321 South Sudan

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There is the first news about a civil war in the brand new state ( only 30 months old)  of South Sudan.
Two main ethnic tribes are fighting each other, or better: the Dinka's are killing the Nuer.

I know little about this country although I drove through it,  over 35 years ago.

Here is roughly my opinion, or better: a scenario that I think is worth testing for its truth.

Facts: 
1. South Sudan is very rich in oil, copper etc.
2  The Chinese had a very good relation to Khartoum and bought a big part of           these minerals.
3. Then Khartoum was bombed by the USA, as they supposedly produced chemical weapons and harbored Osama. No proof of chemical residue was found later on.
4. The very very poor black population of the South was able to have a costly war for 20 years. Against the arab government in Khartoum. Where did they get the money and the arms from?
5. The president of Sudan was accused of genocide and had to go to the ICC in The Hague. People 'in the know' ( living in the region, working there) like Alex de Waal and Keith Harmon Snow said this was injust.
6 After the threat of the ICC, Sudan agreed to let South Sudan become independent.
7. On e ship transporting weapons from Ukraïne to South Sudan rebels was taken over by Somali pirates. Thats how the world found out that the owner was an Israeli and Mossad man: Alperin..

Information from Keith Harmon Snow: 
The US has helped Ugandan president Museveni.
The US has supported Tutsi rebels ( Kagame) to drive out the Hutu government in Rwanda.
Then Kagame went on to destabilise eastern Congo, a land full of minerals.
These minerals are grabbed for a penny by Israeli companies.
In South Sudan its the Americans ( dressed as NGO do-gooders) who lead the revolt.
One American agent, mr. Winter, really calls the shots.

Now, very shortly, my hypothesis: 
As Sudan refuses to become a client state of the US ( why would they, they have got China) , it was beneficial to split the South from the North.
This was succesfull.
Now, how to get the oil? How to drive the Chinese out?
I think this ethnic war was calculated with.
I even think that the Americans would be able to prevent it if they had wanted this.
I think the civil war will make the Chinese back away from South Sudan.
That is already a victory for the USA.
But also I think that the USA has no problem with an African country in civil war: They throw around some money and then are free to do what they want.
Of course diamants are very small and easy to transport. To exploit oil one needs huge and costly infrastructure.
OK. then the US will wait and see what the future brings.

As I said: this is just a very sketchy hypothesis.

Here is a 2009 article by Keith Harmon Snow:
(Here it is on the web.)


THE WINTER OF BASHIR’S DISCONTENT: AFRICOM’S COVERT WAR IN SUDAN | KEITH HARMON SNOW

April 9, 2009, 4:04 pm
Filed under: Africa, Global

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (R) meets with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Cairo (25 March 2008)

* * * * *

(Dated Piece | 4 March 2009 )

Source: All Things Pass

I recently received a phone call from an Australian man who identified himself as an investigator for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, Netherlands. The investigator and his colleague had read my story, “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,” and they wanted my cooperation to provide more detailed evidence about the warlords behind the massacres at Bogoro, Congo, described briefly in my story.

After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an email at the definitive moment, when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier” about the specific case—which they said “had generated a lot of interest” at the ICC—and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only indicting black Africans. I indicated my concern for the witness ‘Sandrine’, a young girl discussed in my story who named names of commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or mysteriously disappeared, and noted my awareness of the injustice of the Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the disconcerting trajectory of the ICC.

I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed, until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the recent ICC indictments against another black man, and an Arab at that. It was a very stupid career move, some one else remarked.

On 4 March 2009 the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last issuing the long threatened but first ever indictments against a sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab President of Sudan. Meanwhile, Somali ‘pirates’ off East Africa recently freed a Ukrainian ship with a Panamanian registration, a Ukrainian crew and flag of Belize: The freighter carried tanks, rockets and munitions destined for Darfur, and it is owned by an Israeli ‘businessman’ and reputed MOSSAD operative named Vadim Alperin.

It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur—especially when people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against blacks that is being committed by the Bashir ‘regime’—but such is the establishment propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it revolves around some relatively unknown but shady characters. What follows is a short and imperfect summary of some of the deeper geopolitical realities behind the struggle for Sudan.

THE POLITICS OF WAR CRIMES

First note that the ICC can now be viewed as a tool of hegemonic U.S. foreign policy, where the weapons deployed by the U.S. and its allies include the accusations of, and indictments for, human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity. To understand this, we can ask why no white man has yet been charged with these or other offenses at the ICC—which now holds five black African “warlords” and seeks to incarcerate and bring to trial another black man, also an Arab, Omar Bashir. Why hasn’t George W. Bush been indicted? Or what about Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? Henry Kissinger? Ehud Olmert? Tony Blair? Vadim Alperin? John Bredenkamp?

Following on the heals of the announcement that the ICC handed down seven war crimes charges against al-Bashir, a story broadcast over all the Western media system and into every American living room by day’s end, President al-Bashir ordered the expulsion of ten international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Darfur under the pretense of being purely ‘humanitarian’ organizations.

What has not anywhere in the English press been reported is that the United States of America has just stepped up its ongoing war for control of Sudan and her resources: petroleum, copper, gold, uranium, fertile plantation lands for sugar and gum Arabic (essential to Coke, Pepsi and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream). This war has been playing out on the ground in Darfur through so-called ‘humanitarian’ NGOs, private military companies, ‘peacekeeping’ operations and covert military operations backed by the U.S. and its closest allies.

However, the U.S. war for Sudan has always revolved around ‘humanitarian’ operations—purportedly neutral and presumably concerned only about protecting innocent human lives—that often provide cover for clandestine destabilizing activities and interventions.

Americans need to recognize that the Administration of President Barack Obama has begun to step up war for control of Sudan in keeping with the permanent warfare agenda of both Republicans and Democrats. The current destabilization of Sudan mirrors the illegal covert guerrilla war carried out in Rwanda—also launched and supplied from Uganda—from October 1990 to July 1994. The Rwandan Defense Forces (then called the Rwandan Patriotic Army) led by Major General Paul Kagame achieved the U.S. objective of a coup d’etat in Rwanda through that campaign, and President Kagame has been a key interlocutor in the covert warfare underway in Darfur, Sudan.

During the Presidency of George W. Bush the U.S. Government was involved with the intelligence apparatus of the Government of Sudan (GoS). At the same time, other U.S. political and corporate factions were pressing for a declaration of genocide against the GoS. Now, given the shift of power and the appointment of top Clinton officials formerly involved in covert operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan during the Clinton years, pressure has been applied to heighten the campaign to destabilize the GoS, portrayed as a ‘terrorist” Arab regime, but an entity operating outside the U.S.-controlled banking system. The former campaign saw overt military action with the U.S. military missile attacks against the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (1998): this was an international war crime by the Clinton Administration and it involved officials now in power.

The complex geopolitical struggle to control Sudan manifests through the flashpoint war for Darfur and it involves such diverse factions as the Lord’s Resistance Army, backed by Khartoum, which is also connected to the wars in the Congo and northern Uganda. Chad is involved, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Germany, the Central African Republic, Libya, France, Israel, China, Taiwan, South Africa and Rwanda. There are U.S. special forces on the ground in the frontline states of Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and the big questions are: [1] How many of the killings are being committed by U.S. proxy forces and blamed on al-Bashir and the GoS? And [2] who funds, arms and trains the rebel insurgents?

UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVASTATION

Rebels? Insurgents? The drumbeat of western propaganda portrays the conflict as a one-sided affair: a “genocidal counter-insurgency by the GoS”—in the words of Eric Reeves—versus the good Samaritans of the ‘humanitarian’ NGO community… and throw in a few (non-descript) rebels.

“Sudan ordered at least 10 humanitarian groups expelled from Darfur on Wednesday after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the country’s president,” wrote Associated Press reporter Ellen M. Lederer. “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the action ‘represents a serious setback to lifesaving operations in Darfur’ and urged Sudan to reverse its decision, U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.”

However, when Ban Ki-moon met with Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame recently, he never called for Kagame’s arrest, no matter the findings of two international courts of law that have issued indictments against top RPA officials. Instead Ban Ki-moon praised Kagame and called for African countries to hunt down and arrest Hutu people purportedly involved in the now specious ‘genocide’ in Rwanda in 1994.

The non-governmental aid groups ordered out of Darfur by President al-Bashir on March 4 were Oxfam, CARE, MSF-Holland, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, Action Contre la Faim, Solidarites and CHF International.

Of course, the western media is all over the expulsion of any big ‘humanitarian’ moneymaker from Darfur—the moral outrage is so thick you can almost wipe it. The NGOs and the press that peddles their images of suffering babes complain that hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees will now be subjected to massive unassisted suffering—as opposed to the assisted suffering they previously faced—but never asks with any serious and honest zeal, why and how the displaced persons and refugees came to be displaced or homeless to begin with. Neither do they ask about all the money, intelligence sharing, deal making, and collaboration with private or governmental military agencies.

Large ‘humanitarian’ NGOs (and ‘conservation’ NGOs) operate as de facto multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID—itself a close and long-time partner for interventions with AFRICOM and the Pentagon.

Refugees and displaced populations are strategic tools of statecraft and foreign policy just as ‘humanitarian’ NGOs consistently use food as a weapon and populations as human shields. The history of the U.S. covert war in South Sudan is rich with examples of the SPLA and its ‘humanitarian’ partners, especially Christian ‘charities’, committing such war crimes and crimes against humanity. (See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, 7 February 2007.)

CARE International has received funding from Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world’s largest and most secretive producer of weapons of mass destruction, and both CARE and Save the Children are tied up with weapons and extractive industries in other ways. A peak at the board of directors of Save the Children makes it clear why the U.S. media is so devoid of truth about Darfur.  Similarly, the International Rescue Committee does not work with refugees, per se, but serves as a policy and pressure group involved in funneling private profits from the west back to the west. The IRC has also been cited for involvement in military operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it has deep ties to people like Henry Kissinger.

The AID (read: misery) industry in Sudan was by the mid-1990’s the largest so-called ‘humanitarian’ enterprise on the planet, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS)—a form of managed inequality and a temporary and mobile economy of white privilege, adventurism and, of course, good will (sic). The misery industry shifted its focus from South Sudan to Darfur after a pseudo peace ‘treaty’ was organized to end the decades old war between the SPLA and GoS; the U.S. and Israel backed the SPLA from 1990 onward, and continue to do so at present. The result of more than 12 years of illegal U.S. covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan resulted in the creation of the independent and sovereign state of South Sudan in circa 2005—a state dominated by Jewish and Christian faith-based interests and western multinational corporations.

Much of the AID infrastructure in Sudan has at one time or another been used as a weapon through the use of human shields, food deliveries to refugee populations inseparable from insurgents, and shipments of weapons by ‘humanitarian’ NGOs. This is both incidental and deliberate policy. Christian ‘relief’ NGOs played a huge role in supporting the covert western insurgency in South Sudan. One notable ‘humanitarian’ NGO involved in weapons deliveries was the Norwegian People’s Aid (known affectionately in the field as the Norwegian People’s Army).

In Darfur, Sudan, the U.S. government agenda is to win control of natural resources and lever the Arab government into a corner and, at last, establish a more ‘friendly’ government that will suit the corporate interests of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and Israel.

Several major think tanks—read: propaganda, lobbying and pressure—behind the destabilization of Sudan include the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, Center for American Progress, Center for Security Policy, International Rescue Committee and International Crises Group. Individuals from seemingly diverse positions of the political and ideological spectrum run these organizations, which are ultra-nationalist capitalist organizations bent on global military-economic domination.

The former Clinton officials most heavily focused on the destabilization of Sudan include: Susan Rice, Madeleine Albright, Roger Winter, Prudence Bushnell, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Anthony Lake and John Prendergast. Carr Center for Human Rights co-founder Samantha Power, now on the Obama National Security Council, has helped to whitewash clandestine U.S. involvement in Sudan.

John Prendergast has continued to peddle disinformation disguised as policy and human rights concerns through the International Crisis Group (ICG), and through its many clone organizations like ENOUGH, ONE and RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO. Prendergast has been a pivotal agent behind the hi-jacking of U.S. public concern and action through the disingenuous (and discredited) SAVE DARFUR movement.

Other notable agents of disinformation on Sudan include Alex de Waal and Smith College Professor Eric Reeves. It is through these and other conduits to the corporate U.S. media that the story of ‘genocide’ in Sudan is cast as an Africa-Arab affair devoid of western interests.

In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, one of many pivotal ‘human rights’ reports that falsely represented events in Rwanda, set the stage for victor’s justice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists: Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Army, and their western backers.

THE MAN FOR A NEW SUDAN

The pivotal intelligence asset working on the ground in Sudan to destabilize and overthrow the Government of Sudan (GoS) is Roger Winter—profiled very disingenuously in the seven-page New York Times Magazine feature story of 15 June 2008.

Interestingly, “The Man For A New Sudan” story—an establishment whitewash of the involvement of the U.S. military-intelligence establishment in Sudan—was written by Eliza Griswold, a ‘Fellow’ with the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank and pressure group with a very confused ideological but nationalist-militaristic position. (The NAF is obviously dependent on U.S. foundation funding, and it reveals no apparent policy formulations of substance on the Great Lakes or Horn of Africa, conflicts for which they remain completely silent).

“When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane,” Griswold wrote. “Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter ‘uncle’; others call him ‘commander’.”

Winter’s special post at the State Department was created specifically for him and his ‘work’ in Sudan. Why do Sudanese people in South Sudan call Roger Winter ‘commander’?

Roger Winter is the primary conduit for the ongoing covert destabilization of Sudan. His operations are run primarily out of Uganda, with the terrorist government of Yoweri Museveni providing support through the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) alliance with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

The SPLA is the de facto backbone of the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the main so-called ‘rebel’ factions involved in Darfur; the SPLA provides military and logistics support to Uganda from the Pentagon through unknown channels, but most likely involving the nearby Pentagon client states of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Chad and Eritrea.

The primary Ugandan agents supporting the U.S. war in Darfur have always been, and remain, Brigadier General James Kazini, a nephew of Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF); General Salim Saleh, half-brother of Museveni; and President Yoweri Museveni himself.

One of the main protagonists in the Darfur conflict is the current military regime in Rwanda, whose troops have been involved in Darfur under the guise of an ‘independent’ and ‘peacekeeping’ operation under the African Union ‘peacekeeping’ umbrella—back by Nato and private military companies.

Little known and widely misunderstood is the role of the United States and its proxies, the UPDF and the RPA, in committing massive crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the Rwandan conflagration, 1990 to 1994. Prior to the RPA invasion of Rwanda (from Uganda) in October 1990, the RPA and Rwandan Tutsi Diaspora had publications like Impuruza, published in the United States between 1984 and 1994 (when the RPA achieved the coup d’etat against Rwandan President Habyarimana). Tutsi refugees joined Roger Winter, who was at the time the Director of the United States Committee for Refugees, to help fund the publication. The editor, Alexander Kimenyi, is a Rwandan national and a professor at California State University. Like most RPA publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite and it peddled a genocidal ideology against Hutu people.

The Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA, assisted by Roger Winter, organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was chosen. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation.

THE DEVIL CAME IN A HELIOCOPTER

Roger Winter was one of the primary architects of the RPA guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that has led to the loss of more than ten or twelve million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since 1990. Winter acted as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies, and he appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN. New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch and Roger Winter made contacts on behalf of the RPA with American media, particularly the Washington Post,New York Times and Time magazine.

Roger Winter moved through Rwanda during the RPA invasion and worked the front lines of the covert war as a key Pentagon and U.S. State Department asset in collaboration with the Kagame RPA operation of terror. From 1990 to 1994, Winter traveled back and forth from the RPA controlled zone to Washington D.C., where he briefed and coordinated activities and support with U.S. military, intelligence and government officials.

Roger Winter is intimate with USAID, and a long-time ally of Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs (1997-2001), Special Assistant to President Clinton (1995-1997), and National Security Council insider (1993-1997). Susan Rice is the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations and staunch enemy of Omar al-Bashir.

Roger Winter is also a staunch supporter of U.S. Rep. Donald Payne, one of the leading U.S. Democrats who has pressing for action to “stop genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Payne sponsored the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act and he was arrested in June 2001, along with John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, for protesting against the GoS.

Christian Solidarity International has a very subversive relationship to ‘peace’ and ‘religion’ in Sudan, and they have been one of the frontrunner organizations peddling the accusations of slavery by the al-Bashir government, in particular; a highly contested and controversial issue generally inflated and manipulated by fundamentalist Jewish and Christian NGOs and missionary organizations, like Christian Solidarity International, Samaritan’s Purse, Servant’s Heart, and Freedom Quest International, that operate in Sudan.

“Roger Winter was the chief logistic boss for [RPA] Tutsis as early as mid-1990,” says Ugandan human rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and until their victory in 1994 they were operating from 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Roger Winter told a [name deleted] South Sudanese exile at the time [1994]: ‘I have now stabilized Rwanda and will turn my full attention to Sudan’. Winter subsequently closed up shop in Rwanda and based himself in Kampala working on Sudan. A few years later, Darfur exploded and with Winter’s manipulations, Rwanda was the first to send troops into that troubled area. From my sources, the Rwanda Defense Forces [working under the African Union umbrella] have killed civilians and brought in their media experts to pile the blame on Sudanese government troops.”

This is exactly what the Kagame and Museveni terror apparatus has done in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the terror operations of the UPDF/RPF in Rwanda in the 1990’s were covered up by Human Rights Watch experts Alison Des Forges (d. February 2009) and Timothy Longman, Associate Prof. of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College.

Similarly, throughout the long war in south Sudan, and now in Darfur, the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed factions were/are downplayed, dismissed or ignored, while those committed by competing factions are amplified and spotlighted. Also, following the pattern of UPDF and RPA criminal activities—such as massacres committed under disguise and/or attributed to the ‘enemy’—for which there is now a long history of documentation, and given the lack of any true independent evaluation, there is no telling who actually committed the massacres always blamed on the GoS or ‘Janjaweed’ militias.

One Sudanese professional from the south told me recently that it was not the Government of Sudan but rather the UPDF and SPLA who were arming the Janjaweed—the so-called Arab militias accused of wanton killing in an Arab-against-Black genocide. (This Arab-on-black genocide has been widely discredited.

Professor Timothy Longman and Alison Des Forges co-produced the fat treatise on ‘genocide’ in Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story, published in 1999. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents—based on field investigations in Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi, from 1995 to 2008—touted as independent and unbiased human rights reports but always skewed by hidden interests. Both Longman and Des Forges had relationships with the U.S. Department of State, National Security Council and Pentagon, both were regular consultants with USAID, and they certainly worked with Roger Winter, the Pentagon’s secret weapon in Sudan.

On 25 September 2008, a Ukrainian freighter was seized by ‘pirates’ off the coast of Somalia and was held until a ransom of $3.2 million was paid on 5 February 2009. (Somali fishermen disenfranchised by international dumping of toxic {and possibly nuclear} wastes off Somalia are labeled ‘pirates’ when they fight for their rights and freedoms.) The MV Faina is registered in Belize, owned by a company registered in Panama and piloted by Ukrainians. The MV Faina carried 33 Soviet T-72 battle tanks, grenade-launchers, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition en route to Mombassa, Kenya, the Pentagon’s primary base on the east coast of Africa.

The U.S. Navy’s 5^th Fleet monitored the Ukrainian ship during the four-month standoff, with the MV Faina pinned down by at least six U.S. and four European warships. The ship’s owner is Israeli national Vadim Alperin (alias Vadim Oltrena Alperin), said to be a MOSSAD agent involved with clandestine activities through offshore front companies and money laundering. The ship was unloaded in Mombassa on February 12, and the weapons are destined for Juba, South Sudan.

There are reports that weaponry also included tank munitions heads sporting deadly depleted uranium and that the final recipients are the Israeli-backed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) ‘rebels’ in Darfur. Sudan has previously accused Israel of supporting ‘rebels’ in the Darfur war. International arms syndicates and dealers routinely transfer ‘Soviet-era’ arms for international organized crime, including covert military operations involving proxy militias and national governments in Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda.








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Hier nog een artikel van KHS uit 2006: 

Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton MA

Op-Ed Published Friday, 15 September 2006.



Keeping “Peacekeepers” Out of Darfur (Submitted Title)



by keith harmon snow & Dimitri Oram





The humanitarian tragedy in the Darfur region of Sudan revolves around natural resources. Such struggles in Sudan began in the days when a budding journalist passed through Khartoum and reported on the British victory at the Battle of Omdurman. “The weapons, the methods and the fanaticism of the Middle Ages,” reported Winston Churchill, “were brought by an extraordinary anachronism into dire collision with the organization and inventions of the 19th century. The result was not surprising.” The gattling gun silenced some 60,000 Sudanese tribesmen armed only with spears, bows and arrows.



While colonialism died a hard death in Sudan, during the Cold War the control of the Sudan remained central to the U.S. and its anti-communist allies throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. War began in the early 1980’s, and after 1990 the U.S. supported the southern Christian rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, for over a decade, until a peace deal was struck in 2003.



In the 1990’s an Islamic government came to power, and tensions escalated (1998) when the Clinton Administration bombed the Al Shifta pharmaceutical factory, the country’s only producer of medical supplies. After 9/11 the Bush Administration warmed to the Government of Sudan, and today Sudan is both credited as a pivotal ally in the “War on Terror” and castigated as “a rogue Arab government committing genocide against black Africans in Darfur.”



Darfur is now the flashpoint for the international geopolitical chess-game to control Sudan and its resources. For example, the U.S. Sugar industry notes that Sudan is a major sugar producer, and the American Botanical Council credits Darfur with supplying two-thirds of world-supply of high-quality gum Arabic—an ingredient in soft drinks and pharmaceutical products. [1] USAID funded Gum Arabic projects throughout the 1980’s, but suspended them with the ascension of the Islamic government in the 1990’s. And, as noted by Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement, one of mysterious factions fighting in Darfur, “oil is everywhere in Sudan.” Darfur is rich in uranium, copper, gold and petroleum.



Combatants in Darfur not only arrive on camels and horses—the infamous “janjaweed” ever credited with genocide—but also in C-130 aircraft, with logistical and strategic support provided by U.S. Air Forces in Europe, under U.S. Marine General James Jones. [2] Backed by the U.S. and NATO, the 7000 troops of the African Union (AU) “peacekeeping” force have only deepened the quagmire: the AU force is accused of taking sides and there are calls for withdrawal. Rwandan troops with the AU mission in Darfur are themselves accused of having committed atrocities in the Congo. The U.S. and its allies, including Britain, Israel and Taiwan, continue to press their interests in the region: both the U.S. and Israel today support combatants in Chad, Sudan and Congo.



U.S. taxpayers also support the operations of U.S. troops in Uganda, Chad, and Ethiopia—three states embroiled in humanitarian crises and war. Acts of genocide and war crimes proliferate in each, but no one is calling for “peacekeeping” missions here. International aid and human rights organizations widely acknowledge that the crises in northern Uganda is the worst in the world, yet the least talked about. Atrocities routinely occur in Ethiopia, and Ethiopian military leaders defected to Eritrea last month in protest of the government’s role. Meanwhile, the attention of the U.S. public has been narrowly focused on the “moral necessity” of intervention to “stop genocide” in Darfur.



While spending two billion dollars a year on the world’s most neglected emergency, the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (M.O.N.U.C.), partially funded by the U.S. public, was unable to stem the mortalities: some 30,000 Congolese have died monthly (1000 people a day) from violence, disease and malnutrition. [3] The situation in Congo remains dire, more deadly than Darfur. M.O.N.U.C. “peacekeepers” have committed atrocities against civilians. Weapons and minerals continue to flow across Congo’s borders routinely, and recent news reports claim that uranium from Congo has appeared in Iran. [4] War in Congo continues.



Those in the U.S. who call for intervention in Darfur fail to understand the greater geopolitical context. Given current realities in Sudan, no intervention in Darfur will proceed, and if it did it would fail. U.S. citizens should support the ongoing peace process mediated by the Eritreans, involving the Sudanese government and the Darfur resistance, which seeks to find a permanent solution to the Darfur crisis. The saying in the Horn is “all roads to peace in the Horn of Africa run through Asmara,” the Eritrean capital, and this is where the winds of change are blowing.



In every case, intervention in the Horn of Africa has only worsened the crises. The promise of the United Nations “peacekeeping” missions has been compromised, and attention needs to shift to reforming “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” agendas and addressing the root causes. Sending more armed forces from outside Sudan will destroy all hope of peaceful resolution, and the people of the Horn of Africa—given their awareness of Sudan’s vast petroleum and uranium reserves, and war in Lebanon and Iraq—are deeply cynical of the motivations of Westerners who call for “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” intervention.



At the Smith College Panel on Intervention in Darfur (6 July 2006), organizers, panelists and sponsors called on Mayor Claire Higgins—a signatory to the Darfur Action Group campaign of the Congregation Bnai Israel—and the Northampton City Council to hold a public hearing to explore the geopolitical realities of this conflict, in hopes to educate and inspire the public to take appropriate action. This call is repeated here, and the public is urged to support it.



Concerned citizens should ask for [1] transparency of U.S. foreign policy and involvement in Sudan; [2] good faith negotiations and diplomacy offering concessions and support from the U.S. and its allies; [3] respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of the people of Sudan; [4] accountability from all factions, and their backers, involved in the conflict; and [5] a withdrawal of all foreign troops from Sudanese soil.



War does not occur in a vacuum, and Americans will pay a high price for misguided action. We need only recall the “humanitarian” failure of the U.S. military in Somalia, and the ridicule and humiliation served to the American people as young American soldiers were dragged through the streets of that far off place.







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A native of Williamsburg, MA, keith harmon snow has worked on the Horn of Africa as a consultant on genocide and humanitarian aid for the United Nations (2005), and he worked in Ethiopia, Sudan and the Congo as a human rights researcher and genocide investigator for Genocide Watch (2004-2005) and Survivors Rights International (2004, 2005). Also an award-winning journalist, he has worked extensively (2004-2006) with the multinational peacekeeping forces of the United Nations Observers Mission for Congo (M.O.N.U.C.). In 2001 he reported from the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and he has worked or reported from 17 countries in Africa. In 2006 he has been working in Congo and Afghanistan. Dimitri Oram is a human rights and genocide researcher, and writer, based in Northampton, MA. For more information: keith.harmon.snow@gmail.com.

[1] http://www.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/articleview.asp?a=2770

[2] http://usinfo.state.gov/af/Archive/2005/Oct/05-737610.html

[3] http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16759_1.html

[4] http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20041081-2703,00.html; and also see: www.allAfrica.com: Congo-Kinshasa: Iran Sought Uranium From Congo, Says UN.