http://www.blackagendareport.com/index. ... 3&Itemid=1 (http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=453&Itemid=1)

The star-studded hue and cry to "Save Darfur" and "stop the genocide" has gained enormous traction in U.S. media along with bipartisan support in Congress and the White House. But the Congo, with ten to twenty times as many African dead over the same period is not called a "genocide" and passes almost unnoticed. Sudan sits atop lakes of oil. It has large supplies of uranium, and other minerals, significant water resources, and a strategic location near still more African oil and resources. The unasked question is whether the nation's Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite are using claims of genocide, and appeals for "humanitarian intervention" to grease the way for the next oil and resource wars on the African continent.

Top Ten Reasons to Suspect "Save Darfur" is a PR Scam to Justify US Military Intervention in African

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

The regular manufacture and the constant maintenance of false realities in the service of American empire is a core function of the public relations profession and the corporate news media. Whether it's fake news stories about wonder drugs and how toxic chemicals are good for you, bribed commentators and journalists discoursing on the benefits of No Child Left Behind, Hollywood stars advocating military intervention to save African orphans, or slick propaganda campaigns employing viral marketing techniques to reach out to college students, bloggers, churches and ordinary citizens, it pays to take a close look behind the facade.

Among the latest false realities being pushed upon the American people are the simplistic pictures of Black vs. Arab genocide in Darfur, and the proposed solution: a robust US-backed or US-led military intervention in Western Sudan. Increasing scrutiny is being focused upon the "Save Darfur" lobby and the Save Darfur Coalition; upon its founders, its finances, its methods and motivations and its truthfulness. In the spirit of furthering that examination we here present ten reasons to suspect that the "Save Darfur" campaign is a PR scam to justify US intervention in Africa.

1. It wouldn't be the first Big Lie our government and media elite told us to justify a war.

Elders among us can recall the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which the US government deliberately provoked to justify initiation of the war in Vietnam. This rationale was quickly succeeded by the need to help the struggling infant "democracy" in South Vietnam, and the still useful "fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here" nonsense. More recently the bombings, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been variously explained by people on the public payroll as necessary to "get Bin Laden" as revenge for 9-11, as measures to take "the world's most dangerous weapons" from the hands of "the world's most dangerous regimes", as measures to enable the struggling Iraqi "democracy" stand on its own two feet, and necessary because it's still better to "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here".

2. It wouldn't even be the first time the U.S. government and media elite employed "genocide prevention" as a rationale for military intervention in an oil-rich region.

The 1995 US and NATO military intervention in the former Yugoslavia was supposedly a "peacekeeping" operation to stop a genocide. The lasting result of that campaign is Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest military bases on the planet. The U.S. is practically the only country in the world that maintains military bases outside its own borders. At just under a thousand acres, Camp Bondsteel offers the US military the ability to pre-position large quantities of equipment and supplies within striking distance of Caspian oil fields, pipeline routes and relevant sea lanes. It is also widely believed to be the site of one of the US's secret prison and torture facilities.

3. If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?

"The notion that a quarter million Darfuri dead are a genocide and five million dead Congolese are not is vicious and absurd," according to Congolese activist Nita Evele. "What's happened and what is still happening in Congo is not a tribal conflict and it's not a civil war. It is an invasion. It is a genocide with a death toll of five million, twenty times that of Darfur, conducted for the purpose of plundering Congolese mineral and natural resources."

More than anything else, the selective and cynical application of the term "genocide" to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the "Save Darfur" movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese "genocide" worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.

4. It's all about Sudanese oil.

Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, sit atop a lake of oil. But Sudanese oil fields are not being developed and drilled by Exxon or Chevron or British Petroleum. Chinese banks, oil and construction firms are making the loans, drilling the wells, laying the pipelines to take Sudanese oil where they intend it to go, calling far too many shots for a twenty-first century in which the U.S. aspires to control the planet's energy supplies. A U.S. and NATO military intervention will solve that problem for U.S. planners.

5. It's all about Sudanese uranium, gum arabic and other natural resources.

Uranium is vital to the nuclear weapons industry and an essential fuel for nuclear reactors. Sudan possesses high quality deposits of uranium. Gum arabic is an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals, candies and beverages like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Sudanese exports of this commodity are 80% of the world's supply. When comprehensive U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime were being considered in 1997, industry lobbyists stepped up and secured an exemption in the sanctions bill to guarantee their supplies of this valuable Sudanese commodity. But an in-country U.S. and NATO military presence is a more secure guarantee that the extraction of Sudanese resources, like those of the Congo, flow westward to the U.S. and the European Union.

6. It's all about Sudan's strategic location

Sudan sits opposite Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where a large fraction of the world's easily extracted oil will be for a few more years. Darfur borders on Libya and Chad, with their own vast oil resources, is within striking distance of West and Central Africa, and is a likely pipeline route. The Nile River flows through Sudan before reaching Egypt, and Southern Sudan has water resources of regional significance too. With the creation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command for the African continent, the U.S. has made open and explicit its intention to plant a strategic footprint on the African continent. From permanent Sudanese bases, the U.S. military could influence the politics and ecocomies of Africa for a generation to come.

7. The backers and founders of the "Save Darfur" movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite.
According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer

"The "Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country - the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum...

"The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year...

"Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars."

Though the "Save Darfur" PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manfacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.

8. None of the funds raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition", the flagship of the "Save Darfur Movement" go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

"None of the money collected by Save Darfur goes to help the victims and their families. Instead, the coalition pours its proceeds into advocacy efforts that are primarily designed to persuade governments to act."

9. "Save Darfur" partisans in the U.S. are not interested in political negotiations to end the conflict in Darfur
President Bush has openly and repeatedly attempted to throw monkey wrenches at peace negotiations to end the war in Darfur. Even pro-intervention scholars and humanitarian organizations active on the ground have criticized the U.S. for endangering humanitarian relief workers, and for effectively urging rebel parties in Darfur to refuse peace talks and hold out for U.S. and NATO intervention on their behalf.

The slick, well financed and nearly seamless PR campaign simplistically depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, in which Arabs, generally despised in the US media anyway, are exterminating the black population of Sudan. In the make-believe world it creates, there is no room for negotiation. But in fact, many of Sudan's 'Arabs", even the Janjiweed, are also black. In any case, they were armed and unleashed by a government which has the power to disarm them if it chooses, and can also negotiate in good faith if it chooses. Negotiations are never a gurantee of anything, but refusal to particpate in negotiations, as the U.S. appears to be urging the rebels in Darfur to do, and as the "Save Darfur" PR campaign justifies, avoids any path to a political settlement among Sudanese, leaving open only the road of U.S and NATO military intervention.

10. Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial armed wings of the Republican party and the Pentagon are eagerly pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.

"Chris Taylor, head of strategy for Blackwater, says his company has a database of thousands of former police and military officers for security assignments. He says Blackwater personnel could set up perimeters and guard Darfurian villages and refugee camp in support of the U.N. Blackwater officials say it would not take many men to fend off the Janjaweed, a militia that is supported by the Sudanese government and attacks villages on camelback."

Apparently Blackwater doesn't need to come to the Congo, where hunger and malnutrition, depopulation, mass rape and the disappearance of schools, hospitals and civil society into vast law free zones ruled by an ever-changing cast of African proxies (like the son of the late and unlamented Idi Amin), all under a veil of complicit media silence already constitute the perfect business-friendly environment for siphoning off the vast wealth of that country at minimal cost.

Look for the adoption of the Congolese model across the wide areas of Africa that U.S. strategic planners call "ungoverned spaces". Just don't expect to see details on the evening news, or hear about them from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.

Bruce Dixon can be contacted at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com

Big "Save Darfur" gig here in Ithaca tonight. My SO is very good friends with the organizer. The guy playing the tunes is a very close personal friend of mine. I haven't talked to Hank but I did talk to the organizer. There was no breaking through the blinders. She's hell bent on doing good. The organization they are working through is run by this guy named Victor Gold, the very same dude who advised Goldwater and GHW Bush and was a speech writer for the latter as well. Of course he was also a darling of the Dems for a while when he hinted that 9-11 was Jr.'s fault or might have been LIHOP or some such thing.

The Tel Aviv connection is quite strong in this particular instance as is the London connection. The Save Darfur Coalition is made up of many conservative Israel groups and of course some US gov't NGO invader types. Seems to me that there is some rumor about Israel getting some land in Uganda or some such thing? I forget the exact details. Of course I'm an Anti-Semite so please be warned. Ask the DU hyenas they'll tell ya.

I've got a small heap o' papers if you want me to post some stuff on this.

Big "Save Darfur" gig here in Ithaca tonight. My SO is very good friends with the organizer. The guy playing the tunes is a very close personal friend of mine. I haven't talked to Hank but I did talk to the organizer. There was no breaking through the blinders. She's hell bent on doing good. The organization they are working through is run by this guy named Victor Gold, the very same dude who advised Goldwater and GHW Bush and was a speech writer for the latter as well. Of course he was also a darling of the Dems for a while when he hinted that 9-11 was Jr.'s fault or might have been LIHOP or some such thing.

The Tel Aviv connection is quite strong in this particular instance as is the London connection. The Save Darfur Coalition is made up of many conservative Israel groups and of course some US gov't NGO invader types. Seems to me that there is some rumor about Israel getting some land in Uganda or some such thing? I forget the exact details. Of course I'm an Anti-Semite so please be warned. Ask the DU hyenas they'll tell ya.

I've got a small heap o' papers if you want me to post some stuff on this.

Yeah, I'd like to see some more material, of course its just one dot in the "humanitarian intervention" puzzle

You might put up some stuff on the Congo too, I know you have some, since that is the truth that proves the lie unequivocally

http://www.blackagendareport.com/images/stories/039/039_congo_montage.jpg

A Tale of Two Genocides, Congo and Darfur: The Blatantly Inconsistent U.S. Position

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

"A human death toll that approaches the Nazi's annihilation of Jews in World War Two unfolds without a whiff of complaint from the superpower."

http://www.blackagendareport.com/images/stories/039/CongoImpaled.jpg

Possibly a quarter million people have lost their lives in Darfur, western Sudan, in ethnic conflict. The U.S. government screams its head off in denunciation of genocide, in this case. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as many as five million have died since 1994 in overlapping convulsions of ethnic and state-sponsored massacre. Not a word of reproach from Washington. A human death toll that approaches the Nazi's annihilation of Jews in World War Two - an ongoing holocaust - unfolds without a whiff of complaint from the superpower.

Why is mass death the cause of indignation and confrontation in Sudan, but exponentially more massive carnage in Congo unworthy of mention? The answer is simple: in Sudan, the U.S. has a geopolitical nemesis to confront: Arabs, and their Chinese business partners. In the Congo, it is U.S allies and European and American corporate interests that benefit from the slaughter. Therefore, despite five million skeletons lying in the ground, there is no call to arms from the American government. It is they who set the genocidal Congolese machine in motion.

Active U.S. Passivity

In 1994, Rwanda was on the brink. The Hutu majority, which had for a century been oppressed by Tutsi surrogates for European colonialists, feared that another massacre of their kin was imminent. There had been many massacres of Hutus, before, in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi, also under minority Tutsi control. Pent-up hysteria exploded in an orgy of violence that claimed the lives of as many as 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus that did not support the genocide.CongRPG

The U.S. did nothing to interfere, because they had two actors in the game. Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni was now the Americans' guy in central Africa. Tutsi Rwandan exiles, headed by Paul Kagame, were an integral part of Museveni's army. As the genocide began, Kagame's forces launched an offensive from Uganda into Rwanda. It did not halt the massacre of Tutsis, but succeeded in driving the disorganized Hutus into neighboring Congo. The Americans now had another player in the African game: the new head of the Rwandan Tutsi-dominated state, Paul Kagame. His forces then invaded eastern Congo, chasing the fleeing Hutus.

"The eastern Congo was up for grabs, and everybody grabbed some."

All hell broke loose. President Mobutu Sese Seko, America's man in the Congo, then called Zaire, was terminally ill. He fled and died in exile in 1997. The eastern Congo was now up for grabs, and everybody grabbed some. Eastern Congo is one of the most minerally rich places on Earth, an extractors' paradise. According to the CIA's "Factbook," the DRC abounds with "cobalt, copper, niobium, tantalum, petroleum, industrial and gem diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, uranium, coal, hydropower, timber." All of these resources are exploited by European andCongoMap American corporations that maintain their own mercenary armies to guard the extraction fields. For generations they have run their patches of Congolese land like governments, with the support of France, Belgium, the United States and other powers. The so-called civil war effectively gave them full autonomy in the wake of Mobutu's corrupt demise, as the power of the central government in Kinshasa, crumbled. Mass carnage raged around them, but did not interrupt the extraction process.

<snip>

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Geopolitical concerns behind United Nations intervention in Darfur
By Chris Talbot
7 August 2007


The United Nations Security Council has unanimously agreed on a resolution to send a joint UN-African Union (AU) force to the Darfur region of Sudan. Proposed as the world’s largest peacekeeping force, there will be 20,000 troops that will incorporate the present 7,000 AU force already in Darfur plus 6,000 police. It will be deployed under Chapter 7 of the UN’s Charter empowering it to use military force to protect civilians and aid workers. The first troops are due to be sent in October, but full deployment will probably take much longer.

Most of the efforts in pushing through the resolution appear to have come from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who have both used the Darfur issue since taking office to boost their humanitarian credentials. It has also enabled them to assure President George Bush of their support. Speaking at the UN after the resolution was passed, Brown personally thanked Bush “for his leadership on Darfur.”

There is certainly a worsening humanitarian disaster in Darfur—a recent UN report stated that more than half a million people out of a total of 4.2 million affected were cut off from humanitarian aid. But the driving force behind the proposed intervention is the interest of the United States and the Western powers in taking more control over this strategic region and its oil wealth.

It is intended that most of the troops in the peacekeeping force will be African, but there will be a single UN chain of command giving Western governments control over operations. The current AU force has suffered from lack of funding by the West and has remained small and ineffective because it was not under their direct control.

France has already volunteered to send troops. The conflict in Darfur has spread into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic, where France has troops in place already and is supporting unpopular regimes against rebel forces (see “The new Sarkozy government hosts conference on Darfur”).

Britain and France, with the agreement of Washington, dropped a demand for “further measures” against the Sudanese government and rebel forces for failing to cooperate. According to diplomats, a more “conciliatory text” was adopted to make sure that China did not veto the resolution in the Security Council and that African countries were kept onside. China buys most of Sudan’s oil exports and supplies it with arms, and has previously opposed US and British proposals directed at the Sudan regime. China has now supported the UN intervention, apparently concerned that the 2008 Beijing Olympics would be targeted by protesters.

Pressure from organisations such as the Save Darfur Coalition—with widespread support in the US—has played a role in getting China to agree to a peacekeeping force. They involve thousands of young people genuinely moved by the plight of the suffering refugees in Darfur. However, the simplistic view put forward by the campaign’s organisers that the problem is merely one of the Khartoum regime backing Arab Janjaweed militias against the rest of the population has served to distract attention from the fundamental issue and has been used to legitimise a military intervention by the major powers.

Darfur is just one tragic outcome of the imperialist domination of the African continent. It is also naïve in the extreme to imagine that the Bush administration, responsible for war crimes in Iraq, could be persuaded to carry out humanitarian measures in Sudan.

The Sudanese regime—and countless other oppressive regimes in developing countries that are not at present singled out for US disapproval—thrives under an imperialist system that has seen billions of dollars in debt relief exported to Western banks under International Monetary Fund auspices and huge profits made from mineral extraction by multinational corporations, but with the vast majority of the population forced to live in abject poverty. Whatever anti-Western rhetoric is used for popular consumption, a vital role is played by such brutal governments as that in Khartoum in maintaining the status quo.

Whilst the Bush administration has applied sanctions to the Sudanese regime and publicised the use of the term “genocide” in relation to Darfur, it has combined this pressure with tacit support for the regime, using its intelligence service for a source of information and even covert operations (see “CIA uses Sudanese intelligence in Iraq”).

Unlike the previous Clinton administration, which gave Sudan a pariah status, Bush negotiated a peace between the Khartoum regime and the Southern rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), in 2005, the so-called Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), bringing the longest civil war in Africa to an end. There are currently some 10,000 UN peacekeepers deployed in maintaining this agreement. Chief among the considerations in Washington was that in a power-sharing arrangement the SPLM would be able to take some of Sudan’s oil wealth and open up possibilities for Western companies as opposed to Chinese firms.

Given these considerations, the US did not want a UN intervention in Darfur—in fact, Darfur was deliberately kept off the agenda in the CPA negotiations and the Sudanese regime was allowed to pursue its long-standing policy of using local militias to kill and drive out villagers. This did not stop the US moving pious resolutions at the UN on Darfur, knowing that they would be vetoed by China and Russia.

It may be that there has now been a shift in policy, and the balance has shifted towards those sections of the US ruling elite, especially in the Democratic Party, who are demanding a military intervention. Apart from conflicts within the US administration, there are a number of possible reasons for this that relate to Sudan.

Firstly, the conflict in Darfur itself has become increasing complex and violent. The UN peacekeeping intervention has been heralded without any peace agreement in place. In May of last year, under the auspices of the United States and Britain, an agreement was reached between the Sudanese government and one of the Darfur rebel movements, but the two other movements rejected it, leading to its collapse.

Instead of the conflict taking place between these rebels and the government-backed Arab Janjaweed militia, much of the fighting this year has been between rival Arab groups. There are now more than 12 different rebel groups, some of them with links to the Chad government, which is increasingly involved in the conflict. These groups have now been invited to talks in Arusha, Tanzania.

One prominent rebel leader, Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur of the Sudan Liberation Movement, has refused to attend. Another leader, Suleiman Jamous, is prevented from leaving Khartoum by the government. It seems unlikely that any meaningful peace agreement can be reached in the immediate future.

Secondly, the north-south CPA deal is unravelling and it is possible that conflict between Khartoum and the SPLM could recommence. The Sudanese government was supposed to pull its troops out of southern areas in July. According to the International Crisis Group’s latest report, this failed to happen in the oil-producing regions. The ICG also notes that the payments from Khartoum to the regional government in the south, supposedly its share of the oil wealth, are steadily decreasing.

Thirdly, the Sudan regime itself is increasingly unstable. With huge disparities of wealth between government circles that benefit from the oil wealth and the rest of the population, it is increasingly losing any base of support. As well as Darfur, there are less-publicised conflicts or potential conflicts in several other parts of the country, the far North, Eastern Sudan and the Kordofan region.

Whatever the machinations within American ruling circles, the chief concern of the US and Western governments is how to halt the growing Chinese involvement in Sudan as well as much of Africa. Unlike the International Monetary Fund—backed by the United States—China has not placed demands on African governments that they accede to free market policies of “good governance” before being granted loans or access to finance. It has also invested in a range of infrastructure projects and assiduously courted African leaders, avoiding the routine and hypocritical references to human rights issues made by the West.

As one recent book put it: “For western politicians and policymakers, China’s growing profile in the African oil business is more than just a commercial threat to western businesses. In particular, Beijing’s growing reliance on African oil has put it on a collision course with US political priorities for the continent. A growing chorus of voices in Washington—from congressmen to newspaper commentators—has been complaining about China’s willingness to do business in countries the United States is trying to pressure or isolate.” *

The Sudanese government has granted oil concessions throughout Darfur and other parts of the country, eager to extend beyond its present oilfields where the output is now peaking. To put such potential oil wealth under UN supervision and open to exploitation by Western governments rather than China is a key consideration behind the proposed peacekeeping intervention.

http://wsws.org/articles/2007/aug2007/darf-a07.shtml


The horn of Africa sits astride the sea lanes used to get much of Saudi and Gulf States oil to market. That makes it a great place for permanent US bases, in the minds of Pentagon planners, who intend to control the flow of that oil to China, India, Europe and wherever else.

Permanent US (and French) bases in the horn of Africa are also within striking distance of Sudanese oil fields which are only beginning to be developed.

Here's some more info you may find useful:

Who is the "Save Darfur" Coalition? Oh yeah, there are a couple of respected groups in there but by and large, huge Tel Aviv link here.

Many find something questionable about the "Save Darfur" enterprise led by many pro-Israeli and formerly pro-war-on-Iraq groups. It lies squarely in the blatant hypocrisy of pushing for sanctions and divestment against an impoverished under-developed country racked by 30 years of famine, of civil war, while our government in the United States is committing a significantly larger travesty in Iraq. For instance, estimates of Janjaweed and Sudani government violence against Darfur's rebels and civilians run as high as 300,000. Since 1990, the United States has killed more than four times that many Iraqis through invasions, bombing and sanctions.

Executive Committee

American Jewish World Service

American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA Society)

Amnesty International USA

Citizens for Global Solutions

Darfur Peace and Development

Genocide Intervention Network

International Crisis Group

Jewish Council for Public Affairs

NAACP

National Association of Evangelicals

National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA

STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition

Union for Reform Judaism

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum




National Groups

Affiliation of Christian Engineers

Africa Faith and Justice Network

Alliance of Baptists

American Anti-Slavery Group

AFL-CIO/Solidarity Center

American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO

American Humanist Association

American Islamic Congress

American Islamic Forum for Democracy

American Jewish Committee

Americans for Democracy in the Middle East (ADME)

Americans for Democratic Action

Anti-Defamation League

Arab American Institute

Armenian Assembly of America

Armenian Church of America

Armenian National Committee of America

B'nai B'rith International

Bread for the World

Buddhist Peace Fellowship

Central Conference of American Rabbis

Christian Solidarity International

Church Alliance for a New Sudan

Church World Service

Coalition for American Leadership Abroad (COLEAD)

Conference of Major Superiors of Men

Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations

Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations (CSJO)

Council for Secular Humanism

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

Cush Community Relief International

Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy

Darfur Association of the USA

Darfur Community Organization

Darfur Human Rights Organization of the USA

Darfur Rehabilitation Project

Dear Sudan

The Echo Foundation

Edah

The Episcopal Church, USA

Faithful America

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

Freedom Quest International

Foundation for Ethnic Understanding

Global Justice

Hadassah

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life

Human Rights First

The Hunger Site

ICNA: Islamic Circle of North America

Institute for the Study of Genocide

Interfaith Council

International Justice Mission

Islamic Circle of North America

Islamic Society of North America

Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights

Jewish Healthcare International

Jewish Labor Committee

Jewish Reconstructionist Federation

Jewish World Watch

Jubilee Campaign

KESHER

Leadership Conference of Women Religious

Lutheran World Relief

MADRE

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger

Metropolitan Community of Churches

Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation

Muslim Public Affairs Council

My Sister's Keeper

NA'AMAT USA

National Black Church Initiative

National Black Law Students Association

National Council of Jewish Women

National Jewish Democratic Council

National Student Campaign against Hunger and Homelessness

NETWORK: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby

Open Doors USA

Operation Sudan

Operation USA

Passion of the Present

Pax Christi USA

Peace Action

Physicians for Human Rights

Presbyterian Church USA; Washington D.C. Office

Progressive Jewish Alliance

Project Islamic H.O.P.E

Rabbinical Assembly

Rabbis for Human Rights North America

Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association

Refugees International

Religions for Peace-USA

Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

Res Publica

The Shalom Center

Social Action Committee of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations

SocialAction.com, c/o Jewish Family & Life!

Society for Humanistic Judaism

Society for Threatened Peoples

Sojourners

Stop Genocide Now

Teachers Against Prejudice

Third World Images, Inc

Tikkun

TransAfrica Forum

Ukrainian American Coordinating Council

Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

Union for Traditional Judaism

Unitarian Universalist Association

Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC)

United Jewish Communities

United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA)

United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism

Vaishnava Center for Enlightenment

Ve'ahavta

Western Sudan Aid Relief in the USA

Women of Reform Judaism

Women's America ORT

Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children

Workmen's Circle/ Arbeter Ring

World Evangelical Alliance



Regional Groups

African Mutual Assistance Association of Missouri

All Saints Church in Pasadena

Board of Rabbis of Northern California

Canadian Aid for Southern Sudan

Canadian Council for Reform Judaism

Canadian Federation of Jewish Students

Canadian Jewish Congress

CASTS: Canadians Against Slavery and Torture in Sudan

Chicago Coalition to Save Darfur

Cincinnatians United to Save Darfur

Cleveland Diocesan Social Action Office & Diocese of Cleveland

Congregation Beth Or

Connecticut Coalition to Save Darfur

Dallas Peace Center

Darfur Alert (Philadelphia)

Democrats for Life of New York

District of Columbia Baptist Convention

Help Darfur Now, Inc.

IKAR

Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington

Jewish Community Federation of Richmond

Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston

Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Dallas

Jewish Community Relations Council of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation

Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin, Sonoma, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties

Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey

Jewish Federation of Greater Houston

Jewish Federation of Tulsa

Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice

Mason-Dixon Darfur Alliance

Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur

Medjugorje International Relief

New Vision Partners, Inc.

New York Board of Rabbis

Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition (PDEC)

Save Darfur Coalition of South Palm Beach

Save Darfur Coalition of Western Massachusetts

STAND Canada (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur)

Sudan Human Rights Organization (SHRO) Washington, DC Chapter

Texans for Peace

Tikkun-Chicago

UJA Federation of New York

Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office (UU-UNO)

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) of America

Washington Buddhist Peace Fellowship

Washington Office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America

Western Massachusetts Darfur Coalition

Yeshiva University

http://www.bestcyrano.org/IMG/darfurOrgLogo.jpg

CONTROVERSY: Logo for the savedarfur.org, one of several orgs demanding intervention in the Sudan by the very people who intervened so selflessly in Iraq. Darfur should be a cautionary tale for easily misguided liberals, who apparently never learn, while it presents an opportunity for business for Western-based, corporate-styled human-calamity agencies, such as Save the Children, who find a raison d'etre in ministering to the stubborn wounds caused by backwardness, and the effects of colonialism and neocolonialism inflicted by the very establishments of which they form an integral part. And the Darfur tragedy reminds us, once again, how important it is to use the right words in a modern world dominated by far from impartial powerful propaganda machines.—The Editors

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as 'Arabs' confront victims clearly identifiable as 'Africans'.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under 'a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel'. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to 'political or civilian' considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot - to kill - without permission from distant places: these are said to be 'humanitarian' demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for 'force as a first-resort response'. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, 'Out of Iraq and into Darfur.'

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics - a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.

As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia - the Janjawiid - that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.

Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington's proclamation began with 'a genocide alert' from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was 'the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum'. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.

The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:

Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That's what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.

By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on 'violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties', and specifically to determine 'whether or not acts of genocide have occurred'. Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa's TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that 'the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its control.' But the commission did find that the government's violence was 'deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians'. Indeed, 'even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.' These acts, the commission concluded, 'were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity' (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: 'The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.'

At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces - namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement - which it held 'responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes' (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of 'crimes against humanity', rebel movements were accused of 'war crimes'. Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included 'officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity'. The list named 51 individuals.

The commission's findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of 'crimes against humanity' and 'war crimes' are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the 'foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity', i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of 'contractors'.

The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof's Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.

Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of 'ethnic cleansing': 'Sudan's Arab rulers' had 'forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages' (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. 'Right now,' he wrote on 27 March, 'the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.' He continued: 'The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government' and 'the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.' He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that 'at best, "only" 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease' but 'if things go badly, half a million will die.'

The UN commission's report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed 'massive displacement' of persons ('more than a million' internally displaced and 'more than 200,000' refugees in Chad) and the destruction of 'several hundred' villages and hamlets as 'irrefutable facts'; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had 'allegedly killed over 70,000 persons'. Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that 'the numbers are fuzzy.' Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as 'a UN estimate', to 'independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000'. A warning followed: 'and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.'

The publication of the commission's report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had 'Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration's past judgment that the killings amount to genocide': he had 'also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur's total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000'. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as 'nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day'. In three months, Kristof's estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that 'if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.' Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to 'nearly 400,000' (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?

In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: 'China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan's pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.' In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as 'war crimes'. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of 'underwriting' war crimes in Darfur?

Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology ('race') and, if not that, certainly in 'culture'. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday's victims are today's perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.

The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign's constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: 'Arabs' are trying to eliminate 'Africans'. But both 'Arab' and 'African' have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of 'Arab'. Locally, 'Arab' was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become 'Arab' over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of 'Arab' was 'privileged and exclusive'; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.

'African', in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an 'African' was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) - 'African' as Bantu and 'African' as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign's characterisation of the violence as 'Arab' against 'African' obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of 'Arab' and 'African': a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion 'Arab', as against 'African', has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.

The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as 'an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organisations'; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.

To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It's tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides - Hema and Lendu - are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?

Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: 'When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It's a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.' But instead of answering the question, Kristof - now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell - moved on: 'And malaria annually kills one million to three million people - meaning that three years' deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.' And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: 'We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That's what makes genocide special - not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.' That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias - many of them no more than child soldiers - were trained by America's allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur - but not the violence in Kivu - is named as a genocide?

It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof's words, the point is not so much 'human suffering' as 'human evil'. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of 'Arabs' killing 'Africans'. Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof's columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities.

Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: 'Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?' Two years later he asked: 'And where is the Arab press? Isn't the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?' Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC's Today Show. Elaborating on the 'real blind spot' in the Muslim world, he said: 'You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it's appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.'

If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: 'Early in his presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton's paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: "Not on my watch." But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.'

With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.

What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.

The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny 'Arabised' elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.

The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.

The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a 'civilising mission'. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised - sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.
Footnotes

* Contrast this with the UN commission's painstaking effort to make sense of the identities 'Arab' and 'African'. The commission's report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted 'Arab' against 'African' was facile. 'In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.' Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories 'Arab' and 'African': 'The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them' (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between 'Arab' and 'African'. On the one hand, 'Arab' and 'African' seem to have become political identities: 'Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as "African" and those supporting the government as the "Arabs". A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been "Arabised".' On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: 'The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.'

http://www.bestcyrano.org/mamdaniMah.Darfur32307.htm

And this is all you need to know about the "humanitarian" intervention the Kosovo crowd has been pushing.

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u107/jamesrisser02/AsiaTimes---DarfurOil.gif

Darfur: Forget genocide, there's oil

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.

<snip>

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Busi ... 5Cb04.html (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IE25Cb04.html)

According to Zionist Army Radio "Galats," Moshe Sergey said at a conference in Bar Ilan University, "The territory of the state of the Sudan is within the security strategy laid down by David Ben Gurion." He said, "the plans to divide up the Sudan into four or three little states are regarded as priorities on the `Israeli' agenda in the Middle East' region."


... I’m struck by the innocence of those who are part of the Save Darfur -- of the foot soldiers in the Save Darfur Coalition, not the leadership, simply because this is not discussed.

Let me tell you, when I went to Sudan in Khartoum, I had interviews with the UN humanitarian officer, the political officer, etc., and I asked them, I said, “What assistance does the Save Darfur Coalition give?” He said, “Nothing.” I said, “Nothing?” He said, “No.” And I would like to know. The Save Darfur Coalition raises an enormous amount of money in this country. Where does that money go? Does it go to other organizations which are operative in Sudan, or does it go simply to fund the advertising campaign?

AMY GOODMAN: To make people aware of what’s going on in Darfur.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: To make people aware of what is going on, but people who then, out of awareness, give money not to fuel a commercial campaign, but expecting that this money will go to do something about the pain and suffering of those who are the victims in Darfur, so how much of that money is going to actually -- how much of it translates into food or medicine or shelter? And how much of it is being recycled?

- Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's most prominent Africa scholars.

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/6/4/ma ... e_politics (http://www.democracynow.org/2007/6/4/mahmood_mamdani_on_darfur_the_politics)


Already carved up by the oil companies:

http://www.grassrootspeace.org/images/sudan_oil_map_10in.jpg

Legend:

http://www.grassrootspeace.org/images/oil_map_legend_sm.jpg

taken from http://www.grassrootspeace.org/dafur_maps.html

Forget genocide, there's oil

You can't do that. Remember, the meme about genocide goes to the issue of Christians versus those evil Muslims.
And the OILigarchy don't go nowhere without it's Christian culture-makers in tow...so the microgenocide is of macro level importance...

Normally, when one of Britain’s stuffy media watchdogs decrees that some public figure or broadcaster has said something less than honest, it causes a commotion. When the Advertising Standards Authority said earlier this year that Gillian McKeith, TV’s self-styled healthy eating guru, should stop using the title ‘Dr’, the media had a feeding frenzy. The Office of Communications’ harsh judgement against Channel 4 over the bullying of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother in January generated metres of newspaper coverage. And in recent weeks, official findings against TV production companies and broadcasters for fixing quizzes or taking liberties with the facts in the editing suite have led to widespread Pontius Pilate-style debates asking: ‘What is truth?’

However, one recent judgement – and an important and potentially deeply embarrassing one at that – has caused barely a ripple of reportage in the serious British media. Last Wednesday, 8 August, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint against the Save Darfur Coalition, an American-based collection of campaigners and celebrities whose aim is to raise awareness about the alleged genocide being executed by the Khartoum government in the western region of Sudan. The European Sudanese Public Affairs Council (ESPAC), an organisation that is generally pro-Khartoum, complained about a Save Darfur advert that was published in the British national press. The ad claimed: ‘SLAUGHTER IS HAPPENING IN DARFUR… 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed.’ The ESPAC said the claim of 400,000 innocent dead was based on speculation, and therefore this was a case of false, or at least misleading, advertising (1).

The ASA agreed. It examined evidence put forward by both the Save Darfur Coalition and the ESPAC. The Save Darfur Coalition cited a study carried out by the now-defunct Coalition for International Justice (CIJ) in April 2005, from which the 400,000 figure is derived. It cited the views of Dr John Hagan, a professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University in the US, who was a co-author of the CIJ study into mortality in Darfur. Dr Hagan has published an article on Darfur fatalities in the peer-reviewed journal Science, and as the Save Darfur Coalition told the ASA, Hagan believes that the 400,000 figure is ‘within the realms of possibility’ (2).

The ESPAC’s evidence pointed out that of the various estimates of the numbers of deaths in Darfur, the US General Accountability Office had judged a study by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which is affiliated with the World Health Organisation, and not the study by the Coalition for International Justice, to be ‘the most objective and methodologically sound’. The CRED’s report, published in May 2005, estimated that 120,000 deaths were attributable to the conflict over a 17-month period, from September 2003 to January 2005. And these 120,000 deaths were not all amongst ‘innocent men, women and children’: they included deaths of combatants as well as violent deaths of civilians and deaths from malnutrition. As part of its evidence, the ESPAC also quoted from a letter written by the CRED’s director, Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir, which was published in the Financial Times in May 2005: the letter criticised the CIJ’s report on the deaths of 300,000 or 400,000 people in Darfur, which was co-written by Hagan, as ‘sensational’ (3).

The US General Accountability Office (GAO) also found Hagan’s estimate to be ‘deficient’. In November last year, the GAO convened a panel of 12 experts to assess the credibility of six different mortality estimates for Darfur. The experts judged that Hagan’s source data was ‘unsound’, and that Hagan had failed to disclose his study’s limitations. Ten of the experts convened by the GAO found Hagan’s assumptions ‘unreasonable’ and 11 said that his extrapolations were ‘inappropriate’. Eleven of the 12 experts said they had ‘low’ or ‘very low’ confidence in Hagan’s study (4).

Finally, the ESPAC put forward evidence to show that mortality rates have decreased in Darfur since 2005. It cited a report in the World Health Organisation’s Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Bulletin from 2006 which said that the number of excess deaths in Darfur had fallen below emergency levels. It also presented comments made by Jan Pronk, a UN Sudan Special Representative, who said that mortality and malnutrition rates had decreased dramatically after 2005, largely as a result of aid received and the setting up of refugee camps (5). This would mean that the Save Darfur Coalition’s adverts were shocking for two reasons: first, they were allegedly based on ‘deficient’ data; second, they were aimed at raising awareness about the ‘SLAUGHTER’ of an alleged 400,000 people at a time when the number of deaths in Darfur had fallen below emergency levels.

The Advertising Standards Authority found in favour of the ESPAC and against the Save Darfur Coalition. In its adjudication published on 8 August, it said the Save Darfur Coalition had breached the ASA’s Code, clauses 3.2 (on ‘division of opinion’) and 8.1 (on ‘matters of opinion’). The ASA said: ‘Although the claim appeared in a strongly worded campaigning ad, and [the Save Darfur Coalition]…were entitled to express their opinion about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur in strong terms, we concluded that there was a division of informed opinion about the accuracy of the figure contained in the ad and it should not have been presented in such a definitive way.’ The ASA said that in future the Save Darfur Coalition should ‘present the figure as opinion, not fact’ (6).

Scour the British newspapers, and you’ll be hard pressed to find much coverage of this quite cutting judgement by the Advertising Standards Authority. You will see plenty of coverage over the past week of the fact that pro-breastfeeding groups have reported OK! magazine to the ASA for featuring a photograph of former glamour model Jordan feeding her child with a brand-named formula milk; but there seems to have been no serious newspaper coverage of the ASA’s adjudication on the Save Darfur Coalition. (It has, however, been covered in the New York Times.) Why is this? In my view, the ASA should not have the authority to censor or censure anyone, including the self-righteous activists of the Save Darfur Coalition. But the question remains: why has there been a deafening silence on the ASA’s adjudication, and why has it been left to a grey, censorious body to raise awkward questions about the Coalition’s sensationalist claims?

Perhaps because many in the British media have uncritically, and continually, repeated the Save Darfur Coalition’s claim that the Khartoum government is pursuing a genocide against Darfuris which has left 400,000 innocent people dead. And thus the ASA judgement is as embarrassing for them as it is for the Coalition. The Independent has published articles on the ‘mass slaughter of 400,000 innocent Muslims in Darfur’; the Observer has reported that ‘as many as 300,000 people have died [in Darfur] in three years’ (7). The Guardian has published articles that describe Darfur as ‘the first genocide of the twenty-first century’, in which ‘up to 400,000 [have been] murdered in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing’ (8). The British media have done a great deal to instil the figure of ‘400,000 innocent dead’ in the public’s mind. To cover the ASA’s adjudication in favour of a complaint by the ESPAC, who argue that actually around 120,000 have died in Darfur and that the mortality rates have since decreased, the media would have to own up to the fact that they themselves relied on ‘sensational’ figures, which are judged by experts to be ‘deficient’ and ‘unreasonable’ and are now described by the ASA as being in the realm of opinion rather than fact. It seems the British media are quite happy to cover media watchdog judgements against broadcasters, production companies and celebrity health experts, but they prefer to keep schtum about any judgement that might indict their own behaviour.

The ASA story shows the deep divide between Western campaigning on Darfur and the reality on the ground; between sensational Western claims about a twenty-first century genocide and the fact that, while things no doubt remain terribly grim in Darfur, the situation there has improved since the intense conflict period of 2003-2005. Western agitation for action in Darfur, which culminated in the deployment of a 26,000-strong UN peacekeeping force at the end of last month, spearheaded by new British PM Gordon Brown, is divorced from real events in Darfur or Sudan. This is not really surprising, since ‘Save Darfur’ activism – from Hollywood celebs calling for Western military action to the growth of campaigning commentary on the conflict – has not really been about Darfur. Rather, it has been about creating a new moralistic and simplistic generational mission for campaigners and journalists in America and Europe.

The Save Darfur brigade has effectively transformed Darfur into a morality tale, in which it plays the role of a pure and virtuous warrior force against what a columnist for the UK Daily Telegraph hysterically describes as a warzone ‘comparable to the death camps in Nazi Germany’ (9). And as with all morality tales, facts are less important than feelings, and the truth comes a poor second to creating a childishly simplistic framework of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University in the US and author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror, has written an excellent essay exploring how Save Darfur activists have transformed the conflict in Sudan into a platform for moral posturing. First, says Mamdani, they have denuded the conflict of its political complexities. A complicated struggle between various armed factions and government forces, over political influence as well as land, resources, grazing rights and dwindling water supplies, is reduced in Save Darfur propaganda to a genocide executed by ‘Arabs’ against ‘Africans’. As Mamdani writes, for Save Darfur activists – many of whom are American celebrities and writers – ‘Iraq is a messy place…with messy politics’. They far prefer to campaign on Darfur, despite their own government’s responsibility for what is happening in Iraq, because they see Darfur as ‘a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as “Arabs” confront victims clearly identifiable as “Africans”’ (10).

This inhumane reduction of Darfur to a ‘place without politics’ can be glimpsed in the statements of Save Darfur activists. Hollywood actor George Clooney, a leading light in the Save Darfur Coalition, says of the conflict: ‘It’s not a political issue. There is only right and wrong.’ (11) Fran Healy, lead singer of the British pop group Travis, who visited Darfur on behalf of the charity Save the Children, recently wrote in the British tabloid the Sun: ‘Africa is a very complex place, but the Darfur crisis is quite simple. The conflict is essentially the Arabs against the Africans. It’s all tied up in various battles over things like oil and gold.’ Clooney and Healy are not just being thick celebrities: rather, they’re taking their lead from the charities they represent and from campaigning journalists and intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Levy, all of whom insist that the political-historical conflict in Darfur is actually ‘quite simple’. This demonstrates, in Mamdani’s words, the ‘reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart’ (12).

Second, says Mamdani, Save Darfur activists and commentators describe the violence in Darfur in lurid and often exaggerated terms. ‘Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence’, he argues. ‘It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (“race”) and, if not that, certainly in “culture”.’ (13) Part of this ‘pornography of violence’, says Mamdani, has been the forever fluctuating figures of how many have died in Darfur, which inexplicably rise and fall, often in the same newspaper on different days, between 120,000 and 300,000 and 400,000. For Mamdani, ‘This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.’ (14) In short, Western activists’ fevered obsession with Darfur’s dead, and the grisly details of how they died, is motivated by a search for a gratifying feeling of virtuous outrage.

Many campaigners and writers in the West have cynically and opportunistically turned Darfur into ‘Our Mission’. They have done this through propaganda and deed. Propagandistically, they insist that the conflict is a simple case of African savages trying to wipe out African victims, and they have exaggerated the current scale of the suffering to suit the purposes of their own Heroes vs New Nazis morality tale. Increasingly, commentary on Darfur is not intended to clarify what is happening there but rather to indulge and flatter readers’ sense of self-serving anger. In deed, campaigners and writers have demanded Western military action to end a conflict that has actually been in decline since 2005 (although there have been renewed outbursts in recent months); and now they have got what they wanted, in the shape of the 26,000-strong UN force. Every bit as cynically as the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq, these activists have sought to turn someone else’s country and conflict into outlets for their own moral self-gratification.

If this only meant that they have distorted public understanding and debate about Darfur, that would be bad enough. But it’s far worse than that. The narcissistic campaigning of the Save Darfur Coalition and others has helped to prolong and even intensify violent clashes in the region. The good-and-evil presentation of the conflict has warped its dynamics. State Department officials claim that, during the height of the conflict, some Darfuri rebels ‘let the village burnings go on, let the killing go on, because the more international pressure that’s brought to bear on Khartoum, the stronger their position grows’ (14). Furthermore, the intense international and celebrity pressure on Khartoum has had the effect of inflaming and encouraging other rebels, based in eastern Sudan, to renew their war against the Khartoum government (15).

In Africa, Western do-gooding can prove deadly indeed. Save Darfur activism is one kind of porn that really has given rise to violence in the real world.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php? ... icle/3723/ (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3723/)

THE EXTREMIST ROOTS OF THE DARFUR REBELLION

"The conflict in Darfur has nothing to do with marginalisation or the inequitable distribution of wealth. Inherently it is a struggle between the two factions of the Sudanese Islamist movement, the (opposition) Popular Congress party and the ruling National Congress (party).”

Sudanese Human Rights Activist Ghazi Suleiman [1]

For all the claims of marginalisation, there is no doubt whatsoever that the conflict within the Sudanese Islamist movement following the government’s sidelining of the Islamist eminence grise Dr Hasan Turabi in 1999 is central to the Darfur conflict. Once the mentor of the present government, Dr Turabi had long been seen by reformists within Sudan as an obstacle both to the normalisation of relations with the United States and a peace agreement with southern rebels.

The ruling National Congress party, al-Mutamar al-Wattani, split in 2000/2001 with hard-liners under Turabi, many of them from Darfur, forming the Popular Congress party, al-Mutamar al-Sha’bi, in opposition to any engagement with Washington and the West and peace in southern Sudan. (De Waal has observed: “It is almost unbearably ironic that just as southern Sudan is on the brink of peace, Darfur – and with it the entire north – is convulsed by another war. The linkage is not accidental” [2].

Sudarsan Raghavan, the Africa bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, a veteran commentator on Darfur and critic of the government, has reported on the Islamist twist to the Darfur issue: “The violence in Sudan’s western province of Darfur…is widely portrayed as an ethnic-cleansing campaign by Arab militias against black African villagers.

But it’s also part of a long-running fight for political supremacy between Sudanese president Omar al Bashir and an Islamist who called Osama bin Laden a hero. [Emphasis added] For 15 years, Hassan al Turabi was Sudan’s most powerful man, deftly manoeuvring its leaders from his perch as speaker of the parliament. He counted bin Laden among his close friends and once called the United States ‘the incarnation of the devil’.” Turabi has subsequently been very critical of Khartoum for “selling out” to Washington, including Sudan’s considerable assistance in the war on terrorism and concessions Khartoum has made in the peace process.

Raghavan asserts that “the government is deathly afraid of Turabi” and has noted: “many Sudanese believe…Turabi’s supporters are the core of the rebel groups”. [3] He also cites Ghazi Suleiman, whom he described as a “well-known Sudanese human rights lawyer”, as saying of the war in Darfur: “It is a struggle to seize power in Khartoum, and the battlefield is in Darfur.” [4] In a different interview, with Reuters, Ghazi Suleiman stated that “Turabi is the mastermind of the existing conflict in Darfur. If he is released and if the government tries to come to an agreement with him he will stop what is going on in Darfur in a week.” [5]

This line of analysis has also been confirmed by other anti-government commentators. Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, the general-secretary of the Pan African Movement and co-director of Justice Africa, a human rights organisation, has also said: “Darfur is a victim of the split within the National Islamic Front personified by…Dr Hassan al-Turabi and his former protégé, General Omar al-Bashir. Al-Turabi’s support is very strong in Darfur…” [6]

The Justice and Equality Movement, at the heart of the Darfur conflict, is led by Turabi protégé Dr Khalil Ibrahim. Formed in November 2002, it is increasingly recognised as being part and parcel of the Popular Congress. Time magazine has described JEM as “a fiercely Islamic organisation said to be led by Hassan al-Turabi” and that Turabi’s ultimate goal is “the presidential palace in Khartoum and a stridently Islamic Sudan”. [7]

Khalil is a long-time associate of Turabi’s and served as a state minister in Darfur in the early 1990s before serving as a state cabinet-level advisor in southern Sudan. Ibrahim was a senior member of the Islamist movement’s secret military wing. The International Crisis Group has noted that “Khalil Ibrahim…is a veteran Islamist and former state minister who sided with the breakaway [Popular Congress] in 2002 and went into exile in the Netherlands.” [8] He was closely involved in raising several brigades of the Popular Defence Force (PDF) and mujahideen, many of them personally recruited from Darfur tribes, to fight rebels in southern Sudan. He was known as the emir of the mujahideen. Ibrahim recruited several hundred JEM fighters from the ranks of those Darfurian tribesmen he had led in the south, claiming that the Khartoum government had sold out to the southern rebels and Washington.

De Waal has mentioned that the student wing and regional Islamist cells followed Turabi into opposition following the split. Two other parts of the Islamist infrastructure that joined Turabi virtually en masse following the break were the financial cell and the military wing (which continued to exist separately of the Sudanese armed forces even after the 1989 coup which brought the present government to power, and which had previously administered the PDF and jihad fighters).

Both had always been strictly controlled by Turabi. This military wing formed the core of JEM and the military structures which planned and initiated attacks in Darfur. In November 2003, the Popular Congress admitted that some party members were involved in the Darfur conflict. [9] In January 2004 Turabi admitted supporting the Darfur insurrection: “We support the cause, no doubt about it…we have relations with some of the leadership.” [10] In the same month, Turabi admitted that 30 members of his Popular Congress party had been arrested in connection with activities in Darfur. [11]

The influential Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram was also explicit in its linking of JEM to extremist Islamism: “JEM is a militant Islamist organisation reputedly linked to the Popular National Congress Party (PNC) of the Sudanese Islamist ideologue and former speaker of the Sudanese parliament Hassan Al-Turabi.” [12] Al-Ahram has also noted Turabi’s involvement in Darfur: “Al-Turabi wields powerful influence among certain segments of Darfur society. Darfur, a traditional Islamist stronghold…The Sudanese government is especially concerned about the involvement of elements sympathetic to Al-Turabi in the Darfur conflict.” [13]

The International Crisis Group has also noted the Darfur war’s Islamist origins: “Darfur’s crisis is also rooted in the disputes that have plagued Sudan’s Islamist movement since it took power in 1989. Following a disagreement with Hassan el-Turabi, the architect and spiritual guide of the Islamist movement, a second split in the ruling Islamist movement had an equally destabilising impact on Darfur. In 2000, Turabi, then speaker of parliament, formed the Popular National Congress (later renamed the Popular Congress, PC) following a fierce power struggle with the ruling National Congress Party. To broaden its base, PC activists reached out to Sudan’s majority but marginalised African population.” [14] These roots have also been commented upon by human rights activists: “The second rebel group is the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), based mostly on the Zaghawa tribe. It is linked with the radical Popular Patriotic Congress party led by the veteran Islamist Hassan al-Turabi who has now fallen out with his former NIF disciples…The relationship between JEM and SLM remains one of the obscure points of the Darfur conflict, even if the two organizations claim to be collaborating militarily. The JEM is by far the richer of the two and the one with the greater international media exposure, even if its radical Islamist connections make it an unlikely candidate for fighting a radical Islamist government…The main financial support for the uprising comes… in the case of the JEM, from foreign funds under the control of Hassan al-Turabi. It is the importance of this last financial source that explains the fairly impressive and modern equipment of the rebel forces.”
[15]

De Waal has also written about the split between the Islamists and the Khartoum government: “It was a protracted struggle, over ideology, foreign policy, the constitution and ultimately power itself. Bashir won: in 1999 he dismissed Turabi from his post as speaker of the National Assembly, and later had him arrested. The Islamist coalition was split down the middle…The students and the regional Islamist party cells went into opposition with Turabi, forming the breakaway Popular Congress. Among other things, the dismissal of Turabi gave Bashir the cover he needed to approach the United States, and to engage in a more serious peace process with the SPLA – a process that led to the signing of the peace agreement in Kenya.” [16]

The International Crisis Group has noted that “the alleged link between JEM (Justice and Equality Movement) and the [Popular Congress] is the most worrisome for [Khartoum], since it fears Turabi is using Darfur as a tool for returning to power in Khartoum at the expense of his former partners in the ruling National Congress Party (NCP).” [17] It has also further noted that “The belief that the Darfur rebellion has been hijacked by disaffected rival Islamists is a main reason behind the government’s refusal to talk to the rebels, particularly JEM. The personal rivalry between Vice-President Taha and his exmentor Turabi for control of the Islamist movement and the country is being played out in Darfur, with civilians as the main victims.” [18] Dr Richard Cornwell, the Sudan expert at the South African-based Institute of Security Studies, has said that many Sudanese believe that JEM was formed as result of the power struggle between President Bashir and Hasan Turabi: “The Turabi link is very important…there are some people who are of the opinion that Turabi’s supporters in Khartoum and Darfur deliberately manufactured this crisis with a view of taking power.” [19] Agence France Presse has concluded that “disgraced Turabi loyalists of Muslim African origin…constitute the core of the JEM’s current leadership…More than a liberation movement, the JEM is seen as an organisation used as a tool by members of the political opposition to destabilise Beshir’s regime.” [20]

The Government of Sudan was initially very reluctant to concede that Dr Turabi and the Popular Congress were intimately involved in the Darfur conflict. In May 2004, however, Sudanese Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein admitted as much: “The Popular Congress is involved in the incidences in Darfur and the JEM is just another face of the Popular Congress.” [21] In September 2004, the Governor of West Darfur, Suleiman Abdullah Adam, stated that the Justice and Equality Movement was the military wing of the Popular Congress: “The JEM are the military wing of the Popular Congress and, as the military wing of the Popular Congress in Darfur, they try to escalate the situation.” [22]

It is also becoming apparent that the Popular Congress has been using a dual – interconnected – strategy in its attempts to overthrow the Khartoum government. They have used orchestrated events in Darfur to weaken the government domestically and internationally – perhaps even to the extent of foreign military intervention. And they have also attempted, in combination, to mount a military uprising. In March 2004, military officers linked to the Popular Congress attempted a coup d’état in Khartoum. The BBC said: “Those detained are also being linked to the uprising in the Darfur region.” [23] They also planned attacks on oil refineries and power stations. [24] In September 2004 the government also foiled another Popular Congress coup attempt. [25] The Islamist plotters were accused of plotting to assassinate or kidnap government officials and take over strategic installations, including state radio and television. [26] The government captured a large arms cache “with which the conspirators planned to kidnap and kill 38 government officials and destroy strategic targets in Khartoum”. [27] The trials of those involved in the coup attempts, including five retired members of the armed forces and a former cabinet minister, began in late 2004. [28] They were charged with possessing weapons, terrorism, undermining the constitutional system and plotting war. Twenty-one serving members of the armed forces were charged separately. [29] The Sudanese government began to move against Islamist extremists. [30]

It is clear that Turabi and Popular Congress deliberately chose Darfur to be the cockpit of their war against Khartoum. They also cold-bloodedly sought to project a racial element on the issue. Popular Congress activists originated and distributed a publication known as “The Black Book” alleging Khartoum’s marginalisation and neglect of Darfur and claiming that Sudan’s political elite was dominated by a northern Arab clique – seemingly the same clique once led by Dr Turabi. The Financial Times confirmed that the “Black Book” had been written by Justice and Equality Movement activists. The newspaper also noted that “The appearance of the Black Book did coincide with a deep split in the regime, which has exacerbated tension in society.” [31] Alex de Waal has also commented on the importance of the “Black Book” in subsequent events in Darfur: “The Islamist split quickly took on regional and ethnic dimensions. The west Africans and Darfurians who had come into the Islamist movement under Turabi’s leadership left with him…In May 2000, Darfurian Islamists produced the “Black Book”…The Black Book was a key step in the polarization of the country along politically constructed ‘racial’ rather than religious lines, and it laid the basis for a coalition between Darfur's radicals, who formed the SLA, and its Islamists, who formed the other rebel organization, the Justice and Equality Movement.” [32]

The intimate involvement of Islamist extremists such as Dr Turabi and his Popular Congress party in the Darfur insurgency has worrying implications for those eager to end and resolve the war. It is very difficult, for example, to end a conflict said to be about marginalisation and underdevelopment when at least one of major participants would appear to have a hidden agenda of overthrowing the Government of Sudan and replacing it with a more hard-line Islamist regime. Building schools and roads and drilling more water wells in Darfur, while doubtlessly useful, is not going to satisfy hard-line Islamist rebels in Darfur any more than reconstruction projects in Iraq have satisfied Islamist insurgents in that country.

http://www.bspac.org/darfur/extremist-r ... ellion.asp (http://www.bspac.org/darfur/extremist-roots-of-the-darfur-rebellion.asp)