of oil revenues. While the terms of the resumption agreement are being challenged by activists, the Chadian government agreed to pass a law requiring 70 percent of oil revenues to go towards “priority poverty programmes”.
As international norms for accountability evolve, the fear that resource endowments will be misused is abating. On July 6, 41 financial institutions agreed to a revised version of “The Equator Principles” for ensuring social and environmental consciousness in their investment decisions. The British government has been leading the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which aims to recruit governments in having constructive action plans for resource revenues. The Kimberley Process for diamond certification and the recent partnership between jewellery manufacturers and groups such as Earthworks and Oxfam on ‘clean gold usage’ are promising signs of constructive engagement. Such efforts are far too easily labelled as “greenwash” and deserve more credit and time to mature.
Natural resource extraction is far too consequential to ignore or tackle on an ad hoc basis. Making choices in environmental conflicts involves a confluence of fearless science and clear policy formulation. We need an integrated natural resource management strategy that considers energy and material sources for our modern lifestyles across the supply chain. While society must be better prepared for depletion of non-renewable resources such as oil, we should not be constrained from harnessing resources to benefit communities that have limited alternatives. It is true that many of these extractive economies have failed to equitably distribute their wealth — the Niger delta region in Nigeria being a prime example of such a case. However, this situation reflects failed policy more than a failure of resource extraction itself. Norway, one of the world’s oldest democracies, has succeeded to manage its resources quite equitably and enjoy relatively high environmental performance as well.
Selective statistical analyses that disparage mineral economies or polemical statements about resource curse are unlikely to address any of the major development challenges that confront us.
Posted by Saleem Ali at 02:10 PM
