The 10th Parallel, religion and conflict in Africa

Coyote

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Lots of conflicts heating up in Africa and CAR is only the latest. This interview with the author of the Tenth Parallel is very enlightening and makes some interesting points - while religion is a factor, other larger factors are influencing the unrest. I think it means also that the world needs to take a harder look at "failed" states or those teetering close to the edge. When a state fails to protect it's citizens - religious, ethnic, or tribal identities become stronger and offer a form of protection. It's what we saw in the Balkans after the fall of the Soviets, and it's playing out in the Middle East as well.

Religion is not the real issue in the Central African Republic's conflict | Public Radio International

Just days after 1,600 French soldiers arrived in the CAR to try to stop the fighting, two of the paratroopers are dead. Journalist Eliza Griswold calls it a significant escalation.

"When we see Western troops targeted, and a willingness for that to happen, it definitely changes the stakes of a local conflict," Griswold says.

Griswold says what looks like a clash between Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic is actually a far deeper struggle over the political future of certain territories rich in diamonds, gold and uranium.

"The fighting itself isn't about religion. It's about control over political power and safeguarding communities," Griswold says. "And it's taking on the color of religion because no other form of identity is protecting the people of CAR now."

Griswold wrote "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam." She says, in the absence of functioning governments, many Africans are increasingly defining themselves in terms of their religious identity.

"If it doesn't make any difference to be a citizen of the Central African Republic, what are you going to turn to?" Griswold asks.

Also, from another interview with the author of 2010:
Eliza Griswold on the Muslim-Christian Divide | October 15, 2010 | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly | PBS

Why she chose to report from Central African Republlic:
ELIZA GRISWOLD: I wanted to go to where the world is really breaking apart. I wanted to go see what happens when these two religions meet on the ground in villages, mega-slums, floods, droughts. I really feel that I’ve seen that the world is breaking down on tribal lines, and the greatest of those tribes is religion.

LAWTON: Griswold spent the past seven years reporting from what she considers perhaps the biggest faith-based fault line in the world—the tenth parallel, the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator in Africa and Asia.

post01-elizagriswoldGRISWOLD: These are very contested spaces traditionally, and religion has become grafted onto what makes them so contested today.

LAWTON: The area includes Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines—all places of bloody battles between Muslims and Christians. Griswold says geography, climate, wind patterns and human migration have led to clear lines of demarcation.

GRISWOLD: When we think of Islam we think of a billion people around the world. We don’t usually think that four out of five of those people live outside of the Middle East. They’re not Arabs. They live in Africa, and they live in Asia, and then you have about half of the world’s two billion Christians who also live in what we call these days the Global South.

LAWTON: Along the tenth parallel, both Christianity and Islam have been experiencing an explosive growth in numbers and religious fervor. Griswold wanted to examine whether fundamentalism necessarily leads to violence.

GRISWOLD: The belief that there is one and only one way to find God, and the understanding that that leads immediately to an enemy, because everybody else is wrong. That kind of binary division between us and them, the saved and the damned, I wondered if that was inherently violent because you were setting yourself against another person.
LAWTON: You talk in your book about many people saying to you this isn’t really a conflict about religion; it’s a conflict about oil, or water, or politics, resources. How much is religion truly a factor in some of these conflicts?

GRISWOLD: It’s almost an impossible question to answer because I have found that each conflict is different. I never saw a conflict that we would see as religious that didn’t have some kind of secular or worldly trigger—whether that’s land, oil, water, even chocolate crops in Indonesia. Now does that mean that religion doesn’t come to bear on these conflicts? It’s more complicated than that.
 

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