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"At what point
do we ask the uncomfortable question, why does the U.S. seem
to consider it acceptable for such genocidal acts to occur in
Africa?" It was a rhetorical question, posed by Africa
Action Executive Director Salih Booker on April 7 as the
world marked the tenth anniversary of the genocide that left
at least 800,000 Rwandans dead. Two week’s later, President George
Bush answered Booker’s question in the usual manner: the U.S.
has more pressing business at hand than ending a genocide-in-progress,
this time in the western region of Sudan.
While U.S. diplomats
feigned outrage at the UN Human Rights Commission's weak
response (“grave concern”) to massive ethnic cleansing of
Black Africans in Darfur – the committee could not bring itself
to even whisper the terms “rape” or “forced removals” – Bush
last week vouched for the Khartoum government’s good faith in
ending a much longer campaign of genocide against Blacks. As Newsweek reported:
President
George W. Bush certified, as required every six months under
the 2002 Sudan Peace Act, that the Islamist regime in Khartoum
is negotiating in good faith for an end to Sudan's other civil
war: the decades-old rebellion in southern Sudan. If the president
had withheld his signature, he could have unleashed severe
economic sanctions against Khartoum. But a southern peace framework
seems tantalizingly close, so policymakers faced a tough choice. "It's
frustrating," says a senior State Department official, "but
given all the progress, we couldn't say they weren't cooperating."
What tantalizes the
U.S. is Sudanese oil reserves, which are at issue in negotiations
between non-Muslim Black southerners and the Arabized rulers
in Khartoum. American and European companies are anxious to
return to their operations in the oil-rich Abyei
region, abandoned during the North-South war that claimed two
million lives. Stability in Abyei weighs far more heavily than
the lives of one million Blacks in oil-poor Darfur, victims
of Khartoum’s “strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape
and forcible displacement,” according to a Human
Rights Watch report.
In
a Euro-American dominated world, Sudan’s rulers are permitted to launch a second
genocidal race war, so long as they allow oil to flow from
the scene of the first holocaust. Declan Walsh, Africa correspondent
for the UK’s Independent,
describes ethnic cleansing in Darfur:
The
first sign is the ominous drone of a plane. Ageing Russian
Antonovs sweep
over the remote Sudanese village, dispatching their deadly
payload of crude barrel bombs. They explode among the straw-roofed
huts, sending terrified families scurrying for safety – but
there is none.
Next
comes the Janjaweed, a fearsome Arab militia mounted on camels
and horses, and armed with AK-47 rifles and whips. They murder
the men and boys of fighting age, gang-rape the women – sometimes
in front of their families – and burn the houses. The villagers'
cattle are stolen, their modest possessions carted off.
 Under
cover of ending the southern genocide, Khartoum unleashes
ethnic cleansing
in the West – with impunity. Although both sides in the Darfur
conflict are Muslims, there is no doubt this is a race war.
As the Independent’s Walsh reported: “One 18-year-old woman
told Human Rights Watch (HRW) that her attacker stuck a knife
into her vagina, saying: ‘You get this because you are black.’"
The
UN Human Rights Commission ignored both the HRW report and
its own investigators,
who concluded that Khartoum has engaged in “crimes against
humanity” in Darfur. Apparently, it is a far worse crime to
leave oil in the ground, in Abyei.
American
diplomats scored easy propaganda points by voting for stronger
UN language on Darfur while their President withheld sanctions
that might have actually forced Khartoum to abandon its
newest genocidal campaign. Europeans, finding few excuses
for doing nothing to stop genocide in the present, pretended
to make big plans for the future. According to the EU Observer:
While
EU and UN diplomats discuss the possibility of an EU-led
peacekeeping mission to the Sudan region of Darfur, the
European development commissioner has warned against
hasty decisions. Speaking
to journalists on Wednesday (28 April), Poul Nielson
urged "not to let things
happen without professional, well-analyzed co-ordination."
The
Dane went on to state that time was needed for "collective analysis" between
the EU member states in order to ensure a mission with "maximum
authority." He suggested that a possible mission might
fail under disagreements between EU member states. "If
one man can fix a tire in 10 minutes this does not mean that
10 men can fix a tire in 1 minute," he said….
As
an alternative, the Commissioner said he favors a peace-keeping
mission under the umbrella of the African Union, which
enjoys EU financial aid worth 250 million euro to conduct
its own peace-keeping operations.
The Europeans issued
a statement on the crisis that scrupulously avoids asking anyone
in particular to stop killing anybody:
The
European Commission today launched a strong appeal to warring
parties in the Darfur region of Western Sudan to secure "safe
humanitarian access" so that the enormous needs of the
population can be properly addressed. The Commission also announced
that ECHO was preparing a new €10 million humanitarian aid
decision to assist the victims of the conflict that has claimed
thousands of lives and resulted in huge population displacements.
The proposed decision will shortly be submitted to the Member
States. Speaking at the launch of the European Commission's
Humanitarian Aid Office Annual Review ("ECHO 2003"),
Poul Nielson, Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian
Aid, highlighted the "tragic situation" in Darfur.
Threats to the "humanitarian space" is the central
theme of ECHO's Annual Review this year.
Having
done their bit to save humanitarian “space,” if not the human beings themselves,
the EU got on with the business of…business.
African
states make up 14 of the 53 members
of the UN Human Rights Commission, 50 of whom voted for
the toothless resolution on Darfur. Two abstained; only
the U.S. called for stronger language. Clearly, the African
Union (AU) is seeking unity, above all else.
The AU expressed “concern” over
violations of a (clearly non-existent) ceasefire in Darfur,
and announced it would send a team of military observers to
the region. The U.S. offered to help the AU with unspecified “logistical
support” – as well it might, since American Special Forces,
Marines and contract mercenaries now operate in nearly every
country of the Sahel. The European edition of Stars
and Stripes reported:
Late
last year, soldiers from the 10th Special Forces Group began
training military forces in Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger
under the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7 million State Department
program designed to help the security forces of those impoverished
nations defend against terrorists.
The
extent of recent American military penetration of Africa
just below the Sahara
can be glimpsed from the accompanying Stars and Stripes interview
with Army Col. Vic Nelson, the Department of Defense’s country
director for West Africa:
The
whole reason [for the Pan-Sahel Initiative] is regional
cooperation, so
that the terrorists can’t use these artificial state borders
at the seams, against us. "Aha! I’m in Algeria! Aha!
I’m in Mali! Aha! I’m in Algeria!"
[Including
more states] would foster regional cooperation, which is
what
this is all about. The policy is, helping Africa build the
capacity to enable them to deal with these problems as a
force multiplier for our own forces in the global war on
terror. Well, what does it mean, that buzzword? That means,
if they can do it, we don’t have to do it. And they want
to do it, they want to help us and be partners in the global
war on terror. They have needs, training and equipment needs.
As
a force multiplier, if I don’t have to put a battalion of U.S.
guys down, but I have a battalion of Chadians, well, then good,
a force multiplier.
At least 110,000 survivors
of the ethnic cleansing in Darfur have fled across the border
to Chad.
The
U.S. goal in the Sahel, says Col. Nelson, is to establish
direct ties (“mil-to-mil”)
with African militaries:
It’s
important to have U.S. military trainers to establish the mil-to-mil
relationship; to foster cooperation among the militaries, both
bilaterally and regionally, and in my experience, you don’t
get as much bang for the buck using contractors, because you
don’t establish the mil-to-mil relationship. You can’t. They’re
not military. They don’t have contractor generals.
American
military tentacles now stretch across the Sahelian belt of
Africa, from
Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden to the Atlantic.  They
are there for the oil, and to cultivate relationships with
the
generals,
and would-be generals – men whose purchase can yield more barrels
for the buck than negotiations with governments beholden to
fractious civil societies.
In
1994, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire tried desperately to
convince the United
Nations to reinforce his peacekeeping mission in Rwanda. President
Bill Clinton’s administration used every device to sabotage
an international rescue effort. (See Paul Street,  April
15.) Last week, Dallaire testified before
the U.S. House Subcommittee on Africa:
"Rwanda simply
had no strategic value in its geography or in its resources.
As [one country's] interlocutor, who came in to do an assessment
whether or not to send troops to support me, said, 'The only
thing you've got here in Rwanda is a lot of people – and
too much of [them].'
"That
was not sufficient to influence that power and many others
to actually come in and stop what had become the start of a
genocide within a civil war."
Dallaire
fears "the
nature of the political interplay in the world has not fundamentally
changed" in the last decade.
Let’s revisit Salih
Booker’s rhetorical question, and put it slightly differently:
At what point will
the U.S. commit itself to effectively oppose genocide in Africa?
Answer:
When acts of genocide impair US ability to extract what it
wants from
the continent. In the case of Sudan, stability in the oil fields
takes precedence over the lives of Darfur’s one million
displaced and hunted persons.
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