The Citizen (Juba)
11 December 2011
editorial
The Northern Sudanese Arabs have since the time they entered the Sudan through Egypt, West and North Africa, and from across the Red Sea have been living precariously as foreigners in the land they have assumed as theirs by force on which they had always survived.
The mercenary armies which they had established were all made up of men they had forcibly recruited. Since the Turkish era through the Mahdiyya the Arabs had always captured men from the markets, farms and in the rivers fishing and took them to training camps to learn the art of war to fight for them their campaigns of seizing the lands of the indigenous peoples.
The people in Nuba Mountains, in Darfur and in the central region of the Sudan can testify to this fact that the Arabs never had any standing army at any given time drawn from people who had conscripted in it voluntarily because they were urged by nationalism. They did not have an iota of patriotism in them because they were not the owners of the land in which they had imposed themselves as leaders. Besides the forcible recruited men into the Arab armies of occupation of different eras, there are some men who have joined in order to benefit from the loot.
If we examine the history of the Arab militarization in the Sudan we shall find that there has been no national army formed out of patriots to defend a cause because the Arabs who are invaders in the Sudan have no cause. During the two civil wars all the fighting men recruited in the north to come and fight the Anya-Nya liberators in the period 1955-72 used to confess that they were caught in the markets and forcibly conscripted in the army. This is a total contrast with South Sudanese who had willingly joined the Anya-Nya movement which had no guns but traditional weapons such as arrows and bows and a few ancient guns from the First World War class of weapons like the ‘tasi’ rifle which loaded one bullet at time.
Southerners joined the Anya-Nya force because they were motivated by nationalism, they joined the freedom movement and faced the better armed Arab soldiers carrying the Second World War generation of weapons like the marker Four rifle which loaded ten bullets, the Stan guns, the Brent-guns, because they were inspired by patriotism.
The situation in armament during the SPLA war of liberation was somehow better because the arsenal included better weapons which included the shoulder fired SAM-7, mortar guns, RPG 7 and later some of the latest weapons of the Cold War era supplied by nations like Russia to some friendly countries to them and these found their ways into the hands of our patriotic fighters in the period 1983-2005. But even so because of the big number of volunteers who wanted to liberate ourselves and our country from Arab domination, the arms available were not enough to go round.
Despite this unfavourable condition, because there was nationalism and the great desire to be free, the few arms were utilized to defeat the better armed Arabs because they had no justification to fight Southerners over their ancestral lands. Since the liberation war was launched by the SPLA in May, 1983, the different Arab leaderships starting with Al Nimeiri, Suar Al Dahab, Sadig Al Mahdi, Al Bashir had used force to recruit an army to go South and fight the rightful people of the land over their rights.
Southerners who were displaced in the north as a policy of the National Islamic Front government for political propaganda purpose had seen what they had previously not known that the Westerners from Darfur and Kordofan and some people from central Sudan region including southern Blue Nile who monopolized the soldiery of the Khartoum army whose officers consisted mainly of people of Arab extraction were recruited by force.
Southerners had witnessed young Northern men raided in the markets of the three towns, in the buses and other public transport vehicles got out forcibly and driven to training centres in different parts of Khartoum state most notably in the Markiat mountainous area west of Omdurman, to Helefun east of Khartoum north, to Degainat near Kalakala along the road to Kosti, to Al Geitana south of Jebel Auliya town and to other closed training centres the so-called “muaskar magfula” spread throughout Khartoum state. This scenarios of capturing young men and recruiting them into the national army of Sudan had reduced the quality of Sudan armed forces to the weakest position in the whole of Africa if not the world and the Arab officers led battalions cannot stand up in the face of the patriotic army of the Republic of South Sudan which is made up of true nationalists.
The Arabs think the world does not know that the army they lead is consisting of frightened men caught and recruited by force. Such men are likely to throw down their guns and run away in the face of fighting with a much more nationalistic oriented army like that of South Sudan because they do not believe in what they are made to fight for by their Arab masters. The Sudan Government uses a lot of money to bribe men as far afield as West Africa especially Chad and Niger in its army but these mercenaries too are no match to the patriotic army of the South. These are the soldiers who wear ‘hujab’ across their chests or round their arms meant to protect them from bullets which is a fake protection.
The Sudan to offset this weakness had proposed the formation of South of the Sahara Defence Command which is based in Khartoum with Niger, Mauritania, Chad and others taking part in it but this too will not help the country because these countries were originally motivated by Sudan’s oil wealth that they aimed to earn for their development and which to their disappointment has fallen on the South Sudan part of the divided country and that will no longer serve the purpose for which they had joined as members of this military union. It may be better for the African nations of this military pact to abandon this dubious union led by Sudan which for years have been a financier of international Arab terrorism by availing sanctuary to Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
The current spate of forceful conscription of men to Sudan army in the North is within the vicious circle of the country which will not serve any purpose but failure in any military confrontation with the South or any neighbouring country whose military is made up of capable volunteers of men and women willingly recruited for the love and defence of their motherlands. Contrary to that of Khartoum where there is no nationalism for joining its force coupled with total absence of cause to fight, defeats are the ultimate results for any provocations of South Sudan by the Arabs of the Sudan. They must know this if they are not aware of their own miscalculations.
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