ISR Issue 50, November–December 2006

Save Darfur from U.S. intervention

By AVERY WEAR AND DAVID WHITEHOUSE

AT LEAST 200,000 people-possibly twice that number-are now dead as a result of a nightmarish civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan.¹. In 2003, the government responded to rebel attacks by unleashing militia campaigns of mass slaughter, rape, and scorched-earth expulsions against the civilian populations that form the rebels' base. Some two million refugees, scattered throughout Darfur and into neighboring Chad, live on inadequate rations and are subject to further violence if they stray from their camps for firewood or food.² Some who returned to their villages are now fleeing a second round of ethnic cleansing-a result of a May 2006 “peace agreement” that splintered Darfur's already fractious rebel forces into factions that have started up a new tribal turf war.³

These horrific conditions began to be widely reported in 2004, and calls for armed intervention in the crisis have grown louder since then. In the U.S., an odd coalition of human rights activists, African American and liberal Democrats, Zionists, and right-wing evangelicals has spearheaded two rounds of pro-intervention demonstrations, the latest when the United Nations convened in September 2006. They called on the UN to build a force of 20,000 with a mandate to impose “peace,” by force if necessary, and protect the refugees. The UN force, envisaged as a joint effort with NATO, would replace 7,000 lightly armed African Union (AU) monitors who were posted in Darfur after a now-forgotten 2004 ceasefire. The AU mandate is set to expire at the end of the year, and the U.S. is stepping up pressure on the Sudanese government of Omar al-Bashir to accept the UN/NATO force as a replacement.

The movement is attempting to rehabilitate U.S. military intervention just at a time when interventions in Iraq and elsewhere have been discrediting the idea that U.S. intervention makes people better off.⁴ Some may be attracted to the campaign to “save Darfur” out of genuine humanitarian concern, but U.S. interests in the region are anything but humanitarian. A “robust” intervention in Darfur, as George Bush demands, would need to bribe, kill, and intimidate the warring parties until they stop fighting. But the only forces with that kind of strength are controlled by people who don't have Darfurians' interests at heart. Even if no U.S. troops set foot in Sudan, U.S. support and guidance would be key to the force. U.S. involvement in Sudan is already considerable, and imperial planners will escalate it only if they see it as a way to further their prime objective in the region-to muscle out potential rivals such as China in a scramble for oil and other resources. If the U.S. is allowed to get deeper into Sudan, things could actually get worse for Darfurians-and for many other Africans.

The perennial idea that imperial forces can be made to do some good “just this one time” relies on a focus on isolated crises without a sense of what really moves imperial governments into action. We need to look at the way the U.S. has used past humanitarian crises for strategic gain, or indeed ignored them where no strategic benefit was likely. But first, it's important to see that the roots of the Darfur crisis itself grow, in part, out of previous wounds inflicted by imperialism. There are local forces, chief among them Sudan's central government, that bear major responsibility for the current crisis. Imperial plunder, however, has made such catastrophes likely to break out and recur.

Legacies of colonialism

Sudan, one of the world's twenty-five poorest countries, has gone through a devastating social crisis for nearly thirty years. The actions of Western powers lie behind the major sources of the crisis-a crushing external debt and persistent internal strife.

Some of the internal division dates back to before the British conquest. The late-nineteenth century regime of Mohammed Ahmad (known popularly as the “Mahdi,” or the chosen one), based in “the Arab and Muslim North, treated the South…a region of numerous languages and ethnicities…as a hinterland-a source of resources and slaves.”⁵

The Mahdi led a fierce resistance movement when the British sought to extend their control of the Nile south from Egypt, but the British took power over Sudan in 1898-99 with the help of the Maxim machine gun. They held power by continuing to set Muslim against Christian and Arab against African. Their main interest was in the produce of the fertile Nile valley, which they controlled from the northern city of Khartoum.

The focus on wealth extraction was universal among colonial overlords, and it produced two legacies that still fuel today's conflicts.

First is a string of weak post-colonial states whose infrastructures were shaped to assist the flow of wealth to the colonial power. A capital city such as Khartoum was thus relatively developed, and the “periphery” was first defined by its irrelevance to the colonizer's goals, then neglected. If the periphery did not start out poor in absolute terms, it tended to become so because it was politically marginalized. And once the period of colonial looting was over, the new states were starved for capital. Where foreign investors filled the gap, their own needs for wealth extraction reinforced the existing regional disparities. For example, Darfur, in Sudan's far west, is still not connected to Khartoum by a single paved road, and it has the country's worst schools and hospitals.⁶

Second, the practice of setting up colonial “centers” to serve as nodes of wealth-extraction produced outer colony boundaries that have no relation to language or ethnicity-or were drawn deliberately to split troublesome groups. So the peripheries are not only poor but tend to be ethnically distinct from the center, while often bearing a connection to a major ethnic or language group in a neighboring territory. This circumstance has set up a pattern of rebellions by peripheral minorities against discrimination by the center-backed by rulers of neighboring states who exploit their ethnic connections to disrupt their regional rivals. Sudan and its neighbors Chad, Eritrea, and Uganda, for example, regularly trade credible charges of cross-border support for insurgencies in each other's territory.

The same option is open to imperial powers that are located farther away. Local rebellions, based on real grievances in a post-colonial country, can become the entry point for an outside power to manipulate the country's internal situation. This is true, of course, with the Kurds in Iraq, but also throughout South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. But a superpower like the U.S. can do more than a regional power can. It can strive to become a remote “super-sponsor” of multiple rebellions against a target state, such as Sudan, through its own clients in the region.

Ravages of civil war and debt

Sudan achieved independence from Britain in 1956 and was soon plunged into a civil war between the Arab north and the animist/Christian south. The U.S. and USSR fought their Cold War through opposing factions. In 1969, General Gaafar Nimeiri took power allied with Moscow, but switched to Washington's side two years later.

When Nimeiri reached a peace agreement with the south in 1972, a period of some hope and progress opened. Agriculture and industry received state support, and Sudan was to become the breadbasket of the region-thus integrating it into the rising economic bloc of Arab oil states. Profits would be reinvested into textiles and heavier industry. Initial finance came from the early 1970s glut of petrodollars on the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. tolerated these moves toward development and independence-although the World Bank did cut off some projects-because Khartoum sided with them in the Cold War.⁷

But Sudan was ultimately caught in the same noose as most countries that launched development schemes in the 1970s. As worldwide profit rates declined, ending the relative global prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, commodity prices fell, interest rates rose, and finance dried up. Through policies such as the interest rate hikes of Jimmy Carter's Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the rich countries pushed the worst effects of recession onto the poor. Like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and others, Sudan entered the 1980s with a ballooning public debt-some $11 billion by 1985. Debt service consumed half of all government spending. The U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) required Sudan and other victim governments to apply Hoover-style economics during recessions as a condition for new loans. The IMF imposed no fewer than six devaluations on the Sudanese pound between 1978 and 1988, and the economy nosedived from a GDP of $468 per capita in 1978 to $288 in 1984.⁸ We may never know how many children starved.

In Darfur, economic downturn coincided with prolonged drought to produce a Sudanese component to the African famine that captured world attention in 1984. This combination of drought and economic crisis forms the backdrop to today's Darfur conflicts. Khartoum's inaction during this crisis highlighted Darfur's neglect and fueled resentment. The central government in turn responded by cultivating alliances with Arab-identified herders in their conflicts with farmers.⁹ While virtually all Darfurians are Muslims, tribal and racial dimensions in this conflict have allowed Khartoum and, as we shall see, other powers to stoke tensions and play divide and rule.

Having pushed it into recession, and then required measures that created a depression, the Reagan White House stood by the corrupt Nimeiri government as economic crisis turned to class struggle. Food riots broke out in 1983.¹⁰ A desperate Nimeiri responded with repression and a declaration of sharia (Islamic) law, in an attempt to hold power by turning the struggle for food into a religious bloodbath.

Nimeiri also encroached on the autonomy the south had gained in the 1972 settlement of the earlier civil war. The central motive was Chevron's 1978 discovery of oil deposits in the south. Nimeiri was overthrown anyway, but he succeeded in provoking a revival of the north-south war. John Garang pulled together the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1983 to fight for southern autonomy and an end to sharia law. But once again, legitimate southern grievances became enmeshed in the strings of Cold War puppet-masters. The USSR backed Garang's SPLA through its Ethiopian proxy, the junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam.¹¹

The U.S. backed the Islamic fundamentalist governments that succeeded Nimeiri. The corporate connection to Sudanese oil was broken early on, though, as Chevron pulled out in 1984 when rebels killed three of their employees.¹2 In the mid-1980s, Khartoum pioneered the tactic in the south it later inflicted on Darfur-forming ethnically based local militias to lay waste to the civilian population of rebel-controlled areas. Assured of U.S. support in a war to expel people from local oil fields, the Khartoum-backed militias created famine and resurrected the capture and sale of slaves.¹³

The U.S. war-criminal alliance with Sudan was stable until 1991. That year, the fall of Ethiopia's Mengistu, combined with the general decline of the USSR's power, reduced pressure on the U.S. to find regional allies such as Khartoum against Soviet influence. Thus, in the same year, when Sudan refused to back the first Gulf War against Iraq, George Bush Sr. retaliated by declaring Sudan a state sponsor of terror, and switched to backing his erstwhile enemies, the southern SPLA rebels. The U.S. eventually transferred more than $2 billion of covert aid to the SPLA.¹⁴

The U.S. Christian Right enthused over the southern insurgency, even though most in the south-as animists-were what evangelicals would refer to as “pagans.” The southern elite, including Garang, were nevertheless seen by some as Christians in a holy war with Islam. The SPLA led a struggle based on mass sentiment and real grievances, and it had its own life, at least before becoming a pawn in the superpower contest. But the Fort Benning-trained Garang also ruled with an iron hand, imprisoning or killing those who opposed his rule in the south.¹⁵ Two million people died in this U.S.-fueled hell, and four million are still refugees.¹⁶

As the war ground on in the Clinton years, the rift with Khartoum deepened. Hassan al-Turabi, second in charge of the government and the country's leading Islamic ideologue, made the country an international focal point for political Islam. Many radicals made their way to Sudan, including Osama bin-Laden, who took asylum there after Saudi Arabia expelled him in 1991. The government made an overture to the West by assisting France in the capture of international fugitive “Carlos the Jackal” in 1995, but in 1996, the U.S. pulled out its diplomats in response to rumored threats against their lives. They've never returned. Sudan expelled bin-Laden later in the year, but Clinton blamed Sudan along with bin-Laden for the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. cruise missiles destroyed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum on the false pretext that it was producing chemical weapons precursors under bin-Laden's direction.¹⁷

Clinton's actions in this period put off the day when U.S. corporations could return to the south's oil business. In 1997, he declared Sudan a “state sponsor of terror” and issued a ban on U.S. corporate connections with Khartoum. Oil-hungry China lost no time in filling the gap. That same year, China partnered with Sudan, Malaysia, and Canada to renew exploration. The joint venture funded a 900-mile pipeline from the south to Port Sudan on the Red Sea that opened in 1998.¹⁸ China now owns 40 percent of the rights to Sudan's main oil field.¹⁹

These developments gave the U.S. incentive to repair its ties with Sudan. Meanwhile, Khartoum drew closer to the U.S. on its own. Three years after expelling bin-Laden, president Omar al-Bashir fired Turabi from the government. And following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Bashir turned thirty individuals and 200 files over to U.S. intelligence.²⁰ In return, Bush removed his new collaborator from restrictions on international finance,²¹ though not from the list of terror-sponsoring states. U.S. direct investment is thus still banned.

To finally restore peace and corporate connections with Sudan, the State Department began pressuring Garang to the peace table. In a January 2005 treaty, Garang-who died later that year in a helicopter crash-won a position in the Khartoum government and a share for the South in its own oil wealth. But U.S. plans to return to Sudan's oil business were upset by the rebellion and counteroffensive in Darfur.

Crisis and conflict in Darfur

Darfur, a region three-quarters the size of Texas in Sudan's far west, has experienced even more isolation and neglect than the South. From its impoverished starting point, the region went into a crisis as a result of a drought, affecting all north African countries, that stretched from the 1970s into the mid-1980s.²² The ideological fracture lines of the crisis, however-which shaped up as a fight for land between Arab-identified and African-identified residents-were far from natural.

The contested area lies mostly in the Sahel, a region south of the Sahara that experiences a yearly transition from green (with rains) to brown (without them). Even when the Sahara is not spreading because of drought, nomadic animal herders-largely but not entirely Arabic-speaking-make yearly migrations in response to fluctuations in the Sahel's foliage. For centuries, they have mixed with settled farmers, who are largely but not entirely speakers of African languages. In good years, the two groups had complementary economies, but desertification began to set them at odds. During the famine year of 1985, Sheikh Hilal Abdullah, father of the future leader of the Arab “Janjaweed” militias, said that

he himself had traveled south every year to Kargula on the slopes of the Jebel [mountain] Marra, where the Fur chief…would welcome him with a feast and the nomads would assist the farmers by buying their grain, taking their goods to market and grazing their camels on the stubble of the harvest. On leaving, the sheikh would present the [chief] with two young camels. But now all this was changing: Fur farmers were barring the Arabs' migratory routes and forcing the camel herders to range further south in search of pastures.²³