Did this slip through the cracks, Bush orders new sanctions against

[whistle]

...Sudan and intensifies the misery there. Iraq all over again, then we read about warship bombarding villages in Somalia. What will Bush say about this at the G* summit? Just expanded war, more killing, starving the people of Sudan, totally counterproductive and unwise foreign policy! Actually, this is totally insane.

<snip>
Archive for the 'The situation in Darfur' Category
US President orders new sanctions against Sudan.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

US President George W. Bush unveiled a new set of sanctions against the Sudanese government in a speech today. Mr. Bush made his speech ahead of next weeks G8 summit in Europe. The new sanctions are intended to influence the Sudanese to ends its blockade against humanitarian aid and an amendment to the African Union peace keeping force there. Mr. Bush will addressed the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, stating; “”President Bashir’s actions over the past few weeks follow a long pattern of promising co-operation while finding new methods of obstruction,”

The US sanctions will focus on four key steps; first, the current enforcement of existing measures will be enhanced; second, 31 additional government owned companies will be added to the list of those prevented from doing business with the United States, one of which is suspected of violating the arms embargo against Sudan; third, two high-ranking Sudanese government officials and one rebel leader will be specifically targeted by new sanctions; finally, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will push for a United Nations resolution enacting sweeping arms embargoes, including prohibiting military flights over Darfur.

Mr. Bush was expected to announce the new measures at an April 18 speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, however, urged the president to delay the announcement amongst diplomatic wrangling with Sudanese officials. Pressure has been racheting up as Sudan has been stalling on meeting its obligations to the international community. In April, Sudan was found to be violating arms embargoes by masking government aircraft as UN vehicles to smuggle weapons.

The new UN effort, however, is not met with universal acceptance. China, who holds veto power at the UN, has stated that new sanctions will only add to the problems in Sudan. China has spent millions investing in Sudan’s oil infrastructure, is a major arms dealer to the country, and buys over half of its oil exports.

The Bush administration has classified the actions in Darfur as genocide, though the United Nations has not yet used the term. Keying in on that fact, administration officials are quoted as saying; “This will be the first time we are taking such an action ahead of the United Nations.” The crisis in Sudan is expected to be a key feature in the upcoming G8 summit.

This story is still breaking; transcripts and links to further analysis to follow as they become available. This is the lead story on the wire services today.

BBC News/AP/Reuters

http://warcrimes.foreignpolicyblogs.com/category/uncategorized/the-situation-in-darfur/

[applegrove]

1. Nobody is bombing the SUDAN. This is about stopping genocide.

I personally cannot wait for the helicopters to arrive and start patrolling area where the junjadaweed attacks.

[whistle]

4. Genocide is defined as....

Deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. A systematic attempt to annihilate a racial group or nation. The word was first used in 1944.

In Darfur it is two groups fighting against one another, the shepherds and cattle herders vs. farmers. They fight over who gets scarce resources such as of water rights, land allocations, transportation issues, fuel, power, etc. George Bush and Dick Cheney see a bigger prize by more interventionist war. They get access to vast oil reserves and mineral resources in the region. It is another BushCo lie like WMD was to justify invading Iraq.

[applegrove]

5. Sorry. I and thousands of others do no agree. One group is targeting

women, children and civilians for terror. And moving them off their land. That is known as ethnic cleansing. * actions are too little, and very late. Someone needs to shock the government in Khartoum into peace. This isn't the same as the war on terror though I am sure the * Admin would like to paint it as such to legitemize the mess they are in in Iraq.

[whistle]

6. Not according to Sudan's Ambassador to the United States, John Ukec Lueth Ukec

...and also Professor Mahmood Mamdani whose March 2007 article can be found on the Sudan Embassy website. He argues that intervensionist policies are moving the country toward chaos and genecide as a self-fulfilling act which at the moment is only a misnamed label. And he draws close comparisons between pre-invasion Iraq and Sudan today.

<snip>
The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
NEWS STORY | Friday, March 23, 2007

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
Mahmood Mamdani
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

<deep snip>
The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

Footnotes
*Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.


<MORE>

http://www.sudanembassy.org/default.asp?page=viewstory&id=485

[applegrove]

7. Yes the government in Khartowm has been denying the genocide.

That is how they happen. The government in power sees some benefit to attacking one group. For sure there are rebels but you don't rape and kill women and children to put down a revolt. The government in Khartown has recently reached a peace deal with the rebels in the South. They need to be prodded to do the same with the people of the west of Sudan. Otherwise they love the ethnic cleansing of people from land where more oil has been discovered.

I am sure Bush would like us to lump the Sudan in with his war on terror. It legitimizes his war in Iraq.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

9. It's both

Genocide and trying to get at the oil.

You are both right.

[whistle]

11. Yes I'm afraid so, if the Sudanese don't kill enough of their own

...before the U.S. invades and occupies the oil and mineral rich areas, our forces will kill them.

[libodem]

2. Where was it that we bombed those wandering shepherds?

And it was touted all over the news that they were some kind of bad guys? Was that Sudan or Somalia?

[whistle]

3. No but the bombing in neighboring Somalia could be a prelude to

....U.S. expanding the war into neighboring Ethiopia to the west and the on the northern border of Somalia into Sudan. Darfur is not genocide, it is a land grab war between animal herders and farmers, just like the U.S. frontier in the mid-late 1800s.

So what is Bush/Cheney's purpose for starving Sudanese people? Oil reserves, that's the prize!

[whistle]

8. China states its opposition to U.S. imposed sanctions on Sudan

<snip>
Africa News
China says US sanctions complicate Sudan situation

May 30, 2007, 22:11 GMT


New York - Fresh economic sanctions against the Sudanese government ordered by the United States would complicate efforts to end the conflict in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, China's UN ambassador Wang Guangya said Wednesday.

Wang said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council were making progress in solving the ethnic conflict. Those efforts included political dialogue, deployment of a UN-African Union peacekeeping force and humanitarian aid, in a three-pronged campaign to end the three-year-old conflict.

'Under such circumstances, the sanctions announced by the United States and the talk of having a Security Council resolution on the sanctions, would make this fragile situation more complicated,' Wang told reporters one day after Bush announced the sanctions in Washington.

The US sanctions aimed at 30 companies, including five in Sudan's booming oil industry, and froze the assets of two senior Sudanese government officials and a rebel leader whose group refused to sign last year's Darfur peace agreement.

The sanctions bar the companies and individuals from all business transactions through the US financial system.

In imposing the sanctions, Bush said he was fighting to end genocide in the Darfur region.

The conflict in Darfur since 2003 pitted government-backed Arab militias, known as janjaweed, against African rebel groups and has left more than 300,000 people dead and more than 2 million displaced.

China, which has strong economic ties to Sudan in developing the country's oil resources, has opposed sanctions against Khartoum. In the US, a group, Save Darfur, has launched a massive advertising campaign saying it is contradictory for China to host the 2008 summer Olympics while it remains on the sidelines of the 'Sudanese government's genocide.'

<link> http://news.monstersandcritics.com/africa/news/article_1311387.php/China_says_US_sanctions_complicate_Sudan_situation

<snip>
RE: "Save Darfur" today in NY Times

Darfur Advocacy Group Undergoes a Shake-Up
By STEPHANIE STROM and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: June 2, 2007

Even as advocacy groups attained the seeming triumph of President Bush’s new sanctions against Sudan, the organization that helped bring the conflict in Darfur to the world’s attention is in upheaval, firing its executive director, reorganizing its board and rethinking its strategies.

At the heart of the shake-up are questions of whether the former executive director of the organization, the Save Darfur Coalition, wisely used a sudden influx of money from a few anonymous donors in an advertising blitz to push for action.

The advertisements strained relationships with aid groups working on the ground in Darfur, the western region of Sudan, where at least 200,000 people have been killed and millions have fled their homes. Many of the groups opposed some of the tone and content of Save Darfur’s high-decibel advocacy campaign.

Coalition board members sought to minimize the dispute, saying that tensions had existed between advocates and aid workers in previous crises, like Kosovo, and that the organization’s rapid growth and changing membership had motivated the board’s decision to remove the director, David Rubenstein.

<deep snip>
Mr. Bacon said similar tension had flared publicly during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, when relief groups had staff members in the Balkans at the same time advocacy groups were calling for bombing and more aggressive military action.

“Not only were there concerns among relief agencies that their workers would be hit if there were bombing, but they were also fearful that more aggressive action could provoke a counterattack against aid workers, who might be seen as representative of the Western powers doing the bombing,” Mr. Bacon said.

John Prendergast, a member of the board of Save Darfur and a leading activist on Darfur, said the changes that the board decided to make were part of an effort to reorganize and re-energize the movement along the lines of its earliest conception: to be a broad, permanent alliance of many different types of organizations working together to prevent atrocities and genocide.

“The growth was so fast in the coalition, as was interest in the issue of Darfur and in the budget, that it was hard to kind of manage the difference between an organization and a coalition,” Mr. Prendergast said. “People felt that the time had some to go back to the roots of the coalition of groups that is so rich and so diverse.”

<MORE>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/world/africa/02darfur.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&oref=slogin

[Viva_La_Revolution]

10. summary: We are at war with China over the oil.

by what-ever means necessary.

[Psephos]

12. So what is your suggestion? n/t

[Viva_La_Revolution]

13. Let them have it.

but that would entail Americans actually learning to conserve. long shot.

[Psephos]

14. Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant, what about the ethnic killing in Sudan?

China seems to think it works out well for their interests if the killing continues, absent a response from other countries. They're big customers of Sudan; their money is helping prosecute the ethnic killings. They're also working sub rosa to advance their interests.

Meanwhile, as the elephants fight, the grass continues to be trampled.