Colin Powell’s visit last week to Sudan - where he denounced the government-backed ethnic cleansing in the western region of Darfur and warned of a Rwanda-like genocide in the making - made one thing perfectly clear: the present cycle of horror and devastation in Sudan continues to prompt more concern in Western countries than in the Arab world.
The victims of this new African tragedy of ethnic slaughter - which erupted more than a year ago but until recently attracted little international attention - are hundreds of thousands of civilians of the Muslim faith. Though Muslim, they are not of the same ethnic origin as their Arab oppressors in Sudan and the majority of their neighbours in North Africa and the Middle East.
Appalling scenes of torture and killing of civilians; the rape of women of all ages, often in front of relatives; the burning to the ground of scores of villages, and the destruction of water sources in the drought-and-poverty- stricken region of Darfur, have for months now been reported by international human-rights groups.
So far, however, only a few Arab voices, most of them in the beleaguered human-rights community, have warned against these large-scale crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Sudanese military government and the Janjaweed militiamen whom it backs and arms. Unfortunately, these voices have little influence in a region where the media is still in the tight grip of entrenched autocrats and most people are mired in illiteracy, prejudice, poverty and injustice.
It is not the first time the state-run Arab media and even civil-society advocates have remained tight-lipped as death, devastation, and human-rights abuses unfold in a "brotherly" Arab country. Sudan is member of the Cairo- based club of Arab autocrats known as the Arab League of States. The immensity of the crimes committed under the watchful eye of General Omar Al-Bashir, who toppled a democratically elected government in June 1989 with the backing of radical Islamists and offered refuge in the early Nineties to Osama bin Laden, led even the toothless Arab League to send, amid international pressure, a fact-finding mission to Darfur in May. The result was an unprecedented press release - the first of its kind since the Arab League’s establishment in 1945 - that acknowledged "gross human-rights violations" committed in a member state. Sadly, the League soon yielded to pressure from the Sudanese government and quietly turned its back on the press release.
But even the hint of a reprimand from another Arab state was enough to spark outrage within the Sudanese government. At the end of May, the Sudanese foreign minister, Mustafa Othman Ismail, erupted in anger during a memorable news conference in Tunis following the Arab Summit, which General Al-Bashir boycotted (apparently to protest against his counterparts’ meddling in Sudan’s business). Ismail said Sudan expected Western organisations to make "unfounded allegations", but not the Arab League.
Arab reaction to the plight of the hundreds of thousands dispossessed, abused and displaced Darfurians is reminiscent of the shocking silence of both the Arab media and civil society that followed the gassing of thousands of Kurds by Iraqi troops led by Saddam Hussein more than 15 years ago.
The majority of Arabs will be inclined
to continue to turn a blind eye to gross human-rights abuses against their
non-Arab neighbours as long as they live in police states where freedom
of association, assembly and expression are still severely curtailed.
Human-rights education is badly needed in the Arab world to combat injustice, prejudice and tribalism. But it will have an insignificant impact in police states where the most independent-minded intellectuals continue to be silenced by the political police and radical Islamists.
• Kamel Labidi is former Amnesty
International human rights education coordinator for the Middle East.