Source/Credit: Aljazeera
Both pan-Arabist and Islamist governments have failed to embrace diversity and pluralism – to their own detriment.
The division of Sudan into two states is a dangerous precedent. The Arab world has to draw the right lessons from if it wants to avoid the break-up of other Arab states into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
The birth of South Sudan is first and foremost a testimony to the failure of the official Arab order, pan-Arabism, and especially the Islamic political projects to provide civic and equal rights to ethnic and religious minorities in the Arab world.
The jubilation that swept the people of southern Sudan at their independence from the predominantly Arab and Muslim north attests to the long-standing feelings of repression and alienation by a people, the majority of whom were born into the post-independence Arab world.
Granted, British rule planted the seeds of ethnic and religious divisions in Sudan and elsewhere in the Arab world. Western and Israeli intervention have played crucial roles in fueling secessionist trends in southern Sudan, and stand to benefit the most from the division of the country.
Avi Dichter, Israel’s former interior security minister, once said: “We had to weaken Sudan and deprive it of the initiative to build a strong and united state. That is necessary for bolstering and strengthening Israel’s national security. We produced and escalated the Darfur crisis to prevent Sudan from developing its capabilities.”
But the Arab world cannot simply explain secession as a product of a Western-Israeli conspiracy.
Arab failuresIf anything, it is the repressive regime in Sudan, combined with an incompetent and corrupt official Arab order, that drove legitimately disaffected people in southern Sudan into Western and even Israeli arms seeking independence from a failing Arab world.