By Hocine Malti, Algeria-Watch, 4 September 2008
On 14 July, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an international arrest warrant against the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.
Sudan has experienced two civil wars since 1984. The first pitted government forces for 21 years against the insurgents of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) led by John Garang. The international media widely relayed the thesis that this was a war of civilisations, a war of religion between the Muslim north and the Christian south. It was, we were told, to oppose the imposition of sharia by the Sudanese government, in a country that is 75% Muslim, 20% animist and 5% Christian, that the Christians had rebelled. In reality, the war was triggered by the discovery by Chevron-Texaco of huge oil reserves in southern Sudan. The American company had invested 1.2 billion dollars of the time in exploration work in the region. In 1984 it was forced to suspend this work following attacks and killings targeting its men and installations, before leaving the country for good; it later sold its interests in Sudan. In retaliation, the American administration, acting through countries in the region (Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Chad), armed and financed the SPLA, which held the Sudanese army in check from 1984 to 2005, the year in which the agreement ending the hostilities was signed and in which John Garang died. The United States also helped train SPLA troops; John Garang himself received such training at the Special Forces school at Fort Benning, Georgia. Fort Benning is one of the nerve centres for the training of American and foreign subversive forces, forces found in the theatres of American covert operations. The Special Forces school is one of the components of what is known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, also headquartered in that town.
The memorandum of understanding of July 2002, which served as the basis for the final agreement of January 2005 between the Khartoum government and the SPLA, had barely been signed when a new rebellion broke out in Darfur. Clearly, the peace that was being established in Sudan greatly displeased the Americans, who this time would act through their new ally of the moment, the Chadian president Idriss Déby. Some ten years earlier, President Bill Clinton had already ordered the bombing of a baby-milk factory which, we were told, was in reality making chemical weapons for anti-American terrorist groups. According to Washington, the future al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was also hiding in Sudan at the time.
The discovery of oil in neighbouring Chad was fatal to peace in Sudan. In 2001, the consortium led by Exxon-Mobil and, once again, Chevron-Texaco produced the first barrels of oil in the Doba basin in Chad, after which it laid a pipeline to the Kribi terminal in Cameroon, where the first deliveries arrived in 2003.
To guarantee the security of the pipeline and protect the interests of the oil majors, the American government then strengthened the Chadian president’s power by providing him with substantial military support. Studies and work carried out by Chevron in both Chad and Sudan had shown that the region straddling central and north-eastern Chad and south/south-western Sudan, that is, Darfur, was extremely promising. American companies could not fail to take an interest in it.
In the same period, the clan of Texan oilmen led by George W. Bush arrived at the head of the White House. Less than a month after his election, he set up a working group, the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPD), which recommended that he make the energy security of the United States his government’s top priority. The National Security Council (NSC), for its part, put forward the theory that al-Qaeda’s terrorist groups, defeated in Afghanistan, would henceforth settle in the area stretching from the Horn of Africa to Mauritania. We know what followed. In application of these two bodies’ recommendations came the war and invasion of Iraq, which made it possible to seize the country’s oil wealth, and the launch of the Pan-Sahel Initiative, followed by the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative, which, under cover of military assistance provided to a dozen Sahel countries, Chad among the first participants, led to the permanent installation of the American army in the region.
Darfur lies at the very heart of this area. It is an arid region where grass is very scarce and where tribes have always fought over the meagre pastures. Taking advantage of the instability already prevailing in the region, Idriss Déby used his own presidential guard to launch the first attacks on Sudanese government forces in 2003. Militias trained and armed by the Americans, from Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia and southern Sudan, also formed the first core of the rebellion in Darfur. It was later strengthened by weapons and means of transport supplied by Chad, including the off-road vehicles that are essential for moving around a desert area. Militias, American private armies such as DynCorp International, also present in Iraq, were also seen in Darfur “fighting” the Janjaweed. These militias have a respectable public face in the United States and are members of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade association of private armies subsidised by the State Department.
Today there are two rebel groups in Darfur fighting the central government in Khartoum: the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The larger, the SLA, is led by Minni Arko Minawi, who was received by George W. Bush at the White House in July 2006 like a genuine head of state. Many of the weapons used by these groups are supplied by a famous arms dealer, a former KGB agent, who operates undisturbed from his offices in Texas and Florida even though he is wanted by Interpol for money laundering. The real mastermind of all these manipulations and operations is therefore not in N’Djamena but in Washington.
To crush the rebellion, the Sudanese government used its own armed forces, which apparently carried out extremely violent operations. It also set other tribes against the rebel factions, including the Janjaweed, who committed horrific abuses. To date, around one million people have fled the combat zones to take refuge in neighbouring Chad, while the number of victims ranges from 70,000, the figure put forward by the United Nations, to 300,000 according to some NGOs, the best known of which is the Save Darfur Coalition, led by the American actor George Clooney and enjoying Hollywood’s full support (1). But can it be said that the Sudanese government and its president Omar al-Bashir committed genocide in Darfur?
The United Nations has sent several missions to the region; all concluded that crimes against humanity had been committed there. They never spoke of genocide. No government in the world has ever declared that there was genocide in Sudan.
Only the United States, supported recently by a few of its allies, has constantly proclaimed since 2003 that genocide was under way in Darfur and has repeatedly tried to have the United Nations endorse its view. Likewise, of all the non-governmental organisations present on the ground, only the Save Darfur Coalition asserts that genocide has been committed in Darfur.
Why is Washington so determined to have the genocide thesis accepted? Article 16 of the founding text of the International Criminal Court, the Rome Statute, provides that “no investigation or prosecution may be commenced or proceeded with under this Statute for a period of 12 months after the Security Council […] has requested the Court to that effect”. The United Nations Security Council would therefore have to recognise that there is genocide in Darfur before the Court could take any legal action. To date, it has not accepted this accusation. Should it do so, it would then act on the request of the International Criminal Court for the prosecution of the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. Such acceptance would also, and above all, make possible a military intervention by NATO, as in Serbia, or by an international coalition, as in Afghanistan or Iraq. In either case, it is the United States that would lead the operations.
We know, moreover, that a joint United Nations/African Union peacekeeping force (UNAMID) is currently in Sudan, trying as best it can to stand between the belligerents and protect civilians. What is less well known is that this mission is in serious financial difficulty, because the largest contribution, that of the United States, arrives only in dribs and drabs. In the view of many specialists, the Americans are making sure this mission fails in order to favour an intervention from outside Africa. Is it really out of compassion for the people of Darfur that the American government is so eager to send troops to their rescue? Alas, no.
According to the American government’s official statistics, Sudan’s oil reserves amount to 5 billion barrels, which would place the country fifth in Africa after Libya, Nigeria, Algeria and Angola. Sudan’s oil production has so far been around 500,000 barrels a day (about 25,000,000 tonnes a year); the government expects to reach 50,000,000 by the end of this year.
After Chevron-Texaco left Sudan, an independent Canadian group took over in 1996 the permits previously granted to the American major. Very soon the Chinese national company CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) entered the scene and took the lead within a consortium that also includes Malaysia’s Petronas, India’s ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation) and the Sudanese national company Sudapet. This consortium built the first export pipeline to Port Sudan, whose entry into service in 1999 allowed the country to export its first barrels of oil. Since then, CNPC has become the main player in the development of Sudan’s oil industry; not a single year has passed without it bringing a new field into production. In exploration and production, it is now present on almost all the oil blocks, which today extend as far as Darfur. It has also built two other pipelines, one carrying production from fields in the south-east of the country to the Port Sudan terminal, the other linking the Fula field in Darfur to the Khartoum refinery, which it owns in equal partnership with the Sudanese government. To date, CNPC has invested more than 15 billion dollars in Sudan’s oil sector, and the Chinese government is considering investing a further ten billion dollars in various other sectors of the Sudanese economy.
The Chinese are obviously not acting out of philanthropy. China is today the world’s second-largest oil importer, after the United States. Its ever-growing energy needs mean that its oil imports are rising at the fantastic rate of 30% a year. A quarter of Chinese oil consumption comes from Africa. Sudan, which alone supplies a third of this amount, ranks fourth among the sources of the imported oil consumed by China, which buys about 70% of its output.
China and the United States are thus engaged in a frantic race for sources of oil supply, African ones in particular. Unlike the Americans, the Chinese take an approach that is far more respectful of their partners’ interests. The financing they offer for the projects in which they take part is generally on preferential terms and often accompanied by offers of technology transfer. China also lifts its customs barriers more readily for goods from the countries from which it buys its oil.
The Americans, for their part, behave as masters of the world; they seek above all to impose their power. Every time American oil companies, the largest in particular, have taken over the exploitation of hydrocarbon fields around the world, they have been preceded or followed by the American army, which intervenes to clear the way for US energy interests or to “protect” them. This was the case in Iraq, of course, but also in Afghanistan and the republics of Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Georgia, etc.). It is also the case in Africa, where the American government is currently creating a special command for the continent, AFRICOM. When it is not the army that intervenes, it is the secret services (CIA, NSA, FBI) that take on the task, fomenting assassinations, unrest and coups, as in Venezuela and Bolivia. In Sudan, there was first the support for John Garang and his attempted secession, the bombing of a factory on the pretext that the Sudanese were making chemical weapons there, then intervention through allies or proxy militias to create and perpetuate the crisis in Darfur. Today the Americans want to get rid of the head of state by accusing him of genocide. That Omar al-Bashir is a dictator who does not hesitate to massacre his people comes as no surprise. Which Arab head of state does not behave as a tyrant towards his people? We all know that Arab countries are far from models of democracy, that every king, emir and president flouts human rights there every day and shows no respect for his citizens. Some do not hesitate to assassinate or massacre their “subjects”.
That was the case of Saddam Hussein. But let no one tell us that it was out of compassion and love for the Iraqi people that the Americans waged war on him and dethroned him before having him executed. Nor let anyone tell us today that the United States is rushing to the rescue of the Sudanese people to save them from tyranny. It is not noble feelings that drive them but, very much, their interests. It is very much to seize Sudanese oil and drive their big Chinese competitor out of the region that the Americans keep the fire burning in Darfur and constantly pour oil on it. After Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Kosovo, the Sahel and other regions of the world, this is just one more of George W. Bush’s wars for oil. As for speaking of genocide…
1. Vijay Prashad, professor and director of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, with a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago, tells us that this NGO was created in 2004 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service, which fund it in partnership with Hollywood film circles.
1. Related article: The incredible American stranglehold on our country (external website, opens in a new tab)
2. Related article: Algeria: an American base without the Algerian people’s knowledge (external website, opens in a new tab)
3. Related article: Retrospective: an article by Lounis Aggoun on BRC… in 2006 (external website, opens in a new tab)
4. Related article: In search of Plato’s city (external website, opens in a new tab)
5. Related article: Chakib Khelil announces that foreign companies will start exploiting new fields in blocks (external website, opens in a new tab)
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6. Related article: Can one speak of a hydrocarbons policy in Algeria? By Hocine Malti (external website, opens in a new tab)
7. Related article: Bush’s wars for oil, by Hocine Malti/Algeria-Watch (external website, opens in a new tab)
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