This article originally appeared on Znet.
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin gave a moving speech at the United
Nations on September 22, 2004. "Tens of thousands have been
murdered, raped and assaulted,” he said. “War crimes and crimes against
humanity have been committed."
A courageous act, to say such things about US foreign policy in Iraq. Even
though reports of rape in prisons like Abu Ghraib are widespread, the
word “rape” is never used in the mainstream US media. Neither
is the word “torture”, though Martin didn’t mention torture in his
speech. The US invasion of Iraq, as straightforward international
aggression (not a "pre-emptive" or even "preventive" strike)
definitely counts as a “crime against humanity”, although again, to
say such things in public, especially on US soil at the United Nations,
would have
major implications for a country’s foreign policy and a politician’s
career. To be sure, sniper attacks, aerial bombardments, and
the use of helicopter and other gunships against civilians are “war
crimes”, and “tens of thousands have been murdered” in this way in
Iraq, but again, in the current political climate, no Western politician
could be expected to say so.
It would therefore have been quite impressive if Paul Martin had actually
been talking about the US in Iraq. But he was not.
Nor was he talking about Palestinian refugees when he said: “They
are hungry, they are homeless, they are sick and many have been driven
out of their own country." This would have been particularly
true for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, where the UN special
rapporteur for food said last year Israel is deliberately starving
the population through its policy of closures, resulting in over a
fifth of children being malnourished. Israeli policy hasn’t changed. Instead,
attacks on civilian infrastructure in the occupied territories have
continued, as have the sieges and closures. Malnutrition
causes brain damage so that even when a child has been restored to
a proper diet he or she may continue to suffer developmental problems.
Talk about Palestine or Iraq would not have earned Paul Martin kudos
from US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who praised him as “a good
friend and neighbor" and declared him “such a leader in the field.”
What field? Not the killing fields of Haiti, where corpses of
Lavalas activists and Aristide supporters have been piling up in morgues
and graves, some three thousand, and ongoing, since “good friends and
neighbors” and “leaders in the field” Canada and the United States
sent their troops to guarantee the February
coup against Haiti’s
democratically elected and massively supported President.
No, Paul Martin was not talking about Iraq or Palestine or Haiti. He
was talking about Sudan.
Martin’s concern about mass murder, starvation, and ethnic cleansing
in Sudan, like Powell’s, might seem inconsistent, given their eager
championing of such deeds elsewhere. The same could be said of
US politicians like Republican Senator Bill Frist and Iraq invaders
like Tony Blair. These notables are either lying about their
indignation about what is happening in Sudan, or they are racists,
who just can’t summon indignation for dead third-worlders when the
killers are from the first world or acting on behalf of it.
In fact the consistency is of a different kind. For it is the
selective indignation of the likes of Martin, Blair, and Powell, and
their ilk to the atrocities unfolding under the auspices of what they
term “rogue states” or “failed states” that leads to the atrocities
unfolding under Western occupations. In Haiti, for example, the
formula was clear: first, help a state to “fail” by denying it aid,
applying vicious sanctions and conditionalities, and arming paramilitary
killers to invade and slaughter their way to the capital. Then
call it a “failed state,” oust its leaders, and occupy the place. Whatever
atrocities occur in response to Western occupation can then be used
as proof of the need for more occupation and intervention. In
Iraq, a genuinely tyrannical and dictatorial state was made to “fail” by
a process of bombing, bleeding by sanctions, and murderous invasion
and occupation. Now, as Blair and Bush’s armies slaughter Iraqis
at will, interventionists argue that the West needs to “stay the course” lest
Iraq, the “failed state,” descend into “civil war.” Israel’s
ongoing massacre, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation program
is justified by the interventionists as necessary because Palestinians
can’t find leaders that will recognize Israel’s security needs.
The Sudan crisis has provided the interventionists with an opportunity
to simply change the subject: “if you care so much about the Palestinians,” they
can ask, “why don’t you care about Sudan? If you care so much
about Iraqis, then why don’t you support intervention to save people
in Sudan?” The next step, of course, is to accuse those who talk
about Western murders and crimes as “anti-Semites,” “anti-Americans,” or
racists. To this, anti-occupation people can reply by calling
the liberal interventionists hypocrites, citing liberal indifference
or contribution to crimes in the above cases as evidence.
Mutual cries of hypocrisy, however, even when true, won’t help those
who are actually being “murdered, raped and assaulted,” who are actually “hungry… homeless… sick
and… have been driven out of their own country.” In the specific
case of Sudan and Darfur, for example, the hypocrisy of gangsters like
Martin, Powell, and Blair does not make atrocities in the region any
less real, or the crisis any less urgent.
Lansana Gberie, an Africa expert who has studied numerous interventions
and conflict situations in the continent, cites liberal interventionists
in his recent paper arguing for intervention in Sudan. But he
also cites very important and credible human rights organizations like
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN, whose estimates
of deaths are in the tens of thousands and displaced people in the
hundreds of thousands. These organizations have sometimes been
wrong (Amnesty International, for example, picked up the phony story
about Iraqis murdering Kuwaiti babies in incubators, helping the propaganda
machine of the US devastation of Iraq in 1991) or disproportionate
(some of Human Rights Watch’s material on Venezuela, for example, has
condemned the Chavez government in disproportionately harsh terms,
helping the US campaign against that government). Their record
overall, however, is quite good, and the evidence they presented in
the cases where they have turned out to be wrong was rather thin and
later discredited. The evidence they have presented on Darfur,
however, is solidly documented. Not to prove “genocide,” but
certainly to prove massive suffering.
The story is also quite plausible on its face (unlike stories of Saddam
Hussein’s al-Qaeda links or imminent nuclear threat). For example,
as US-backed paramilitaries in Colombia know, civilian massacres to
drive whole populations into refugee camps can be a highly effective
counterinsurgency strategy, cutting insurgents off from their support
and supply base and terrifying the population away from them.
Gberie’s paper cites Sudan expert Alex de Waal’s excellent July 2004
article from the London Review of Books for background on Darfur. That
background is too extensive to summarize in a short article. Those
concerned about Darfur should read it, and carefully. But suffice
it to say that similar dynamics exist in Darfur’s crisis as exist in
so many other conflicts that plague the third world today: a legacy
of colonial destruction; a postcolonial state that acts like the colonial
state did; an elite that uses the state as its own private estate to
dole out privileges and power; mobilization along ethnic lines using
racist ideologies; interference from outside powers; closed political
spaces leading to armed insurgencies, and a state that responds to
armed insurgencies with vicious counterinsurgency.
De Waal’s recommendations might strike both anti-imperialists and
liberal interventionists as unsatisfactory:
“A huge aid effort is grinding into gear. But
the distances involved mean that food relief is expensive and unlikely
to be sufficient. It's
tempting to send in the British army to deliver food, but this
would be merely symbolic: relief can be flown in more cheaply by
civil contractors,
and distributed more effectively by relief agencies. The areas
controlled by the SLA (Sudan Liberation Army) and JEM (Justice
and Equality Movement)
contain hundreds of thousands of civilians who are not getting
any help. As soon as an intrepid cameraman returns with pictures
of this
hidden famine, there will be an outcry, and pressure for aid
to be delivered across the front lines. There's no reason to wait
for
the
pictures before acting, although it's clear that cross-line aid
convoys will need to carry armed guards.
“The biggest help would be peace. In theory,
there's a ceasefire; in practice, the government and Janjawiid are
ignoring it, and the
rebels are responding in kind. The government denies that it
set up, armed and directed the Janjawiid. It did, but the monster
that Khartoum
helped create may not always do its bidding: distrust of the
capital runs deep among Darfurians, and the Janjawiid leadership
knows it cannot
be disarmed by force. When President Bashir promised Kofi Annan
and Colin Powell that he would disarm the militia, he was making
a promise
he couldn't keep. The best, and perhaps the only, means of disarmament
is that employed by the British seventy-five years ago: establish
a working local administration, regulate the ownership of arms, and
gradually
isolate the outlaws and brigands who refuse to conform. It took
a decade then, and it won't be any faster today. Not only are there
more weapons
now, but the political polarities are much sharper.”
If de Waal’s recommendation of methods used by British colonialists
seems unsavory, Gberie’s advocacy of an African solution might seem
better:
“By the end of August 2004, the AU had 305 soldiers
on the ground in Darfur as part of a ceasefire monitoring mechanism,
and the UN was
working with the AU on a plan that would raise this force level
to 3,000 AU troops and 1,200 police officers. However, the Sudanese
government
has rejected AU offers to increase the size of the force and
extend its mandate to include the protection of civilians, insisting
on an
AU role that is limited to observation and monitoring.”
Gberie sensibly argues that the Sudanese government’s consent
ought to be irrelevant (as irrelevant, for example, as Israel’s
consent ought to be if an international intervention to protect
Palestinians from
massacre, assassination, and starvation were ever mounted). The
example he provides, however, is equally unsavory to anti-imperialists: “However,
the issue of consent should be irrelevant. There was no consent
in 1999, to the aerial bombardment and insertion of some 50,000
NATO troops
into Kosovo in response to the deaths of some 2,000 people.” When
one considers the problems the NATO intervention caused compared
to those it solved, this "success" of "humanitarian
intervention" seems
less “humanitarian” and less “successful.” The same is true
of the world’s response to the mass murder in the Congo,
which took place largely in Rwandan and Ugandan-controlled
parts
of the Congo
between 1998-2001, while the liberal interventionists were
still trying to find ways of using the Rwandan genocide of
1994/5 as a rhetorical
device to justify future Western interventions.
Clearly Ramesh Thakur, Vice Rector of the UN University, who Gberie
also cites, is correct when he argues that “Western Medicine is no
cure for Darfur’s ills,” and that “a Western intervention, far from
offering a solution, may add to the problems.” Thakur has good
reasons for thinking so. The US’s actions in Afghanistan, where
funds were available for bombing but not for rebuilding, show that
the US is more interested in building bases, controlling regions, and
controlling energy sources than solving local humanitarian crises. The
oil connection in Darfur also casts doubt on US humanitarian intentions. Sudan
is a country with a Muslim population and, even though the Islamist
regime is oppressive and unpopular, an invasion would do little for
pro-US sentiment in a region where such sentiment is sorely lacking. US
military doctrine, which compensates for its reluctance to risk its
soldiers by using firepower and ruthlessness against non-US civilians,
tends to have very un-humanitarian effects. A year after the
Iraq invasion, there should be little doubt about any of these points.
Given that, one would have to disagree with the conclusion of
the Black Commentator’s well-reasoned editorial of September
23, 2004, that: “No matter how cynical U.S. motives, Colin Powell’s
invocation of the Genocide Convention in Darfur invigorates forces
seeking a more
just world. When criminals are compelled to cite the law, we
know that justice is within our reach.” In fact, we know
no such thing. The
Colin Powell brand of criminal always cites the law, whether
he’s ignoring
it, upholding it, or tearing it up. Proposals for an
African Union intervention as cited by Gberie, however flawed,
could have the
best chance of success (it was African intervention that brought
the Congo civil war to a halt).
The real world demands not allowing genuine concern for victims
of atrocities to be transmuted by interventionist hypocrites
into apologetics
for an imperialism that will ultimately produce more victims
of more atrocities. But those same victims deserve better
than mere denunciations of intervention and its apologists as
hypocrites and warmongers. Perhaps
Khalid Fishawy and Ahmed Zaki of Egyptian alternative media
site kefaya.org posed the challenge for movements best:
“Could we imagine building a front for the potentials
of peoples and democratic movements in Sudan, hurt and disaffected
by war, with
the solidarity of the global antiwar movement, to impose
democratic mechanisms caring for the interests of oppressed Sudanese
communities,
races, cultures and classes, against the rapacity of the
interests of US and Western European Imperialists? Could this aim
be possible?
Is it promising for the global justice and peace movement
to regain its momentum, instead of supporting undemocratic authoritarian
and
fundamentalist forces, this time in Sudan, under the title
of allying with whomever is against the American Empire?”
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