Word: arabism
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...hair and bleached bones is an ominous sight. We enter a mud-walled, straw-roofed village. Instead of offering the usual smiles and waves, the children duck away. The reason for the villagers' fear becomes evident a few minutes later: nine turbaned men on horseback, members of the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, appear with rifles over their shoulders. We are gone before they can react, but their presence on the road in broad daylight provides a hint of their sense of invulnerability...
...mountainous land just below the Sahara in western Sudan, is the world's worst man-made disaster. In four years, according to the U.N., fighting has killed more than 200,000 people and made refugees of 2.5 million more. The conflict is typically characterized as genocide, waged by the Arab Janjaweed and their backers in the Sudanese government, against Darfur's black Africans. But what is often overlooked is that the roots of the conflict may have more to do with ecology than ethnicity. To live on the poor and arid soil of the Sahel--just south of the Sahara...
...shifting dynamics of the fighting in Darfur illustrate why the prism through which the war is commonly explained--ethnic animosity between Arabs and blacks--may be less applicable than other factors, including the environment. Because of Darfur's harsh, dry terrain, the region's Arab herders and its non-Arab farmers have had to work together in the past: the farmers allowed the herders' livestock on their land in exchange for goods such as milk and meat. As resources become more scarce, that history of cooperation may help persuade some local Arabs and non-Arabs to join forces against...
...that assessment lies a portent of doom for the U.S. in Iraq. From the start, the occupation has been informed by illusions--about the strength of the insurgency, about the level of antagonism among Iraq's sects, about the very nature of Arab society and culture. Those illusions could be sustained as long as you stayed within the protected confines of the Green Zone. As much as any other indicator, the deterioration of security inside this ostensible fortress underscores the extent to which the war has spiraled out of the U.S.'s control...
Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, argued that the Arab section of Sudan must confront its past and acknowledge its role in the violence in Darfur instead of remaining in a “state of amnesia.” In a speech last night called “Darfur: Anything to do with Slavery?” Soyinka addressed the ongoing violence that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of displaced refugees. Soyinka argued that Arabs played a historic role in the African slave trade...