Family of Egypt's Mursi threaten legal action over 'abduction'.

The family of Egypt's ousted Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi, said on Monday it would take legal action against the army for abducting him. Mursi has been held at an undisclosed military facility since the army deposed him on July 3 and suspended the constitution in the wake of huge street protests against his one-year rule. The army says Mursi is being held for his own safety. His detention and the arrests of numerous senior members of his Muslim Brotherhood have fuelled fears of a broad crackdown against a group banned during Hosni Mubarak's 30 years of autocratic rule, until he was toppled by street protests in 2011. "There is no legal or constitutional basis ... for detaining someone not accused of a crime for his own safety," Mursi's son, Osama, told a news conference. He said the family would take immediate legal action "inside Egypt and at an international level" against Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the army commander and defense minister who played a central role in forcing Mursi from office. The Muslim Brotherhood accuses the army of orchestrating a coup that has triggered violent clashes and exposed deep fissures in the Arab world's most populous nation, a strategic hinge between the Middle East and North Africa. The Brotherhood says it has had no contact with Mursi since he was overthrown, and that it believes he has not had access to a lawyer. Osama said the family had also not been able to contact him and had no information on the state of his health or where he was being held. "WILL OF THE PEOPLE" He described Mursi's removal as "nothing less than the abduction of the will of the people and the entire nation". Mursi's supporters are maintaining a round-the-clock vigil in a Cairo suburb, now in its third week. They say they will stay put until Mursi is returned to office. A few thousand of his supporters protested outside the High Court in central Cairo on Monday. The military has installed an interim cabinet and promised a new election under a constitution now being amended to replace one drafted last year by a body dominated by Islamists and approved despite objections from Christians and liberals. Egypt's public prosecutor's office launched a criminal investigation against Mursi on July 13, saying it was examining complaints including spying and inciting violence. It did not specify who had filed the complaints. No formal charges have been announced. Mursi's daughter, Shaimaa, told the news conference that the family held the army responsible for his safety. Heba Morayef, Egypt director of Human Rights Watch, said that, without a detention order from the prosecutor's office, there were no grounds to hold Mursi without charge beyond a maximum 48 hours. "(Mursi's)arrest and that of his advisers is completely illegal," Morayef said. Gamal Abdel Salem, a doctor who spoke alongside the Mursi family, said Mursi suffered from diabetes, and that a doctors' union had asked for access to him

The wonks who sold Washington on South Sudan.

In the mid-1980s, a small band of policy wonks began convening for lunch in the back corner of a dimly lit Italian bistro in the U.S. capital. After ordering beers, they would get down to business: how to win independence for southern Sudan, a war-torn place most American politicians had never heard of. They called themselves the Council and gave each other clannish nicknames: the Emperor, the Deputy Emperor, the Spear Carrier. The unlikely fellowship included an Ethiopian refugee to America, an English-lit professor and a former Carter administration official who once sported a ponytail. The Council is little known in Washington or in Africa itself. But its quiet cajoling over nearly three decades helped South Sudan win its independence one year ago this week. Across successive U.S. administrations, they smoothed the path of southern Sudanese rebels in Washington, influenced legislation in Congress, and used their positions to shape foreign policy in favor of Sudan's southern rebels, often with scant regard for U.S. government protocol. "We never controlled anything, but we always did try to influence things in the way we thought most benefited the people of South Sudan," said Roger Winter, now an honorary adviser to the South Sudan government and one of the group's original members, who dubbed himself the Spear Carrier. The story of the Council has not been told before. For a Reuters series chronicling the first year in the life of South Sudan, the group's main members spoke for the first time about how they came together and what they tried to achieve. They pinpointed key moments when peace could have slipped away. Some expressed disappointment at the compromises America made to broker the creation of South Sudan. One idea shines through: Independence was far from inevitable. "I actually think it was a miracle we got something," said Winter. Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people. It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives. President George W. Bush, who set out to end Africa's longest-running civil war, also played a big role, as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress. But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world's newest state was the tightly knit group, never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington's DuPont Circle. A CHARISMATIC REBEL In 1978, Brian D'Silva, a young student in agricultural economics, began pursuing a doctorate at Iowa State University. There, he studied alongside an intensely charismatic southern Sudanese man named John Garang, who had begun dreaming of a democratic Sudan. After graduation, D'Silva went with Garang to Sudan to teach at the University of Khartoum. An uneasy peace held between Sudan's predominantly Arab Islamic north and largely Christian south. The divide stemmed from colonial times, when Britain encouraged Christian missionaries to evangelize the south. The British considered splitting the country in two, but ultimately handed a unified Sudan to a small Arab elite in Khartoum, who tried to impose Islamic law throughout the country. A 1972 agreement had given southerners semi-autonomy. That fragile deal began unraveling in 1979 after Chevron discovered oil in the south; the north did not want to lose control over the newly found riches. D'Silva returned to the United States in 1980 to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Three years later, his old schoolmate Garang, a conscript in the Sudanese army, led a mutiny of southern Sudanese soldiers. His group would become the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement (SPLM), which led the fight for southern autonomy. Roger Winter visited Sudan in 1981 for a non-governmental outfit called the U.S. Committee for Refugees. Upon his return, the former Carter administration official sought out Sudanese who were based in Washington. Key among them was respected legal scholar Francis Deng, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "A man with a ponytail came to see me," recalled Deng, who is now the U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Deng hails from Abyei, a fertile area straddling north and south Sudan. He thought Winter must be some "wealthy hippie-type" who wanted to give money to the rebels. When Winter explained that the best he could do was disseminate information, Deng suggested that the American public needed first-hand accounts of people affected by the war. He called a cousin in the rebel movement to ensure that on future visits, Winter would have access to all the so-called liberated areas - the parts of Sudan held by the rebels - where he could gather direct testimony on the impact of the war. By the mid-1980s, these three future Council members - D'Silva, Deng and Winter - were working in the United States as proxies for John Garang. Over six feet tall and more than 200 pounds, the rebel leader had a laugh - and a personality - that filled a room. "You meet Dr. John, you get converted," said Winter, who first met Garang in 1986. The three men quickly discovered the size of the task ahead of them. In 1987, D'Silva tried to bring a delegation from the SPLM to meet officials in Washington. But standard procedure at Foggy Bottom was to maintain relations with the recognized Sudanese government in Khartoum and ignore the rebel movement. D'Silva received a phone call from an official instructing him that no meetings should be arranged on any government-owned or -leased property. ENTER "THE EMPEROR" According to Deng, many in Washington associated the rebels with the Soviet-backed government in neighboring Ethiopia, leaving the SPLM on the wrong side of the Cold War. "It took a lot of hard work to remove the prejudice against John Garang," Deng said. As D'Silva, Winter and Deng tried to get the southern rebels through doors in Washington, a wayward college graduate in search of a cause was traveling in the Horn of Africa. By the early 1990s, John Prendergast had decided his calling was to help win better U.S. policies for Africa. At the time, the circle of people in Washington who cared about the Horn of Africa was small. Prendergast soon ran into Winter, and the pair began briefing journalists, urging them to cover the conflict and putting them in contact with the rebels. Human rights campaigning was very different from today. The idea of Western groups advocating in a coordinated way on behalf of foreign causes - as they had during the British-led anti-slavery campaigns in Belgian Congo more than a century before - had only recently been rekindled by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. For the few Americans who had heard of Sudan at all, "the south was a black hole," said Winter, the refugee-rights organizer. It was about this time that the Council's future Emperor made his entrance. Ted Dagne was a 14-year-old Ethiopian in 1974 when a Soviet-backed military junta seized power. Dagne's older sister, a student leader, was among the first to be executed by the new government. "After that, there was a (target) on our family," said Dagne, drawing a cross in the air. By the time Dagne was 16, both he and his older brother had been imprisoned and tortured. Dagne was subsequently released, but his brother was executed and Dagne's own prospects for survival looked slim. One morning he donned his sister's T-shirt and his brother's jeans and shoes, keepsakes for an unknown future, and told his parents he was going out for groceries. It was the last time he saw them. With the help of a Somali man who pretended to be his father, Dagne crossed the border into Somalia. Eventually he reached Djibouti, and subsequently joined a generation of people fleeing communist lands who were granted asylum in the United States. Dagne got through college by working two jobs - answering phones from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. and an afternoon shift at a Lincoln Memorial souvenir kiosk. By 1989 he had earned a masters degree, acquired U.S. citizenship and was working on African affairs at the Congressional Research Service, the non-partisan policy-analysis arm of the U.S. legislature. AN EYE-OPENING VISIT That year, Winter took two members of Congress to meet Garang on one of his visits to rebel-held areas of Sudan. The trip had a big impact. One of the visitors, Viriginia Republican Frank Wolf, said he still remembers a question put to him by a Dinka woman named Rebecca. "She said to me, ‘Why is it that you people in the West are very interested in the whales but no one seems to be interested in us?'" he recalled. "It was an eye-opener, and I became very sympathetic toward the southerners." After that, D'Silva, Deng, and Winter finally managed to get a delegation led by Garang on an official visit to Washington. Wanting to ensure the group from his homeland made a good impression, Manute Bol, the 7-foot, 7-inch sensation for the Golden State Warriors basketball team, offered to hire a limousine to take Garang's delegation to Capitol Hill. Winter told them this was a bad idea. "I explained to them, you can't go to the Capitol building in this and then go in and talk about starving people!" Winter recalled. The visitors switched to an old bus that blew out gobs of black smoke as it sputtered to Congress. It was on that visit to Washington that Dagne met Garang for the first time. More than any other member of the Council, Dagne formed an intense friendship with the rebel leader. There were periods in the years ahead in which they spoke by phone every day, Dagne says. By the early 1990s, the group's work was starting to pay off. Dagne was seconded from the Congressional Research Service to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, where he began to build allies for the southern Sudanese cause. Congressional staffers are supposed to be neutral, but it was an open secret that Dagne's allegiance lay with the southerners. "Ted was very suspicious of the Sudan government, and so I became very suspicious," said former Democratic Senator Harry Johnston, who headed the subcommittee. "I pushed the envelope quite a lot," Dagne acknowledges. In 1993, for instance, Dagne drafted a congressional resolution stating that southern Sudanese had the right to self-determination. He passed his draft to Johnston, who reviewed it and then presented it to his colleagues in Congress. The resolution was not binding, but it passed unanimously. It was the first time any part of the U.S. government had recognized the right of the southerners to determine their own relationship to the Sudanese government. By the mid-nineties, five men - Dagne, Deng, D'Silva, Prendergast and Winter - were meeting regularly at Otello's. Prendergast had been nicknamed the Council Member in Waiting because he liked to challenge the Emperor. Deng was referred to as the Diplomat, marking him as the least strident of the group. D'Silva, the most serious among them, went without a nickname. The group was united by a respect for Garang. The men acknowledge that his SPLM fighters committed horrific crimes during the war, and say they often had highly critical conversations with Garang. But they say they never doubted that they backed the right side. "You have these well-trained guys in Khartoum who are murderers and never keep an agreement," said Winter. "How do you treat them equally?" MODERN-DAY ABOLITIONISTS Crises in Somalia and Rwanda were absorbing most of America's attention in Africa. But the southern Sudanese cause soon got a boost from an unlikely quarter. In 1995, Christian Solidarity International initiated a controversial program in Sudan called slave redemption. The Zurich-based human-rights organization began paying slave traders for the freedom of southerners captured in raids by government-backed militias from the north. Christian Solidarity took journalists and pastors from the black evangelical community along on their missions, and stories of modern-day slavery filtered into church congregations and the U.S. media. The group drew fire for fueling a market for slavery, but it had a big impact in the United States. American schoolchildren began raising money to free slaves, and members of Congress started getting letters from their constituents. "Americans are divided on just about every issue imaginable, but we are an abolitionist nation," said Charles Jacobs, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which led the U.S.-based outcry. Dagne's network of southern Sudan allies in Congress solidified. He organized trips into SPLM-held areas for bipartisan delegations, including Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist and the late New Jersey Democratic Rep. Donald Payne. Seeing the human impact of the war firsthand, the lawmakers grew as skeptical of Khartoum as the Council was. For Frist, a surgeon, a key moment was seeing personnel at a field hospital in southern Sudan having to flee a government bombing raid to nearby caves during the middle of an operation. "Why, I asked myself?" Frist recalled. "No answer except the government in Khartoum's goal to create terror." For meaningful change, however, the executive branch needed to get on board. This was tough as long as the State Department focused on maintaining a working relationship with Khartoum. In 1993, though, the United States linked a car bomb at the World Trade Center in New York to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Islamic fundamentalist living in Sudan. Khartoum was added to the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism. A chance encounter at a Princeton University conference on Somalia provided the Council its next break. Among the speakers was Susan Rice, a young Rhodes Scholar who was gaining influence in the State Department as the senior director of African affairs. Rice and Dagne took the train back to Washington together, talking U.S. policy on Africa for the four-hour journey. Rice soon became an informal member of the Council, dropping in occasionally for lunches at Otello. Rice, currently the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., declined to comment for this article. Prendergast, who also met Rice at the conference, applied to work for her. In his job interview, he says, he told her that Khartoum was "too deformed to be reformed," a view that had long been espoused by the southern rebels. Rice hired him. A LITERARY POLEMICIST Rice successfully urged the Clinton administration to place comprehensive sanctions on Sudan, prohibiting any U.S. individual or corporation from doing business there. This shift brought the official U.S. position closer to the Council's. By the late 1990s, Washington was not just providing humanitarian assistance to the southern Sudanese. It was also giving leadership missions and training, as well as $20 million of surplus military equipment to Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea, who all supported the southern rebels. Prendergast said the idea was to help states in the region to change the regime. "It was up to them, not us," he said in an interview. But the regime was hard to shift. Thanks to a pipeline built by the Chinese linking the southern oil fields to the Red Sea, Sudan began exporting oil in 1999. Now Khartoum had a new source of revenue to fund its fighting. The Council's Deputy Emperor, Eric Reeves, joined in 2001. Reeves was a professor of English literature at Smith, a small college in Western Massachusetts. He had no background in Sudan. But after reading about the humanitarian conditions in the south and attending a lecture Winter gave at the college, Reeves became the Council's most prolific writer. He published hundreds of opinion pieces and blogged detailed reports brimming with moral outrage against Khartoum. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, Rice and Prendergast left the State Department and joined think tanks. That left only USAID policy adviser D'Silva and congressional researcher Dagne on the inside track. Suddenly, though, the Council's cause became a White House cause. On the second day of his presidency, Bush directed senior staff to focus on bringing an end to the war in Sudan. Bush declined to comment on what drove him to home in on Sudan. But a pillar of his support base, evangelical Christians, was imploring him to take up the cause. They had long been concerned about the persecution of Christians in southern Sudan. One influential evangelical, the Rev. Franklin Graham, recalls pushing the future president to focus on Sudan during a breakfast meeting they had in Florida two days before the presidential election. At the urging of religious groups, Bush also appointed former senator and Episcopalian minister John Danforth to be his envoy, tasking him with helping to unlock ongoing negotiations between north and south. Evangelical groups suddenly found journalists turning up on the doorstep. "People wanted to hear what we wanted to say," said Deborah Fikes, spokeswoman for the Midland Ministerial Alliance, based in Bush's hometown of Midland, Texas. Fikes started working with the Sudan embassy and went to Khartoum to meet those in the government she believed were moderates. That didn't impress the Council, who accused her of naiveté. "She didn't know what the hell she was doing," said Reeves. Fikes dismisses the criticism. "I didn't have a career or an agenda. When you look at Christ, he was misunderstood," she said. "DAMNED IF WE DO?" After his time in the Carter administration, Winter had vowed never to work in government again, preferring the less bureaucratic non-government sector. But USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios convinced him that Bush was going to make peace in Sudan a priority. Winter agreed to return to government. With his new role as an adviser to Danforth, the Council was back at the center of Sudan policy. As with Dagne, it was an open secret that Winter was biased. Danforth says he asked for Winter's help because of his detailed knowledge. Winter himself felt tension with many of the diplomats he was now working alongside. "The State Department was used to working with Khartoum," Winter said. Progress came that summer, when Khartoum's chargé d'affaires in Washington, Ahmed Khidir, flew to Danforth's home in St Louis, Missouri. Khidir had just one question, Danforth recalls: "Are we damned if we do and damned if we don't?" In other words, if Khartoum agreed to peace, would it still be a pariah to the U.S. government? The answer mattered. Ever since the rulers in Khartoum had taken power in a 1989 coup, their ability to maintain control depended greatly on patronage networks. Because the United States had effectively black-listed Sudan, Khartoum had to rely on loans from non-Western nations and revenue from the south's oil fields to fund these networks. To sign a pact in which they risked losing the oil-rich south, northern leaders needed an alternative source of income. Normalizing relations with Washington would be a sure pathway back to the international financial system. After consulting with Bush, Danforth told Khidir that Washington looked forward to normalizing ties. "That was an important message," Danforth said in an interview. Khidir couldn't be reached for comment. The biggest breakthrough, however, came not as the result of diplomacy or advocacy, but of Al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. When Bush told the world that Washington would "pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism," the U.S. relationship with Khartoum changed overnight. Sudan had expelled Al Qaeda leader bin Laden in 1996, but it worried it might be a U.S. target. Washington suddenly found itself with enormous leverage over Khartoum, which the Bush administration used to push for a peace agreement. Almost all the key issues that would end up in a landmark 2005 peace deal between Khartoum and the SPLM were agreed in the first five months of 2002. Most surprisingly, Khartoum agreed to let the southerners hold a referendum on whether to remain part of Sudan. THE COUNCIL, CLOONEY & CONGRESS By 2003, though, progress stalled. Reports of U.S. overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan diminished Khartoum's fears of becoming a future military target. And the U.S. government approach to Khartoum started to fracture. The CIA had issued glowing reports about Sudan's cooperation in the "War on Terror" and supported Bush's promise of normalized relations. On the other hand, events in Sudan took on a life of their own. As it became clear that southerners were getting a new deal, people in Darfur, in west Sudan, wanted one, too. The civil war had been framed as a north-south or Muslim-Christian conflict. The truth was that southerners were far from the only group suffering under Khartoum. Other marginalized groups included the religiously diverse populace of the Nuba Mountains and mixed northern-southern populations in the Blue Nile and Abyei. As the Darfuri rebellion escalated, Khartoum moved to crush it. The Council immediately saw the parallels between Khartoum's response and previous atrocities in the south. But shifting the U.S. focus to Darfur could jeopardize the peace agreement for the south. Dagne consulted Garang, who encouraged him to introduce the Darfuri cause to the U.S. lawmakers backing the southerners. The Council stepped in; over the coming years they would be among the most crucial actors in cementing the previously unknown Darfur region in the imagination of the American public. Prendergast, at the time working at an independent research group, became a key player in the founding of the Save Darfur movement. He spent weeks at a time talking about Darfur on college campuses and working with actor George Clooney, who became an advocate for the cause. Reeves and Rice, then a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, wrote op-ed pieces. At USAID, Winter and D'Silva organized visits for State Department officials so they could see the violence firsthand. And after interviewing Darfuri refugees, Dagne worked with Rep. Payne on a resolution calling the atrocities genocide. Dagne was by now an expert at getting his congressional allies to insert pro-southern provisions into sure-to-pass bills on unrelated topics. Using this approach he had succeeded in exempting rebel-held areas of southern Sudan from U.S. sanctions. His Darfur genocide resolution, though, needed no such maneuver. Growing public outrage ensured it passed the House and Senate unanimously. PEACE - AND A BLOW In January 2005, as fighting in Darfur continued, Khartoum finally concluded a Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the south. Garang invited Dagne and Winter to dinner at his home in Nairobi, Kenya, to celebrate. Seven months later, the south Sudanese leader died in a helicopter crash. Garang's death was a huge blow to the south Sudanese project, but the Council rallied around his successor. Salva Kiir, who had spent his career on the battlefield, is as understated as Garang was garrulous. Before Kiir's first meeting with Bush, the Council gathered in his Washington hotel suite for an informal briefing, just as they had been doing since Garang's first visit to Capitol Hill. After the peace pact was signed, Winter retired from government. D'Silva remained at USAID and Dagne at the Congressional Research Service, while Prendergast founded his own advocacy organization. Rice, after Obama won office, joined the new administration as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But the momentum ebbed as fractures opened up in the new administration. Retired Air Force General Scott Gration, the president's new envoy to Sudan, wanted closer engagement with Khartoum. Gration didn't respond to requests for comment. But in interviews in 2009, he argued that without resetting the relationship, Khartoum had no incentive to let the southerners vote on independence. He thought that making sure the independence referendum happened on time should be the overriding objective. Rice maintained vocal skepticism, believing that Khartoum's treatment of troubled areas outside the south, like Darfur, warranted continuing condemnation. A lengthy and acrimonious policy review ran through late 2009. In the end, it recommended that Darfur, north-south peace, and counter-terrorism cooperation should all be given equal priority. But disagreement around the details meant there was no consensus on how to pursue all three objectives. The first 18 months of Obama's term slipped away in a bureaucratic stalemate. Finally, in the summer of 2010, Obama called his Sudan team into the Oval Office. The president said he would not allow a return to bloodshed between north and south, according to Denis McDonough, chief of staff at the National Security Council at the time. SHOWDOWN WITH BIDEN Momentum returned. Vice President Joe Biden, due in South Africa for the World Cup, was tasked with urging leaders across Africa that the independence referendum must go ahead. Some African countries feared that southern independence would establish a precedent for secessionist movements in their own states. Meanwhile, Sudanese preparations for the referendum had stalled. Khartoum and Juba couldn't agree on the makeup of a steering group handling the logistics of the vote, and Khartoum was dragging its feet in releasing funds promised for the poll. The south had been urging Washington to push Khartoum to fulfill its promises. At a meeting in Nairobi, Biden told Kiir the South Sudanese themselves had to make sure the vote happened. "‘I don't care about what Khartoum is or is not doing,'" he said, according to Cameron Hudson, who attended as a member of the National Security Council. "‘We can't want this more than you.'" Kiir's office declined to comment on the meeting. Throughout the fall of 2010, the National Security Council's McDonough chaired meetings of a dozen Sudan policymakers every evening, often to midnight. They debated what incentives to offer Khartoum in exchange for letting the south go. One important call was over what the north needed to do to trigger these incentives: Was holding the referendum enough? Or should the rewards be tied to the completion of other outstanding issues, such as border demarcation and oil flow? Ultimately, the group concluded that they could not force the parties to agree on anything beyond holding the referendum. The U.S. decided to push for the vote to go ahead as scheduled. It began on January 9, 2011. The final tally showed that 98.8 percent of voters chose independence for southern Sudan. Speaking before the U.N. Security Council six months later, on the day South Sudan joined the world community, Rice promised that the United States would remain a "steadfast friend." Washington pledged $370.8 million in aid for the new country in the six months following independence alone. OFF TO JUBA The unresolved diplomatic issues have come back to haunt the region. In January, Kiir shut down the southern oil industry, accusing Khartoum of having stolen 1.7 million barrels of South Sudan's oil from a cross-border pipeline. Khartoum said it only confiscated what it was owed in pipeline fees. Other unfinished business - the border, and the fate of regions such as Abyei and the Nuba Mountains - has sparked new violence. Still, the current U.S. envoy to Sudan, Princeton Lyman, argues that even in hindsight, it was right for the U.S. to push for the referendum to be held on time. Members of the Council have mixed views on the legacy of the peace agreement. Prendergast, Deng and Reeves - none of whom were in government when the agreement was created - are pessimistic, believing that other troubled areas in Sudan should have been more seriously attended to. D'Silva wonders whether the agreement would have been better implemented had Garang survived. Winter and Dagne - who were closest to the creation of the final pact - are more sanguine, saying the independence of the south alone justifies the agreement. Previously, the north-south clash was a domestic dispute which the world could ignore. Now it is a conflict between two states, and the south has its own army to defend itself. "All the other issues are minor once you have your sovereignty," Dagne said. One evening in January, Dagne headed to Dulles International Airport outside Washington to catch a flight to Juba. He had left his Congress job and was off to take up a role as special adviser to South Sudan's President Kiir. Leaving behind his family and a secure U.S. government position, he was returning to the continent he left 31 years earlier. On his iPhone, Dagne carries a recording of a message Garang left him less than 24 hours before he died. "Hi, Nephew, this is Uncle," it begins. Dagne scrolled through farewell messages from Council members. "South Sudan could not be more fortunate," wrote Reeves. "I salute you… you are…the Emperor.

The myth of the 1,400 year Sunni-Shia war.

During the period of European rule over Rwanda, the Belgian colonial administrators of the territory accomplished an extraordinary feat in their subjugation of the local population - the deliberate manufacture of new ethnic divisions. By formulating ethnic categorisations based on subjective judgments of Rwandans' height and skin colour, the Belgians sought to keep the Rwandan people at odds with one another and subservient to them. Entirely fabricated histories and genealogies were concocted for the "Hutu" and "Tutsi" peoples, although these terms themselves had been taken from the dustbin of Rwandan history and had had little effective meaning for hundreds of years. This strategy of divide-and-conquer eventually resulted in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, a bloodbath which shocked the conscience of the world and claimed the lives of roughly 800,000 people. Hutus and Tutsis, themselves only recently fabricated identities, had come to believe in a false narrative in which they had been in opposition to one another since the dawn of time. Today it is increasingly common to hear talk of the existence of a "1,400 Year War" between Sunni and Shia Muslims. In this narrative, the sectarian violence of today is simply the continuation of an ancient religious conflict rooted in events which transpired in the 7th century. While some Muslims themselves have recently bought into this worldview, it would suffice to say that such beliefs represent not only a misreading of history but a complete and utter fabrication of it. While there are distinct theological differences between Sunnis and Shias, the claim that these two groups have been in a perpetual state of war and animosity throughout their existence is an absurd falsehood. The conflict now brewing between certain Sunni and Shia political factions in the Middle East today has little or nothing to do with religious differences and everything to do with modern identity politics. Just as in Rwanda, Western powers and their local allies have sought to exacerbate these false divisions in order to perpetuate conflict and maintain a Middle East which is at once thoroughly divided and incapable of asserting itself. False continuities Analyses of the roots of sectarian conflict in the Middle East tend to look at the historical schism between Sunnis and Shias as the original driving factor behind present-day tensions. In this reading of events, the 680AD Battle of Karbala in which the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (who are particularly revered by Shia Muslims) were killed was merely the first battle in a long and continuous sectarian conflict which today is being played out in Syria, Lebanon and other countries throughout the Middle East. Head to Head - What is wrong with Islam today? As described by the Saudi writer Abdullah Hamiddadin, this explanation of contemporary events is as absurd as explaining modern tensions between Turkey and the EU as being rooted in the ancient conflict between King Charles and the Empress of Byzantium. Positing that present-day political rivalries can be explained by examining ninth-century conflicts between European powers is transparent nonsense. However, the same logic is readily applied to conflicts within the Muslim world. Indeed, while modern political factions often make reference to theological differences, the usage of symbolism and rhetoric which draws upon the distant past (a tactic employed by political opportunists around the world) is very different than the existence of an actual continuity between ancient history and the present. However, thanks to the efforts of well-funded religious demagogues - themselves either ignorant of history or cynical manipulators of it - this patently ridiculous explanation of world events is gaining some purchase even among Muslims themselves. Remembering history in the Middle East For those who would seek to shamelessly fabricate a historical narrative in order to serve their venal political interests, it is worth restating some basic realities about the nature of sectarian relationships in the Middle East. While over a millennium of cohabitation the various religious communities of the region have experienced identifiable ups-and-downs in their relations, the overall narrative between them is vastly more of pluralism, tolerance and accommodation than of hard-wired conflict and animosity. For centuries, Sunnis and Shias (as well as Christians, Jews and other religious groups) have lived closely intertwined with one another to a degree without parallel elsewhere in the world. Even where they have exerted power through distinct political structures, the argument that this has equated to conflict does not stand up to even a cursory analysis. While the Sunni Ottoman Empire and Shia Safavid Empire experienced their share of conflict, they also lived peaceably alongside one another for hundreds of years, even considering it shameful to engage in conflict with one another as Muslim powers. Furthermore, despite seething protestations to the contrary from zealots of all types, "sects" have hardly been separately self-contained entities over history. Shia and Sunni Muslim scholars have long engaged in dialogue and influenced the religious thought of one another for centuries, blurring the already largely superficial distinctions between the two communities. As a legacy of this, today the greatest seat of learning in Sunni Islam also teaches Shia theology as an integrated school of thought. Modern Dark Ages The contrast between this history and the unconscionably brutal wars of religion which for centuries ravaged Europe could not be starker. When describing tensions between factions in the Middle East today, Western analysts (and increasingly, many Muslims) tend to view events through a historical lens which is derived from a distinctly Western experience of intractable religious conflict. Indeed, far from being ancient history, Europe's dark obsession with religious hatred reached its nadir mere decades ago in the form of the Holocaust - perhaps the ultimate religious "pogrom" against the long-oppressed Jewish population of the continent. For every sectarian terrorist group or militia, there are countless ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims around the world who have risked their lives to protect their co-religionists. In recent decades however this dynamic has been largely reversed. Europe has taken great strides in enshrining tolerance, while the Middle East's once unrivalled religious pluralism has degraded to the point where even co-religionists of marginally-different sects are now often violently at odds with one another. European leaders now regularly lecture their counterparts in the Middle East on the need to protect the rights of minorities; something which may be tolerable today but which would have been thought unconscionable throughout most of history. While contemporary Muslim societies have regressed to the point where Europeans can now claim moral authority to lecture them on religious diversity, looking at history it should be noted that the periods of greatest religious tolerance within Islam have historically corresponded with the peaks of political power among Muslim empires. The lesson contained herein is something which modern leaders and religious figures - many of whom are disdainful at best towards minorities - ignore at their great peril. A dangerous myth Those who ignorantly claim that progress can be attained through the enforcement of strict ideological purity should take heed of the past and resist the temptation towards religious chauvinism. The conflict which some claim exists today between Sunni and Shia Muslims is a product of very recent global events; blowback from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the petro-dollar fuelled global rise of Wahhabi reactionaries. It is decidedly not the continuation of any "1,400 year war" between Sunnis and Shias but is driven instead by the very modern phenomena of identity politics. Factions on both sides have created false histories for their own political benefit and have manufactured symbols and rituals which draw upon ancient history but are in fact entirely modern creations. Furthermore, Western military powers have sought to amplify these divisions to generate internecine conflicts within Muslim societies and engineer a bloodbath which will be to their own benefit. While neoconservatives practically salivate in anticipation of Muslims committing mass-fratricide against one another, away from the political sphere ordinary people continue to live with the deeply engrained sense of tolerance that has traditionally characterised the once-global civilisation of Islam. For every sectarian terrorist group or militia, there are countless ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims around the world who have risked their lives to protect their co-religionists as well as the religious minorities within their societies. For every story which discards the nuances of todays' conflicts and casts them as part of a narrative of spiralling sectarian violence, there are others which point resolutely in the opposite direction. In the words of an 80-year old Pakistani farmer, a man older than his own country: "I've witnessed this Shia-Sunni brotherhood from my childhood, you can say from the day I was born." In Rwanda a people who came to believe a false history about themselves ended up being driven towards madness and self-destruction. Today, the Rwandan government has done away with the artificial colonial categorisations of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" and has formally recognised all Rwandan citizens as being of one ethnicity. Similarly, it is incumbent upon Muslims to reject crude myths about a 1,400 year sectarian war between themselves and to recognise the dangerous folly of such beliefs. Indeed, the simple truth is that if such a war existed Sunnis and Shias would not have been intermarrying and living in the same neighbourhoods up to the 21st century. Furthermore, were they truly enemies, millions of people of both sects would have stopped peacefully converging on the annual Hajj pilgrimage many centuries ago. If Islam is to continue as a constructive social phenomenon it is important that these traditional relationships and ways of life are not destroyed by modern ideologies masquerading as historical truths.

Rival groups in Egypt reject transition plan.

The Muslim Brotherhood has rejected a transition timetable set out by the military-backed interim president Adly Mansour, as the National Salvation Front, Egypt's main opposition bloc, denounced a decree which invests the new leader with extensive powers. The rejection from rival groups in Egypt came on Tuesday, as the transitional administration named the Prime Minister as Hazem el-Beblawi and appointed liberal opposition chief and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei as vice president for foreign relations. Essam el-Erian, a senior Brotherhood figure and deputy head of its Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissed the transition timetable on Tuesday, saying it would take Egypt "back to zero". "The cowards are not sleeping, but Egypt will not surrender," he said. "The people created their constitution with their votes," el-Eiran wrote on his Facebook page, referring to the constitution that Islamists pushed to finalisation and then was passed in a national referendum during former President Mohamed Morsi's year in office. Egypt's interim administration published a timetable for a transition to a new democratic government hours after the army shot dead scores of people outside the elite Republican Guards' headquarters in Cairo on Monday. The plan includes holding parliamentary elections by 2014, after which a date will be announced for a presidential ballot. The country will have five months to amend the current draft constitution, suspended following Morsi's removal last week, ratify it in a referendum, and then hold parliamentary elections, according to the text of the 33-article decree published online. The process will take no more than 210 days, according to the decree, meaning elections will be by February at the latest. "The National Salvation Front announces its rejection of the constitutional decree," the group said in a statement. The NSF complained of a lack of consultation before the charter was adopted. "We call for it to be amended and will propose our own amendments to the president," the group added. Earlier, the grassroots Tamarod campaign, which organised the mass protests that led to Morsi's overthrow, also complained it had not been consulted on the transition plan. Tamarod spokesman Mahmud Badr said the movement would itself make proposals for changes to the blueprint. For its part, the US cautiously welcomed the plan. "We are encouraged the interim government has laid out a plan for the path forward," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a daily briefing. "The details of a path back to a democratically elected civilian government are for the Egyptian people to decide," she added. Military issues warning The Egyptian military on Tuesday issued a statement defending the legitimacy of the interim government,. Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi warned against anyone who would put "the homeland at the people in jeopardy" and any attempt to disrupt the country's "difficult and complex" transition. Elsewhere, Egypt's prosecutor general on Tuesday began investigating 650 people suspected of involvement in violence on Monday, although it is not clear who, exactly, is under investigation. Meanwhile, one of the leading critics of Morsi's government, the United Arab Emirates, has pledged $3bn in loans and grants to Egypt's new government. The Gulf state alleges that Islamist groups backed by the Muslim Brotherhood have sought to topple its Western-backed ruling system. Saudi Arabia also approved a $5bn aid package to Egypt, which is to include $2bn in central bank deposits, $2bn in in energy products and $1bn in cash.

Egypt's Brotherhood rejects cabinet offer.

The Muslim Brotherhood has rejected an offer to join Egypt's transitional cabinet, as new interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi announced he would start work on forming an interim government once he meets with liberal leaders. Beblawi told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday that he accepted that it would be difficult to win the unanimous support of Egyptians for his new government. "Of course we respect the public opinion and we try to comply with the expectation of the people, but there is always a time of choice, there is more than one alternative, you cannot satisfy all of the people," he said. Meanwhile, Egypt's main liberal coalition, the National Salvation Front, withdrew its earlier statement rejecting the transition plan for interim rule and issued a statement containing milder criticism, Reuters said. Beblawi, a liberal economist and former finance minister, was named the new prime minister on Tuesday. Liberal opposition chief and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei was also named vice president and head of foreign relations. The appointments were followed by an announcement that ministerial posts in the new government would be offered to members of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, and to the Nour Party. Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh, reporting from Cairo, said that some of the opposition groups like Tamarrod said that they were not consulted, and that the plans for the interim government was a rushed political process done in the dark. Political 'manoeuvring' The administration moves come almost a week after the military overthrew President Mohamed Morsi and chose chief justice Adly Mansour to head the Arab world's most populous country. ElBaradei was initially tipped to lead the cabinet but his nomination was rejected by the Nour party. The head of the party added that it was still studying ElBaradei's appointment as vice president. Beblawi now faces the daunting task of trying to reunite a deeply divided country and rescue its battered economy. Shortly after the Islamist parties made their statements, Egypt's army chief went on state media to say that the military will not accept political "manoeuvring". Defence Minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said that "the future of the nation is too important and sacred for maneuvers or hindrance, whatever the justifications". The blueprint unveiled by Mansour is intended to replace the controversial Islamist-drafted constitution which he suspended following last week's coup. A committee will be set up to make final improvements to the draft before it is put to a referendum. Parliamentary elections will then follow within three months and Mansour will announce a date for a presidential election once the new parliament has convened. Beblawi and ElBaradei Both Beblawi and ElBaradei are well-known on Egypt's political scene. Beblawi, 76, studied in Cairo and Paris, where he obtained a doctorate in economics. Egypt in turmoil as rivals reject interim leader's plan. During his long career, he worked in public and private institutions, both at home and abroad, including as head of Egypt's Export Development Bank between 1983 and 1995. He has also taught at several universities around the world and has written numerous books and articles on finance in Arabic, French and English. Beblawi was appointed as deputy prime minister and finance minister in the "Revolution Cabinet" after a popular uprising saw the ousting of long-time President Hosni Mubarak. Egypt's military council rejected Beblawi's resignation in October of 2011, when he quit in protest over deadly clashes that left at least 26 people dead. ElBaradei, who has the backing of the June 30 Front - an amalgam of several groups opposing Morsi - is widely respected in Egypt and has received the country's highest honour, the Nile Shas, in 2006. The former director of the UN nuclear watchdog agency, 71, has had a long career on the international scene. ElBaradei served as an Egyptian diplomat to the UN and later as an aide to Egypt's foreign minister. He was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency for nearly 12 years. He and the IAEA shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei was tipped to be the new deputy prime minister last week, but Egyptian media later negated the reports.

US Bin Laden raid was an act of war,report says.

The unilateral decision by the US to launch a military operation to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden on Pakistani territory constituted "an act of war", a Pakistani government investigation has found. The report of the Abbottabad Commission, which investigated the circumstances around the raid and how the al-Qaeda leader came to live in the country for nine years without apparently being detected, was exclusively released on Monday. The report of the commission, formed in June 2011 to probe the circumstances around the killing of bin Laden by US forces in a unilateral raid on the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, had earlier been suppressed by the Pakistani government. The raid illustrated Washington's "contemptuous disregard of Pakistan’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity in the arrogant certainty of […] unmatched military might", the report concluded in its "Findings" section. In the same section, the report also details the "comprehensive failure of Pakistan to detect the presence of Bin Laden on its territory for almost a decade". The report draws on testimony from more than 200 witnesses, including members of Bin Laden's family, Pakistan's then spy chief, senior ministers in the government and officials at every level of the military, bureaucracy and security services. Scathing report The commission's 336-page report is scathing, holding both the government and the military responsible for "gross incompetence" leading to "collective failures" that allowed both Bin Laden to escape detection, and the US to be able to violate Pakistani sovereignty by carrying out an attack on its soil without the knowledge of the military or the government. View the Abbottabad Commission report It singles out the military for particular criticism on this front, citing an "overall policy bankruptcy" amongst both the political and military leadership, when it came to securing the country’s western border against possible violations of Pakistani territory or airspace. The commission’s investigators were told by the Pakistani Air Force that low-level radars were on "peacetime deployment", and hence were not active on the western border with Afghanistan. It is through this lack of radar coverage, and the fact that the US forces carried out the raid in stealth helicopters, flying fast and low, they were told, that the US SEAL team was able to evade detection. Pakistani Air Force jets were only scrambled in response to the threat after US forces had already left Pakistani airspace, after having spent approximately three hours in Pakistani territory and airspace. It concluded that Pakistan’s defence policy was "outdated" and reactive, with major policy documents not having been updated since 2004 (the Defence Policy) and 2007 (the Joint Strategic Directive). The two documents designate India as being the only country to be considered "hostile" to Pakistan. "There was no pro-active anticipatory policy or policy planning," the report says, in detailing how the Pakistani military apparently had no contingency plans in place to respond to a unilateral US raid. It also noted that such a raid had been alluded to in public statements by senior US officials. "Is it official or unofficial defence policy not to attempt to defend the country if threatened or even attacked by a military superpower like the US?" the report asks several top military officials, including the chief of the air force and the director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). 'Too weak' Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then director general of the ISI, moreover, told the commission that Pakistan had become "too weak" and dependent on Washington to take necessary actions to defend itself against US policies, according to the report. Spotlight Al Jazeera's exclusive coverage of the leaked Bin Laden files "We are a very weak state and also a very scared state," Pasha told the commission. He said that the case of Bin Laden was one "not so much of specific individual or institutional failure, but [one of] collective and systemic failure". Pasha went on to allege that Pakistani society was "deeply penetrated" by US intelligence and other services, quoting a US intelligence officer as having told him: "You are so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner … we can buy anyone." The report also makes detailed allegations against Hussain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the US, regarding the procurement of an extensive number of visas, without proper authorisation, for US nationals. Haqqani denied these charges both to Al Jazeera and to the commission in his written testimony. The commission also found, based on testimony from officials from the ISI, that Pakistani intelligence had effectively closed the book on the hunt for Bin Laden after the CIA stopped sharing information on his possible whereabouts in 2005. The ISI was provided with four telephone numbers in 2010 related to the hunt for Bin Laden, but they were not told the significance of the numbers. The commission concludes that the ISI was "paralyzed by the CIA’s lack of cooperation", and should have been able to track the al-Qaeda leader on its own territory more effectively. The report also details "culpable negligence and incompetence at almost all levels of government" in both the violation of sovereignty constituted by Bin Laden’s stay in the country for nine years, and the US raid that killed him in 2011.

Zuma sacks three ministers in reshuffle.

South African President Jacob Zuma has reshuffled his cabinet for a fourth time, sacking three ministers, including a former anti-apartheid activist and a critic of his administration. Tokyo Sexwale, who has been human settlement minister, was fired on Tuesday along with embattled communications minister Dina Pule and the minister of traditional affairs, Richard Baloyi. The reshuffle, announced less than a year before Zuma seeks re-election for another five-year term, followed Sexwale's criticism of the president's stewardship of the economy, Africa's largest. Sexwale, a wealthy businessman, was jailed on the Robben Island like Nelson Mandela, the country's first black president and an anti-apartheid icon. The businessman was among a group of senior African National Congress (ANC) members looking to replace Zuma last year. However, Zuma is almost assured of being the party's presidential candidate in 2014 after winning an ANC leadership contest in December. Analysts say he has high chances of winning the 2014 election given his ruling ANC's stranglehold over politics but international credit agencies have downgraded South Africa in the last year, citing his ineffectual leadership among other long-term risks. Shady deals One of the dismissed ministers has been facing allegations of being involved in shady deals. Pule stands accused of giving preferential treatment to a firm run by her then-boyfriend - a charge she denies. The ministers of energy and transport swapped portfolios while the much-maligned basic education minister, Angie Motshekga, at the centre of scandal in which textbooks went undelivered for months to a province, kept her post. Many ANC veterans feel Zuma has steered Mandela's former liberation movement away from its idealistic beginnings and into a morass of graft, cronyism and a culture of self-enrichment. Mandela, now 94 years old, has spent a month in hospital battling a lung infection that has left him in critical condition. South Africa was mired in recession when Zuma came to power, but since then has struggled to pick up to pre-2008 growth rates of around 5 percent. Since the ANC assumed power after the end of apartheid in 1994, the government has built hundreds of thousands of houses and provided basic service to millions of poor blacks left by the wayside during white-minority rule. But festering labour strife in the mining sector, a poor education system and a rigid jobs market have been eroding South Africa's economic competitiveness.