The Oil
Factor About Sudan
By John Laughland
03 August, 2004
Guardian
If
proof were needed that Tony Blair is off the hook over Iraq, it came
not during the Commons debate on the Butler report on July 21, but rather
at his monthly press conference the following morning. Asked about the
crisis in Sudan, Mr Blair replied: "I believe we have a moral responsibility
to deal with this and to deal with it by any means that we can."
This last phrase means that troops might be sent - as General Sir Mike
Jackson, the chief of the general staff, immediately confirmed - and
yet the reaction from the usual anti-war campaigners was silence. Mr
Blair has invoked moral necessity for every one of the five wars he
has fought in this, surely one of the most bellicose premierships in
history. The bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, the 74-day
bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, the intervention in Sierra Leone
in the spring of 2000, the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, and
the Iraq war last March were all justified with the bright certainties
which shone from the prime minister's eyes. Blair even defended Bill
Clinton's attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan in
August 1998, on the entirely bogus grounds that it was really manufacturing
anthrax instead of aspirin.
Although in each
case the pretext for war has been proved false or the war aims have
been unfulfilled, a stubborn belief persists in the morality and the
effectiveness of attacking other countries. The Milosevic trial has
shown that genocide never occurred in Kosovo - although Blair told us
that the events there were worse than anything that had happened since
the second world war, even the political activists who staff the prosecutor's
office at the international criminal tribunal in The Hague never included
genocide in their Kosovo indictment. And two years of prosecution have
failed to produce one single witness to testify that the former Yugoslav
president ordered any attacks on Albanian civilians in the province.
Indeed, army documents produced from Belgrade show the contrary.
Like the Kosovo
genocide, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as we now know, existed
only in the fevered imaginings of spooks and politicians in London and
Washington. But Downing Street was also recently forced to admit that
even Blair's claims about mass graves in Iraq were false. The prime
minister has repeatedly said that 300,000 or 400,000 bodies have been
found there, but the truth is that almost no bodies have been exhumed
in Iraq, and consequently the total number of such bodies, still less
the cause of their deaths, is simply unknown.
In 2001, we attacked
Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and to prevent the Taliban from
allegedly flooding the world with heroin. Yet Bin Laden remains free,
while the heroin ban imposed by the Taliban has been replaced by its
very opposite, a surge in opium production, fostered by the warlords
who rule the country. As for Sierra Leone, the United Nations human
development report for 2004, published on July 15, which measures overall
living standards around the world, puts that beneficiary of western
intervention in 177th place out of 177, an august position it has continued
to occupy ever since our boys went in: Sierra Leone is literally the
most miserable place on earth. So much for Blair's promise of a "new
era for Africa".
The absence of anti-war
skepticism about the prospect of sending troops into Sudan is especially
odd in view of the fact that Darfur has oil. For two years, campaigners
have chanted that there should be "no blood for oil" in Iraq,
yet they seem not to have noticed that there are huge untapped reserves
in both southern Sudan and southern Darfur. As oil pipelines continue
to be blown up in Iraq, the west not only has a clear motive for establishing
control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted
the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely this. Oddly
enough, the oil concession in southern Darfur is currently in the hands
of the China National Petroleum Company. China is Sudan's biggest foreign
investor.
We ought, therefore,
to treat with skepticism the US Congress declaration of genocide in
the region. No one, not even the government of Sudan, questions that
there is a civil war in Darfur, or that it has caused an immense number
of refugees. Even the government admits that nearly a million people
have left for camps outside Darfur's main towns to escape marauding
paramilitary groups. The country is awash with guns, thanks to the various
wars going on in Sudan's neighboring countries. Tensions have risen
between nomads and herders, as the former are forced south in search
of new pastures by the expansion of the Sahara desert. Paramilitary
groups have practiced widespread highway robbery, and each tribe has
its own private army. That is why the government of Sudan imposed a
state of emergency in 1999.
But our media have
taken this complex picture and projected on to it a simple morality
tale of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They gloss over the fact that
the Janjaweed militia come from the same ethnic group and religion as
the people they are allegedly persecuting - everyone in Darfur is black,
African, Arabic-speaking and Muslim. Campaigners for intervention have
accused the Sudanese government of supporting this group, without mentioning
that the Sudanese defense minister condemned the Janjaweed as "bandits"
in a speech to the country's parliament in March. On July 19, moreover,
a court in Khartoum sentenced six Janjaweed soldiers to horrible punishments,
including the amputation of their hands and legs. And why do we never
hear about the rebel groups which the Janjaweed are fighting, or about
any atrocities that they may have committed?
It is far from clear
that the sudden media attention devoted to Sudan has been provoked by
any real escalation of the crisis - a peace agreement was signed with
the rebels in April, and it is holding. The pictures on our TV screens
could have been shown last year. And we should treat with skepticism
the claims made for the numbers of deaths - 30,000 or 50,000 are the
figures being bandied about - when we know that similar statistics proved
very wrong in Kosovo and Iraq. The Sudanese government says that the
death toll in Darfur, since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, is
not greater than 1,200 on all sides. And why is such attention devoted
to Sudan when, in neighboring Congo, the death rate from the war there
is estimated to be some 2 or 3 million, a tragedy equaled only by the
silence with which it is treated in our media?
We are shown starving
babies now, but no TV station will show the limbless or the dead that
we cause if we attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be what the Red
Cross always said it must be - politically neutral. Anything else is
just an old-fashioned colonial war - the reality of killing, and the
escalation of violence, disguised with the hypocritical mask of altruism.
If Iraq has not taught us that, then we are incapable of ever learning
anything.
· John Laughland
is an associate of Sanders Research Associates
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