Ten
Reasons Why
“Save Darfur” Is A PR Scam
By Bruce Dixon
30 November, 2007
Black Agenda Report
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 Kosovo 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 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 PR campaign
which depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, in which Arabs,
who are generally despised in the US media anyway, are exterminating
the black population of Sudan, is slick, seamless and attractive, and
seems to leave 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 refusing to talk to that government’s
negotiators is a sure way to avoid any settlement.
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 look expect to see details on the evening news, or hear
about them from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.
Bruce
Dixon is the managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, where
this article first appeared. Read other articles by Bruce
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