SOUTHERN Sudan's nearly certain secession from the Arab-dominated north is likely to set a dangerous precedent in an Arab World looking increasingly fractured along sectarian and ethnic lines. The referendum is part of a 2005 peace deal that ended 22 years of civil war between the Christian and animist south and the Muslim and Arabized north. Already, there are growing secessionist sentiments, exclusive enclaves and intensifying calls for autonomy in some Arab nations. “The lesson we must all learn is that secession, as in the case of Sudan, can be the road to safety when union becomes a heavy and unbearable burden on people,” prominent columnist Salama Ahmed Salama recently wrote in Cairo's newspaper Al-Shorouk. In an Arab World traditionally suspicious of what it sees as Western “plots” to fragment and weaken it, secession, federalism and autonomy are taboos often rejected out of hand regardless of their validity. The Sudan vote has sparked soul-searching about how the predominantly Arab and Sunni Muslim nations of the region have dealt with ethnic and religious minorities since independence from colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s. The intense discussion of the Sudanese vote, played out in the media across the region, touched on such relevant issues as the validity of international borders drawn by the area's European colonizers after World War I, the supremacy of citizenship over sectarian and religious affiliation and how big a part regional, non-Arab powers like Israel and Iran play in allegedly fueling dissent among minorities in the Middle East. Apart from the Sudanese vote, some of the fractures already existing in the Arab world have grown deeper. In Iraq, leaders of the embattled Christian minority, citing the failure of security forces to protect them, are calling on the government to establish a new province they can claim as their own. Khadum Al-Muqdadi, an Iraqi political analyst, warns against creating an exclusively Christian province, arguing it would only be a matter of time before some in the West demand its independence. Secessionist movements and civil war are gaining grounds in the Arab World. “I think there is a common issue, which is that the modern Arab state is fraying at the edges for different reasons,” said Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. “The question that Sudan raises is: ‘Is there a structural problem with other Arab countries? And are there other Arab countries that are possibly vulnerable to secessionist movements?”'
