Our Friends

In the Sudan we now have fighting on two fronts. You're familiar with the Darfur atrocity, where the U.S. has announced we're watching a genocidal event and still stayed on the sidelines. It may be that being overextended in Iraq is a viable excuse for our inaction, but why are we on the sidelines in asking for U.N. or international action?

The situation in Darfur is intolerable.

Atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan are occurring daily at a "horrific" level , the top U.N. human rights official said yesterday, adding that countries in the region were "in denial" about the situation.

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, told a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva that the Sudanese government and an allied militia called the Janjaweed were "responsible for the most serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law."

"The atrocities must stop," she said.

Arbour's rebuke came a day after the 47-member Human Rights Council rejected a resolution from European countries and Canada calling on Sudan to prosecute those responsible for the violence. The council instead adopted a resolution urging all parties involved in the conflict to "put an immediate end to the ongoing violations" with a special focus on "vulnerable groups."

The conflict began in early 2003 when rebels rose up against the government, which responded by arming and supporting the Janjaweed, human rights groups say. As many as 450,000 people have died from disease and violence, and 2.5 million have been displaced.

In a separate briefing, the U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, said it was "very strange" that the council "was quiet on Darfur for such a long time."

"They obviously do not meet the raped women and the abused civilians. They do not see the true picture," Egeland said.


In a civilized world, the 'quiet on Darfur' could hardly go on when it was well known and thoroughly acknowledged in the face of atrocities that are clearly genocide.

It seems that the government of Sudan releases bits and pieces of information about Osama bin Laden, information it had collected when he was located in the Sudan and was still our intended instrument of war against Russia in Afghanistan.

After some attacks on U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia, Saudi authorities revoked bin Laden's citizenship. Bin Laden went to the Sudan and then on to Afghanistan. His precise location is unknown...

Also, there is a continuing presence:

"One of bin Laden's businesses was the Hijra Construction Company in Sudan, which built roads and bridges and bought explosives to clear the way, according to testimony at the U.S. Embassy bombing trials. Bin Laden's Taba Investments fund, also of Sudan, was used to change Sudanese currency into dollars and British pounds." (AP, Sept 18, 2001)

It is essential to recognize that bin Laden's financial presence in Sudan continues in many forms, primarily agriculture (including gum arabic), banking, and construction.

Of course, there are other points of view for the U.S.'s ignoring the actions it condemns but lets go on, as these on the U.S.'s general purposes expressed in Talking Points;

U.S. policymaking regarding international relations (and domestic relations as well) is a juggling act. On one side, the goal is enhancing the privilege, power, and wealth of U.S. elites. On the other side, the constraint is keeping at bay less powerful and wealthy constituencies who might have different agendas, both at home and abroad.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has had a problem--how to scare the public into ratifying policies that don't benefit the public, but that serve corporate and elite political interests. The fear of a Soviet menace, duly exaggerated, served that purpose admirably for decades. The ideal response to the current situation, from the elite standpoint, will be to replace the Cold War with the Anti-Terror War. With this accomplished, they will again have a vehicle to instill fear, arguably more credible than the former Soviet menace. Again they will have an enemy, terrorists, whom they can blame for anything and everything, trying as well to smear all dissidents as traveling a path leading inexorably toward the horrors of terrorism.



This country can't push the Sudan government too hard or it will lose this source of enlightenment - a word that hardly suits for a government that condones genocidal raids by Arab Janjaaweed against the black residents of Darfur.

Now Sudan has discovered it is like Caesar's wife, above reproach, it can forge on into more violence, more flaunting of its power and its security from any moderating forces.

Hundreds of people may have been killed in the heaviest fighting between Sudan's former north-south foes since they signed a peace deal last year, a former senior rebel officer said Thursday.

Terrified civilians in the southern town of Malakal reported looting and bodies in the streets after three days of clashes, and U.N. officials in New York said 240 civilian workers had been temporarily evacuated.
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"More than hundreds have been lost. The Sudan army sustained very heavy casualties, and civilians were caught in the crossfire," said Elias Waya Nyipuocs, a former senior officer in the Sudan People's Liberation Army, a rebel group that fought the government in a long civil war.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called the clashes "a serious violation" of the January 2005 deal, which ended what had been Africa's longest civil war. The conflict in southern Sudan took 2 million lives and displaced 4 million people. A separate conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan has left as many as 450,000 people dead from disease and violence and forced 2.5 million from their homes since 2003.

About 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers are monitoring the 2005 agreement, which created separate north and south armies with joint units in major towns and an autonomous southern government.

Malakal is the capital of the Upper Nile region, potentially one of the most oil-rich regions in Sudan.

The totally inept administration at the head of this country is allowing yet another conflagration to break out without intervening. As with North Korea, we ignore horrific regimes to continue on without interference, because this regime has thrown its lot into the fray in its unilateral war in Iraq. As a civilized people, we cannot allow this to continue. If only regime change could solve the crisis in Iraq, in this administration's words, it would appear that only regime change will return rational decision-making processes and decency to power in the U.S.