For you dafur guys
As a asian guy, i see things differently. for me everything starts at home. instead of protesting other people's business and so on.
anyway its a interesting article about american involvement in dafur and its about oil!!! not about deaths.
http://atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IE25Cb04.html
Page 1 of 2
Darfur: Forget genocide, there's oil
By F William Engdahl
To paraphrase the famous quip during the 1992 US presidential debates, when an unknown William Jefferson Clinton told then-president George Herbert Walker Bush, "It's the economy, stupid," the present concern of the current Washington administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we look closely, genuine concern over genocide against the peoples in that poorest of poor part of a forsaken section of Africa.
No. "It's the oil, stupid."
The case of Darfur, a forbidding piece of sun-parched real estate
in the southern part of Sudan, illustrates the new Cold War over oil, where the dramatic rise in China's oil demand to fuel its booming growth has led Beijing to embark on an aggressive policy of - ironically - dollar diplomacy. With its more than US$1.2 trillion in mainly US dollar reserves at the Peoples' National Bank of China, Beijing is engaging in active petroleum geopolitics. Africa is a major focus, and in Africa, the central region between Sudan and Chad is a priority.
This is defining a major new front in what, since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, is a new Cold War between Washington and Beijing over control of major oil sources. So far Beijing has played its cards a bit more cleverly than Washington. Darfur is a major battleground in this high-stakes contest for oil control.
China oil diplomacy
In recent months, Beijing has embarked on a series of initiatives designed to secure long-term raw materials sources in one of the planet's most endowed regions - Sub-Saharan Africa. No raw material has higher priority in Beijing at present than oil.
Today China draws an estimated 30% of its crude oil from Africa. That explains an extraordinary series of diplomatic initiatives which have left Washington furious. China is using no-strings-attached dollar credits to gain access to Africa's vast raw material wealth, leaving Washington's typical control game via the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) out in the cold. Who needs the painful medicine of the IMF when China gives easy terms and builds roads and schools to boot?
In November last year Beijing hosted an extraordinary summit of 40 African heads of state. They literally rolled out the red carpet for the leaders of, among others, Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Angola, Central African Republic, Zambia and South Africa.
China has just done an oil deal that links it with two of the continent's largest nations, Nigeria and South Africa. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) will lift oil in Nigeria, via a consortium that also includes South African Petroleum Co, giving China access to what could be 175,000 barrels a day by 2008. It's a $2.27 billion deal that gives state-controlled CNOOC a 45% stake in a large off-shore oil field in Nigeria. Previously, Nigeria had been considered in Washington to be an asset of the Anglo-American oil majors, ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron.
China has been generous in dispensing its soft loans, with no interest or as outright grants, to some of the poorest debtor states of Africa. The loans have gone into infrastructure, including highways, hospitals, and schools, a stark contrast to the brutal austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank. In 2006 China committed more than $8 billion to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique, versus $2.3 billion to all sub-Saharan Africa from the World Bank. Ghana is negotiating a $1.2 billion Chinese electrification loan. Unlike the World Bank, a de facto arm of US foreign economic policy, China shrewdly attaches no strings to its loans.
This oil-related Chinese diplomacy has led to the bizarre accusation from Washington that Beijing is trying to "secure oil at the sources", something Washington foreign policy has itself been preoccupied with for at least a century. No source of oil has been more the focus of China-US oil conflict of late than Sudan, home of Darfur.
Sudan's oil riches
Beijing's China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) is Sudan's largest foreign investor, with some $5 billion in oil field development. Since 1999 China has invested at least $15 billion in Sudan. It owns 50% of an oil refinery near Khartoum with the Sudan government. The oil fields are concentrated in the south, site of a long-simmering civil war, partly financed covertly by the United States to break the south from the Islamic Khartoum-centered north.
CNPC built an oil pipeline from southern Sudan to a new terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where the oil is loaded on tankers bound for China. Eight percent of China's oil now comes from
create a united democratic Sudan." In other words, regime change in Sudan.
The US Senate adopted a resolution in February 2006 that requested NATO troops in Darfur, as well as a stronger UN peacekeeping force with a robust mandate. A month later, President George W Bush also called for additional NATO forces
in Darfur. Genocide? Or oil?
The Pentagon has been busy training African military officers in the US, much as it has trained Latin American officers for decades. Its International Military Education and Training program has provided training to military officers from Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.
Much of the arms that have fueled the killing in Darfur and the south have been brought in via murky, protected private "merchants of death" such as the notorious former KGB operative, now with offices in the US, Victor Bout, who has been cited repeatedly in recent years for selling weapons across Africa. US government officials strangely leave his operations in Texas and Florida untouched despite the fact he is on the Interpol wanted list for money laundering.
US development aid for all Sub-Saharan Africa, including Chad, has been cut sharply in recent years while its military aid has risen. Oil and the scramble for strategic raw materials is the clear reason. The region of southern Sudan from the Upper Nile to the Chad border is rich in oil. Washington knew that long before the Sudanese government.
Chevron's 1974 oil project
US oil majors have known about Sudan's oil wealth since the early 1970s. In 1979, Jafaar Nimeiry, Sudan's head of state, broke with the Soviets and invited Chevron to develop the country's oil industry. That was perhaps a fatal mistake. UN Ambassador George H W Bush had personally told Nimeiry of satellite photos indicating oil in Sudan. Nimeiry took the bait. Wars over oil have been the consequence ever since.
Chevron found big oil reserves in southern Sudan. It spent $1.2 billion finding and testing them. That oil triggered what is called Sudan's second civil war in 1983. Chevron was the target of repeated attacks and killings and it suspended the project in 1984. In 1992, it sold its Sudanese oil concessions. Then China began to develop the abandoned Chevron fields in 1999 with notable results.
But Chevron is not far from Darfur today.
Chad oil and pipeline politics
Condoleezza Rice's Chevron is in neighboring Chad, together with the other US oil giant, ExxonMobil. They've just built a $3.7 billion oil pipeline carrying 160,000 barrels per day from Doba in central Chad, near Darfur, via Cameroon to Kribi on the Atlantic Ocean, destined for US refineries.
To do it, they worked with Chad "President for life" Idriss Deby, a corrupt despot who has been accused of feeding US-supplied arms to the Darfur rebels. Deby joined Washington's Pan Sahel Initiative run by the Pentagon's US-European Command, to train his troops to fight "Islamic terrorism".
Supplied with US military aid, training and weapons, in 2004, Deby launched the initial strike that set off the conflict in Darfur. He used members of his elite Presidential Guard, who come from the province, providing them with all-terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to aid Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in southwestern Sudan. The US military support to Deby in fact had been the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum reacted and the ensuing debacle was unleashed in full, tragic force.
Washington-backed NGOs and the US government claim unproven genocide as a pretext to ultimately bring UN/NATO troops into the oil fields of Darfur and southern Sudan. Oil, not human misery, is behind Washington's new interest in Darfur.
The "Darfur genocide" campaign began in 2003, the same time the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline began to flow. The US now had a base in Chad to go after Darfur oil and, potentially, co-opt China's new oil sources.
US military objectives in Darfur - and the Horn of Africa more widely - are being served at present by US and NATO backing for African Union (AU) troops in Darfur. There NATO provides ground and air support for AU troops who are categorized as "neutral" and "peacekeepers". Sudan is at war on three fronts, against Uganda, Chad, and Ethiopia, each with a significant US military presence and ongoing US military programs. The war in Sudan involves both US covert operations and US trained "rebel" factions coming in from south Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia and Uganda.
Chad's Deby looks to China too
The completion of the US and World Bank-financed oil pipeline from Chad to the Cameroon coast was designed as one part of a far grander Washington scheme to control the oil riches of Central Africa from Sudan to the entire Gulf of Guinea.
But Washington's erstwhile pal, Chad's Deby, began to get unhappy with his small share of the US-controlled oil profits. When he and the Chad parliament decided in early 2006 to take more of the oil revenues to finance military operations and beef up its army, the new World Bank president - and Iraq war architect - Paul Wolfowitz moved to suspend loans to the country. Then that August, after Deby had won re-election, he created Chad's own oil company, SHT, and threatened to expel Chevron and Malaysia's Petronas for not paying taxes owed, and demanded a 60% share of the Chad oil pipeline. In the end he came to terms with the oil companies, but winds of change were blowing.
Deby also faces growing internal opposition from a Chad rebel group, United Front for Change, known under its French name as FUC, which he claims is being covertly funded by Sudan. The FUC has based itself in Darfur.
Into this unstable situation, Beijing has shown up in Chad with a full coffer of aid money in hand. In late January, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a state visit to Sudan and Cameroon among other African states. In 2008, China's leaders visited no less than 48 African states. In August 2006, Beijing hosted Chad's foreign minister for talks and resumption of formal diplomatic ties cut in 1997. China has begun to import oil from Chad as well as Sudan. Not that much oil, but if Beijing has its way, that will soon change.
This April, Chad's foreign minister announced that talks with China over greater China participation in Chad's oil development were "progressing well". He referred to the terms the Chinese seek for oil development, calling them "much more equal partnerships than those we are used to having".
The Chinese economic presence in Chad, ironically, may be more effective in calming the fighting and displacement in Darfur than any AU or UN troop presence ever could. That would not be welcome for some people in Washington and at Chevron headquarters, as they would not secure the oil.
Chad and Darfur are but part of the vast China effort to secure "oil at the source" across Africa. Oil is also the prime factor in US Africa policy today. George W Bush's interest in Africa includes a new US base in Sao Tome/Principe, 124 miles off the Gulf of Guinea, from which it can control Gulf of Guinea oil fields from Angola in the south to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Nigeria. That just happens to be the very same areas where recent Chinese diplomatic and investment activity has focused.
"West Africa's oil has become of national strategic interest to us," stated US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner back in 2002. Darfur and Chad are but an extension of the US Iraq policy "with other means" - control of oil everywhere. China is challenging that control "everywhere", especially in Africa. It amounts to a new undeclared Cold War over oil.
F William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics, Pluto Press Ltd. His next book, Seeds of Destruction: The Dark Side of Genetic engineering (Global Research Publishing) will be released this June. He may be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
anyway its a interesting article about american involvement in dafur and its about oil!!! not about deaths.
http://atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IE25Cb04.html
Page 1 of 2
Darfur: Forget genocide, there's oil
By F William Engdahl
To paraphrase the famous quip during the 1992 US presidential debates, when an unknown William Jefferson Clinton told then-president George Herbert Walker Bush, "It's the economy, stupid," the present concern of the current Washington administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we look closely, genuine concern over genocide against the peoples in that poorest of poor part of a forsaken section of Africa.
No. "It's the oil, stupid."
The case of Darfur, a forbidding piece of sun-parched real estate
in the southern part of Sudan, illustrates the new Cold War over oil, where the dramatic rise in China's oil demand to fuel its booming growth has led Beijing to embark on an aggressive policy of - ironically - dollar diplomacy. With its more than US$1.2 trillion in mainly US dollar reserves at the Peoples' National Bank of China, Beijing is engaging in active petroleum geopolitics. Africa is a major focus, and in Africa, the central region between Sudan and Chad is a priority.
This is defining a major new front in what, since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, is a new Cold War between Washington and Beijing over control of major oil sources. So far Beijing has played its cards a bit more cleverly than Washington. Darfur is a major battleground in this high-stakes contest for oil control.
China oil diplomacy
In recent months, Beijing has embarked on a series of initiatives designed to secure long-term raw materials sources in one of the planet's most endowed regions - Sub-Saharan Africa. No raw material has higher priority in Beijing at present than oil.
Today China draws an estimated 30% of its crude oil from Africa. That explains an extraordinary series of diplomatic initiatives which have left Washington furious. China is using no-strings-attached dollar credits to gain access to Africa's vast raw material wealth, leaving Washington's typical control game via the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) out in the cold. Who needs the painful medicine of the IMF when China gives easy terms and builds roads and schools to boot?
In November last year Beijing hosted an extraordinary summit of 40 African heads of state. They literally rolled out the red carpet for the leaders of, among others, Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Angola, Central African Republic, Zambia and South Africa.
China has just done an oil deal that links it with two of the continent's largest nations, Nigeria and South Africa. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) will lift oil in Nigeria, via a consortium that also includes South African Petroleum Co, giving China access to what could be 175,000 barrels a day by 2008. It's a $2.27 billion deal that gives state-controlled CNOOC a 45% stake in a large off-shore oil field in Nigeria. Previously, Nigeria had been considered in Washington to be an asset of the Anglo-American oil majors, ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron.
China has been generous in dispensing its soft loans, with no interest or as outright grants, to some of the poorest debtor states of Africa. The loans have gone into infrastructure, including highways, hospitals, and schools, a stark contrast to the brutal austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank. In 2006 China committed more than $8 billion to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique, versus $2.3 billion to all sub-Saharan Africa from the World Bank. Ghana is negotiating a $1.2 billion Chinese electrification loan. Unlike the World Bank, a de facto arm of US foreign economic policy, China shrewdly attaches no strings to its loans.
This oil-related Chinese diplomacy has led to the bizarre accusation from Washington that Beijing is trying to "secure oil at the sources", something Washington foreign policy has itself been preoccupied with for at least a century. No source of oil has been more the focus of China-US oil conflict of late than Sudan, home of Darfur.
Sudan's oil riches
Beijing's China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) is Sudan's largest foreign investor, with some $5 billion in oil field development. Since 1999 China has invested at least $15 billion in Sudan. It owns 50% of an oil refinery near Khartoum with the Sudan government. The oil fields are concentrated in the south, site of a long-simmering civil war, partly financed covertly by the United States to break the south from the Islamic Khartoum-centered north.
CNPC built an oil pipeline from southern Sudan to a new terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where the oil is loaded on tankers bound for China. Eight percent of China's oil now comes from
create a united democratic Sudan." In other words, regime change in Sudan.
The US Senate adopted a resolution in February 2006 that requested NATO troops in Darfur, as well as a stronger UN peacekeeping force with a robust mandate. A month later, President George W Bush also called for additional NATO forces
in Darfur. Genocide? Or oil?
The Pentagon has been busy training African military officers in the US, much as it has trained Latin American officers for decades. Its International Military Education and Training program has provided training to military officers from Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.
Much of the arms that have fueled the killing in Darfur and the south have been brought in via murky, protected private "merchants of death" such as the notorious former KGB operative, now with offices in the US, Victor Bout, who has been cited repeatedly in recent years for selling weapons across Africa. US government officials strangely leave his operations in Texas and Florida untouched despite the fact he is on the Interpol wanted list for money laundering.
US development aid for all Sub-Saharan Africa, including Chad, has been cut sharply in recent years while its military aid has risen. Oil and the scramble for strategic raw materials is the clear reason. The region of southern Sudan from the Upper Nile to the Chad border is rich in oil. Washington knew that long before the Sudanese government.
Chevron's 1974 oil project
US oil majors have known about Sudan's oil wealth since the early 1970s. In 1979, Jafaar Nimeiry, Sudan's head of state, broke with the Soviets and invited Chevron to develop the country's oil industry. That was perhaps a fatal mistake. UN Ambassador George H W Bush had personally told Nimeiry of satellite photos indicating oil in Sudan. Nimeiry took the bait. Wars over oil have been the consequence ever since.
Chevron found big oil reserves in southern Sudan. It spent $1.2 billion finding and testing them. That oil triggered what is called Sudan's second civil war in 1983. Chevron was the target of repeated attacks and killings and it suspended the project in 1984. In 1992, it sold its Sudanese oil concessions. Then China began to develop the abandoned Chevron fields in 1999 with notable results.
But Chevron is not far from Darfur today.
Chad oil and pipeline politics
Condoleezza Rice's Chevron is in neighboring Chad, together with the other US oil giant, ExxonMobil. They've just built a $3.7 billion oil pipeline carrying 160,000 barrels per day from Doba in central Chad, near Darfur, via Cameroon to Kribi on the Atlantic Ocean, destined for US refineries.
To do it, they worked with Chad "President for life" Idriss Deby, a corrupt despot who has been accused of feeding US-supplied arms to the Darfur rebels. Deby joined Washington's Pan Sahel Initiative run by the Pentagon's US-European Command, to train his troops to fight "Islamic terrorism".
Supplied with US military aid, training and weapons, in 2004, Deby launched the initial strike that set off the conflict in Darfur. He used members of his elite Presidential Guard, who come from the province, providing them with all-terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to aid Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in southwestern Sudan. The US military support to Deby in fact had been the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum reacted and the ensuing debacle was unleashed in full, tragic force.
Washington-backed NGOs and the US government claim unproven genocide as a pretext to ultimately bring UN/NATO troops into the oil fields of Darfur and southern Sudan. Oil, not human misery, is behind Washington's new interest in Darfur.
The "Darfur genocide" campaign began in 2003, the same time the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline began to flow. The US now had a base in Chad to go after Darfur oil and, potentially, co-opt China's new oil sources.
US military objectives in Darfur - and the Horn of Africa more widely - are being served at present by US and NATO backing for African Union (AU) troops in Darfur. There NATO provides ground and air support for AU troops who are categorized as "neutral" and "peacekeepers". Sudan is at war on three fronts, against Uganda, Chad, and Ethiopia, each with a significant US military presence and ongoing US military programs. The war in Sudan involves both US covert operations and US trained "rebel" factions coming in from south Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia and Uganda.
Chad's Deby looks to China too
The completion of the US and World Bank-financed oil pipeline from Chad to the Cameroon coast was designed as one part of a far grander Washington scheme to control the oil riches of Central Africa from Sudan to the entire Gulf of Guinea.
But Washington's erstwhile pal, Chad's Deby, began to get unhappy with his small share of the US-controlled oil profits. When he and the Chad parliament decided in early 2006 to take more of the oil revenues to finance military operations and beef up its army, the new World Bank president - and Iraq war architect - Paul Wolfowitz moved to suspend loans to the country. Then that August, after Deby had won re-election, he created Chad's own oil company, SHT, and threatened to expel Chevron and Malaysia's Petronas for not paying taxes owed, and demanded a 60% share of the Chad oil pipeline. In the end he came to terms with the oil companies, but winds of change were blowing.
Deby also faces growing internal opposition from a Chad rebel group, United Front for Change, known under its French name as FUC, which he claims is being covertly funded by Sudan. The FUC has based itself in Darfur.
Into this unstable situation, Beijing has shown up in Chad with a full coffer of aid money in hand. In late January, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a state visit to Sudan and Cameroon among other African states. In 2008, China's leaders visited no less than 48 African states. In August 2006, Beijing hosted Chad's foreign minister for talks and resumption of formal diplomatic ties cut in 1997. China has begun to import oil from Chad as well as Sudan. Not that much oil, but if Beijing has its way, that will soon change.
This April, Chad's foreign minister announced that talks with China over greater China participation in Chad's oil development were "progressing well". He referred to the terms the Chinese seek for oil development, calling them "much more equal partnerships than those we are used to having".
The Chinese economic presence in Chad, ironically, may be more effective in calming the fighting and displacement in Darfur than any AU or UN troop presence ever could. That would not be welcome for some people in Washington and at Chevron headquarters, as they would not secure the oil.
Chad and Darfur are but part of the vast China effort to secure "oil at the source" across Africa. Oil is also the prime factor in US Africa policy today. George W Bush's interest in Africa includes a new US base in Sao Tome/Principe, 124 miles off the Gulf of Guinea, from which it can control Gulf of Guinea oil fields from Angola in the south to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Nigeria. That just happens to be the very same areas where recent Chinese diplomatic and investment activity has focused.
"West Africa's oil has become of national strategic interest to us," stated US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner back in 2002. Darfur and Chad are but an extension of the US Iraq policy "with other means" - control of oil everywhere. China is challenging that control "everywhere", especially in Africa. It amounts to a new undeclared Cold War over oil.
F William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics, Pluto Press Ltd. His next book, Seeds of Destruction: The Dark Side of Genetic engineering (Global Research Publishing) will be released this June. He may be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Comments
-
Subject: Re: For you dafur guys
armchair_warrior wrote: As a asian guy, i see things differently.
I do believe you see things differently from me. I'm slightly long-sighted, and not only is there a higher prevalence of myopia among East Asian males than Europeans, it's on the increase. -
haha you know what i mean.
europeans in general always mind other people's business. while asians like to keep to themsleves.
there is no shortsightednesses here just a different point of view on things.
for me americans or europeans should clean their own houses first before muddling and creating more problems around the world.
africa today is a artificial creation of european colonialism. if countries were created along ethnic lines. would be less wars there.
if africa was left alone to their own devices. they would be in much better shape. there might be war and so on.
but if they get time they'll create nations that are stable. even if there is war now. -
No no, I mean literally, not politically. The focal distance of your eyes is shorter than mine, which means you see things differently. Even if our vision is corrected, there's still some difference.
-
This was a really interesting article to me for two reasons: 1. it was a non-traditional (read: non-American) news story and its always worthwhile to read news written outside my home country. and 2. it brings up a very unspoken-about aspect of Sudan's two civil wars: oil.
The article's criticism of US foreign policy is valid, and by and large I agree with it. However, the writer disturbingly had a pro-Gov of Sudan (GoS) agenda and made some very misleading comments. The article clearly tried to blur any distinction between who has been dying in Darfur and who has been doing the killing. Furthermore, the article is trying to pin the origins of the conflict on the US (and Chad and other countries) by supplying arms to the Darfur rebels, which is clearly not the case.
When 400,000 mostly innocent civilians have died largely at the hands of the GoS and its armed militia, to pin any significant responsibility for the ethnic cleansing (if the author finds the term 'genocide' to be dubious) on the US is patently false.
It is unbelievable to me that the author wrote a long and detailed story that hardly criticizes the GoS, let alone bring up the fact that it is a military dictatorship that's been in power since 1989 and has seen two (soon to be three) civil wars pop up within its borders b/c of the degree to which "President" Omar Al-Bashir neglects, abuses and uses the poorer regions of the country.
30% of Sudan's population resides in Darfur yet 80% of Sudanese money and development goes to Khartoum and the surrounding areas. (Incidentally the areas where Bashir's ancestors come from). (source: Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, by Gerard Prunier.) The US may be supplying arms, but they had very little to do with the 50-,100- 200-year old grievances the South, West and soon to be East.
At certain times it seems the author places most of the blame on the US' covert operations. While dumping arms into a struggle is deplorable, a majority of those 400,000 dead are unarmed civilians who died at the hands of the government and its sponsored militias. The rebel groups JEM and SLA opened the first salvo in 2003 by attacking a GoS military installation. The GoS has responded with mass murder intentionally targeting civilians.
As if using crude bombs on defenseless villagers wasn't bad enough, the Gos armed, trained, supplied and supported the raiding Janjaweed militias which are known for raping girls as young as 5, 10 years old, and throwing babies onto burning houses. Not to mention burning over 200 villages to the ground and putting dead bodies into drinking wells to poison what is frequently the only supply of water for miles around.
As the attacks on villages have died down in the past 12 months, over 2 million innocent civilians have been displaced into the horrid conditions of refugee camps. To continue their goal of killing the rebels only means of support (the local population) the GoS has taken to barring any food aid from reaching the region, and even gone as far as tacitly allowing selective attacks on aid workers in order to discourage them from helping the displaced persons.
Currently the ethnic cleansing has taken the form of starvation. Death at the hands of the GoS and its militias rages on.
An example of the author's dubious reasoning:Much of the arms that have fueled the killing in Darfur and the south have been brought in via murky, protected private "merchants of death" such as the notorious former KGB operative, now with offices in the US, Victor Bout, who has been cited repeatedly in recent years for selling weapons across Africa.
The "arms" the author accuses the US of sending have resulted in a fraction of the 400,000 dead, and have mostly been used on armed gov't soldiers and militias. To in any way equalize this responsibility to the intentional and open ethnic cleansing policies of the GoS targeting civilians is at best dishonest and at worst pro-genocidal propaganda.
Furthermore, the author seems to be implying that the arms from the US are somehow preventing peace in Darfur. This is false reasoning. The dictatorship of Sudan has never shown in any interest in fair treatment of 'other' ethnic groups (the West, the South, etc), let alone the ability to deal with any sort of opposition, whether political or social, without resorting to ethnic violence.
A closer reading of the history of Darfur dating back to colonialism and before, as well as analysis of Dictator Bashir (and the dictators that proceeded him), would shed some light on the ethnic cleansing in Darfur that's claimed 400,000 lives and has no hopes for peace in the immediate future, regardless of whether the US is successful in its 'secret scheme' to get the conflict labeled a genocide in order to gain access to Darfur's limited oil supply.
For over 30 years the GoS has shown no interest in peace, justice or equality. For generations the various dictatorships in Khartoum (whether British, Egyptian, or Sudanese (Niemery, Bashir, etc)) have treated the black African Southern population and Black Muslim Western population as, at-best, second class citizens and at-worst slaves and pawns in their wars of power and conquest. (See Chad's civil war which used Darfur as a staging ground, Chad's war against Libya which used Darfur as a staging ground, or the use of Darfur conscripts in the 30 year civil war in the south, etc, etc.).
Make no mistake, the imperialist and cold war machinations of the West and the US have created unspeakable tragedies across the globe, and in Africa specifically. But to somehow claim that murderous dictators like Omar Al Bashir don't have equal (or stronger) responsibility for the death, destruction and murder in their country under their watch is ignorant to say the least.
Furthermore, the US may have problems at home, and it may have disastrous foreign policy based covertly on oil, but to write off their efforts to get Bashir to stop murdering his own citizens by the 100,000's is morally dubious.
Dictator Omar Al Bashir has overseen a rate of death in Southern Sudan and Western Sudan almost unparalleled on Earth (save the Congo). I don't care what Bush does because of oil or how eff'd up the Iraq war is, Omar Al Bashir is a war criminal who should be in jail or at the least not be in power.
For this author, or anyone, to gloss over his crimes while in power is disgusting. -
-
Khartoum Karl is the man.
And by 'man', I mean "guy who's been given the job to explain away a genocidal regime to the world"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/30/AR2007053002157.html
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