Why the Arab World Fears Sudan
Split?
Arab fears about Sudan's split have roots closer to home
Emile Hokayem
Last Updated: Jan 9, 2011
Voters in southern Sudan may well opt for independence from the
north today and obtain prompt international recognition for their
state. Should this happen (and many things can go awry in the
process), it won't be a repeat of the peaceful break-up of
Czechoslovakia in 1992, an oddity in world history. Still, it won't
necessarily reignite the 20 year-long civil war that was fought over
the south's future.
Sudan may sit at the geographic and political periphery of the Arab
world, yet the prospect of the break-up of a member state of the
Arab League is unnerving many across the region. The Libyan leader
Muammar Qaddafi warned of "a contagious disease" that would affect
its neighbours. A few months ago, Prince Saud Al Faisal, the Saudi
foreign minister, remarked: "Sudan, a member of the Arab League, is
facing the threat of division. No Arab League member can justify its
neutral stand on the issue. We have to support Sudan to overcome
these dangers."
Bad timing and fear of Sudan setting a precedent are the main
reasons for this angst. For one, Sudan would be breaking up just as
Kurdish self-determination sentiments in Iraq are rising. The
prospect of seeing Iraq dissolve is still far-fetched but a few
weeks ago, the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani made a provocative
plea for the right to self-determination. This may have been
political manoeuvring during the formation of the Iraqi government,
but Mr Barzani still got enthusiastic applause from the audience.
The Arab world already lost much balance since Iraq's political
transformation - its disintegration would be too disruptive.
In truth, the Arab world has faced many such crises: the Polisario
insurgency opposes Morocco in the Western Sahara; Saddam Hussein
attempted to annex Kuwait in 1990; and a failed unification process
led to the short-lived secession of South Yemen in 1994. Arab
officialdom never parted with its principled opposition to
re-drawing the region's borders but has done little to address the
root causes of separatism and secessionism.
Indeed, those crises are rooted as much in unsettled and disputed
borders as in the failure of governance throughout the Arab world.
Fixated on building strong, centralised states and perpetuating
their rule, Arab leaders have failed to develop models of
decentralisation and federalism more in sync with today's
developmental needs.
The UAE is truly a unique case in this regard. Its founding fathers
designed a federation despite the odds. They understood that this
arrangement better protected the survival and development of their
emirates rather than the typical go-it-alone approach. The other
federal model was born out of trauma and blood in Iraq, once the
epitome of the strong Arab state.
Then there is the matter of foreign interference. On blogs and in
op-ed pages across the region, there is a conviction that the West
is maliciously encouraging Sudanese southerners in their quest for
independence in order to weaken the Arab world. Kurds are also
suspected of similar western manipulation. Both southern Sudan and
Iraqi Kurdistan are resource-rich, so the argument goes that foreign
greed explains this suspected interest. In fact, both southern Sudan
and Kurdistan are land-locked and politically risky, so western
companies have mostly stayed away. And communities that sit on these
resources often compete for their control.
Saad Mehio, a columnist for Al Khaleej, goes even further. He blames
the coming Sudanese separation on a grand Israeli design to divide
the region along sectarian lines and sees a pernicious Israeli hand
from Sudan to Iraq. But the Arab world has proven quite adept at
dividing itself without external help. Blaming Israel and the West
smacks of a desire to have scapegoats rather than progress.
One cannot deny that the Ottoman Empire, and more importantly, the
western powers, drew the borders of the modern Middle East. For the
overwhelming majority of Arabs, the partition of Palestine remains
the ultimate instance of such Machiavellian engineering. That memory
runs deep but often obfuscates unpleasant realities. The thinking
goes that a unified Arab nation could have risen from the
Ottoman-era wilayet without such interference, leaving conveniently
aside the fact that Arabs were deeply divided after the First World
War.
The Druze and the Alawi of Syria lobbied the French occupiers to set
up their own distinct states. Promises of statehood were made to the
Kurds and then reneged on. Only the Christians of Lebanon were
successful in their efforts.
To be true, some Westerners have yet to give up their re-engineering
fantasies, taking comfort in the simplistic view that ethnic and
religious identity is carved in stone. When he was a US senator, the
US Vice-President Joseph Biden advocated a partition of Iraq into a
loose three-region sectarian federation. His proposal got little
traction inside the US government but interestingly it echoed a
proposal by a senior Iraqi political and Shia leader, Abdul Aziz al
Hakim, to create a Shia-super region in Iraq.
And when a fringe US military analyst, Ralph Peters, redrew all the
borders in the Middle East in a privately-owned defence journal,
many Arabs assumed - wrongly - that his views reflected the
nefarious designs of the US administration. Mr Peters created
homogenous sectarian and ethnic entities, including a Greater
Kurdistan, Baluchistan and a Shia state that extends from Baghdad to
the Shia-dominated eastern region of Saudi Arabia.
Ultimately, the coming split of Sudan has less to do with foreign
machinations than with bad governance in Khartoum - Sudan ranks
third on the Failed States Index - and the rise of sub-and
supra-national loyalties throughout the region. Arab states may have
centralised political control but they rarely have fostered a sense
of citizenship - witness the tensions in Egypt between the Copts and
the state. Even cosmopolitan and promising states like Lebanon and
Iraq have failed to build modern institutions that combine cultural
diversity and a feeling of national belonging. The Sudanese scission
will hopefully be a wake-up call to avert similar crises in the
future.
By Emile Hokayem
Emile Hokayem is the senior fellow for regional security at the
International Institute for Strategic Studies - Middle East
Source: The National
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