One must always begin one's resistance at home, against powers that as a citizen one can influence; but alas, a fluent nationalism masking itself as patriotism and moral concern has taken over the critical consciousness, which then puts loyalty to one's "nation" before everything. At that point there is only the treason of the intellectuals, and complete moral bankruptcy.

Edward Said: Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 June 1999

Injustice has become endemic to Africa and fashionable as nationalism in the developed world. However, in some African countries there seems to be a conviction that the only cure to injustice is war.  Intellectuals around the world have devoted valuable time to the conceptualization and contextualization, and other difficult to pronounce words, of war and its causes and consequences. In the process they also engage in their own wars that, in my view, have contributed to setting the stage for bloody wars. They contribute in at least two ways: the first is their silence in the face of religious extremism, and their conviction that extremism is a bubble that will soon burst and lose its effect.  The second is their participation in the so called civilian branches of militia where they devote their time to justifying war and theorizing solutions through prophecies of new socio-economic relations formulated at the expense of uninformed poor civilians whose lives would be shattered for decades to come. After reading part of this at a recent workshop I think it wise to state the obvious: Not all intellectuals commit reckless acts; however, the sheer fact that the adjective intellectual applies to them is enough to hold them responsible for how they behave as intellectuals and how their silence or participation makes a difference. 

The silence in the face of the extremist intellectuals has taken a heavy toll on the lives of the courageous intellectuals who performed their duty towards their communities and religions. Albagir Mukhtar of Amnesty International, London, recently decried the intellectuals' dire attempts after September 11^th to exonerate Islam from sanctioning killing of the innocent.  Not that they had not done it before, but then they did it as if it were meant just to sit on shelves and be dug out by wide-eyed graduate students and other scholars. Those who courageously took the responsibility to confront fanaticism and destruction of their communities ended up hanging from gallows or exiled to other countries. One wonders whether it would have been possible for dictators to kill and exile them if all intellectuals stood fast behind the courageous ones, through words and actions. Cases in point are Mahmoud M. Taha of Sudan, Ken Sara wiwa of Nigeria, and Nasr Hamid Abuzaid of Egypt. Intellectuals around the world were busy trying to agree or disagree with the scholars and publish their opinions rather than take the moral and ethical stand of supporting them, whether they agreed with them or not. For some reason intellectualism seems to be the antithesis of activism. Lack of activism in the anti-extremist camp allowed the extremists’ message about injustice to be carried to the grassroots, while the counter-message remained the domain of sympathetic western and apologetic Muslim scholars.

The civil wars and other upheavals in the Sudan may serve as good examples of how intellectuals have been part and parcel of the wars and other conflict situations. Intellectuals who are participating in the war rhetoric, whether they are from the government side or the rebel side, are engaged in a war of words—words that never reached the more than one million people who have been displaced and the 50,000 killed in Darfur region. The internet revolution has made easy the exchange of insulting partisan or ethnic foul language that may sometimes culminate in intellectual lynching.  The formation of troops to attack someone on a list-serve or a discussion board is an amazing daily exercise on those lists, topped only by the formation of long lines to congratulate or pay condolences to a list member for a sad or happy occasion. The keyboard troops lead character assassination expeditions, descriptions of past and future battlefields and exchange of nationalistic jargon that borrows from the heritage of war. 

For almost sixteen years Sudan has been under the thumb of Islamist extremists whose cadres spent at least twenty years organizing to take power. Their organization made them the envy of the rest of the political entities. They took over the major financial institutions by initiating their own banks, insurance and other public and private companies. They spread their influence carefully in both military and civilian institutions. They knew that from then on they only had to wake up early enough to overthrow the democratic government.² Despite the fact that their financial institutions were failing, they managed to overthrow the elected government and to threaten all other stronger financial institutions.

Islamist intellectuals were pivotal in turning the war between the government and the Southern Sudanese rebels into a religious one. They carefully chose military chants and used the media especially radio and television to spread ideals that they themselves knew were silly but were effective in playing on the religious passions of Sudanese Muslims. The propaganda ranged from silly stories of monkeys fighting with soldiers and trees chanting Allahu Akbar, to holding wedding parties for the martyrs whom they were sure were being wed to the celestial wide-eyed females in heaven. In their endeavor to Islamize the whole country they sold Islam as a unifying factor that worked against racism and nationalism. They turned the conflict over power into a holy war. Now that the American administration had forced both sides into a peace agreement, the Islamist rhetoric quickly changed into one of ethnicity and a warning that Muslims would be wiped out by the Southern rebels who found their way into the capital city after the peace agreement.

Newspapers are full of stories of how the capital city is now the sight of men in military fatigues carrying machine guns raising havoc whenever it fits their purposes. Whatever the reason that this behavior is allowed in the market areas and neighborhoods of the city, the rhetoric of Islamist intellectuals has seized the chance to turn their position against racism and nationalism into one that is full of prophecies of doom that would befall the Northerners by the trigger happy rebels roaming the streets.  They, the Islamists, totally ignore of course the fact that escalating the war and signing a lame, vague peace agreement is their responsibility.

The latest warning came from Mr. Altayeb Mustafa, one of the Islamists’ prominent writers. He has been for a while a proponent of the cession of the North from the South. His latest article is posted on the largest Sudanese discussion board Sudaneseonline.com; the title may be translated as, “You will remember my words”. The arrogance of the rebel leaders and soldiers became the base for fueling resentment against the warriors who seem to have earned some sort of impunity after the peace agreement. Certain facts and truths collected for his article make it difficult to convince his readers that the status quo is part of the poor governance of his party.

It is easy to implicate the Islamist intellectuals for their blatantly manipulative rhetoric, but the rebels are not exactly free from the same vice. Civilian branches of armed rebellions, known as the “movement,” play the role of think tanks for armed rebels. The Sudan Liberation Army is no exception in making sure that it has its “Movement”, hence the acronym SPLM/A. The prominent Northern scholar, Dr. Mansur Khalid, who is a law graduate and holder of a Ph.D. in Education and who held positions such as Minister of Foreign Affairs and that of Education led the think tank of the Movement. Dr. Mansur Khalid’s two-volume book titled, The Sudanese Elite and Addiction to Failure,³ is sitting on the shelves of thousands of intellectuals. I, not counting myself among the intellectuals, have been a devoted fan of Dr. M. Khalid ever since my high school days. His style and his meticulous research are beyond admirable. In his abovementioned book he makes the case for how the Sudanese intellectuals are the source of all the crises that plagued the Sudan. He decries how the intellectuals have turned into professionals who are constricted by their lack of vision and their content with a salary at the end of the month. Ironically, this widely admired intellectual has joined one of the most devastating wars of the past century. The sheer fact that an intellectual of his caliber has become party to a war, regardless of which side he is on, is an indication of how peace time can be a time for intellectuals to work their way into war rather than become factors in preventing it.  His very words against intellectuals mirror his own status in the apparatus of conflicts.  

The wars that keep breaking out one after the other in the Sudan seem to be owned by the intelligentsia of the country. Dr. Elizabeth Hodgkin, East Africa researcher for Amnesty international, and a long time Sudanist, told a large group of Sudanese in Iowa City that the people fleeing the war in Darfur kept asking her why they were being shot at and who was shooting at them. She answered, "I don't know." However, not a day passes by without a long article or a pamphlet from the various groups that are fighting the government in the region, with hardly a note on how unwinnable such wars are. A clear indication that the conflict is about competing political interests and that the people are not only uninformed but were not consulted on whether they wanted to trade miserable, deprived lives for the total devastation of war. Long articles from the intellectuals of the rebels about the long suffering of the people, and press releases promising to avenge them, are not in short supply. Fiery lies and irresponsible acts of the government subject the people to one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in Africa if not in the world. Both sides find strength in turning their war into an ethnic conflict that pits ethnicities against each other.

Treason versus patriotism is the government intellectuals’ favorite field of writing. In effect Darfur and adjacent regions are now set for some genocidal acts. Granted, the UN could not prove genocide in Darfur; however, there is no lack of evidence that there is a high possibility that it may occur. Each ethnic group has turned genocidal against the other. Intellectuals on all sides hardly address the hard glaring, fact that military presence of any type amongst the disempowered, disenfranchised and dispossessed citizens does nothing but victimize those civilians. Edward Said eloquently makes the point that, “As any displaced and dispossessed person can testify, there is no such thing as a genuine, uncomplicated return to one's home; nor is restitution (other than simple, naked revenge, which sometimes gives an illusory type of satisfaction) ever commensurate with the loss of one's home, society, or environment.”⁴ If people could come to terms with the volume of devastation to civilian lives, then forgiveness of excesses in the name of a higher cause or good would be totally unacceptable; impunity of the government for disregarding its responsibility towards citizens would not pass for defending them or for peacekeeping. 

The intellectualization of killing and rape takes various shapes and forms. The frightful practice of playing with words and of demonizing the other is chilling. The gender wars are the most disgusting to me. They are a vivid reminder of how intellectuals turn the malignant into benign. A recent article published on Sudaneseonline.com by a writer from Western Sudan awakened the humiliations of the 19^th century civil wars in the worst way possible. He described the mass rapes by the Mahadiyya army of women of a certain ethnic group in the North as a “sexual spree” that overwhelmed those women and attracted them to the super sexuality of the men of western Sudan, who made up the bulk of that army. He ridiculed the impotence of men in the North and praised his kinfolks for satisfying the women through their insatiable sexual desires and abilities. He ignored the fact that the women who were violated by that army, committed group suicides by holding hands and jumping into the Nile to drown, so as to spare their men the indignity and hurt of living with raped women.  The most heinous war crime was turned into a sexual competition between the men. This is being said and published at a time when the same crimes are being committed in another civil war, in Darfur, Western Sudan. Could there be a stronger incentive for an ethnic sexual pay back? Not surprisingly the women-members of that board who dared to express their opinions against male aggression and sexual assault were quickly treated to some sexual suggestions that were thought to put them in their place.

The war in Iraq is another example of how intellectuals cannot resist a chance to do some abstract thinking. Case in point is the elections that took place in that country. It is disheartening to listen to analysts articulating how the act of casting a ballot has liberated the Iraqis; never mind that it was under occupation, martial law, and on a ballot that shows no names. Another example is how some terminology is taken for granted and used as basis for theory development. Often one hears intellectuals take the division along ethnic and religious lines without questioning it. Geographically Iraq became the Sunni triangle, the shi'a concentrations, and Kurdish areas that dream of independence. The Kurds have been removed as a Sunni segment of the population and ethnicity has been confused with religion. New expressions are not in short supply; the latest is the "debaathification" of Iraq. Groups, zones and expressions are created and dismantled to fit the "experts’" parameters and imagination.

The simple question by the “masses” seems to be, “but what is the difference between Iraq before elections and Iraq after the elections?” The simple answer is that the war has turned bloodier after the elections. Attempts to tell the Iraqis to forget about ethnic and religious differences are futile after three years of basing the Iraqi lives on those divisions. News anchors, who are among the media networks intellectuals, paid a solemn gesture to mark the day when the number of dead American soldiers reached 1,500 and the injured more than 11,000. The same anchors continue to count the Iraqi dead by the dozen as if they were things or individuals who “needed killing.”

The destruction of infrastructure in big Iraqi cities and heavily populated centers is rarely mentioned. Some intellectuals will quickly thwart any attempt to mention the devastation and displacement of thousands by saying that people who concentrate on destruction were just doomsday advocates, and we would do better if we paid some attention to the positive peaceful life that was going on in some parts of that country. To explain why such a suggestion should insult anyone's intelligence, let us apply it to the USA. Suppose that we embraced the notion of being positive and applied it to the events of september 11^th. on that devastating day life was hardly disrupted in most parts of the country. Schools remained open and people expressed their shock and horror while meeting in peaceful places. Even in New York City the news was not heard in all boroughs at the same time. Would it have been a good argument to tell everyone to remember that it was only two buildings and a couple of thousand people and thank goodness we still had about 300 million alive and a government in place? We may not feel the absurdity of such an argument till we equate the devastation and the inequity of destabilization in both places.  It is not far fetched to conclude that flag waiving nationalists chanting death to the enemy on all sides emerge from the same devastation, and there is no virtue in branding one group insurgents and another patriots.

There is, more often, a negative tendency in the existing debate; the debaters are excellent at vilifying what they are against rather than speak to what they are for. Not only that but the debate involves anti-government arguments rather than antiwar arguments, to the extent that there is usually a celebration of killing of government soldiers and wailing over human rights when the killing is of the rebels. For me the most disconcerting of all is how intellectuals take for granted the legality of war and concentrate on the illegal acts of the warriors.

[1] This title is taken from the title of a book edited by Meredeth Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya titled, What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa.

2 The Sudanese people grew accustomed to waking up in the morning to the tunes of military marches that would be followed by a declaration of a military take over. It became a joke that whoever wakes up the earliest can take over power.

3 Khalid, Mansur. 1993, The Sudanese Elite and Addiction to Failure, Cairo, Sijjil Alarab Printers.  

4 Edward Said. The Treason of the Intellecuals. In Masters of the universe? : NATO's Balkan crusade  edited by Tariq Ali. London ; New York: Verso, 2000.