[Peace-discuss] Darfur talk

[Karen Medina]

Deng made a distinction between African and Arab more than black and 
Arab. He was saying it was a clash of cultures and never mentioned a 
thing of skin color. That by accepting the religion but not the culture 
this was the reason the people of Western Sudan are targeted. Southern 
Sudan was and is Christian, or so Deng implied. Deng himself was 
returned to his tribe after his enslavement. He would have been around 
12 years old at that time, and they (his owners) had told him to take on 
the Muslim religion and physical display of such, so he did.

Even during the actual talk, Deng quite animately stated that he was not 
for military intervention. "Military intervention will not solve the 
problem so tomorrow the problem will still be there." At this time he 
also gave what he did want from the United States as a superpower: peace 
talks. Signing a paper with the powers of the world will be better than 
signing the papers of the past with what the "Arabs" call "infidels."

Beyond saying that a military intervention would not have an end, he 
also said that there could not be enough troops to do what a military 
intervention would have to do.

All this information about what he wanted from the US came late in the 
talk, so I am wondering if part of it was lost by the listeners. He gave 
us a lot to think about, and if I had known more about the Sudan, I 
would have been mulling over questions by the time he got to this part 
of his talk.

To see a transcript of a very similar talk by Deng, you might look at 
this -> http://www.iheu.org/node/1539

-karen medina

Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> The people in Darfur were said to be Muslim, but not to have adopted the 
> Muslim ways of Khartoum—retaining their own culture and hence 
> persecuted. As to the blackness of all concerned, Deng was murky on 
> that. I remember him saying only that there was a tiny radical Islamist 
> minority in Khartoum who were running things, the implication being that 
> they may not have  been as black as those in Darfur. Perhaps Karen or 
> May, who were sitting next to me will remember better.   --mkb
> 
> On Feb 22, 2006, at 10:16 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for the helpful summary, Mort.  Regarding "the long and
>> tragic history of the black peoples in Sudan" -- aren't all
>> the parties involved in Darfur, oppressors and oppressed
>> alike, black (and Muslim)?  Here much of "Darfur awareness"
>> (e.g., the article in the "Black History Month" issue of the
>> Public i) seems to suggest that blacks there are being
>> oppressed by Arabs, who it is implied are in some sense
>> non-black. --CGE