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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2001Column: Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mary Holmes
Islamic fundamentalism in Africa
Since Sept. 11, whether in the alternative or the mainstream media, there has
been surprisingly little discussion of the role of Islamic fundamentalism in
Africa. Yet it was in East Africa, with the 1998 truck bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, that bin Laden's Al Qaeda network staged its
first mass murder. These attacks killed 212 African civilians and 12 U.S.
diplomats, while thousands of other African civilians were injured, many of them
permanently.The U.S. bombed Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation, killing mainly
civilians. It also acted in an extremely arrogant manner toward the victims in
East Africa. To this day, their Bomb Blast Legal Rights Project is fighting for
compensation from the U.S. government. In addition, against the wishes of the
local people, the ensuing trial was held in New York, not Africa. But it is in Sudan that Islamic fundamentalist rule has assumed the form of
outright genocide. Over the past two decades, some two million people, almost
all of them non-Muslim southern Sudanese, have been killed or starved to death
in an ethno-religious war by the fundamentalist rulers on their own population.
These same rulers have also encouraged a massive slave trade whose victims have
been almost entirely southern women and children. Additionally, the regime
served as international headquarters for Al Qaeda before its move to
Afghanistan. Despite its 1998 bombing of Sudan, the U.S. government has actually drawn
closer to the regime in recent years. One factor is undoubtedly the beginning of
oil production in southern Sudan. Another is the fact that Sudan says it no
longer supports Al Qaeda. In the meantime, genocide and the slave trade continue
unabated. While officially committed since its 1999 elections to a multiethnic secular
democracy, Nigeria, too, faces a growing fundamentalist threat in the
predominantly Muslim North, historically the power base of the army. Twelve of
the country's 36 states have adopted Islamic Sharia law, resulting in vicious
attacks on women. Recently, the "justice" system under the Sharia gave
a teenage girl 100 cane strokes for premarital sex, while another woman has been
sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. Some 5,000 Nigerians have been killed in religious clashes since the end of
military rule in 1999, many of them attacks by Muslims on non-Muslims. In the
aftermath of Sept. 11, bin Laden posters have been put up on walls in many
Muslim neighborhoods. Such a retrogressive ideology has managed to post itself
as an alternative to the corrupt civilian regimes that have alternated with
corrupt and authoritarian military ones ever since independence. All the while,
the conditions of life and labor in this oil-rich country have declined. |
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