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SUDAN AND OIL
The United States and Britain are playing
the ethnic cleansing and genocide cards. Again. This time in Sudan.
And while there may indeed be a genocide
going on, it's very unlikely either country cares overly much about ethnic
cleansing and the destruction of a people.
After all, they have always been quite
willing to live with, even perpetrate, atrocities every bit as vile, if,
somewhere down the line, there's a buck in it.
And in Kosovo, where they said there was a
genocide planned and ordered by Slobodan Milosevic (but have failed to produce
any evidence or testimony to that effect at the Hague Tribunal), and where in
the aftermath of the NATO war thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma have been
driven from their homes, ethnic cleansing has been both a pretext to wage war,
and, where it offers no geo-strategic benefit, something to be ignored.
What's more likely to be the case is that
the conflict in Sudan provides a compelling pretext for military intervention,
one which could eventually see the US and Britain stumble into Sudanese oil
wells, while claiming to be rescuing the victims of ethnic cleansing.
Here's what's said to be going on: Arab
militias, the Janjaweed, have pursued a campaign of ethnic cleansing, displacing
more than one million from their homes in Sudan's Darfur region and driving them
into filthy, disease ridden refugee camps in neighboring Chad, (much as
numberless Afghans were driven by US bombs into filthy, disease ridden refugee
camps in neighboring Pakistan.)
On the surface, it seems simple enough.
Ethnic cleansing. Maybe genocide. An obligation on the part of the international
community to act. But it's not quite as simple as that.
For one thing, Sudan has oil -- lots of
it.
And there's been a 21-year long civil war
raging in the country, with the secessionist Sudanese People's Liberation Army,
which seeks self-determination in the south, battling the government in
Khartoum, not one of Washington's favorites.
The SPLA, backed by the US, is said to
employ terrorism against civilians to further its aims -- hardly the kind of
organization the US is supposed to be backing, yet precisely the kind of
organization the US government takes a shine to, if its interests are served.
The US doesn't abhor terrorism so much as terrorism that works against its
interests, rather than for them.
And there's China. Dangerously dependent
on US controlled sources of oil, it's involved in a consortium developing
Sudan's oil. China needs to cultivate sources of supply outside the US
orbit.
Problems is, at every turn, the US is
there to thwart its plans.
The Shanghai Five, a security
organization China established to protect a planned pipeline to carry petroleum
resources from the oil rich Caspian Sea, fell apart when the US invaded
Afghanistan and set up bases throughout Central Asiaalong the proposed pipeline
route.
And China also had a deal to develop Iraqi
oil -- one that's unlikely to be honored, now that the US has 141,000 troops in
the country, and has installed its own people in Iraq's interim government to
look out for the interests of corporate America.
Blocking Chinese oil deals in Iraq,
scuppering the Shanghai Five, and working to undermine Chinese oil field
development in Sudan serves a strategic goal of the US: to limit the rise of a
great power rival. Keeping China (along with the European Union and Japan)
dependent on the US for access to oil, is one way of ensuring US primacy remains
unchallenged.
Is it any wonder then that China is
reluctant to approve a proposed UN Security Council Resolution imposing
sanctions on Sudan, or that it refused to authorize the US invasion of Iraq (or
that the US is seeking one in Sudan, and sought a UN imprimatur to conquer
Iraq)?
Face it. The US doesn't care about ethnic
cleansing. It's seeking to dominate the oil producing regions of the world: to
secure its own oil supply; to ensure oil sales continue to be denominated in US
dollars (thus propping up the dollar in the face of a yawning trade deficit);
and to ensure strategic competitors Japan, Europe and China remain dependent on
the US for access to oil.
It doesn't give a damn about ethnic
cleansing. Look around at who the US steadfastly supports.
Israel, one of Washington's favorites, was
founded on ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were driven into
squalid, disease-ridden refugee camps in neighboring countries, where they and
their descendants still live, many decades later.
If Washington is so concerned about ethnic
cleansing, why isn't it threatening Israel with sanctions and military
intervention?
And as far as US legislators are
concerned, the right of Palestinians to return to the homes they were driven
from or fled a measure that would reverse ethnic cleansing is completely out
of the question.
Indeed, rather than opposing Israel's
actions, the US abets the Zionist state, and facilitates the ongoing expansion
of its borders -- at the Palestinians' expense. Is this the behavior of a
country that abhors ethnic cleansing and genocide?
A closer parallel is Colombia, in which a
decades long civil war has raged between the government, right-wing
paramilitaries, and Leftist guerilla groups. While the government and
paramilitaries have engaged in the same activities the Janjaweed are accused of,
US policy has been to support the government, and to oppose the
guerillas.
If they can, the US and its British ally
will use the civil war in Sudan as a pretext to intervene militarily, to secure
control of the country's oil resources, in the same way they've done in Iraq,
and in the same way they may soon do even if there's a Democrat in the White
House in Iran.
Great capitalist powers don't care about
the fate of people abroad, or about most people who live within their own
borders, for that matter. There's too much evidence of their indifference to
believe otherwise.
But what they do care about is markets,
and opportunities for profitable investment, and sources of raw materials,
especially oil.
Civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide
come in handy when the commercial interests of a country's business class can be
pursued by military means. They offer a ready made justification for
invasion.
But more than that, these grim events are
often outcomes of the very same scramble for markets, investment opportunities
and raw materials.
The US, UK and Germany were very much
involved in fomenting the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia, encouraging
Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia to secede. The US funneled arms to the Bosnian
Muslims, facilitated the flow of Mujahedeen into Bosnia, provided intelligence
to the Croats, and, with Germany and Britain, trained and equipped the KLA,
among other things.
Once the kindling of ethnic conflict was
carefully gathered in a pile, and a spark added, the roaring fire was cited as a
rationale to hurry to the scene, with fire hoses at the ready. Problem is, the
fire hoses were just props -- pass keys to gain entry. The fires were left to
rage unchecked.
And the US, as backer of the SPLA, is
hardly innocent of involvement in Sudan's long running civil war, or, through
the billions of dollars in aid it provides Israel every year, of the ethnic
cleansing carried out by Israel in Palestine.
Western intervention in trouble spots,
then, can hardly be meliorative. The West itself is in many instances at least
partly, if not wholly responsible for the very conflicts it proposes to resolve
through intervention.
In the long running serial of imperialist
intervention, Sudan is just another episode.
*******
A group calling itself al-Qaeda's European
branch has threatened terrorist attacks against Australia if it doesn't withdraw
its troops from Iraq.
"You came to our lands to loots its
wealth," a communiqué from the group charges, "and God willing we will move the
battle to your country as you did to our countries." ("Al Qaeda threatens
Australia and Italy," Associated Press, July 25, 2004.)
By this analysis, the war on terrorism is
imperialism in disguise, and attacks on the imperialist countries are salvos in
a war of national liberation.
What makes this war different from those
of the past is that the resistance hasn't limited its attacks to imperialist
forces within the occupied countries, but has "moved the battle" to the
imperialist countries themselves.
However morally reprehensible the attacks
are, they are still an inevitable response to imperialist plunder, and will
almost certainly continue so long as the United States and its subalterns loot
the wealth of Northern Africa, Western Asia and Central Asia.
The only effective protection against
these attacks is to put an end to the imperialism that prompts them in the first
place. And since what lies behind the exploiting, subjugating, and plunder is
the incessant drive to accumulate that lies at the heart of capitalism, the task
of achieving genuine "homeland security" is inseparable from the task of
replacing capitalism itself.
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