Bush
Decrees New Sanctions
Against Sudan
By Bill Van Auken
30 May, 2007
World
Socialist Web
President
Bush Tuesday announced that his administration is imposing a fresh set
of economic sanctions on Sudan, claiming the measures are designed to
pressure the government in Khartoum to halt the bloodshed in the country’s
western-most province of Darfur.
The sanctions target 30 Sudanese
government-owned companies along with a company that Washington accuses
of trafficking arms to Sudan, barring them from any financial relations
with the US and making it a crime for American corporations or individuals
to do business with them.
Three individuals—two
senior Sudanese officials and a rebel leader—are subjected to
similar economic sanctions under the presidential edict.
Bush also vowed to seek a
new United Nations Security Council resolution imposing a tighter arms
embargo on Sudan and creating conditions for further military intervention.
Four years of fighting in
the Darfur region between armed separatist rebels, government forces
and the Janjaweed, an ethnic Arab pro-government militia, have divided
indigenous Arab and non-Arab tribes and left an estimated quarter of
a million people dead—most of them from disease and hunger—while
displacing some 2 million others.
While Washington has consistently
sought to place the entire onus for the continuation of the conflict
on the government in Khartoum, there is ample evidence that the separatist
rebels have little incentive to reach a settlement, believing that a
continuation of the violence could increase pressure for Western intervention
and further their aims of regional autonomy and power-sharing.
In his speech Tuesday, Bush
justified the new set of sanctions by accusing Sudanese President Omar
Hassan al-Bashir of blocking the deployment of a United Nations peace-keeping
force.
The Sudanese government has
resisted the deployment of UN troops, fearing it could turn the country
into a de facto Western protectorate. Instead, it has called for an
expanded African Union force, with UN backing.
Once again, Bush labeled
the humanitarian crisis in Darfur “genocide.” This assessment
that has been rejected by both the United Nations and a number of aid
organizations active in the region, which acknowledge that Darfur constitutes
one of the world’s greatest humanitarian disasters, but dispute
the inference that violent repression carried out by the government
in Khartoum constitutes an attempt to exterminate an entire people.
The use of this term has
an unmistakable purpose. Under the UN charter, the determination of
genocide in a given country requires armed intervention. Washington’s
accusations of genocide have gone hand-in-hand with an attempt to portray
the conflict as a racial struggle pitting “Arabs” against
“black African” tribes, a gross simplification and distortion
of the conflict aimed at inflaming public sentiments.
The “genocide”
label is also utilized for domestic political purposes. Floated first
by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in the run-up to the 2004 election,
the accusation was popular both with the Christian right and Zionist
organizations, which have adopted the cause of Darfur for their own
reasons.
The Bush administration had
until recently dropped the use of the word genocide, but has resurrected
it in the last several months.
“For too long, the
people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is
complicit in the bombing, murder, and rape of innocent civilians,”
Bush declared in his White House speech Tuesday. “My administration
has called these actions by their rightful name: genocide. The world
has a responsibility to help put an end to it.”
If one were to remove the
word “Darfur” and substitute “Iraq,” the entire
passage would stand as a fitting indictment of the Bush administration
itself. The number of Iraqis who have lost their lives as a result of
four years of US war and occupation is at least three times as great
as number who have died in Darfur, and a far greater percentage of these
deaths is directly attributable to military action. Twice as many Iraqis
have been driven from their homes, either internally displaced or forced
into exile, and every essential social institution and aspect of basic
infrastructure has been decimated.
Washington is not pursuing
a policy of genocide in Iraq; its aim is not to wipe out the Iraqi people
or exterminate its Sunni population. Rather, it is to suppress all opposition
to its semi-colonial control of the country and its strategic oil wealth,
a goal that has unleashed violence and death on a near genocidal scale.
Nor is the government of
al-Bashir out to exterminate the non-Arab people of Darfur, but rather
has sought to suppress a challenge to its centralized control, an aim
that has also entailed widespread death and suffering.
There is, of course, a noteworthy
difference in these two tragic processes. George Bush heads the militarily
and economically most powerful nation on the face of the planet, while
al-Bashir is the president of one of its most impoverished—a nation
that bears the scars of protracted colonial domination and which was
an arena throughout the latter part of the twentieth century for bloody
wars fomented by US imperialism in an attempt to block Soviet influence
in the region.
The present improbable attempt
by George W. Bush to masquerade as a champion of human rights is driven
by similar geo-strategic interests. Sudan is a significant producer
of oil, with reserves estimated as high as 1.2 billion barrels. Moreover,
as the country with the largest land mass in Africa, it straddles the
strategic Red Sea, the Maghreb, Central Africa and the Horn of Africa.
Last, and certainly not least,
it has become the focal point of a bid by China to secure its steadily
rising demand for oil by cementing close economic and political ties
with the African continent.
China has invested some $15
billion in Sudan since 1999, and it owns a 40-percent stake in the Greater
Nile Petroleum Operating Co., which runs Sudan’s oil fields. Its
Sudanese oil imports have increased nearly six-fold over the past year,
reaching 220,000 barrels a day, according to customs figures released
by Beijing earlier this month.
Not surprisingly, Bush’s
imposition of unilateral sanctions and his demand that the UN follow
suit drew sharp criticism from Beijing, which has no intention of ceding
its interests in the region. According to the Associated Press, Liu
Guijin, China’s special envoy to Sudan, commented, “Willful
sanctions and simply applying pressure are not conducive to the solution
of the problem and will only make the issue more complicated.”
Having just returned from
a trip to Darfur’s refugee camps, Liu said he believed Sudanese
factions and international negotiators were working to resolve the humanitarian
crisis in the region.
“I didn’t see
a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger,” the Chinese envoy
told the press. He added, “The Darfur issue and issues in eastern
Sudan and southern Sudan are caused by poverty and underdevelopment.
Only when poverty and underdevelopment are addressed will there be peace
in Sudan.”
Opposition to the US sanctions
was echoed by Russia and South Africa. Russia’s ambassador to
the UN, Vitaly Churkin, questioned the timing of Washington’s
measures, commenting to Reuters that the UN had been working with Sudan
and “there have been some positive developments.”
South Africa’s UN ambassador,
Dumisani Kumalo, also expressed skepticism about the US sanctions. “Right
now the surprising thing was that we were thinking the government of
Sudan was now beginning to take the right actions and agree to what
we were going to do,” he said. “It’s not clear which
way we are going.”
Washington has no interest
in the stabilization of Sudan or a resolution of its humanitarian crisis.
Its policy there, as in Iraq, has since well before the Darfur crisis
been one of regime change, with its supposed humanitarian concerns serving
merely as a useful cover. As China—perceived by Washington as
its principal rising global rival—has expanded its influence in
the country, this desire for regime change has only strengthened.
There is also undoubtedly
within this new-found campaign over Darfur an attempt to shift public
attention from the catastrophe that US imperialism has created in Iraq.
The Bush administration enjoys
the strongest support for this diversion from within his ostensible
opposition, the Democratic Party, whose leading politicians have sought
to cast a US intervention there as some kind of moral crusade. Last
month, Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who heads the Foreign
Relations Committee and is a candidate for the party’s 2008 presidential
nomination, called for direct US military intervention.
“I would use American
force now,” he said at a hearing of his committee. “I think
it’s not only time not to take force off the table. I think it’s
time to put force on the table and use it.”
Similarly, in February, New
York Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, the party’s putative
front-runner in the presidential race, called for US action “to
stop the genocide in Darfur.” During testimony by Defense Secretary
Robert Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
she asked the Pentagon chiefs whether the Bush administration would
send in American warplanes to enforce a no-fly zone over Sudan.
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