Eliza Griswold: All Publications, Events and Press

A Middle Ground in Sudan

Erin Drankoski — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:32:00 -0400

After months of contentious deliberation over U.S. policy in Sudan, President Barack Obama has announced his administration's long-awaited position on the largest country in Africa. In a statement released on Monday, Obama said...well, not very much, really. Carefully calibrated not to further enrage the Khartoum regime or the human-rights activists irate over the softening approach the Obama administration has appeared to be taking on Sudan, the president's missive offered a nod to both.

Terror in the Jungle

Erin Drankoski — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:39:00 -0400

Abu Sayyaf, which means Bearer of the Sword, is a mercenary group of militant thugs more keen on kidnapping for ransom than on any kind of devotion to God. Based in the rainforest jungles of the southern Philippines, they reappeared on the international scene this week with the detonation of a makeshift landmine, which flipped a Humvee and killed two U.S. soldiers-Christopher D. Shaw, 37, and Jack M. Martin III, 26-and a Filipino Marine in a coconut grove on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines.

'Occupation' By Eliza Griswold | NPR

Erin Drankoski — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:53:00 -0400

One of Eliza Griswold's poems from Afghanistan from NPR. ... Original Article

African Taiban Terrorizes Nigeria

Erin Drankoski — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:26:00 -0400

Under Hillary Clinton's watch, the State Department has called Nigeria "probably the most important country in Africa." Why? Three words: light, sweet, crude. Nigeria is one of America's largest oil producers, and poised to become even a bigger one. It is also Africa's most populous country—one in six Africans comes from Nigeria—and one of the continent's richest and most corrupt democracies.

Hillary's Gutsy Mission

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:49:00 -0400

There's a cynical kind of math that comes along with reporting on Africa. Forget positive, or complex coverage; the bottom line is death tolls have to be high for anyone to care at all, or for any news outfit to foot the bill on a given story.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 11-day trip to Africa is a promising indication that may be changing. First, it's the longest venture she's taken out of the country thus far. Second, it comes on the heels of her boss' trip to Ghana three weeks ago. Such heavy hitters so early on in Africa? It's unheard of.

The Truth About the Somali Pirates | Atlantic Online

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:05:00 -0400

But apart from the fact that they kicked up dust, not sea spray, in their wake—the men were pirates. Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Wideawake Field (2007), is working on a book about Christianity and Islam, ...

The Truth About the Somali Pirates

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:50:00 -0400

Desperate Somali women are flocking to the coast to marry pirates! This is perhaps the most outrageous claim of the past ten days, during which Somalia’s pirates have succeeded, more than any aid or news organization so far, in drawing the world’s attention to the plight of their country--the world’s longest running failed state.

Somalia Revisited

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:59:00 -0500

Nigeria: Religious Riots Leave Hundreds Dead | PBS

Communications — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:11:00 -0500

To shed light on this tenuous coexistence and the violence it often ignites, we recommend this Atlantic cover story by Eliza Griswold, who traveled to the ...

Al Qaeda 3.0

Communications — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
10/10/2008 - 8:45am

Panel 1: The Future of Al-Qaeda

Frances Fragos Townsend noted that the two foiled Al-Qaeda plots in 2004 and 2006 prove that Al-Qaeda ought to still be taken seriously. She stated that “North Africa is more significant than most people talk about…[and] is a threat to the U.S. because of immigration through Western Europe.” The recent attacks on the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad,

Al Qaeda 3.0: The "War on Terror" after the Bush Administration

Communications — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:37:00 -0400

Washington, DC - The next U.S. president, whether Republican or Democrat, will face serious questions about American policy toward the threat of Islamist extremism, one of the most important security challenges of the 21^st century.

On October 10, six panels of leading policymakers, journalists, law enforcement officials, and scholars will explore and debate what steps the next administration should take in combating al Qaeda and its affiliates both at home and abroad.

The conference, convened by the newly-launched Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative at the New America Foundation and NYU's Center on Law and Security, will feature analysis from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright, the FBI/National Security Branch's Philip Mudd, Terrorism Experts Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman, President Bush's former Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, Peter Bergen and Abdel Bari Atwan, both of whom have interviewed Osama bin Laden, among many others.

Panels will cover the future of Al Qaeda, the war of ideas, the current state of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda's presence in the wider Arab world and in Europe, counter-radicalization, and counterterrorism measures in America. For a complete list of panels, click here.

For those who cannot attend in person, the event will be WEBCAST LIVE on the event web page and www.thewashingtonnote.com.

New America's Steve Coll, Peter Bergen, Nir Rosen, and Eliza Griswold are available for interviews and media appearances. For additional information about the Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative or to arrange interviews, please call Erin Drankoski at 202-997-8727 or e-mail drankoski@newamerica.net.

Additional Information:
Event Agenda: www.newamerica.net/files/AQ3.0Agenda.pdf
RSVP to Al Qaeda 3.0 Event: www.newamerica.net/events/2008/al_qaeda_3_0
Panelist Bios: www.newamerica.net/files/AQ3.0PanelistBios.pdf
Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative: www.newamerica.net/cci

The Man For a New Sudan

Ron Tang — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:46:00 -0400

When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane. Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter “uncle”; others call him “commander.” On this day, angry and anxious, the people of Abyei wanted Winter’s help in averting a return to civil war between the predominantly Arab north and the black south -- a decades-long conflict, claiming more than two million dead, that Winter helped to end with his work on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005.

Winter blinked in the flat light. It was 9 a.m., and the Caravan’s fuselage cast the only shadow. Abyei is 600 miles north of the equator, and this was the height of the dry season. The sun sucked the color from everything; alongside the airstrip a herd of gaunt cows licked at the last remnants of mud. The cows would head back north when the rains returned. The people who tend them, the Arab tribe called Misseriya, would then be gone for the season, and northern forces, guided by the national government in Khartoum, would feel free to swoop down and force the Ngok Dinka farmers farther south. Burning villages, killing young men, raping and abducting women and children: this creates ethnic facts on the ground to justify pushing the border south and increasing the north’s control of a territory rich in oil. From Easter until May was not much time to forestall the attack, and Winter knew it.

For the past quarter century -- as head of a nongovernmental organization called the U.S. Committee for Refugees, as an official at the federal Agency for International Development and, most recently, as a special representative to the State Department for Sudan, a post created for him -- Winter has fought in the back rooms of Washington and in the African bush to bring peace to Sudan. It’s not even-
handedness that makes him effective; it’s his total commitment to the people of south Sudan and a conviction, which has only grown with the years, that the government in Khartoum is, in essence, a brutal cabal. After two decades of fighting for their rights at negotiating tables, he has gained the southerners’ complete trust. “He’s simple and clear,” Edward Lino, the southern government’s chairman in Abyei, told me. “He doesn’t mince words. He’s a great man” who also “has great, great push.”

His stamina is also legendary. Once, during an all-night meeting on the 2005 agreement, a snake bit Winter as he raced through tall grass to present an amended paragraph for the south’s approval. Intent on striking a deal, he thought he had run into a rock until a colleague pointed out fang marks in his leg the next day. Senator Jack Danforth, the Bush administration’s special envoy to Sudan from 2001 to 2004, calls him “a saint,” an “excellent, excellent human being,” whose “soulfulness” inspires trust in those he serves. According to Danforth, Winter’s intense attachment to the southern side was an asset in the context of a larger diplomatic offensive. “The same person,” Danforth notes, “doesn’t have to talk to everybody.” Winter’s bond with the south is such that, since retiring in August 2006, he has worked pro bono as an adviser to the government of southern Sudan, a government he helped to build following the 2005 agreement.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement -- which ended the north-south war but did nothing to stop the conflict to the west in Darfur -- was among the Bush administration’s few major foreign-policy successes. Now it’s coming undone, and the collapse is beginning in Abyei, a hot little village built up into a town by oil companies. The population grew to 30,000 from 5,000 as its residents returned after two decades of war. Around a buzzing market of tin-roofed lean-tos and U.N. food warehouses, people were building huts and hanging up tarps. But on the main road, the armies of north and south were mobilizing T-72 tanks and amassing more soldiers.

Abyei is at the southern edge of arid land and the beginning of sub-Saharan jungle -- even the soil changes from barren sand to rich laterite loam. From the north comes the influence of the Arab world; the south, partly because of the war, has far stronger ties to the West and Christianity. Here, two worlds collide and two governments compete for territory inch by inch; under that ground lies as much as half of Sudan’s estimated five billion barrels of oil. In many ways, Abyei is a microcosm for the entire country. As Winter put it, “The future of Abyei is the future of all Sudan.”

Winter wore black Rockports and brown socks. He carried a nylon briefcase in one hand and a blue plastic shopping bag in the other. Inside it were bug spray, a shaving kit, a change of clothes and “An Army at Dawn,” a history of World War II in Africa. As an architect of the failing peace, Winter came to see what might be done to avert the potential slaughter.

As activists and journalists in recent years focused attention on Darfur, Winter argued, they and the Bush administration have neglected the push for comprehensive peace in the rest of the country. Although both north and south signed the peace accord more than three years ago, little has changed. Without international pressure sufficient to slow the process, both sides were starting to play a very dangerous game of chicken in Abyei.

“I hope you’ve done some homework in the United States,” Chol Changoth, a member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (S.P.L.M.), which dominates Sudan’s south, said as someone handed Winter a sweating bottle of orange Fanta. “Are the people of the United States taking Abyei into consideration?” He scanned Winter’s face for any flicker of hope.

Although, technically, north and south share a unified government, the National Congress Party of the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement of the south are mostly at odds. Between them, politics become a zero-sum game. The 2005 peace agreement calls for a nationwide census, which, despite flaws, has finally started. The accord also calls for a 2009 national election, which Winter and others say Khartoum may try to delay. Above all, peace means that in 2011, the south is counting on a referendum on whether or not to stay with the north.

The question of Abyei was so contested during negotiations for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that it got its own protocol, one that the United States -- with Winter on the negotiating team -- agreed to in order to save the peace process as a whole. The U.S. drafted the protocol, pushed both sides to sign it and, according to Winter, then walked away. “We did a good thing and a bad thing,” as he explained to the crowd at the airport. “The good thing is the Abyei Protocol. The bad thing is we went home.” Now Winter is watching his old adversary, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, play familiar tricks. “Bashir knows he’s looked the whole international community right in the eyes,” Winter said. “He says yes, yes, yes to the protocol, and then he says no... And what happened? Nothing. So he’s learned a lesson, and you can see the lesson even in Darfur because the United Nations says a hybrid force should come and he says no, and what happens? Nothing. So it’s very, very, very dangerous, this pattern.”

At its core, the fight over Abyei raises the question of whether Sudan will remain a single country and how a fissure might be averted. As Alex de Waal, a longtime observer of Sudanese politics, told me, “Abyei is the cockpit of Sudan where the two parties are testing each other’s readiness to go to war again.”

****

On the surface, two different people, the ethnic Ngok Dinka linked to the south and the Arab Misseriya of the north, vie over who has rights to the land. With the added pressure of desertification, the Arab nomads need the greener pastures of Abyei more than ever to graze and water their cattle. They are also being pushed south by the pressures of commercial farming. “In this belt north of the 10th parallel, land that used to be common access has been leased out to mechanized farming schemes,” Douglas H. Johnson, a member of the Abyei Boundaries Commission, said. To settle the problem, after the 2005 agreement Johnson and an international team drew a shared border along the 10th parallel, but the north rejected their solution and, on the ground, there was only mounting tension. With so much to lose, the Misseriya and Dinka were growing more anxious as May loomed ahead.

And in this standoff President Bashir has done what he always does: endorsed Arab militias who carry out Darfur-style scorched-earth tactics. In the late 1980s, when Bashir was the general in charge of Abyei, the militias chased the Dinka off their land. Just last year, Bashir called on the militias “to open their camps and gather the mujahedeen.” Salva Kiir, the president of south Sudan, said, “The guns the Misseriya are using are military weapons.” According to Kiir, who is also first vice president in the somewhat notional united Sudanese government, the militias are supported by Khartoum.

The similarities between Darfur’s attacks and those around Abyei are no coincidence. They betray war’s grander pattern in Sudan, the largest country in Africa. As Winter says: “You have to connect the dots. You connect the dots, you see a pattern. A pattern means intent.” All of Sudan’s wars involve the handiwork of a small group in the center waging campaigns against those who live at the periphery. To hold onto power and resources, the center fights its own edge. Marginalization, Winter said, meant perpetual warfare. “Unless you really have engaged in Sudan, you don’t get to that point of thinking,” he said.

Winter got to that point of thinking some time ago. His colleague Susan Rice, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Bill Clinton, watched Winter’s views evolve. “I’ve seen him be an advocate when I was a policy maker, and when I was on the outside, he was somebody on the inside we could trust to do the right thing,” she told me. “Roger has been a consistent, passionate, principled advocate at a time when we had reason to doubt that the Bush administration was really engaged in these issues.” On Sudan, she added, “people of all political, religious and racial stripes view Roger as the compass’s true north.” In this case, true south is more apt. For Winter’s part, he has watched many an American offer “carrots,” as he says, to Khartoum. That practice “can be deadly,” he told me. “You go to Khartoum, they treat you very nicely, they’re very presentable, they’re indefatigably hospitable, but their approach to governance is murderous,” he said.

It’s this murderous governance that Winter is determined to end. “I’m not opposed to engagement,” he said. “The problem is the way we’re doing this and the atmosphere which surrounds it.” In Sudan, he argues, “there’s a good guy and a bad guy.” As he sees it, he sides with the good guys. He doesn’t hang out in the middle. “I guess there’s a role for that,” he said. “It’s just not mine.”

Taking sides can be dangerous, Andrew Natsios, who served as U.S. special envoy to Sudan from 2006 to 2007, argues. “We don’t need rallying cries,” he said. “A big advocacy campaign right now could be really destructive to the possibility of peace.”

Winter argues that the Bush administration’s pressure for comprehensive peace in Sudan is flagging, in part because America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have hamstrung its ability to call Khartoum on its myriad abuses against its own people. The U.S. government also seems to be moving toward strengthening relations with Khartoum, which Winter vehemently opposes. But Natsios believes that right now, with the likelihood of a tougher American administration taking over in January, there’s a critical window to engage Khartoum. “The north badly wants to normalize relations with the U.S. during the Bush administration,” he said. Natsios envisions “a grand deal,” including an exchange of oil for land in which the north cedes Abyei to the south (as it already is supposed to do under the Abyei Protocol) in exchange for a percentage of southern oil revenue.

“Quite frankly, to make progress in Sudan, you have to engage all parties,” Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told me. “Our vision has been a unified government, which is something Roger himself worked for, so we can’t not engage the government.” Regime change has not been part of American policy in Sudan, and while the United States has kept Khartoum under sanctions, put pressure on it at the United Nations, acquiesced in the referral by the Security Council of Darfur prosecutions to the International Criminal Court (which the Bush administration otherwise opposes) and led several large-scale diplomatic initiatives to push for peace in the region -- not least the initiatives in which Winter played a key role -- Washington has nonetheless always accepted Khartoum as a partner of sorts. According to Frazer, the United States offered as recently as last December to mediate the north-south conflict over Abyei, but the southern government, led by the S.P.L.M., said it preferred to handle the negotiations with Khartoum itself. “You can’t really criticize us for dealing with President Bashir when the S.P.L.M. themselves are saying that’s their partner and that’s who they want to negotiate on Abyei,” Frazer told me.

Richard Williamson, the American negotiator appointed by President Bush, has come under fire for his talks with Bashir. “Our president’s commitment to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan is deep,” Williamson said. “His support for our efforts is unwavering. He looks at me, and I can’t come up with a key. Some of my critics have criticized me for engaging. But given the level of suffering, it’s worth engaging. It’s not enough to criticize. It may make you feel better, but people are still suffering.” Danforth told me: “Roger is more principled than I am. He definitely sees engagement as more of a moral issue.” But there’s a practical aspect, too, to negotiation. After all, Danforth points out, the north did sign a peace agreement. “It has lasted nearly four years,” he said. “A lot of lives, I think, have been saved.”

****

Winter ducked into a thatched hut in the front-line village of Todaj, a few miles north of Abyei. On the roof were a wooden cross and book-size solar panels, which were charging a satellite phone. Inside, the air was close. Several days earlier, this entire village -- 150 Dinka families -- fled south to the safety of Abyei on foot. Now only a handful of elders and a chief, Nyol Paduot, his salt-and-pepper hair and beard unkempt, his eyes baggy with lack of sleep, had returned to safeguard their land.

Having been run off the land three times -- in 1991, 1997 and 2000 -- the elders knew the lethal pattern by heart. “We know that when they burn our village, they want the land,” Paduot said. “That’s why we come back.”

The elders of Todaj refused to be pushed farther south by Arab militias camping nearby or by the government (northern) soldiers who built barracks at the village’s edge. Under the peace deal, the soldiers of Sudan’s 31st Brigade stationed here were supposed to withdraw from Todaj, but they have not. As Winter drove past the barracks in a silver S.U.V., one shirtless soldier doing laundry stood up and took a long look. The S.U.V. belonged to their rival, the S.P.L.M., for whom Winter was working. Winter passed what looked like a huge white circus tent, which was labeled I.O.M. in U.N. blue, for International Organization for Migration: a way station for displaced people. It stood dusty and empty. The U.N. had judged it too risky to stay in Todaj.

“It’s a long war,” the chief told Winter. “Peace came, and no one helped us implement it, and it’s become a problem.” He went on: “I have a question for you who’ve come from America. In Abyei, we don’t know if it’s war or peace. When will the intervention come? When the fighting has started again?” The hut grew quiet. A fly buzzed; a pair of baby goats bleated in the corner. Cooking pots clanged next door. “All that’s happening in Darfur,” the chief said, “happened here in Abyei.”

The main differences between Darfur and Abyei were religion and oil. Khartoum’s troops hit Todaj because they claimed many people there had left Islam, becoming apostate. They justified their actions as jihad against infidels. But in Darfur, government troops attacked fellow Muslims. “That surprised us,” the chief said. Besides religion and oil -- which Darfur does not have -- there was nothing to separate Abyei from Darfur. “Todaj is very strategic for the 31st Brigade to coordinate all their activities for the oil fields,” Paduot added. “They bring their supplies from the oil fields here, and this is where they come to distribute ammunitions.”

He ran his finger north along the white space of a tattered map. According to the boundaries commission’s recommendation, this land -- up to the line of latitude at 10 degrees 10 minutes -- belonged to the Dinka, although the Misseriya were free to use it for grazing. The global-positioning-
system reading off the satellite phone put Todaj, the last and northernmost Dinka settlement, at 9 degrees 43 minutes, more than 30 miles south inside where the Dinka had the right to be. “This is our land,” the chief said. His own village lay in Block Four of an oil concession operated by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (G.N.P.O.C.) -- pronounced gin-pock. The oil was right under us, Paduot said, but no Dinka he knew -- or Misseriya for that matter -- worked in the oil fields.

Suddenly, a group of men in ragtag fatigues arrived outside the mud hut. They sat with their backs against the wall, where they could hear everything going on inside. Sure enough, it was the government forces, and it was time to go. Winter clasped the chief’s hand, and then quickly took his leave.

Not all of the Dinka were as lucky as those of Todaj. Days earlier, many who had been working as goatherds at Misseriya cattle camps were forced to leave everything behind for good and flee south to the relative safety of Abyei. Because the large white tents near Todaj were too risky to use, about 400 survivors were camped in Abyei, using water from a nearby swamp.

“We refused to leave without our goats,” Ayii Dut Dut, one of the displaced goatherds, told me. Among the herders in the camp, about half a dozen were abducted years earlier, then taken north to work for the Misseriya. But most were there voluntarily as shepherds and sharecroppers after the 1988 famine sent them searching for work. In recent skirmishes between the Arab militias and the southern forces, many Arabs were killed. As a result, when the militias returned to their cattle camps after fighting, they wanted their Dinka workers to leave -- immediately. But the Dinka said they wouldn’t go without the goats, which represented all their wealth in the world.

So that night, riding camels and horses, Arabs attacked their camp. Most escaped, but not all. After hiding in the nearby bush, Dut said he returned to the deserted camp at dawn to find three children -- ages 5, 5 and 3 -- who had been shot. He buried them and left without his goats, he said as he squatted in the shade of a single acacia tree near 200 other displaced people. If Darfur is a land grab, then Abyei is an oil grab. Last year, an estimated $529 million of oil revenue came from the region, according to the International Crisis Group, an independent, nonprofit political-analysis group. Khartoum has used the south’s oil to build the north’s infrastructure. A combination of war, sanctions and public outcry forced Western companies to abandon Sudan’s oil over the past decade, and China, among others, stepped in.

Without knowing what to look for, the signs of oil excavation around Abyei aren’t so easy to see. You can drive for hours and see nothing but fishermen searching in ponds for Nile perch and mudfish. The roadside is lined with long brown braids of dried fish for sale. “They are some of the poorest people in the world,” Edward Lino, the southern government’s chairman for Abyei, told me as we drove through the wasteland. “They have this rich land that’s being robbed from them, and they don’t know what to do.”

Suddenly, a series of white pipes with red knobs appeared in a clearing along the telltale hummock covering the pipeline itself, which was built in 2003. Beginning in the 1980s, many of the fishermen were forced to resettle in much the same way the people returning to Todaj were being threatened this year. To survive, they depended on a battery of international aid agencies as oil was pumped out from beneath them.

One afternoon, I visited a field office of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. The company is a consortium in which 40 percent of the investment is Chinese, 30 percent Malaysian, 25 percent Indian and 5 percent Sudanese. International workers in red, green and beige jumpsuits scurried through the waiting room, where a sign read, “Use the waiting time to ask for forgiveness.” Outdoors, Chinese workers in red jumpsuits worked alongside Sudanese. The Great Wall Drilling Company was “rigging up”: preparing to drill in the next few days, a supervisor, Mohamed Idris, said. He sat behind a door that read “Company Man,” while soap operas flickered on flat-screen televisions in the air-conditioned dark. The fishermen living outside the facility have no electricity at all.

****

The relationship between the Ngok Dinka and the Arab Misseriya is more complex than it looks at first glance. They share a way of life in what John Ryle of the Rift Valley Institute calls “an intimate enmity.”

One evening, Winter attended a feast in his honor at the home of the paramount Dinka chief, Kuol Deng Kuol, a towering, soft-spoken man. The large mud greeting room, hung with red-flowered bedsheets, was full of Dinka and Misseriya elders. Winter was eating wild honey and bread when two anxious Misseriya leaders, wearing white turbans, approached him. Each was the head of at least 2,000 Misseriya -- they were the “cornerstone” of the Arabs in Abyei -- and none of them wanted war. Conflict would mean their cows could no longer come south into Dinka land, and they would die. Already under pressure from farming and other nomads to the north, they couldn’t risk being squeezed out of the south too. “About this peace, we don’t want to lose it,” Deng Bilial Bachar, a blustery leader, told Winter. “We’re holding it very tightly and very hard.”

Recently, the two elders told Winter, government-backed militias had gathered at the edge of town. They were going to attack Abyei. “Three days I was talking night and day to make people go back,” Bachar said. Both the Misseriya Arabs and the Dinka were simply pawns in a larger battle playing out between north and south over politics and oil, he said. If north or south wanted to return to war, let them do it somewhere else. “We don’t want war, 100 percent,” he said. “You have to convey this message clearly.”

Next to Bachar, with clear blue eyes and a deeply creased face, was Shogar Muhammad Mahmud, who had come from his cattle camp next to the village of Todaj. “The water on that side,” he said, indicating the north where he’d come from, “has become so few -- little -- like drought. Just allow our cattle to graze and get water because there’s no water in our side. Just allow us to come through.” The Abyei Protocol safeguarded Misseriya migration routes, but Mahmud didn’t know this. Critics like Winter argue that Khartoum manipulates the Misseriya by not explaining that peace protects their rights. “It is too easy for those who wish to undermine the C.P.A. to exploit the fear on the part of the Misseriya that ceding Abyei to the south would cut them off from access to dry-season grazing,” Ryle told me, referring to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. “And the fear of Ngok Dinka in the S.P.L.M. that they might once more be cheated of the chance for self-determination means that they also are in no mood to compromise.”

The north argues that Abyei isn’t simply a matter of maps. Culturally, Abyei has always been part of the Arab north, they say. “Even during World War II, Abyei was supporting the Middle East by sending cows,” the chairman of the National Congress Party in Abyei, Zachariah Atem Payin, said. As a Dinka man who supports Khartoum, Payin exemplifies the complexities of identity in Abyei. He was also among Winter’s many detractors. “I’ve heard he’s very difficult, very hard,” Payin said. “He’s the one who caused all this confusion in Sudan.” By confusion, he meant war. “It’s because of Roger Winter supporting the S.P.L.M. that they won’t listen.”

****

Winter gazed at the sun-bleached photo and the artificial flowers that marked the grave of his friend, Dr. John Garang, in the southern capital, Juba. The leader of the south’s liberation movement, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash three years ago. Many, including Winter, saw his death as an enormous setback to durable peace. Winter and Garang were extremely close. “He loved to tell jokes, he loved to tell stories,” Winter said. Tears gathered on his white eyelashes. “He never lost his focus and basically his focus was a new Sudan, a totally new country, whether it was in one piece or two.”

Later, Winter sat by the Nile drinking a Bell, a Ugandan beer. The moon was heavy and full, bright enough to see the river eddy as it passed. He spied a baby crocodile splash off the bank. “Look!” he said gleefully, seeming much more like a boy adventurer than an elder statesman.

Winter’s new role as an adviser to the southern government set off a political storm in Khartoum. In a cable, the U.S. Embassy took note of what one northern paper said: “Winter’s appointment ‘shows that the S.P.L.M. is a farce... a movement that suckles the breasts of the U.S.’ ” Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the State Department, insisted that Winter’s advocacy for the south shouldn’t bother people (“It doesn’t me,” she said) because he no longer has any official American role.

His activism began when he was in his 20s in Hartford, where he worked for the Salvation Army. He went on to resettle refugees arriving in America from the world’s worst conflict zones, beginning with Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. But it was his experience working with Tutsis displaced from Rwanda -- before the genocide began -- that made him move on to the conflict zones themselves. Soon he was riding on the front lines in Rwanda in 1994 with the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame. During the genocide, he flew home every few weeks to brief the U.S. government on what he witnessed firsthand. President Clinton’s later statements that he had not been fully aware of what was happening caused Winter, he says, to leave the Democratic Party.

Winter told the people in Abyei: “Honestly, the people that have your interests at heart are you, really only you. The Americans can be O.K. now, but next year they may be not so O.K. But it’s your place, it’s your life, it’s your future.” Now that he’s out of the American government, Winter makes no bones about what he is: an advocate. His job is to shout himself hoarse until someone listens to what he’s saying about the worsening crisis in Abyei and the failure to do enough about it. “That’s what an advocate does,” he said. “No matter how good the government does, you’re always goosing them to do better. Otherwise, why does anybody need you?”

Sometimes neutrality is just not the right answer, and on Sudan, he thinks neutrality is practically and morally bankrupt. “I’m an evangelist,” he said, only half joking. “I preach the gospel of Sudan.”

****

Abyei burned to the ground when the rains began in May. As Winter predicted, once the Misseriya cattle were safely out of the south, the north attacked the town. The violence began with the kind of small skirmish that had been occurring for months: policemen from the south and soldiers from the north got into a fight a few miles from Todaj. There was a shootout, and when a northern soldier died in the hospital, his colleagues shot up the ward. Within hours, the 31st Brigade was firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades into the heart of Abyei. The United Nations evacuated most of its nonessential staff by helicopter. Tens of thousands of Dinka fled south. The Arabs took over the town. The ethnic facts that favored Khartoum now existed on the ground. “Mainly women and children are uprooted again from their houses and are now in open areas under heavy rains with no shelter, food and water,” the south’s president, Salva Kiir, said in a speech late last month. “This human tragedy is caused unfortunately by Sudan Armed Forces Brigade 31 that is illegally present in Abyei town and against the provisions of the C.P.A.”

As usual, Winter was close by. He flew in the next day from Juba. He organized the first convoy into town after the attack. “Some of the buildings and vehicles are still smoking,” he told me by satellite phone. Then he was caught in a sandstorm. “I can’t see squat and I can’t open my eyes,” he said, as he spat sand through his teeth. “The U.N. is buttoned up behind barricades again,” he added. “There are almost no people.” Later, Winter sent me photographs: the market’s stalls were incinerated. Lines of white ash marked where the walls had been. Hospitals and schools were shelled. The U.N. warehouses were destroyed. Terrified people were still streaming south. The U.N. first estimated that 50,000 people were displaced, but Winter, in the road among them, thought the number looked much higher.

“This didn’t have to happen,” Winter shouted over the wind.

Kuol Deng Kuol, the gentle Dinka chief who had held the feast in Winter’s honor six weeks earlier, was now destitute and staying in huts with dozens of family members. “My people are living under trees,” he said by phone from a camp south of town. The American negotiator, Richard Williamson, flew to the town. “I’ve been to Bosnia and Kosovo and I’ve never seen anything like Abyei,” he told me. “At least 95 percent of the homes were destroyed” -- even those 25 feet from the United Nations base. When U.S.-led talks between north and south over Abyei turned to bickering, Williamson walked out. “I’m not going to give any legitimacy of U.S. participation to name-calling,” he said. The next day, amid reports of troops massing at Abyei, the United Nations Security Council met with both sides, who agreed to international arbitration, as they have many, many times before. “We need terms of arbitration -- specifics,” Williamson said. “If 50,000 people who’ve had their lives shattered isn’t enough for you to take responsibility for your own solution, then the U.S. cannot impose one.” Disgusted, he told both sides, “If you think I’m a junkyard dog, wait until January.”

God's Country

Ron Tang — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It was an ordinary soccer pitch: sparse tufts of grass and reddish soil surrounded by cinder-block homes. The two candidates stood on opposite sides of the field as the people of Yelwa, a town of 30,000 in central Nigeria, lined up behind them one May morning in 2002 to vote. Whoever had more supporters would lead the town’s council. And whoever led the council would control the certificates of indigeneship: the papers certifying that Yelwa was their home, and that they had a right there to land, jobs, and scholarships. Between the iron goalposts milled ethnic Jarawa, principally Muslim merchants and herders; next to them were the Tarok and Goemai, predominantly farmers and Christians. For several years, their hereditary tribal chief, a Christian, had refused certificates of indigeneship to Muslims no matter how long they’d lived in Yelwa. Without the certificates, the Muslims were second-class citizens.

As the two groups waited in the heat to be counted, the meeting's tone soured. "You could feel the tension in the air," Abdullahi Abdullahi, a 55-year-old Muslim lawyer and community leader, said later. A tall, thin man with a space between his two front teeth and shoulders hunched around his ears in perpetual apology, he was helping to direct the crowd that day. No one knows what happened first. Someone shouted arna -- "infidel" -- at the Christians. Someone spat the word jihadi at the Muslims. Someone picked up a stone. "That was the day ethnicity disappeared entirely, and the conflict became just about religion," Abdullahi said. Chaos broke out, as young people on each side began to throw rocks. The candidates ran for their lives, and mobs set fire to the surrounding houses.

After that episode, the Christians issued an edict that no Christian girl could be seen with a Muslim boy. "We had a problem of intermarriage," Pastor Sunday Wuyep, a church leader in Yelwa, told me on the first of two visits I made in 2006 and 2007. "Just because our ladies are stupid and attracted to money," he sighed. Economics lay at the heart of the enmity between the two groups: as merchants and herders, the Muslim Jarawa were much wealthier than the Christian Tarok and Goemai. But Pastor Sunday, like many others of his faith, felt that Muslims were trying to wipe out Christians by converting them through marriage. "It's scriptural, this fight," he said. So he and the other elders decided to punish the women. "If a woman gets caught with a Muslim man," Sunday said, "she must be forcibly brought back." The decree turned out to be a call to vigilante violence as patrols of young men, both Christian and Muslim, took to the streets. What eventually transpired, in the name of religion, was a kind of Clockwork Orange.

****

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, with 140 million people (one-seventh of all Africans), and it's one of the few nations divided almost evenly between Christians and Muslims. Blessed with the world's 10th-largest oil reserves, it is also one of the continent's richest and most influential powers -- as well as one of its most corrupt democracies. Last year's presidential election in particular -- in which President Olusegun Obasanjo, an evangelical Christian, handed power to a northern Muslim, President Umaru Yar'Adua -- was a farce. Ballot boxes were stuffed by thugs or carted off empty by armed heavies in the pay of political candidates. Across the country, political power is a passport to wealth: according to Human Rights Watch, anywhere from $4 billion to $8 billion in government money has been embezzled annually for the last eight years. The state has all but abdicated its responsibility for the welfare of its people, roughly half of whom live on less than $1 a day.

In this vacuum, religion has become a powerful source of identity. Northern Nigeria has one of Africa's oldest and most devout Islamic communities, which was galvanized, like many others, in the 1980s by the global Islamic reawakening that followed the Iranian revolution. For Christians, too, in Nigeria, there’s been a revolution: high birthrates and aggressive evangelization over the past century have increased the number of believers from 176,000, or 1.1 percent of the early-20th-century population, to more than 51 million, or more than a third now. Thanks to this explosive growth, the demographic and geographic center of global Christianity will have moved, by 2050, to northern Nigeria, within the Muslim world.

No one knows what this shift will yield, in part because neither faith is a monolith. Indeed, the most overlooked aspect of this global religious encounter may be that the competition within the faiths -- between Pentecostals and orthodox Christians, or between Islamic groups that want to engage with or reject the modern world -- is just as important as the competition between the faiths. But it's also true that the fastest-growing forms of faith on both sides tend to be the most effervescent and absolute. They promote a system of living in this world that promises heaven in the next, they see salvation in stark binary terms, and they believe they have a global mandate to spread their exclusive brand of faith.

While religion became a source of friction in Nigeria during the Biafran civil war in the late 1960s, the trouble between Christians and Muslims intensified in the 1980s, when the first oil boom fizzled and the ensuing economic downturn led to violence. Since then, thousands have been killed in riots between the two groups sparked by various events: aggressive campaigns by foreign evangelists; the implementation in 1999 and 2000 of sharia, or Islamic law, in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states; the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in 2001; and the 2002 Miss World pageant, when a local Christian reporter, Isioma Daniel, outraged Muslims by writing in one of Nigeria’s national papers, This Day, that the Prophet Muhammad would have chosen a wife from among the contestants. Most recently, in 2006, riots triggered by Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad left more people dead in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.

"These conflicts are a result of secular processes," said Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, one of Nigeria's leading intellectuals and a top executive of one of the country's oldest banks, FirstBank. "It’s about bad government, economic inequality, and poverty -- a struggle for resources." When a government fails its people, they turn elsewhere to safeguard themselves and their futures, and in Nigeria at the beginning of the 21st century, they have turned first to religion. Here, then, is the truth behind what Samuel Huntington famously calls religion's "bloody" geographic borders: outbreaks of violence result not simply from a clash between two powerful religious monoliths, but from tensions at the most vulnerable edges where they meet -- zones of desperation and official neglect where faith becomes a rallying cry in the struggle for land, water, and work.

****

In Nigeria, the two faiths meet along a band of terrain roughly 200 miles wide called the Middle Belt. This swath of land, for the most part (an exception being Nigeria’s southwest), marks the fault line between Christianity and Islam not only in Nigeria, but across the entire continent. A satellite image from Google Earth shows the Middle Belt as a gray-green strip between the equator and the 10th parallel, dividing the fawn-colored dry land from the vibrant sub-Saharan jungle canopy. It also separates most of the continent's 367 million Muslims to the north from 417 million Christians to the south. Plagued by bad government, a shortage of water and arable land, and rising birthrates, the Middle Belt is also the victim of environmental change: growing aridity in the north (the desert creeps forward at slightly less than half a mile a year) and flooding in the south. Shifting weather patterns have made planting and grazing seasons unpredictable and allowed insect-borne diseases, such as malaria, to run rampant.

Islam all but stopped its southward spread here in the late 1800s, because the traders, missionaries, and Sufi jihadists who had carried Islam south couldn't handle the jungle terrain or the tsetse flies that plagued their horses and camels with sleeping sickness. Abdullahi's people, the Jarawa, claim that their rights to the land go back to the days of Usman Dan Fodio, a Sufi teacher and ethnic Fulani herder who launched a 19th-century jihad to purify the faith, promote the education of women, and outlaw the enslavement of his fellow Muslims. Some of his jihadists, called his flag bearers, rode south over vast reaches of dry land until they reached the southern edge of the Sahel, roughly where the town of Yelwa is today.

The high, dry ridges and rocky escarpments of the Middle Belt also provided an ideal defense against Muslim slave raiders for non-Muslim hill people like the Goemai. When Christian missionaries arrived 100 years ago, many targeted these "pagan" hill people. For some, the mission was to create a buffer against the southern "spread of Mohammedanism," as Karl Kumm, one of the more uncompromising missionaries, put it. But many of his coreligionists had little interest in combating Islam. Instead, armed with the two B's of Bible and bicycle, as well as with the imperative of self-reliance, they dispensed practical advice on health, agriculture, and eventually education, providing a form of "emancipation" for the historically disenfranchised hill people, who also gained a powerful collective identity in Christianity.

The British colonial administration was ambivalent about missionaries, fearing that their efforts to convert Muslims would destabilize Britain's plans for empire-building -- as they had elsewhere in Africa. When the British overthrew the caliphate, then unified North and South Nigeria in 1914, the new colonial administration forbade missionaries to enter Muslim lands. Under the British policy of Indirect Rule, which was modeled on the Raj in India, Dan Fodio's emirs were largely left in place. Many came to be seen as colonial agents, losing their religious legitimacy even as they amassed power and wealth. This colonial policy of favoring Muslims over minority Christians left a legacy of mistrust between the two groups. "Every crisis is automatically interpreted as a religious crisis," said Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the Anglican bishop of Kaduna. "But we all know that, scratch the surface and it's got nothing to do with religion. It's power."

****

One Tuesday at 7 a.m. in Yelwa, about 70 people were praying their morning devotions at the Church of Christ in Nigeria (founded by none other than the fiery Kumm himself). It was in February 2004, about a year after the elders had issued their edict that no Christian woman was to be seen with a Muslim man. As the worshippers finished their prayers, they heard gunshots and a call from the loudspeakers of the mosque next door: "Allahu Akhbar, let us go for jihad." "We were terrified," recalled Pastor Sunday, who had been standing outside the gate as the churchyard swarmed with strangers. He stayed near the church gate, but many other people fled toward the road behind the church. There, men dressed in military fatigues reassured them that they were safe and herded them back to the church. Then the men opened fire.

Pastor Sunday fled; that's why he survived. The attackers -- who were not, in fact, Nigerian soldiers -- set the church on fire and killed everyone who tried to escape. They chased the head of the church, Pastor Sampson Bukar, to his house next door and ran him through with cutlasses. They set fire to the nursery school and the pastor's house. During my first visit to Yelwa in the summer of 2006, his burned Peugeot was still outside. The church had been rebuilt and painted salmon pink. Boys were playing soccer, each wearing only one shoe so that everyone could kick the ball. "Seven in my family were killed," said Sunday as we sat in the churchyard. "We call them martyrs." He pointed to a mound of earth not far from where we were sitting. On top was a small wooden cross: it marked the mass grave for the 78 people killed that day.

"This is about religious intolerance," he went on. "Our God is different than the Muslim God… If he were the same God, we wouldn't fight." For Pastor Sunday, the clash was millenarian and grounded in the literal words of Christian scripture. "The Bible says in Matthew 24, the time will come when they will pursue us in our churches," he said. Matthew 24 foretells the Tribulation: the war that will precede Armageddon and the final coming of Jesus.

****

A few hundred yards down the road from the church, there's a cornfield. In it, a row of mounds: more mass graves. White signs tally the dead below in green paint: 110, 50, 65, 100, 55, 25, 60, 20, 40, 105. Two months after the church was razed, Christian men and boys surrounded Yelwa. Many were bare-chested; others wore shirts on which they'd reportedly pinned white name tags identifying them as members of the Christian Association of Nigeria, an umbrella organization founded in the 1970s to give Christians a collective and unified voice as strong as that of Muslims. Each tag had a number instead of a name: a code, it seemed, for identification. They attacked the town. According to Human Rights Watch, 660 Muslims were massacred over the course of the next two days, including the patients in the Al-Amin clinic. Twelve mosques and 300 houses went up in flames. Young girls were marched to a nearby Christian town and forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Many were raped, and 50 were killed.

Yelwa was still a ghost town of sorts in August 2006. In block after burned-out block, people camped in what used to be their homes. The road was lined with more than a dozen ruined mosques and churches, but the rubble was hidden in hip-high elephant grass; canary-yellow morning glories climbed the old foundations. When I arrived at the home of Abdullahi, the Muslim human-rights lawyer, his street was mostly deserted. He stooped on his way out of a low-ceilinged hut. Behind him, I could see the sour faces of a man and woman sitting on the floor by his desk. "Marital dispute," he explained.

It was the rainy season, so I waited out the noon deluge in another small hut on his compound. Finally, Abdullahi ducked inside, a worn accordion file under his arm. His wife followed, carrying a pot of hot spaghetti. In the beginning, he explained, the conflict in Nigeria had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. "Let me give myself as a case study," Abdullahi said. He went to Christian mission schools and federal college, and never, as a Muslim, had any problem. "Throughout this period, I'd never seen religious segregation, because at that time the societal value system was intact. We were taught to respect each other's beliefs and customs." But as the population grew and resources shrank, people began to fight over who had the right to the land and its resources -- who belonged as an indigene, and who didn't.

Abdullahi has attempted to bring several cases of ethnic abuse to the government's attention, but as with the church massacre, the government has done little to investigate or to try those involved. He handed me a folder with depositions from one such case. As I read them, Abdullahi returned with two young women, Hamamatu Danladi and Yasira Ibrahim, who had survived the incident detailed in the files. Danladi met my eye as she stood in the doorway; Ibrahim, with long upturned lashes and a moon face, didn't. Abdullahi invited the women in, lowered his head, and left.

During the Christian attack, the two young women took shelter in an elder's guarded home. On the second day, the Christian militia arrived at the house. They were covered in red and blue paint and were wearing those numbered white name tags. The Christians first killed the guards, then chose among the women. With others, the two young women were marched toward the Christian village. "They were killing children on the road," Danladi said. Outside the elementary school, her abductor grabbed hold of two Muslim boys she knew, 9 and 10 years old. Along with other men, he took a machete to them until they were in pieces, then wrapped the pieces in a rubber tire and set it on fire.

When Danladi and Ibrahim reached their captors' village, they were forced to drink alcohol and to eat pork and dog meat. Although she was obviously pregnant, Danladi’s abductor repeatedly raped her during the next four days. After a month, the police fetched Danladi and Ibrahim from the Christian village and took them to the camp where most of the town's Muslim residents had fled. There, the two young women were reunited with their husbands. They never discussed what happened in the bush.

"The Christians don't want us here because they don't like our religion," Danladi said. "Do you really think they took you because of your religion?" I asked. The women looked at each other. "In Islamic history, there are times when believers and nonbelievers have fought," Danladi said. "We think what happened here is part of the clash that will come. After the clash, people will see poverty and suffering and that's what's happening now. According to our ulamas [teachers], there is no way that the whole world will not be Muslim."

Later, I looked up Matthew 24, the verses that Pastor Sunday had cited. In many versions of the Bible, Jesus' words are inked in red to show that these are the exact and inerrant words of the Lord. Down the rice-paper page, one red verse (Matthew 24:19) caught my eye: "But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days!" I thought of Hamamatu Danladi. After her rape, she told me, she didn't give birth for four more months, which meant she carried that child for more than a year. Maybe I didn't understand her. When I returned to visit her a year later, I asked again if I'd misunderstood. No, she said, she'd carried the baby for more than a year. Maybe, she thought, he simply refused to come into this world during the conflagration.

****

At the time of the massacre, Archbishop Peter Akinola was the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, whose membership was implicated in the killings. He has since lost his bid for another term but, as primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, he is still the leader of 18 million Anglicans. He is a colleague of my father, who was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America from 1997 to 2006. But the American Episcopals' election of an openly homosexual bishop in 2003, which Archbishop Akinola denounced as "satanic," created distance between them. When I arrived in 2006 in the capital of Abuja to see the archbishop, his office door was locked. Its complicated buzzing-in system was malfunctioning, and he was trapped inside. Finally, after several minutes, the angry buzzes stopped and I could hear a man behind the door rise and come across the floor. The archbishop, in a pale-blue pantsuit and a darker-blue crushed-velvet hat, opened the door.

"My views on Islam are well known: I have nothing more to say," he said, as we sat down. Archbishop Akinola has repeatedly spoken critically about Islam and liberal Western Protestants, and he was understandably wary of my motives for asking his thoughts. For Akinola, the relationship between liberal Protestants and Islam is straightforward: if Western Christians abandon conservative morals, then the global Church will be weakened in its struggle against Islam. "When you have this attack on Christians in Yelwa, and there are no arrests, Christians become dhimmi, the vocabulary within Islam that allows Christians and Jews to be seen as second-class citizens. You are subject to the Muslims. You have no rights."

When asked if those wearing name tags that read "Christian Association of Nigeria" had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. "No comment," he said. "No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet." He went on, "I'm not out to combat anybody. I'm only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I'm living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I've said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence."

Archbishop Akinola, 63, is a Yoruba, a member of an ethnic group from southwestern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully. But the archbishop's understanding of Islam was forged by his experience in the north, where he watched the persecution of a Christian minority. He was more interested during our interview, though, in talking about the West than about Nigeria.

"People are thinking that Islam is an issue in Africa and Asia, but you in the West are sitting on explosives." What people in the West don't understand, he said, "is that what Islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century, it's trying to do by immigration so that Muslims become citizens and demand their rights. A Muslim man has four wives; the wives have four or five children each. This is how they turned Christians into a minority in North Africa."

He went on, "The West has thrown God out, and Islam is filling that vacuum for you, and now your Christian heritage is being destroyed… You people are so afraid of being accused of being Islam-phobic. Consequently everyone recedes and says nothing… Over the years, Christians have been so naive -- avoiding politics, economics, and the military because they're dirty business. The missionaries taught that. Dress in tatters. Wear your bedroom slippers. Be poor. But Christians are beginning to wake up to the fact that money isn't evil, the love of money is, and it isn't wrong to have some of it. Neither is politics."

****

Democracy, Nigerians told me repeatedly, is a numbers game. That's why whoever has more believers is on top. In that competition, Christianity has a recruiting tool beyond the frontline gospel preached by those such as Archbishop Akinola: Pentecostalism, one of the world's most diverse and fastest-growing religious movements. In Nigeria, the oil boom of the 1970s brought a massive movement of people into cities looking for work. That boom's collapse spurred the growth of the Pentecostal Gospel of Prosperity, with its emphasis on good health and getting rich; and of the African Initiated Churches, or AICs, which began about 100 years ago, when several charismatic African prophets successfully converted millions to Christianity. Today, AIC members account for one-quarter of Africa’s 417 million Christians.

One bustling Pentecostal hub, Canaanland, the 565-acre headquarters of the Living Faith Church, has three banks, a bakery, and its own university, Covenant, which is the sister school of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Canaanland is about an hour and a half north of Lagos, which has an estimated population of 12 million and is projected to become the world's 12th-largest city by 2020. With 300,000 people worshipping at a single service at the Canaanland headquarters alone and 300 branches across the country, Living Faith is one of Nigeria's megachurches, and the dapper Bishop David Oyedepo is its prophet. The bishop, whose bald pate glistens above deep-set eyes and dazzling teeth, never wanted to be pastor: he had no interest in being poor, he told me. "When God made me a pastor, I wept. I hated poverty in the Church -- how can the children of God live as rats?"

Bishop Oyedepo built Canaanland to preach the Gospel of Prosperity. As he said, "If God is truly a father, there is no father that wants his children to be beggars. He wants them to prosper." In the parking lot at Canaanland, beyond the massive complex of unusually clean toilets, flapping banners promise: WHATSOEVER YOU ASK IN MY NAME, HE SHALL GIVE YOU, and BY HIS STRIPES HE GIVES US BLESSINGS.

The Pentecostal movement is so vast and varied, it's a mistake to generalize about its unifying principles. But Pentecostals do tend to share an experience of the Holy Spirit, or the numinous, that offers the gift of salvation and success in everyday life -- particularly in the realms of personal health and finance. Archbishop Akinola, whose own Anglican Church is more threatened in some ways by the rise of Pentecostalism than by the rise of Islam, finds these teachings suspect: "When you preach prosperity and not suffering, any Christianity devoid of the cross is a pseudo-religion."

But Bishop Oyedepo's followers say that those who criticize don't understand what's happening in Africa. "There's a kind of revolution going on in Africa," one of the bishop's employees, Professor Prince Famous Izedonmi, said. "America tolerates God. Africa celebrates God. We're called 'the continent of darkness,' but that's when you appreciate the light. Jesus is the light." The professor, a Muslim prince who converted to Christianity as a child to cure himself of migraine headaches, was the head of Covenant University's accounting department and director of its Centre for Entrepreneurial Development Studies.

"God isn't against wealth," Professor Famous said. "Revelations talks about streets paved with gold." He added, "Look at how Jesus dressed." When I appeared baffled, he patiently explained that since the soldiers cast lots for Christ's clothes, they were clearly expensive. In Canaanland, clothes matter: the pastors wear flashy ones and they drive fast cars as a sign of God's favor. They draw their salaries from sizable weekly contributions. On Sundays at some Nigerian Pentecostal churches, armored bank trucks reportedly idle in church parking lots, while during the service, believers hand over cash, cell phones, cars -- all with the belief that if they give to God, God will make them rich. It's said that if the Christian Prosperity churches disappeared, the banks of Nigeria would collapse.

But to see the Prosperity movement as simply a get-rich-quick scheme is to miss its importance. In many ways, Pentecostalism has updated Max Weber's Protestant work ethic for the 21st century. Pentecostals do not drink, gamble, or engage in extramarital sex; so all of that formerly illicit energy can go into either business or education. Covenant has been voted the best private university in Nigeria by Nigeria’s National Universities Commission. Education is an essential element of the Prosperity message; so is hard work. "Abraham was a workaholic," Professor Famous said. "He worked 16 or 17 hours a day."

During my first visit to Covenant, school wasn't in session, so I poked around the empty labs until I ran into a lone student, Mchenson Ugwu, 22, studying mechanical engineering in hopes of getting a job in the oil industry. Ugwu was born again in 2004. "Once in a while I backslide and have to rededicate my life to Christ," he said. "That's how it works: backslide, rededicate." For Ugwu, salvation had very little to do with the next world; it was all about this one. "Because he owns everything here on Earth, if you make God your father, beginning and end, he'll keep you up. Our bishop is the perfect example. He tells us he hasn't been poor in 25 years, and God takes him from one level to the next."

Later, the bishop led me across his red shag carpet to a white fountain tinkling in the corner of his office. "The problem with the African man is that he sees himself as poor, and others see him as poor," the bishop said. He walked over to his desk and handed me a stack of his books -- he's written 60 -- including one of the best sellers, Understanding Financial Prosperity. The cover design features Nigerian banknotes. The back cover reads: "I am not a preacher of prosperity, I am a prophet. God spoke specifically to me while I was away in America for a meeting, 'Get down home and make My people rich!'"

****

The Christian Gospel of Prosperity is so powerful that it has spawned a unique Nigerian phenomenon: an Islamic organization called Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fathi (NASFAT). The name is drawn from a verse in the eighth chapter of the Koran: "There is no help except from Allah." This is the same chapter, "The Spoils of War," or Al-Anfal, that Saddam Hussein cited to justify his genocide against the Kurds. But NASFAT has no interest in violence. Instead, the organization is based on economic empowerment and prosperity with an Islamic spin. Started with about a dozen members in the 1990s, NASFAT now has 1.2 million members in Nigeria and branches in 25 other countries. The organization has an entrepreneurship program, a clinic, a prison-outreach program, a task force to address HIV/AIDS, a travel agency, and a soft-drink company called Nasmalt, whose profits go to the poor. It even offers matchmaking. Although many conservatives believe that this engagement with the secular world is haram, forbidden, and distinctly un-Islamic, NASFAT argues that it is the only way to survive in the marketplace.
"We are competing for faithfuls," NASFAT's executive secretary, Zikrullah Kunle Hassan, said one blistering Sunday last August in Lagos. "Many people now want God. This is happening especially among the youth, that they feel they need to be committed to faith." Gesturing to the streets choked with more than 100,000 men and women clad in shining white as they came from a prayer service at the Lagos Secretariat Mosque, he explained that NASFAT meets on Sundays so that Muslims have something to do while Christians attend church. "The space on Sunday is usually not dominated by Islam, but other faiths and other values. But when our people come here, they come and drink from the fountain of Islam."

The prayer ground looked like a fair. Hawkers sold lemons from a wheelbarrow. Small booths offered pretty, scalloped hijabs, embroidered with “NASFAT” in blue. Men sat on prayer mats eating rice, while women attended a lecture on ways to make money that are in keeping with Islam.

NASFAT’s primary mission is to reclaim those values the world sees as Western, but which its members perceive as integral to the success of the global Islamic community, or ummah. Foremost is education. "We know that the West is ahead today because of education," Hassan said. NASFAT has its own nursery, primary, and secondary schools, as well as the brand-new Fountain University. While many orthodox believers say that this new movement is bi'dah, innovation, and therefore dangerously un-Islamic, NASFAT’s adherents disagree, arguing that they are part of a charismatic Muslim movement that addresses social welfare -- and that is on its way to sweeping the world. (They're also mostly Muslims from Nigeria's southwest, which means they grew up around Christianity and are more comfortable with its ways.) If every answer to life can be found in the Koran, Hassan said, then questions of how to survive and prosper must be addressed there. When conservative northern clerics kick up a fuss about NASFAT's growing presence in the communities, NASFAT reaches out to them with gestures like involving community youth in business programs.

"To be honest, for us there's a competition of civilizations, there's a competition of values, and to me, the roots of the conflict are that we believe all civilizations have collapsed in the face of Western civilization," he went on. "Communism collapsed. All other values collapsed. Islam remained resistant to Western civilization." In order to survive, Islam has to address the contemporary needs of its people and compete with the Christian promise of prosperity. As one young member, who joined the organization to get a job through its business network, told me, "There's nothing you want to achieve that NASFAT can’t help you get, here in this country." He added, "Success, triumph, and glory are from the Creator."

****

"Prosperity Gospel is more a symptom than the disease," Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, the Roman Catholic author of Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria, told me in his office above a Catholic church in the city of Kaduna, at the northern edge of the Middle Belt. To his mind, Nigerians' resort to religion to achieve prosperity was a natural response to their corrupt political landscape and the absence of any civil government. "You can buy a car and insure it," he continued. "You don't need a priest to pray over the car, to bless your house to keep robbers away… Here, there's no guarantee. God is being called upon to police a lot of areas of our lives." This need for God's protection isn't only individual, but collective and political, given the collapse of the state.

Many Muslims share that point of view. Take, for example, the ongoing effort to implement sharia, or Islamic law, in northern Nigeria, which came to fruition in 1999. On a practical level, sharia, with its promise of moral justice at the local level, seems to offer an end to the corruption that bedevils the people. And given that many Nigerians associate that corruption with the failure of Western-style democracy in Africa, "to reinstate the sharia… is not only good religion, it is supremely sound politics," argues Murray Last, an emeritus professor at University College London.

Yet despite a huge outcry from Christians and the West, the implementation of sharia, which is currently on the books in 12 of Nigeria's 36 states, has had very little practical impact. The harsh criminal punishments spelled out in the hudud have proven, for the most part, impossible to implement. And northern Nigerians have now seen that sharia has not stanched the corruption they face every day. In fact, many of the politicians who backed sharia have been linked to massive corruption; these include the biggest advocate, the former governor of Zamfara state, who is even rumored to have paid a man to let the state amputate his hand for stealing livestock.

So if religion has proven not to safeguard the car, not to cure malaria, not even to stop politicians from stuffing ballot boxes, is it worth fighting and dying for? Popular disillusionment is one reason why Father Kukah believes that Nigeria's religious mayhem is an isolated stage in its development of plural stability. Paradoxically, this progression is clearest in Kaduna, formerly one of the most intense flash points, where Kukah lives. Over the past 20 years, many of the city's churches and mosques have been burned down, and thousands of residents have been killed in battles fueled by religion. Kaduna, whose name means "crocodile," is a microcosm of Nigeria: its population of 1.5 million people is divided in half between Muslims and Christians. The split isn't just demographic; it's geographic. The city's Muslim neighborhoods -- nicknamed Baghdad and Afghanistan -- are on the north side of town. The Christian ones -- called Television, Haifa, and Jerusalem -- are on the south side. The Kaduna River separates them.

Pastor James Movel Wuye was born in Kaduna into an ethnic minority called Gbagyi. Historically, his people were aboriginal warriors who fought off Hausa Muslim slave raiders before the arrival of the British, who actually made things worse. "They were merciless, the Muslims who were ruling over us," he said. His people still call the Hausa Muslims ajei, which means "those who trouble us." Pastor James's father was a soldier, and when James and the other barracks boys played war, their imagined enemies were their Hausa oppressors. As a teenager, James rebelled: he drank and smoked, and he wooed a long list of girlfriends. He also joined the Christian Association of Nigeria and, at 27, became general secretary of the Youth Wing. In 1987, the Middle Belt exploded. When fighting between Christians and Muslims reached Kaduna, Pastor James became the head of a Christian militia. "We took an oath of secrecy," he said. "We carried pictures of those [of us] who'd been killed. We were martyrs: we felt that we were dying in defense of the Church." The war, like the faith itself, became a struggle for liberation.

James incited violence by relying on the literal, inspired word of scripture. "I used to say, 'We've been beaten on both cheeks, there's no other cheek to turn,'" he said. "I used Luke 22:36: as Jesus said to the disciples the night before his crucifixion, 'And if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.'" When the pastor was 32, a fight broke out between Christians and Muslims over control of a market. "That day, we were outnumbered," he said. "Twenty of my friends were killed. I passed out, so I don't know exactly what happened." When he woke up, his right arm was gone, sliced off with a machete.

****

Imam Muhammad Nurayn Ashafa is also a former militia leader, from the other side of the river, where he still lives. "We were fighting on either side of town, James and I," he told me when I first visited his home in August 2006. Ashafa's life is equally steeped in the history of his people. He comes from a long line of Muslim scholars who were powerful under the caliphate of Usman Dan Fodio, and his story, too, is a tale of oppression and reaction to oppression. "My family had, all its life, struggled against colonialists and missionaries because they watched the colonialists bring Christianity into the hinterlands. I grew up hearing stories of how our land was stolen and our people were crushed." When Ashafa was a boy, his father refused to let him go to school, because missionaries ran the school. "Missionaries are evil," he told his son. But Ashafa's uncle talked his father into it, saying, "Let the boy go to school. Don't you trust your God?"

At mission school, Ashafa won the prize for best Bible student; he had a gift for memorization. After school, Ashafa would use a slingshot to fling stones at women who were showing their bare arms or backs in the streets. When the religious crisis hit Kaduna in 1987, Ashafa, like James, became a militia leader. The two were enemies. "We planted the seed of genocide, and we used the scripture to do that," Ashafa said. "In Islam, you must fight in defense of any women, children, or old people -- Muslim or not -- so as a leader, you create a scenario where this is the only interpretation," he explained. But Ashafa's mentor, a Sufi hermit, tried to warn the young man away from violence. "You will not cross the ocean with hate in your heart," he told Ashafa.

In 1992, Christian militiamen stabbed the hermit to death and threw his body down a well. Ashafa's only mission became revenge: he was going to kill James. Then, one Friday during a sermon, Ashafa's imam told the story of when the Prophet Muhammad had gone to preach at Ta'if, a town about 70 miles southeast of Mecca. Bleeding after being stoned and cast out of town, Muhammad was visited by an angel who asked if he'd like those who mistreated him to be destroyed. Muhammad said no. "The imam was talking directly to me," Ashafa said. During the sermon, he began to cry. Next time he met James, he'd forgiven him entirely. To prove it, he went to visit James's sick mother in the hospital.

Slowly, the pastor and the imam began to work together, but James was leery. "Ashafa carries the psychological mark. I carry the physical and psychological mark," he said. "He talks so much. I'm a little miserly with words. So when he uses his energy like that, he sleeps very deeply. There were instances where we shared a room. He's a very heavy sleeper. You can actually take the pillow off his head and he will just struggle and go back to sleep. More than once, several times, I was tempted to use the pillow to suffocate him. But this restraining force of the deepness of my faith comes ringing through my ears."

At a Christian conference in Nigeria sponsored by Pat Robertson -- one of the most anti-Muslim preachers in the world -- a fellow pastor pulled James aside and said, in almost the same words as the Sufi hermit, "You can't preach Jesus with hate in your heart." James said, "That was my real turning point. I came back totally deprogrammed. I know Pat Robertson might have had another agenda, but I was truly changed."

For more than a decade now, James and Ashafa have traveled to Nigerian cities and to other countries where Christians and Muslims are fighting. They tell their stories of how they manipulated religious texts to get young people into the streets to shed blood. Both still adhere strictly to the scripture; they just read it more deeply and emphasize different verses.

Nonbelievers may wonder how these "deprogramming" efforts can actually work. But religion is the X factor in conflicts like Nigeria's, which can't be reduced just to economics. As Barbara Cooper, the author of Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel, puts it, "Faith matters."

Pastor James sent me on a tour of Kaduna with one of his employees, Haruna Yakubu, a former Islamic militant who now works as a youth coordinator for the Interfaith Mediation Centre, which the pair of religious allies founded. Yakubu took me to see the poured-cement skeleton of the fire-ravaged Alafia Oluwa Baptist Church. "The Baptists want to sell it," Yakubu said, as we climbed out of the pastor's aging Mercedes. The cross and spire had been sheared off, but the walls and heavy cement Romanesque arches were still standing. They now enclosed a large grassy field; a cow was tethered to a tree. I walked toward the narthex, but Yakubu stopped me. It stank of human excrement. "The locals have turned it into a toilet," he said, uncomfortably. On the wall, through a hole blasted into the cement, someone had painted a picture of a naked woman, a penis with "Pastor S--" written on it pointed between her spread legs. "We're trying to convince the Baptists to come back, but they don't want to.” I could see why. I couldn't imagine a more desecrated place. In 2007, the Christians sold it after all. When Yakubu and I drove by a year after our first visit, the word masalaci, which means "mosque," had been spray-painted across it in red.

We drove in silence. Yakubu looked out of the car's smeared window at the colonial-era ash trees lining the broad road toward the polo ground. "Our religious leaders are some of our most dangerous people," he said. "They preach that they want us to go back to Medina, but we can't go back to Medina." Medina, the city in which Muhammad led an army and a state, has different connotations than Mecca, the city of his youth. In the Koran, the verses from Medina speak frequently of war and violence, unlike the ones from Mecca. "Even the Prophet lived with Christians; why can't we? If we call ourselves true Muslims, why can't we do that?" said Yakubu.

Along the road, red-eyed boys sold jerricans of petrol. Nigeria is the United States' fifth-largest supplier of oil, but because of corruption and mismanagement, it imports much of its gasoline. During price hikes and shortages, these young hawkers appear by the roadside. Such boys are the first to join the fighting; their gas cans become weapons. Usually someone's paying them. In the north, there are millions of these jobless and school-less young men. For the price of a meal, they form a ready army.

****

One Friday before afternoon prayer, I visited Imam Ashafa at home. He'd already solved three neighborhood disputes that morning. Two smiling old men wearing dark glasses sat on his green sectional couch. Both were blind, and the imam had started a foundation to help them. His two young wives, Fatima and Aisha, both disarmingly warm and very attractive, served tea on top of a tin canister. "I like pretty women," the imam told me later. The room was stuffy: the windows were shut and the green-and-white striped curtains drawn in purdah. On one closed door, a bumper sticker read COMBAT AIDS WITH Shari'a. The method was clear: abstinence. The imam and the pastor share the same conservative moral values, which has also helped them to find common ground.

Frequently, the problems each confronted weren't divisions between Christians and Muslims, but arguments within his own side. One of Ashafa's greatest challenges is to manage Kaduna's growing list of Muslim groups at odds with each other. The self-proclaimed Shia of northern Nigeria are closely tied to Iran. They're engaged in a cold war -- which sometimes heats up -- with a radical group of Sunnis. Some Sunni hardliners, in turn, rail against what they see as the "corrupt" Islam practiced by Nigeria's Sufi majority. As among the Christians, the divisions between the Muslims continue to deepen -- a splintering that undermines any facile notions of a global clash of two monoliths. Still, the imam is frequently accused of being a sellout because he associates with Christians. He identifies himself very much as a fundamentalist and sees himself as one who emulates Muhammad. Although he and Pastor James don't discuss it, he also proselytizes among Christians. "I want James to die as a Muslim, and he wants me to die as a Christian. My Islam is proselytizing. It's about bringing the whole world to Islam," he told me that day.

Such missionary zeal drives both men, infusing their struggle to rise above their history of conflict with the same undercurrent of competitive tension that runs across the Middle Belt and the continent. As Pastor James told me at his office, Peace Hall, in Kaduna, he still believes strongly in absolute and exclusive salvation mandated by the gospel: "Jesus said, 'I am the way and the truth and the life.'" He still challenges Christians to rely on the strict and literal word, and he's still uncompromising on fundamental issues of Christianity. "We see same-sex marriages in the United States as signs of end times: it's Sodom and Gomorrah," he told me. "But I also want to say you can believe what you want to believe. We have to find a space for coexistence."

Eliza Griswold on Public Radio International | 'God's Country: Nigeria's Middle Belt'

Communications — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:39:00 -0500

God's Country: Nigeria's Middle Belt (Public Radio International)

Over a slideshow of photos by Seamus Murphy, Lisa Mullins talks with The Atlantic magazine's Eliza Griswold about reporting in Nigeria's middle belt, and the history of religious tensions in the region.

Eliza Griswold wrote the article "God's Country" appearing in the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic. It is available online along with additional coverage of Nigeria's middle belt.

Occupational Hazard

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:55:00 -0400

"Take off your veil!" the Somali soldier shouted at the woman in the mostly empty street. Steadying his assault rifle with his right hand, he ripped away the woman's black niqab with his left. "Why are you coming so close to us? You have explosives?" He leveled the muzzle of his gun against the bridge of her nose. Her mouth, suddenly embarrassed and exposed, broke into a jester's forced grin.

"I just want a juice," she pleaded. Except for a handful of armed soldiers, the only other person on the deserted street was a man selling mango juice from behind a table. (A few weeks earlier, the stall he had operated for 14 years had been blown up.) The woman held up her empty palms and backed away. The soldiers let her be and hustled back to their waiting Jeep.

We were in Tawfiq, the most contested neighborhood of Mogadishu, where soldiers of the current Somali government are busy trying to root out militia members of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which ruled Mogadishu for six months last year and managed to bring relative peace for the first time in 16 years. It was overthrown late last year by a force sent by neighboring Ethiopia with America's tacit blessing. Now the UIC's military wing, the shebab ("youth"), has retreated into a maze of shallow bunkers and sandy berms in the Tawfiq neighborhood from which the Islamist group drew most of its local support. A sign on a daub wall nearby advertised the (now closed) new falluja cafe -- named after the Iraqi city razed by the Americans in late 2004 where the insurgency continues to simmer.

The government soldiers' overreaction to the woman buying juice is at least somewhat understandable. The first real suicide bomber in Somalia's history blew himself up last September, in a failed attempt to assassinate President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, whom many Somalis see as a puppet of Ethiopia and, by proxy, the United States. Since then, suicide bombers have detonated every few months.

During its brief tenure, the UIC had defeated Mogadishu's U.S.-backed warlords and quelled the clan divisions that riddle Somali life. It also set up sharia courts to administer justice and instill order in the name of Islam. To some degree, it worked. Somalis backed the UIC less for religious reasons than because, for the first time in almost two decades, Mogadishu wasn't a free-fire zone.

But the UIC had a much darker side: The shebab dug up and tossed out the bones of more than 700 dead Italians from an "infidel" cemetery and forced men to shave their heads as punishment for un-Islamic hairdos. They banned watching the World Cup and chewing the popular leafy stimulant qat. The head of the UIC's shura council, Sheik Hassan Aweys, was the military leader of Al Ittihad Al Islami, which launched several attacks against Ethiopia in the 1990s and had links to Al Qaeda. Also, in the second half of 2006, hundreds of foreign fighters reportedly arrived in Somalia to fight alongside the shebab. The UIC harbored several members of Al Qaeda, including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the elusive mastermind reportedly behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 225 people.

And so, last Christmas Eve, the Christian-led government of Ethiopia invaded and -- supported, later, by U.S. air strikes -- successfully dislodged the Islamist UIC, largely because it believed (correctly) that rebels backed by its enemy, Eritrea, were using Somalia as a staging area for attacks. The result is an occupation by Ethiopian soldiers that fuels the local insurgency, threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa, and offers Al Qaeda an additional talking point in its campaign to persuade Muslims that the West has declared war upon them. Many of the region's Muslims saw the Ethiopian invasion as a Christmas present from Ethiopia's leaders to America's. "When the Americans started backing the Ethiopians around Christmas," one woman who supported the courts said, "we started calling the Ethiopians kafir, or infidels."

"The occupation in Somalia is having roughly the same effect as in parts of Iraq," John Prendergast, an analyst at the International Crisis Group and founder of the enough Project, says. "We know by now that the one thing that unifies Somalis and brings them into the streets for guerrilla-style operations is occupation." In other words, Somalia is shaping up to be a third blundered front, after Afghanistan and Iraq, in the war on terrorism.

As in Iraq, the overthrow of the UIC government has left widespread chaos in its wake. In the streets of Mogadishu, grazing cows and children sniffing glue compete to eat from piles of garbage. Qat is back too: Few dare to travel after 3 p.m., the hour at which government soldiers begin to chew. While qat is ostensibly a stimulant, the glassy, pink eyes of soldiers in the late afternoon, and their indifference to pulling the triggers of their automatic weapons, make it seem a soporific.

Casualties from the occupation and insurgency fill the 60 beds of a local hospital. When I visited, I met Abdi Ghani Mohammed Ali, a 30-year-old English teacher who clutched the drainage tube protruding from his abdomen. Out of work since war shut his school some months ago, Abdi sold mobile phones to Ethiopian soldiers to support his family. One day, he told me, the Ethiopians shot him, stole $1,000, and left him in the street to die. An 18-year-old boy had been admitted to the hospital several days earlier bleeding from his rectum. He had been gang-raped by government soldiers who belonged to one of Somalia's rival clans. ("It's not sexual; it's about power," an onlooker said.) A woman in intensive care was waiting for her sister, shot during a carjacking, to wake from a coma. "Under the Islamic courts," she said, "it wasn't possible for anyone to do this." Meanwhile, in the crowded room next door, a woman named Rogia poked at the cast on her right knee, where she had been shot by an Ethiopian sniper. "The Ethiopians hate our religion," she said. The hospital's one doctor was slightly embarrassed but translated for her nonetheless: "Muslims wouldn't do anything like this."

This is certainly how Al Qaeda would like the world's 1.3 billion Muslims to view what's happening in Somalia. In early 2007, Ayman Al Zawahiri called for attacks against the occupying Ethiopian soldiers using "ambushes, mines, raids, and martyrdom-seeking campaigns to devour them as the lions devour their prey." But his message wasn't meant merely for Somali ears; it was also intended to inflame Muslims worldwide by suggesting, once again, that the Christian West is at war with Islam.

Al Qaeda's interest in Somalia dates back to the early ‘90s, when, according to a recent report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, an "Africa Corps" made up of a dozen or so Al Qaeda members set out for Mogadishu from nearby Sudan. "Al Qaeda saw Somalia as being really crucial long before the U.S. did," explains Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower. "They look at the Horn of Africa as the gateway to the Red Sea: Egypt and Saudi Arabia are their main prizes." But, like the American peacekeepers sent by President Clinton in the early ‘90s, Al Qaeda's Africa Corps members found the failed state too problematic to build the infrastructure they needed. Their jihad ideology, moreover, was a tough sell among the Sufi-influenced Somalis, and it was hard to tear militants away from their clan loyalties and salaries. The Africa Corps letters make fascinating reading, tracing the evolution of Al Qaeda's mission from combating Somali communism to confronting "crusaders."

Al Qaeda has claimed some public relations victories in Somalia, notably Osama bin Laden's boast that his foot soldiers helped to bring down a Black Hawk helicopter and kill 18 American Rangers in Mogadishu in October 1993. That attack, he bragged later, set the "paper tiger" of the United States alight. And, as terrorism expert (and TNR contributor) Peter Bergen notes, Al Qaeda's first act of terrorism, the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, targeted American soldiers staying there -- soldiers on their way to Somalia. "Al Qaeda saw Somalia as part of the American grab for Muslim lands that began in Saudi Arabia," Bergen says. "When you talk about ‘cutting off the head of the snake,' where do you begin? Somalia."

In the end, though, resentment toward the U.S.-backed occupation may prove to be a greater destabilizing force for the entire region than Al Qaeda ever was, especially in Kenya, where the war on terrorism is directly linked to the rise of radical Islamic identity. In the name of chasing a few bad men, the Christmas invasion played into millennia of distrust between predominantly Christian Ethiopia (40-50 percent of the population is Muslim) and Somalia, which is almost 100 percent Muslim. "The popular perception is that Christian soldiers are occupying a Muslim land," says Roland Marchal, a senior research fellow at Sciences-Po in Paris.

Ethiopians see Somalia as a haven for Islamic militants and insurgents backed by Eritrea, which would like to overthrow the repressive Ethiopian regime. But they also play up this analysis to encourage U.S. backing for their efforts to destroy the rebels. In 2002, during a visit by Senator Arlen Specter, Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi called the U.S. war on terrorism "something of a godsend." As Ethiopian Envoy to Somalia Fesaha Shawal recently explained, "Ethiopia and America have a common strategy, a common thinking, and a common enemy."

It's a point on which both sides concur. Ahmed Mohammed Hashim, an emaciated 25-year-old shebab foot soldier, told me, "Ethiopia is our first enemy. Right now, they go into our mosques with their shoes on; they shit and pee there." Second is the Ethiopia-backed interim government, "because it is illegitimate." And third: "America. America is the father of our enemy. America is using the Ethiopians to take over our country, and we're against them."

When I visited one head of the interim government, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi, at his home, he argued that the de facto alliance between Ethiopia and the United States would eventually work to everyone's benefit. Surrounded by armed, glowering teenagers belonging to his clan in the heavily fortified Mogadishu neighborhood that one Somali journalist called the Lime Zone (to Baghdad's Green), Gedi told me: "The United States government is very cooperative. ...Somalia is a very important country from a geopolitical point of view in the war on terror."

A few hours later, a suicide truck bomber crashed through the gate of his compound, killing six people and injuring ten more. The prime minister was rushed to an undisclosed location. It was at least the third attempt on his life, and a great opportunity for spin. Soon after, my phone rang. It was the prime minister calling me directly -- apart from the photographer Seamus Murphy, I was evidently the only Western journalist in Mogadishu. "This bombing will make the international community pay attention," he told me. "It is the mark of Al Qaeda."