Strange, isn't it, how reductive our world sometimes turns out to be? Bring
up any subject these days -- try genocide in Darfur, for example -- and sooner
or later you seem to end up talking about oil. At this moment, the world is
experiencing an energy race. Think of it as the twenty-first century's
equivalent of the arms races of the previous two centuries. Everywhere there is
a hint of an energy source or resource, you find a mad dash for the (black)
gold.
The Middle East may be the oil heartland of the planet, but in a world in
which energy demand is on the rise and fears of limited energy reserves are
rising as well, Africa, like Central Asia,
suddenly finds itself in the crosshairs of oil exploration. The Pentagon is soon
likely to announce the setting up of its own Africa
Command, with new basing moves on the continent sure to follow. Though such
developments are invariably presented in the context of the President's Global
War on Terror, they are essentially energy moves.
As David Morse indicates below, we are hardly alone. In Sudan, for instance,
along with the Europeans, the Chinese are now major
players and the ongoing slaughter in Darfur turns out to be significantly
connected to oil exploration. In late August, the Bush administration
launched the mid-term election season in this country with a round of
"appeasement" charges against the opponents of its war in Iraq. Morse, an expert
on the situation in Sudan, considers that charge of "appeasement" in the context
of the genocide in Darfur and the oil race in that region. Tom
Appeasement Driven by Oil
The Bush Administration and
Darfur
By David Morse
The Bush administration is now in the habit of hurling the charge
of "appeasement" at critics of its Iraq war. Anyone who has followed the
President's stance toward Sudan closely will appreciate the deep irony.
President Bush has targeted "Islamo-fascists" across the globe as
successors to the Nazis, while likening his own position to that of Roosevelt
and Churchill in World War II. "We're in a war we didn't ask for," he recently
declared, "but it's a war we must wage and a war we will win."
Never mind that the war he "didn't ask for" began with a preemptive
shock-and-awe strike on Iraq, based on fabricated evidence, or that his
administration has done more to fan
the flames of Islamist extremism around the world than to contain it. Just
focus on that charge of "appeasement." Only when we shift the spotlight from
the President's critics to George Bush himself and his stance toward Sudan's
troubled western province, Darfur, does the charge make any kind of sense.
Identifying the Islamo-fascist Enemy
Let us speak plainly and in George W. Bush's own terms: Giving him the
benefit of the doubt, let's assume that in his label of choice,
"Islamo-fascist," his implied adjective is not Islamic, referring to
the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but Islamist, referring only to those
fundamentalist Muslims who seek to impose their worldview on others.
Certainly, if any Islamist government deserves the epithet "fascist," it is
the one established by the National Islamic Front (NIF), which seized control
of Sudan in a military coup in 1989 and installed the country's current ruler,
Lt. General Omar al-Bashir. The Front took over with a grandiose agenda that
assumed the racial superiority of a northern Arab elite in a country that
historically enslaved, and continues to enslave and marginalize, black
Africans. Dominating the central government in the capital, Khartoum, the NIF
Party sought to impose sharia, Muslim fundamentalist law, on all Sudan,
including Christians and practitioners of indigenous African religions who
lived in the South.
The Front's ambitions were too large even for a country of just under a
million square miles, the largest in Africa. They extended to the rest of the
continent and the Middle East as well. In the 1990s, Khartoum became an
incubator for international terrorists, Osama bin Laden among them. Bashir
viewed Sudan as the gateway for the Arabization and Islamification of all of
Africa. His party's "totalitarian ideology," coupled with greed, prompted
Khartoum to grab oilfields newly discovered in South Sudan by the simple
expedient of redrawing jurisdictional boundaries in the early 1980s to deny
them to the South. This triggered a bitter civil war that lasted twenty-two
years and claimed the lives of an estimated two million Sudanese civilians,
mainly poor, black subsistence farmers in the South. Most died of starvation
when food supplies were cut off. Now, for similar reasons, a reprise of that
tragedy has been unfolding in Darfur, the poorest region of Sudan.
If Khartoum's racism was muddied by the religious dimension of the
North-South civil war, it is starkly evident in Darfur, where Arab Muslims are
killing black Muslims. For the past three years, Arab militias on horseback
and camel-back, armed and supported by Khartoum, and accompanied by aerial
bombardment by government planes, have attacked non-Arab farming villages in
Darfur -- murdering and raping, poisoning wells, seizing cattle and household
goods, burning houses and mosques, and driving survivors from their land in a
scorched-earth campaign of ethnic cleansing. Now some 3.5 million displaced
Darfuris, roughly half the population, are wholly dependent on outside food
aid.
Meanwhile, the NIF-controlled government prevents the citizens of Khartoum
from grasping the genocidal nature of the campaign in Darfur -- by censoring
the Sudanese media, shutting down newspapers, torturing activists, and denying
visas to foreign journalists.
Here, in short, is a totalitarian regime with significant parallels to Nazi
Germany, even if hardly on the same economic or military scale. It is also a
regime arguably more murderous than that of Saddam Hussein, with a more
expansionist agenda; a rogue state that has sponsored terrorism in the past
and threatens to launch a jihad if the UN
intervenes in Darfur. Earlier this year, Osama bin Laden issued a world-wide
call for terrorists to go to the aid of Khartoum. Sudan has bona fide -- not
fabricated -- ties to al-Qaeda. Khartoum is, in other words, everything Mr.
Bush could wish for in an "Islamo-fascist" enemy.
The Bush response to a real "Islamo-fascist" threat
In September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell famously described
what was happening in Darfur as "genocide," with the caveat that the U.S.
would not intervene militarily because we had "no vital interests" in the
region. For the past two years that realpolitik twist of logic has
underpinned U.S. policy in Sudan. The claim of "no vital interests" seemed
credible because of the sanctions imposed by President Bill Clinton in 1997,
when he added Sudan to the State Department's list of states sponsoring
terrorism. These sanctions, which are still in place, include heavy fines and
jail sentences for U.S. citizens doing business with Sudan.
Powell's startling use of the word genocide suggested at the time a
moral forthrightness lacking in his European counterparts, even while the "no
vital interest" caveat assured Khartoum's leaders that we would not interfere.
President Bush used the word in an
address before the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 2004,
saying that "the world is witnessing terrible suffering and horrible crimes in
the Darfur region of Sudan, crimes my government has concluded are genocide."
Strong pronouncements. In hindsight, however, these can be seen as a
carefully scripted pre-election sop to conservative Christians who had long
complained about Khartoum's attacks on Sudanese Christians in the south during
the civil war.
After the 2004 elections, the administration fell silent on Darfur, even as
the slaughter continued. In early March 2005, Khartoum stopped granting visas,
effectively preventing foreigners from witnessing the ongoing carnage. Two top
officials from the NGO Doctors without Borders were jailed for "treason"
simply for delivering a report in the Netherlands on Khartoum's use of rape as
a military weapon. President Bush kept silent.
Without leadership from the Oval Office, Congress spent most of 2005
dickering over the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act. In its original
version, the bipartisan bill had formidable teeth. It provided a broad new
set of sanctions, in addition to the existing Clinton-era ones which had been
limited to trade. The new sanctions would have put the U.S. government on
record as seeking a UN resolution embargoing arms sales to Sudan, establishing
a no-fly zone over Darfur, seeking unspecified measures affecting "the
petroleum sector in Sudan," and guaranteeing humanitarian aid workers' access
to those suffering in Darfur. Even more to the point, additional sanctions
would target individuals in the Khartoum government who were responsible for
the genocide, freezing their assets abroad and imposing travel restrictions on
them -- exactly the sort of hamstringing that such men fear, especially if
they are likely to be prosecuted by the International
Criminal Court.
Taken together, these powerful sanctions, if approved by Congress and then
adopted by the UN Security Council might conceivably have stopped the genocide
in its tracks. Whether it all could have gotten past the Security Council is
questionable. Russia and China are selling weapons to Sudan; China, Britain,
and France are heavily involved in exploiting its oil resources. Indeed,
considering that U.S. firms were already prevented from trading with Sudan
under the 1997 sanctions, such a resolution from the U.S. might have appeared
self-serving.
But the relevant question is this: Did President Bush support the bill?
The answer is: Quite the opposite. Under pressure from the White House,
virtually all the sanctions were seriously weakened or eliminated in
Congressional committee. The reference to a possible embargo aimed at the
petroleum sector was deleted. The provisions for targeting individuals were
replaced by a single provision giving the President discretion to refer
individual war criminals to the International Criminal Court, a highly
unlikely prospect considering the administration's hostility to the ICC. In
its final form, the bill was toothless. It offered modest funding -- guilt
money -- to the under-funded African Union mission in Darfur, and little else.
The President, by failing to support a bill that would certainly have
defined the nation's moral position, and might even have saved tens of
thousands of lives, was choosing to appease, not confront the very
"Islamo-fascists" against whom he rails in the abstract.
This was the same George W. Bush who, shortly after taking office, had
scrawled the phrase "Not on my watch!" in the margin of a briefing paper that
referred to former President Bill Clinton's inaction during the genocide in
Rwanda. That phrase has been interpreted by Samantha
Power and other writers as Bush's declaration that he would never
countenance such a horror during his presidency. If so, then his
retreat during the past two years is all the more pathetic. A different
interpretation can, however, be offered for that scrawl. It can be seen as an
_expression_ of relief that Rwanda happened on somebody else's watch.
Oil Enters the Picture
Exactly how much oil lay beneath the dusty red savannas of Darfur was
unclear, at least to the outside world, back when the Bush administration took
office. (If Khartoum had commissioned preliminary geologic surveys, it wasn't
telling.) Darfur is three-quarters the size of Texas, and the violence there
had left large swaths of the country inaccessible to geologists. By early
2005, however, the destruction of villages and the clearing of inhabitants
from the land had opened the way for oil exploration.
Until April 2005, it was said that whatever oil deposits existed in Darfur
were confined to its southeastern corner. However, new seismographic studies
brought a surprise. On April 19, 2005, Mohamed Siddig, a spokesman for the
Sudan Energy Ministry, announced that a new high-yield well had been drilled
in North Darfur -- several hundred kilometers northwest of the existing
fields. Seismographic studies indicated that a huge basin of oil, expected to
yield up to 500,000 barrels of crude per day, lay in the area. This Darfur
discovery effectively doubled Sudan's oil reserves.
Perhaps as astonishing as the oil discovery, reported in brief by
Reuters, was that it was not picked up by the world press. You are
probably learning about the discovery for the first time here at Tomdispatch.
Yet it may explain in part Mr. Bush's puzzling retreat on Darfur.
The Bush administration had already been developing a closer relationship
with Khartoum, based (it was claimed) on the sharing of intelligence about
potential operations in the President's Global War on Terror. The announcement
of the new find in April 2005 seemed to accelerate these efforts, and may
explain why, a month later, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a jet to
Khartoum to ferry Sudan's chief of intelligence, Major General Salah Abdallah
Gosh, to a clandestine meeting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
This provoked a political tempest when the Los Angeles
Times revealed the meeting (as well as a split within the State Department
between those who thought Gosh should be arrested as a war criminal and others
who toed the administration line). Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had the
unenviable task of explaining that our government sought "closer ties" with a
terrorist regime because of its cooperation in the "war on terrorism."
Khartoum voiced hopes that U.S. sanctions would soon be lifted.
June 2005 saw oil companies from India, France, Malaysia, China, Great
Britain, Japan, and Sweden flocking to sign
contracts in Sudan, while U.S. companies were officially sidelined by the 1997
sanctions. The rush was occasioned partly by the new oil finds in Darfur, but
also by a long-awaited North-South peace agreement, scheduled to be
implemented in July, that ended the civil war.
As part of a power-sharing agreement, rebel leader John Garang was to be
installed as vice president of Sudan, and oil revenues were to be divided
between the government of Sudan in Khartoum and the now semi-autonomous
government of South Sudan. Garang had already signed an oil deal with a new
British oil company called White Nile, and had rescinded an earlier contract
concluded by the government of Sudan and the French oil giant, Total. The
French company had pulled out of South Sudan when fighting got fierce during
the civil war. Shares of White Nile on the London stock exchange now shot up.
Total threatened to sue.
"No Vital Interests"
Although U.S. oil companies could not openly join the scramble for Sudan's
oil, many were finding ways to circumvent the sanctions. One method was by
minority ownership. For instance, Marathon
Oil, based in Houston and a major contributor to the Bush re-election
campaign, is a partner in the French company Total. Before John Garang
thwarted such expectations by signing the White Nile contract, Marathon had
resumed payments to the Khartoum government in the expectation that it would
take part of Total's operations in the oilfields.
In addition, certain foreign companies -- including some that exist only on
paper -- were probably serving as place-holders for large U.S. firms until the
sanctions could be lifted. One such "foreign" company is registered in the
Virgin Islands, uses a Swiss business address, and is owned by an American oil
tycoon, Friedhelm Eronat, who has fronted for Exxon Mobil in the past. BBC 4
discovered Eronat was at the heart of a deal to get at Darfur's oil. Eronat
avoided prison and a fine only by swapping his U.S. citizenship for British
citizenship just before signing a lucrative contract with the government of
Sudan for drilling rights to a huge tract that spreads west from South Sudan
across the middle of Darfur. As a result of the new Darfur discoveries, that
contract is now worth billions of dollars. The deal provoked outrage from
human rights groups in Britain. U.S. media showed little curiosity.
"Eronat is not interested in Darfur or political issues," a former
colleague told BBC. "He's interested in making money."
But was Eronat acting only on his own behalf or was he the middle-man for
some third party?
Here's the rub. While various subterfuges can be employed to skirt U.S.
sanctions, most involve fraud, bribery, or worse. Individuals like Eronat may
thrive in this shadowy world, but oil giants like Exxon Mobil cannot afford to
get too deeply into projects that are effectively "off the books." For this
reason, the same industry that bankrolled Bush's presidential campaigns and
crafted his petroleum-driven energy policy is undoubtedly now pressuring his
administration to normalize relations with Sudan. And soon. As the global
scramble for Africa's oil intensifies, the price exacted by wheeler-dealers
like Eronat will only get higher.
In July, 2005, John Garang was inaugurated as Sudan's vice president before
a huge crowd of cheering supporters. A new era had dawned. Three weeks later,
he was killed in a helicopter crash. Riots broke out in Khartoum and in Juba,
the capital of South Sudan. The crash is still under investigation. Thus far,
the peace has held in South Sudan, but barely. Oil remains at issue between
north and south -- and Khartoum keeps its troops in the oilfields.
All this is to suggest that the stakes in Darfur are extremely high and
that the claim the U.S. has no "vital interests" in Sudan is entirely bogus.
Quite apart from oil, Sudan is a huge nation, and one of the poorest in
Africa, with untapped mineral wealth that may include gold and uranium. It
occupies a strategic geographic position, dominating the Horn of Africa and
sharing borders with ten other countries. Its largest trading partner is now
China.
Although activists and pundits continue to quote Colin Powell's "genocide"
finding, the Bush administration has backed away from the word. When Deputy
Secretary of State Robert Zoellick visited Sudan last April, he back-pedaling
furiously on Darfur: "It's been a terrible series of events," Zoellick said,
"and as you know, there's a debate. The [UN] did a legal analysis of whether
this was a genocide, and their conclusion was that it was crimes against
humanity, as opposed to genocide."
This was not idle word-niggling on Zoellick's part. A finding of genocide
would have required the UN to honor its 1948 convention against genocide.
Zoellick's evasion seemed to signify a shift in Bush administration policy.
Asked how many Darfuris had died, he suggested that the figure might be
60,000-160,000. The numbers estimated by responsible analysts range widely, to
be sure, from 200,000 to 500,000. But it was as though someone had instructed
Zoellick to cut the deaths by one-third. On the other hand, Bush himself used
the word in addressing
the UN last week. The administration may be seesawing.
Appeasement by Oil
All that stands between U.S. oil companies and Sudan is the genocide in
Darfur.
Why, then, does the White House not take bold steps to stop the slaughter
-- for pragmatic reasons, if not moral ones? And why, last May, did the
administration help broker a treaty between the government of Sudan and the
several rebel groups in Darfur that was clearly doomed to fail?
The answer to the second question is easier. The Darfur Peace Agreement was
negotiated in great haste. The delegates from Khartoum threatened to pack
their bags and leave the talks. Tensions flared between rebel factions. Egos
and fears were involved, differences papered over, all in the haste to produce
a document which only two of the four rebel groups signed. (In contrast, the
comprehensive peace agreement that officially ended the North-South civil
required multiple sessions over a period of years.) All the Darfur Peace
Agreement really offered was political cover to Khartoum and Washington, who
could say they had tried.
Now for the deeper question: Why does President Bush not use his clout to
seriously attempt to stop the slaughter?
The most sympathetic conjecture might be that the President is truly torn
between his conservative Christian constituency, upset over the killings of
Christians in South Sudan, and his oil constituency. In truth, George W. Bush
may be paralyzed, as Bill Clinton seemed paralyzed by the genocide in Rwanda
-- as indeed the world so often seems paralyzed, when confronted with the
worst that human beings can do to each other.
Intervention may raise for Bush the specter of American failure -- the
failed attempt at nation-building in Somalia by the Clinton administration,
his own failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, even the failure implicit in
attempting to impose military solutions on political problems.
But that seems unlikely. It is far more likely that George W. Bush does not
recognize the moral imperative before him, that he and his top officials are
thinking purely pragmatically. More cynically, the administration may imagine
it easiest to go through the motions of concern without accompanying action --
so as to minimize the political costs and let Khartoum finish its work as
quickly as possible.
Certainly "going through the motions" has characterized the Bush efforts.
After months of pressure from activist groups, the president finally appointed
a special envoy to Sudan, and earlier this month he formally requested the UN
to send a robust peacekeeping force to Darfur with a mandate to protect
civilians. Bush is finally on record as supporting a NATO-enforced no-fly
zone. But these steps are a far cry from the sanctions urged more than a year
ago in Congress. Still conspicuously missing are those that targeted
individuals.
Finally, what is needed most, both within the UN and outside its structure,
is exactly the kind of multifaceted, collegial diplomacy that this
administration seems to understand least. Bush himself seems to understand
only bullying and force -- or, in the case of Sudan, its flip-side,
appeasement.
Appeasement driven by oil is surely as reprehensible as any. When
confronted with reality, this President is clearly reluctant to confront the
genuine "Islamo-terrorists" of his nightmares.
David Morse's articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire,
Friends Journal, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, The Progressive
Populist, and various on-line publications including Alternet, Counterpunch,
Mother Jones, and Salon. His last article for Tomdispatch, War of the Future: Oil
Drives the Genocide in Darfur, was widely posted and translated into
several languages. He is now writing a book about the Darfur situation.
