The trauma of Saddam Hussein’s secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction barely having faded in Iraq, the United States is already launching an identical scenario in a new propaganda campaign targeting Sudan. This scenario is based on another lie, a “faking” as the Ambassador of Sudan to the United States, John Ukec Lueth Ukec, calls the humanitarian crisis and civil war in Darfur.
Referring to the grossly exaggerated reports in the Western media and the campaign over the so-called ‘genocide’ in Sudan, Ambassador Ukec said, “There’s no apartheid in Darfur. These Darfuris are our brothers and sisters. They are the majority of the Sudanese Army. Seventy per cent of the Sudanese Army are Darfuris! So, if the army is killing those, they are killing their own family!”
He said that just as in Iraq, most people in the United States were being “misled.” “The situation in Darfur is not a genocide. A genocide is when you get innocent people, not armed, and kill them. This is not what is happening in Darfur. What is happening in Darfur, is Darfuris are fighting among themselves. The herders, who are mobile, with their cattle, horses, camels, sheep, and all types of animals; and the farmers, who only live on their land, and cultivate grain, sorghum, millet, and those things.”
Then, if the purported ‘civil war’ in Darfur between the Sudanese Government forces and ‘rebel factions’ has been misrepresented by the American, British, French and other Western media, what is the ‘hidden agenda’ behind Western vested interests in fuelling the Sudanese crisis?
THE HIDDEN AGENDA
One has merely to revisit the Iraq war-plan to see the broader picture of how the Sudanese nation has been targeted. Ambassador Ukec believes the ‘hidden agenda’ behind Western motivations is primarily oil. “… This is why my leadership thinks that it is our oil which is being targeted. They are going to split us, to make us weak, and then they may pick their stooges, like they have done in Iraq, got their stooges, pulled them into war under the pretext that there were weapons of mass destruction, which we never got. They even showed us certain things, ‘these are mobile weapons of mass destruction,’ fake things which never happened. They are faking those things now in Darfur.”
But oil is only one aspect of U.S. interests in fanning the flames of Darfur. Others include ‘regime change,’ a virtual manipulation of upcoming elections in Sudan to ‘cherry-pick’ a stooge government, and another major issue is the destabilisation of Egypt. The U.S. ‘Darfur policy’ is aimed “to topple or dismember the Sudanese government,” which would violate an agreement on water between Egypt and Sudan made in 1959. This would pressure Egypt which depends on this water. If, indeed, this is one of the key factors in the neo conservative administration’s ‘hidden agenda’ targeting Sudan, the implications are perhaps far more devious and frightening than the mere region of Darfur, or Sudan alone. What these devious plans indicate is a broadening of protracted warfare in the Middle East region, already spreading murder and mayhem in Arab nations.
Worse still, the duplicity behind the ‘democratisation’ of the region is being exposed. Bush’s plan to bring democracy, like the pretext of WMDs in Iraq, is merely a smokescreen, a veiled term for ‘regime change.’ “There is some powerful organisation somewhere, that has picked on certain countries in Africa, especially those countries where the leadership has been strong, has been against any encroachment on their sovereignty. They are the targets of that hidden agenda,” said Ambassador Ukec. The case of Zimbabwe is another one targeted for human rights abuses by the West.
KILLER SANCTIONS
The population of Sudan, 39.4 million people, occupy the largest area among African nations, spread over 8% of the continent’s land area. Ukec himself was targeted when he tried to evict the Canadian Talisman Oil Co. out of Southern Sudan, where there are large reserves of oil, besides the Darfur region. The civil war instigated by the West, the arming and funding of rebels against the government and army, are aimed at ‘splitting’ the region, causing a humanitarian crisis trough displaced populations which would flee to neighbouring countries. This has already occurred in the past sixty years of this poor nation brutalized by Western oil and other interests.
On May 29 last month, Bush announced killer economic sanctions on three Sudanese and 31 companies. These sanctions ban Sudan from business exchanges with any American company. Following a process which began in 1997, Washington’s latest sanctions bring the total to 132 companies. More pernicious still, out of the 31 companies 8 are related to food or farming, which is a literal death-sentence for Sudan’s largely agricultural population. Sugar is one of the mainstays in the diet of the poor, who survive on tea. The Gezira Board, along with four other companies that deal with sugar, have been sanctioned, creating a crisis for sugar production and consumption among the poorest.
LIST OF SANCTIONED COMPANIES
The following is a list of the other sanctioned companies: Arab Sudanese Blue Nile Agricultural Company; Arab Sudanese Seed Company; Arab Sudanese Vegetable Oil Company; Gueid Sugar Company Limited; New Halfa Sugar Factory Company Limited; Sennar Sugar Company Limited; Sudanese Sugar Production Company Limited. Two companies are pharmaceuticals, critical for healthcare in the country: Wafra Pharma Laboratories; Alfarachem Company Limited. Four infrastructure companies are also sanctioned: Sudan Advanced Railways; Advanced Engineering Works; Advanced Mining Works Company Limited; Sudan telecommunications Company Limited (a foreign-owned cell phone company). Added to these are five petrochemical companies. The justification from the U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for the large number of targeted companies was, “These companies have supplied cash to the Bashir regime, enabling it to purchase arms and further fuel the fighting in Darfur.”
BRITISH-AMERICAN HAND
U.S. duplicity in its covert and overt operations against Sudan provides more evidence of the Bush administration’s unilateral wars. Before the G-8 meeting last week, Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, threatening to taken action against Sudan if the United Nations failed to handle the Darfur situation. “I will be stressing, along with Tony [Blair], the need for nations to take action,” Bush said. “If the UN won’t act, we need to take action ourselves, and I laid out a series of sanctions that I think hopefully will affect [Sudanese President Omar] al-Bashir’s behaviour.” Bush is calling for a more stringent UN Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Sudan, already crippled by years of sanctions and destabilisation. Most alarming about the U.S. double standards was the attempt to boycott peaceful negotiations in the Darfur region.
According to Lam Akol, Sudan’s Foreign Minister, “The U.S. took the decision on the sanctions to create confusion that obstructs the effort by the international community for finding peaceful solution for the Darfur problem.” Further, the American actions, veiling the neo cons’ rapacious appetite for oil, have double-crossed two critical peace accords of the past three years. The “Comprehensive Peace Agreement”, signed in February 2005 ended 20 years of civil war between North and South Sudan. This was a major breakthrough for the country’s vital economic development projects in the South. An African Union peacekeeping force of 7,000 was posted in Darfur, which Sudan expanded by 3,000 in 2006.
On May 3, 2007, Sudan and Chad (bordering Darfur) signed a reconciliation agreement to cooperate with the UN and African Union, again to stabilise the Darfur area and neighbouring regions of Chad. Instead of promoting these crucial peace initiatives in one of the world’s poorest regions, Washington’s threats of military interventionism come under the travesty of ‘saving’ Darfur. The message sent to war-lords is to topple the government.
Ironically, U.S. State Department officials around Secretary Condoleezza Rice helped draft the Darfur Peace Agreement of May 6, 2006. Ambassador Ukec is shocked at the American turnaround. “Why are these things being ignored? Why is America unilaterally targeting Sudan? The UN has not suggested that we be sanctioned; the African Union, which is working with us, has never been contacted; they have never even condemned us, by saying ‘this is a genocide.’ It’s just making my government and my people think twice: ‘Maybe America has something on its mind. Something dubious, something which may be terrible to our people’ … it is unwarranted, it is unwarranted, to do this, and put us under sanctions, when we need to be provided for and rewarded.”
If a tragedy is to be averted in Sudan, one that could escalate like forest fire throughout Africa, an alternative to the Western media’s disinformation regarding the Darfur crisis – to promote another war in a country already decimated by poverty – has to be heard, particularly vocalised by the Sudanese themselves.l