Darfur:
Bush And Blair Plan
No-Fly Zone And Consider
Air Strikes Against Sudan
By Ann Talbot
21 December 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
Bush administration is considering imposing a no-fly zone over the Darfur
region in western Sudan. It would be backed up by the threat of air
strikes, a naval blockade and an extension of the existing sanctions
regime.
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair
has endorsed the plan. Blair announced his support for “tougher
action” on his return from a trip to Washington. A UK official
was reported in the Financial Times as saying, “The Americans
mean business.”
The plan seems to be to work
with France, which has 1,200 troops in Chad and units of its air force
in the Central African Republic. French mirage jets have already carried
out air sorties over the last two weeks in the Central African Republic
and Chad. A spokesman from the French Ministry of Defence warned of
the danger of “Somalisation” of the region. He told the
Independent, “We want to ensure that the Darfur crisis does not
take on a further dimension. The region is crucial if we want to put
a peace force in Darfur.”
According to local reports,
thousands of civilians were forced to flee from the town of Birao in
the Central African Republic as a result of a French air strike. If
France were to join with the US and UK in imposing a no-fly zone it
would mean a joint attack on one of the poorest countries in the world
by three major powers.
At present, diplomacy is
continuing. Andrew Natsios, the US special envoy to Sudan, reported
some progress after a four-day trip to Khartoum during which he met
with President Omar al-Bashir. He had a two-hour meeting with Bashir,
who has refused to see him on previous visits. According to Natsios
the Khartoum regime is now prepared to accept the presence of United
Nations technical staff, including military advisors, in Sudan.
This concession to US pressure
follows Natsios’s public threat that the US would resort to what
he called “Plan B.” Natsios declined to say what this plan
entailed, but the report in the Financial Times makes it clear that
the US and UK are considering military action. Khartoum’s concession
falls short of accepting the 13,000 UN troops that the US is demanding
should be allowed into Sudan.
The possible move to military
action against Sudan follows a period in which the US ruling elite have
been deeply divided over the best course of action. The divisions have
been no less marked between the US and Europe.
If Bush now seems to be leaning
towards military action it is despite warnings from the US military,
which is sceptical about its ability to intervene effectively in Sudan.
With an area of 1 million
square miles, Sudan is the largest country in Africa. It borders on
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central
African Republic, Chad, Libya and Egypt. The potential for war in Sudan
to involve other African countries is immense. Its Red Sea coastline
and Arab and Muslim culture in the north give it links to the Middle
East.
The possibility of the conflict
expanding on a more than regional scale is immense. China, for example,
is the largest foreign investor in Sudan. The Chinese National Petroleum
Company (CNPC) has invested £8 billion in the Sudan oil industry.
According to the Washington Post, China owns 40 percent of the Greater
Nile Petroleum Operating Co., which dominates Sudan’s oilfields.
Almost half of CNPC’s overseas oil and 7 percent of all Chinese
oil imports are thought to come from Sudan. Chinese workers are engaged
in infrastructural projects, such as the 900-mile pipeline that connects
the Heglig oilfield in Kordofan with Port Sudan on the Red Sea. According
to the Daily Telegraph, 10,000 Chinese nationals worked on this project.
A US or British hit on a Chinese merchant ship or Chinese owned plant
such as the pipeline could have global implications.
Nor is it certain than any
agreement between the US, UK and France would withstand intervention
in this strategically important country. Western Sudan was the scene
of the Fashoda incident, which almost brought Britain and France to
war before World War I.
Bush’s threat to attack
Sudan flows directly from the US debacle in Iraq. The worse the situation
in Iraq has become for the US and its allies, the more confident has
the Khartoum regime felt to assert its own interests in the Horn of
Africa and beyond. The result is that the Horn of Africa is at the epicentre
of a growing regional conflict that is now spreading into Central Africa.
It is a conflict that the New York Times has described as the next Congo.
The epithet is not inappropriate given the region’s mix of mineral
wealth and complex rivalries. But it was possible for imperialist rivalries
over Congo to be contained in both the post-World War II period and
in the late nineteenth century. That is far less certain today.
The Sudanese government has
stepped up its murderous campaign against the civilian population of
Darfur and is spreading the war into Chad and the Central African Republic.
This escalation follows the signing of a Darfur peace deal in May.
The Darfur agreement is only
one of the many Western-backed deals that has been disrupted by Khartoum’s
action. Conflict has again broken out in southern Sudan where a peace
deal brought an end to the civil war only last year. The need to maintain
a deal that offered the prospect of US and European access to the oilfield
of the south was one of the reasons that the Bush administration has
previously resisted calls to take action over Darfur.
Such was the brutality of
the attacks by an unidentified militia in southern Sudan that some observers
have suggested that they are the work of the Lord’s Resistance
Army (LRA) that has been engaged in an uprising in northern Uganda for
the past 20 years. The LRA recently began talks with the Ugandan government.
Long backed by Sudan, the LRA may now be active again—this time
working against the Khartoum regime’s internal enemies.
Meanwhile in Somalia, the
Supreme Islamic Courts Council (SICC) has driven out the Transitional
Government that was set up under a UN-backed deal in 2004 and which
established itself in Somalia at the beginning of this year. Somalia’s
neighbours Eritrea and Ethiopia are being drawn into the dispute. Ethiopia
and Eritrea were at war from 1961 until 2000 with a brief interlude
of peace between 1991 and 1998 and that conflict is set to reignite
over Somalia. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has declared
that his country is at war with the SICC. Eritrea has given its support
to the SICC.
The immediate cause of the
spread of conflict may be a new assertiveness on the part of the Sudanese
government. But the real causes of the instability of the region lie
in the policies of US imperialism, both past and present, and the long
history of colonial involvement going back to the nineteenth century.
Since the days of the Cold
War the US has poured weapons into the area because of its strategic
significance. It has supported various nationalist elites in ferocious
internecine wars as it tried to exclude the Soviet Union from the area.
By the end of the Cold War these national elites controlled rival armed
camps with ruined economies. They attempted to maintain their political
grip by plunging their countries into a further round of wars and civil
wars. Such are the conditions that US policy has created in the Horn
of Africa that if Sudan did not assert itself, one of its rivals would
make its own bid to become the regional hegemon.
A major humanitarian disaster
is already unfolding in Darfur. The Khartoum regime is attempting to
depopulate a region the size of France. It has unleashed a scorched
earth policy in which villages and crops are destroyed, and civilians
raped and mutilated. An estimated 1 million people have been displaced
into makeshift camps where they are dependent on aid handouts and 200,000
killed by the government-backed Janjaweed militia.
A Save Darfur campaign has
won support from celebrities such as George Clooney, who visited Darfur
with fellow actor Don Cheadle and Olympic athletes Tegla Loroupe and
Joey Cheek. But it is endorsed by major political figures such as former
US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who was part of the Clinton
administration when the US destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum
with cruise missiles. Albright and other Democrats at the National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs are in fact lobbying for a return
to that same militarist policy in relation to Sudan.
Former US secretary of state
for Africa Susan Rice, a board member of the National Democratic Institute,
called for air strikes against Sudan at the beginning of October in
a Washington Post article. “The United States, preferably with
NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese
airfields, aircraft and other military assets,” Rice wrote. “It
could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan’s oil exports flow.
Then UN troops could deploy—by force if necessary, with US and
NATO backing.”
The model she cites is the
NATO invasion of the Balkans. She wrote: “The real question is
this: Will we use force to save Africans in Darfur as we did to save
Europeans in Kosovo?” The reality of the NATO bombing campaign
against Serbia was that Albanians as well as Serbs were killed, while
ethnic tensions were increased. The purpose of the Balkan intervention
was not to protect the Albanian minority, but to secure access to the
vital oil reserves of the Caspian. Camp Bondsteel, one of the biggest
US military bases to be built from scratch since the Vietnam War, now
sits in Kosovo close to vital pipelines.
Oil is also a question in
Sudan and the surrounding countries. Southern Sudan has large oil reserves.
The extent of the oil reserves in the Darfur region is still uncertain,
but they may be considerable. Rolls-Royce Marine in Norway is manufacturing
$10 million worth of oil equipment for Sudan. According to two Norwegian
organisations—Norwatch and the Norwegian Council for Africa—this
equipment is destined for Darfur. Eric Hagen of Norwatch said, “The
equipment probably will be used to connect new oilfields to the gigantic
main oil pipeline in Sudan.”
Sudan’s national oil
company began drilling in Darfur last year. According to the Guardian,
Friedhelm Eronat, a wealthy British-based businessman, has bought the
largest single share of oil rights in Darfur through his company Cliveden
Sudan. He may be acting alone or on behalf of another company. US companies
are currently excluded from Sudan by US sanctions. Eronat gave up his
US citizenship and became a UK citizen shortly before the deal was signed.
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