INTRODUCTION:

When history repeats itself for a third time, it is beyond tragedy. Since its independence fifty-one years ago, Sudan has suffered two civil wars between North and South, each of them as bloody as--and much longer than--today's crisis in the western region of Darfur.

Sudan is Africa’s largest country and one of its poorest in terms of development and spending power, but with infinite natural resources including vast oil reserves. It has a population of 36 million consisting largely of Muslims. Darfur is the western province with only six million people. Sudan produces 350,000 barrels oil per day, earning a million dollars a day in oil revenues. By next year, the figure is expected to increase substantially thanks to rising oil prices. The oil factor has changed the dimensions of the conflict, inviting rivalry between China and the US, China being the largest investor in Sudan’s oil industry.

The Darfur situation has been described as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, and the first genocide of the 21st century. Genocide the Darfur conflict most certainly is not. There is no ethnic cleansing, as such. It’s not a religious conflict either because all the combatants involved are Muslims. Attempts, made earlier in the propaganda war against Sudan did try to portray it as Islamic ‘violence’ against non-Muslims, were quietly piped down once it became clear that the blood being shed on both sides was, indeed, Muslim.

Discovered energy resources have made Sudan of enormous interest to US corporations. In addition to having oil and gas reserves, it has one of the three largest deposits of high purity uranium in the world, along with the fourth largest deposits of copper.


HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE CRISIS:

First Crisis: When Sudan won its independence in 1956, a rebellion was already under way in the South. Southern Sudanese, black and overwhelmingly non-Muslim, feared that national independence simply meant a replacement of British imperial rule by Northern Sudanese Arab colonialism. Their fears were well founded, as Southerners suffered discrimination and abuse from Northern governments seeking to create a Muslim and Arabized country. This war lasted seventeen years, until a peace accord was signed in 1972.

Second Crisis: A second war broke out in 1983. The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), headed by John Garang, fought four successive governments in Khartoum until, with major effort from Kenya, the United States and Europe, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in January 2005. Commonly known as the Naivasha Agreement, after the Kenyan resort where negotiations were conducted, the CPA promised the democratization of Sudan and an equitable distribution of oil revenues between North and South. Its greatest weakness is that despite the word "comprehensive," the accord didn't deal with the war in Darfur. That conflict had erupted just as the North-South war was finally coming close to settlement.

The Darfur rebellion: The Darfur rebellion arose out of a sorry history of misgovernment and the region's unfortunate location next door to Chad's civil war, which has alternately smoldered and blazed since the 1960s. Twenty years ago Khartoum turned a blind eye to Libya's use of Darfur as a rear base to attack Chad, and the depredations of the Chadian Arab militia it had armed--the original Janjaweed. As law and order collapsed and Darfurian tribesmen acquired weapons to defend their farms and herds, Khartoum failed to act as an honest broker in the numerous local conflicts. On the contrary, it policed Darfur by promoting loyal chiefs and arming their militias. Most of these loyalists were Arabs who fueled Arab supremacist ideology and underwrote an escalating land grab. By 2003 a coalition of village self-defense groups trying to hold on to their land and educated Darfurians incensed at the region's marginalization in national politics came together as the Sudan Liberation Army and mounted a guerrilla war. Garang encouraged the SLA, hoping that a new insurgency in the west would press Khartoum to make bigger concessions on his agenda of a radical "New Sudan."


DARFUR GENOCIDE:

The Darfur crisis erupted in February 2003. The conflict began as an uprising of African tribes against Arab tribes known as the Janjaweed and supported by Khartoum. It is alleged that 250,000 people have been killed by violence, hunger and disease and about 1.9 million displaced. Nearly three million depend on international aid for food, health and medical treatment.

The Darfur issue came under the international spotlight in 2004, with the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsing a US Congress resolution that genocide had been committed in Darfur. It must be borne in mind that both warring factions are Muslims and the conflict is considered by many (including the government) not to about ethnic or racial animosities but pastures and water. The expression genocide has since been used deliberately to mobilise global attention and concern and pave the way for US intervention. The efforts of the Sudanese government for peace between Khartoum and west Sudan resulted in an agreement in May 2006 between the government and the Sudanese Liberation Movement. The peace agreement, inter alia, provided for a referendum, but it did not consider the SLM demand for giving the post of vice-president to Darfur, or to resolve power-sharing and wealth distribution issues.


ROLE OF AFRICAN UNION:

To bring about peace and enforce the provisions of the Abuja agreement, the African Union agreed to a peace-keeping operation. Accordingly, 7,000 troops were deployed to monitor the truce. The mission costs about $40 million a month, and the AU that is financially dependent on donor nations, is facing a serious financial crisis. The AU peace-keeping operation has also been severely limited by lack of vehicles and communication equipment, and is not expected to continue beyond the end of this year.


CHINESE FACTOR:

The discovery of oil in Sudan, in the 70s, brought the western oil companies scrambling to a dirty poor country, which hardly anyone in the West had cared to know about, much less assist, before its wealth in black gold became known.

China, just then, happened to be breaking out of its isolation and infused by Deng Xiao Ping’s revolutionary open-door economic policies. The Chinese and the Sudanese struck a nexus of interest in oil, needed by China to revive its industrial machines to full throttle ahead.

China buys two-thirds of all the oil produced by Sudan. However, unlike the western corporations, China has a more humane corporate culture. The state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has invested $300 million in Sudan’s largest oil refinery, doubling its output. Much of Sudan’s petroleum needs are met from the same refinery.

No wonder Washington is being egged on by the oil lobby, with its clout and muscle so well recognized, to muscle its way into Sudan and edge out the Chinese.


AMERICAN INTENTIONS TO TAKE OVER SUDAN’S OIL RESERVES:

The neo-conservatives of Bush administration have been eyeing Sudanese oil covetously. For the last three years, they appear to be working towards isolating Sudan and intervening militarily to take over its oil reserves. The introduction of Shariah laws in Sudan is another reason for this agenda.
Sudan despite close cooperation with the US on terrorism in the wake of 9/11 still continues to be classified as a terrorist state. Horrific images of genocide in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s are being invoked to justify intervention in Sudan, on the grounds of humanitarian concern.

The oil factor as in other cases, particularly that of Iraq, is the main determinant of the increasing US pressure directly and through the Security Council to bring in peace keeping forces to supplant the AU forces, and thus get into a struggle to secure energy resources. The US through Ghana and Uganda is exacerbating the situation by driving a wedge in African ranks to make Sudan succumb to US pressure.


THE ISRAEL FACTOR:

The American interest groups, with an axe to grind against Sudan, are being spearheaded by two Zionist groups: The American Jewish World Service (AJWS) and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which have been in the forefront of fomenting public interest in the “genocide” theory. The recent rallies in New York and Washington were the handiwork of these bodies working for the promotion of Israeli interests in the world.
Israel has a history of actively fuelling and supporting anti-Muslim ‘causes’ in Africa. Its interest in unsettling the Sudanese government goes back a long way when it actively started arming the South Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) fighting a war against the Sudanese government. Israel had full support of American evangelical groups in rattling the government in Khartoum because the SLA, in their view, was fighting for Christian interests in that part of Sudan.


THE UN ROLE:

Sudan has rejected the stationing of UN troops, but pressure is being applied relentlessly. Meanwhile, the hardliners continue to say that the most compelling challenge of our times is to stop the genocide in Darfur. The Security Council has passed a couple of resolutions 1679 and 1706.
The UN resolution 1706 has called for the deployment of up to 20,000 UN peace-keepers to replace AU troops over the rejection of Sudan, which President Omar al-Bashir regards as a US ploy to invade his country and plunder its resources. The resolution does not talk of any sanctions due to opposition by China and Russia, but refers to UN World Summit Declaration.


FUTURE PROSPECTS & SUGGESTIONS:

Role of Arab League: The die seems to have been cast for Sudan as it is incapable of resisting the combined pressure of the US and the UN. Unless the Arab League intervenes effectively or the African Union insists on an African solution, Sudan will be headed for troubled waters and will find itself caught in a conspiracy that seeks to provide the US and the West with an assured source of energy and perpetuate their presence in the name of humanitarian assistance.

The Arab League can thwart the neo-con agenda of military intervention if its members collectively meet the estimated budget $40 million per month that is needed for the maintenance of AU peacekeepers and also assist Sudan in resolving the continuing crisis and avert another tragedy.
The UN SC Resolutions: The Security Council authorised deployment of a peacekeeping force of 20,600 troops and police to Darfur six months ago. Yet only a few countries — Bangladesh, Nigeria and Tanzania — have offered troops, and Norway and Sweden have offered a joint engineering battalion. The absence of a force-in-waiting is rightly interpreted by Khartoum as a sign of international weakness.


Role of OIC:

It’s unfortunate that the Islamic world has done precious little to have any peacemaking role in this entirely Muslim conflict. The OIC has been conspicuous by its absence, as well as silence in the context of Darfur.