The
mask of altruism disguising a colonial war
Oil will be the driving factor for military intervention in
Sudan
By John Laughland
09/08/07 "The
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 scepticism 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 scepticism 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 neighbouring 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 practised 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 defence 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 scepticism 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 neighbouring
Congo, the death rate from the war there is estimated to be some
2 or 3 million, a tragedy equalled 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
jlaughland@sandersresearch.com
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