Ethiopia Fends Off Arab Conspiracy Theories

This perennial piece of nonsense usually appears in Egyptian newspapers,because Egypt is dependent on the Nile and lives in constant paranoia at the thought that someone might interfere with the river upstream. The more fantastic the notion, the easier it is to get published....

Ethiopia is a country which, in the past thirty years, has repeatedly known major famine. We have all seen the pictures. Yet the headwaters of the Nile begin in Ethiopia, and intelligent irrigation projects could save many lives in Ethiopia.

Yet Egypt has been threatening, and screaming, that Ethiopia's plans are outrageous. And if the threats and screams do not work, then the Egyptians try smiles, and wiles, and offers to cooperate, if only -- oh, if only the Egyptians are given a veto over what Ethiopia does, and how much water it diverts.

Never mind that it the Ethiopians who for years have suffered, and that Egypt looks benignly on the massacres of the blacks in the southern Sudan, because it wishes to extend Arab Muslim power down to where it will immediately threaten what has always been seen, in Islam and in the West, as the celebrated Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. Securing the Sudan is one element; threatening Ethiopia, from Eritrea and Somalia, and from the Arabs of Egypt and the Sudan from the north, and as well, from within the country, with a very aggressive program of da'wa (conversion) which can always become subversion.

Ethiopia, in Islam, was once accorded special status because 82 families of followers of Muhammad supposedly found temporary refuge there from the Meccans. Gratitude to the the Christian Negus of Ethiopia entitled the country to a kind of special status, as dar al-sulh, a kind of halfway house between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb. But that gratitude, and that special consideration, however minor it may have been, is not demonstrated in the slightest by Egypt's proprietary and exclusivist claims on the Nile waters.

If Ethiopia wishes to divert waters to feed people who have lacked, until now, the wherewithal and the technical assistance to use those waters for irrigation, that should be encouraged by the entire Infidel world. Egypt's threats, Egypt's wiles, should be seen in the proper context. The Arabs everywhere in North Africa essentially treat the black Africans with contempt. In deed, in Darfur, the Arabs have tried to wipe out black Africans -- as there is ample testimony from survivors -- even if they are Muslim.

In the Biafra War, a war brought on by the Jihad against the Christian Ibo and other Christian peoples of southern Nigeria by the Hausa and Fulani Muslims of the north (Islam itself was spread most recently in the 1804 Jihad declared by Othman Dan Fodio), and by the desperate attempt of the Ibo (Igbo) people to free themselves from Muslim aggression, tens of thousands of civilians were murdered --- by the Egyptian pilots who repeatedly bombed and strafed them (meanwhile, the only two countries in the world to recognize Biafra were Ghana and Israel; the rest of the Infidel world turned its back, pretending to believe that it was more important to "keep the largest black African country whole" even if this meant the appropropriation by the Muslims who controlled the army, of southern oil wealth, and repeated aggression against the Christians of Nigeria -- an aggression that continues to this day, in the steady spread of sharia, in the attacks on Christian peoples (usually the press only reports the Christian attempts at retaliation, not all that goes before -- and furthermore, describes this as "communal violence" rather than Muslim aggression which the Christians must ward off).

It is not surprising that Egypt should attmempt to arrogate to itself the water of the Nile, and deny, even in its nascent stage, the attempt of the oldest free black African country, and a country so celebrated for its long history of Christianity that, when Western Christendom imagined a Christian realm, beyond Islam, that represented an ally that might be counted on for succor and protection, they placed the Kingdom of Prester John first in India -- and then in Ethiopia.

Those in Western Europe who claim to have the interests of the Third World at heart really have to be put to the test. They sided with the Muslims in Biafra. They have not moved a finger to aid the Christian blacks in the southern Sudan, and have done nothing to denounce the Arab Muslim genocide against them, that has lasted more than 20 years. They seem not to know much, and care nothing about, the continued enslavement of blacks, by Muslim Arabs, in Mali and in Mauritania. They do not take the side of the government of Tanzania, trying to deal with Arab revanchism in Pemba and Zanzibar.

And what will they say about Ethiopia, and its need for water. ONe suspects, because this phony left, including the Anglican clergy who have never gone to the aid of the African Anglicans under attack by Islam, will say nothing -- or even denounce Israel yet again (for they have no sympathy, and no understanding, of Israel's endless plight as the subject of a relentless Jihad against it, a tiny Infidel sovereignty in an Arab Muslim sea) for "troublemaking" in Ethiopia.

Really, it is important for the American government to do something dramatic -- for nothing will come from Europe, not even from, or especially not from -- the co-religionists of the black African Christians under assault -- in Africa.

I have repeatedly suggested in these postings that a small force could seize the southern Sudan, and secure it until the local black population, Christian and animist, Dinka and Nuer and others, can vote on their own independence. Why should they not? And why should the sinister regime in Khartoum, which keeps denying it has anything to do with the Janjaweed in Darfur, be heeded in the slightest?

Or is the American government, too, hellbent on ignoring what is happening to black Christians throughout Africa, and doing nothing to help or protect them against Muslim depredation and aggression and threats?

Ethiopia is one test. Nigeria is another test. And the Sudan is yet another. Let us see.

Egypt, whether Muslim or not, always has to watch with a certain amount of trepidation any attempt at diverting Nile waters. As Herodotus said ages ago, "All Egypt is a gift of the Nile." The same is true of most of Sudan below Khartoum--no water save what flows from the south.

I understand that water is becoming one of the major bones of contention in the Middle East--not only between Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon over the Jordan, but also between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq over the Euphrates.

Also, Egypt's relations with the Muslim Sudan have been problematic for a while. The revolt of Muhammad Ahmad, the so-called Mahdi, in the late 19th century was directed against both British attempts to suppress the slave trade and attempts by the Egyptian Khedive (heirs of an Albanian named Mehmet Ali)to extend Egyptian influence southwards.

Egypt's intervention in the Biafran-Nigerian War in the early 1970's was not strictly a Muslim thing. Throughout the 1960's and '70's, everyone except Moammar Qaddafi bent over backwards to preserve the artificial boundaries by which colonial powers defined African states. The USA also backed the Nigerian government at the time, too.

This has been a long-standing problem in US foreign policy. The USA sees no reason why any border anywhere in the world should be changed. This is partly a "goodwill" gesture to all governments; partly a reflection of the USA lacking territorial ambitions; and partly a reflection of the USA's own polyethnic experience. That is, is we could forge a unity between unevenly blended groups, everyone else ought to be able to, too.

BTW, my own feelings are that nations will rise and fall until the end of time, and it is foolish to commit American national prestige, honor, lives, and treasure to maintaining states whose peoples have no sense of belonging together.

Egypt's intervention was "not a strictly Muslim thing"? The Biafrans certainly thought it was, from top to bottom, and they still do. One Biafran website discusses how the Muslim Northerners "found accomplices in Egyptian pilots. The ruthless and heartless pilots started doing the bidding of their Nigerian employers, bombing everything in sight, dispossessing mothers of their children and robbing children of their parents through deadly air assaults" and descirbes other "atrocities the Egyptian pilots were visiting on civilians all over Biafra." Other websites run by Biafrans show "the motivated Biafra soldiers working hard to save their innocent children, women, the aged and their entire land from Islamic jihad."

Apparently the Biafrans thought what they were enduring was a continuation of the long process of islamization that was first unleashed in 11804, and gathered force after independence, when the British were no longer around to hold the Muslim north back, which tried violence, forced conversion of Christians in the north (who were then supposed to return to the south and convert their fellows), bribery, and all manner of means.

In the end, the Biafrans were defeated, and a million people, most of them Christian civilians, strafed by the Egyptians, murdered by the Muslim forces in the army, were killed. The West was utterly indifferent; it was one of the most disgraceful performances in the modern world, and it had to do with unwillingness to have the Nigerian oil flow interrupted, or to in any way offend the Muslim states, including those involved in direct support for the northern Muslims, Egypt, Algeria, and the Sudan.

In the famous 1969 Ahiara Declaration, the leader of Biafra, Col. Ojukwu, said that the Biafrans were fighting white economic imperialism (the whites who did not want, under any conditions, to upset political applecarts because all they cared about was that oil from the south should flow uninterruptedly, whatever happened to the Ibo or other Christians), and he also repeatedly emphasized (read the whole speech--it is online) that the Biafran secession was a resisstance to "the Arab-Muslim expansionism which has menaced and ravaged the African continent for twelve centuries."

Remember how the war started: with the simultaenous killing, all over Nigeria, of 50,000 Christian Ibo, murdered "like cattle."

Let me quote just a bit from that Ahiara Declaration, before going on: Col. Ojukwu noted that "we are the latest victims of a wicked collusion between the three traditional scourges of the black men, racism, Arab-Muslim expansionism and white economic imperialism." The "racism" he located in the insistence of the outside world that tribes and peoples be yoked together, permanently, in countries defined purely by borders drawn by colonial powers, and that racism explained the indifference as well to the right of true "independence and basic human rights" for black peoples. "In the thinking of many white powers a good, progressive and efficient government is good only for whites" and "our view [that we needed a progressive state with "social and ecoomic justice"] was considered dangerous and pernicious."

And then he went on to add:

"Our Biafran ancestors remained immune from the Islamic contagion....We came to stand out as a non-Muslim island in a raging Islamic sea. Throughout the period of the ill-fated Nigerian experiemnt, the Muslims hoped to infiltrate Biafra by peaceful means and quiet propaganda, but failed. Then the late Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto tried, by political and economic blackmail and terrorism, to convert Biafrans settled in Northern Nigeria to Islam. His hope was that these Biafrans of dispersion would then carry Islam to Biafra, and by so doing give the religion political control of the area. The crises, which agitated the so-called independent Nigeria from 1962, gave these aggressive proselytisers the chance to try converting us by force.

"It is now evident why the fanatic Arab-Muslim states like Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan have come out openly and massively to support and aid Nigeria in her present war of genocide against us. These states see militant Arabism as a powerful instrument for attaining power in the world. Biafra is one of the few African states untainted by Islam. Therefore, to militant Arabism, Biafra is a stubling block to their plan for controlling the whole continent.l The control is fast becoming manifest in the Organization of African Unity. On the question of the MIddle East, the Sudanese crisis, in the war between Nigeria and Biafra, militant Arabism has succeeded in imposing its point of vieww through blackmail and bluster.

"It has threatened African leaders and governments with inciting their Muslim minorities to rebellion if the governments adopted an independent line on these questions. In this way an O.A. U. that has not felt itself able to discuss the genocide in the Sudan and Biafra, an O.A.U. that has again and again advertised its ineptitude as a peace maker, has rushed into open condemnation of Israel over the MIddle East dispute. Indeed, in recent times, by its perforrmance, the O.A.U. might well be an organization of Arab unity."

And, one might add, the U.N. might as well be such too -- in its utter ineffectiveness in dealing with the Jihad, some thirty-four years later, still being conducted against the Sudanese blacks.

Anyone who wishes to refresh his memory, or to learn more about the Jihad against the Biafrans (a Jihad that continues, with special vigor, now that the Sharia is being imposed in state after northern state), should simply google at the same time "Biafra" and "Jihad." You will find much material, including speeches, memoirs of those who lived through that war, the works of historians, and much else.

Of course, the Muslim war against black Christians used many means. One was simple bribery. How many despots -- was it Omar Bongo of Gabon, or Bokoassa, or Idi Amin, or all three, who converted to Islam because of financial inducements from Khaddafy and others (the same Arab money, of course, led to the turning away from Israel after the 1967 war, and the severing of diplomatic relations, even though the Israeli aid program in Black Africa had been one of the most spectacularly successful programs particularly in small-scale agricultural development, that had ever been attempted).

The American government can attempt to publicize the Jihad against Christians in Nigeria, and the Sudan, and in Ethiopia (for the dispute over the Nile waters will, inevitably, be the occasion for Egypt to rally Muslim forces, including those within Ethiopia that will naturally side with their fellow Muslims in Egypt rather than with what will be seen as "Christian" Ethiopia). It can come to their aid, in any number of ways. Or it can do what it did over Biafra -- nothing, and let a million people be killed. Or what it did in the Sudan -- nothing, and let 2 million people be killed.

One hopes that the Black Caucus, that the NAACP, that all those who have been so interested in the welfare of Black Africans, will not cease to defend thse Black Africans against genocide directed at them because they are Christians, and reject the imposed mental strait-jacket of what is rightly seen as an Arab religion that, as Col. Ojukwu sensed, constrains human potential.

Posted by Hugh at June 30, 2004 10:47 PM