[Peace-discuss] Black Agenda Report on Darfur

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Ten Reasons Why "Save Darfur" is a PR Scam to
	Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa
	Tuesday, 27 November 2007
	by BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon

The star-studded hue and cry to "Save Darfur" and "stop the genocide" 
has gained enormous traction in U.S. media along with bipartisan support 
in Congress and the White House.  But the Congo, with ten to twenty 
times as many African dead over the same period is not called a 
"genocide" and passes almost unnoticed. Sudan sits atop lakes of oil. It 
has large supplies of uranium, and other minerals, significant water 
resources, and a strategic location near still more African oil and 
resources. The unasked question is whether the nation's Republican and 
Democratic foreign policy elite are using claims of genocide, and 
appeals for "humanitarian intervention" to grease the way for the next 
oil and resource wars on the African continent.

The regular manufacture and the constant maintenance of false realities 
in the service of American empire is a core function of the public 
relations profession and the corporate news media.  Whether it's fake 
news stories about wonder drugs and how toxic chemicals are good for 
you, bribed commentators and journalists discoursing on the benefits of 
No Child Left Behind, Hollywood stars advocating military intervention 
to save African orphans, or slick propaganda campaigns employing viral 
marketing techniques to reach out to college students, bloggers, 
churches and ordinary citizens, it pays to take a close look behind the 
facade.

Among the latest false realities being pushed upon the American people 
are the simplistic pictures of Black vs. Arab genocide in Darfur, and 
the proposed solution: a robust US-backed or US-led military 
intervention in Western Sudan.  Increasing scrutiny is being focused 
upon the “Save Darfur” lobby and the Save Darfur Coalition; upon its 
founders, its finances, its methods and motivations and its 
truthfulness.  In the spirit of furthering that examination we here 
present ten reasons to suspect that the "Save Darfur" campaign is a PR 
scam to justify US intervention in Africa.

1.  It wouldn't be the first Big Lie our government and media elite told 
us to justify a war.

Elders among us can recall the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which the US 
government deliberately provoked to justify initiation of the war in 
Vietnam.  This rationale was quickly succeeded by the need to help the 
struggling infant "democracy" in South Vietnam, and the still useful 
"fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here" nonsense. 
  More recently the bombings, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan 
and Iraq have been variously explained by people on the public payroll 
as necessary to "get Bin Laden" as revenge for 9-11, as measures to take 
"the world's most dangerous weapons" from the hands of "the world's most 
dangerous regimes", as measures to enable the struggling Iraqi 
"democracy" stand on its own two feet, and necessary because it's still 
better to "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here".

2.  It wouldn't even be the first time the U.S. government and media 
elite employed "genocide prevention" as a rationale for military 
intervention in an oil-rich region.

The 1999 US and NATO military intervention in Kosovo was supposedly a 
"peacekeeping" operation to stop a genocide.  The lasting result of that 
campaign is Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest military bases on the 
planet.  The U.S. is practically the only country in the world that 
maintains military bases outside its own borders.  At just under a 
thousand acres, Camp Bondsteel offers the US military the ability to 
pre-position large quantities of equipment and supplies within striking 
distance of Caspian oil fields, pipeline routes and relevant sea lanes. 
  It is also widely believed to be the site of one of the US's secret 
prison and torture facilities.

3.  If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the 
focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five 
million dead?

“The notion that a quarter million Darfuri dead are a genocide and five 
million dead Congolese are not is vicious and absurd," according to 
Congolese activist Nita Evele.  "What's happened and what is still 
happening in Congo is not a tribal conflict and it's not a civil war. It 
is an invasion. It is a genocide with a death toll of five million, 
twenty times that of Darfur, conducted for the purpose of plundering 
Congolese mineral and natural resources."

More than anything else, the selective and cynical application of the 
term "genocide" to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty 
times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy 
around the "Save Darfur" movement.  In the Congo, where local gangsters, 
mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, 
Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation 
on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players 
eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for 
Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western 
reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other 
Congolese resources continue undisturbed.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the 
board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining 
concerns in war-torn Congo.  Evidently, with profits from the brutal 
extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no 
Congolese "genocide" worth noting, much less interfering with. For their 
purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as 
the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the 
bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.

4.  It's all about Sudanese oil.

Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, sit atop a lake of oil.  But 
Sudanese oil fields are not being developed and drilled by Exxon or 
Chevron or British Petroleum.  Chinese banks, oil and construction firms 
are making the loans, drilling the wells, laying the pipelines to take 
Sudanese oil where they intend it to go, calling far too many shots for 
a twenty-first century in which the U.S. aspires to control the planet's 
energy supplies.  A U.S. and NATO military intervention will solve that 
problem for U.S. planners.

5.  It's all about Sudanese uranium, gum arabic and other natural resources.

Uranium is vital to the nuclear weapons industry and an essential fuel 
for nuclear reactors.  Sudan possesses high quality deposits of uranium. 
  Gum arabic is an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals, candies and 
beverages like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Sudanese exports of this 
commodity are 80% of the world's supply.  When comprehensive U.S. 
sanctions against the Sudanese regime were being considered in 1997, 
industry lobbyists stepped up and secured an exemption in the sanctions 
bill to guarantee their supplies of this valuable Sudanese commodity. 
But an in-country U.S. and NATO military presence is a more secure 
guarantee that the extraction of Sudanese resources, like those of the 
Congo, flow westward to the U.S. and the European Union.

6.  It's all about Sudan's strategic location

Sudan sits opposite Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where a large 
fraction of the world's easily extracted oil will be for a few more 
years.  Darfur borders on Libya and Chad, with their own vast oil 
resources, is within striking distance of West and Central Africa, and 
is a likely pipeline route.  The Nile River flows through Sudan before 
reaching Egypt, and Southern Sudan water resources of regional 
significance too.  With the creation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon 
command for the African continent, the U.S. has made open and explicit 
its intention to plant a strategic footprint on the African continent. 
 From permanent Sudanese bases, the U.S. military could influence the 
politics and economies of Africa for a generation to come.

7.  The backers and founders of the "Save Darfur" movement are the 
well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite.
According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer

"The Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned 
about genocide in the African country – the American Jewish World 
Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum...

“The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public 
relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal 
year...

“Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, 
which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 
Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman 
said the amount is in the millions of dollars.”

Though the "Save Darfur" PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, 
reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a 
grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support 
of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and 
Mozambique a generation ago.  Top heavy with evangelical Christians who 
preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known 
for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, 
the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a 
propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to 
manufacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the 
cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.

8.  None of the funds raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition", the 
flagship of the "Save Darfur Movement" go to help needy Africans on the 
ground in Darfur, according to stories in both the Washington Post and 
the New York Times.

“None of the money collected by Save Darfur goes to help the victims and 
their families. Instead, the coalition pours its proceeds into advocacy 
efforts that are primarily designed to persuade governments to act.”

9.  "Save Darfur" partisans in the U.S. are not interested in political 
negotiations to end the conflict in Darfur

President Bush has openly and repeatedly attempted to throw monkey 
wrenches at peace negotiations to end the war in Darfur.  Even 
pro-intervention scholars and humanitarian organizations active on the 
ground have criticized the U.S. for endangering humanitarian relief 
workers, and for effectively urging rebel parties in Darfur to refuse 
peace talks and hold out for U.S. and NATO intervention on their behalf.

The PR campaign which depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, 
in which Arabs, who are generally despised in the US media anyway, are 
exterminating the black population of Sudan, is slick, seamless and 
attractive, and seems to leave no room for negotiation.  But in fact, 
many of Sudan's "Arabs", even the Janjiweed, are also black.  In any 
case, they were armed and unleashed by a government which has the power 
to disarm them if it chooses, and refusing to talk to that government's 
negotiators is a sure way to avoid any settlement.

10.  Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial 
armed wings of the Republican party and the Pentagon are eagerly 
pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.

"Chris Taylor, head of strategy for Blackwater, says his company has a 
database of thousands of former police and military officers for 
security assignments. He says Blackwater personnel could set up 
perimeters and guard Darfurian villages and refugee camp in support of 
the U.N. Blackwater officials say it would not take many men to fend off 
the Janjaweed, a militia that is supported by the Sudanese government 
and attacks villages on camelback."

Apparently Blackwater doesn't need to come to the Congo, where hunger 
and malnutrition, depopulation, mass rape and the disappearance of 
schools, hospitals and civil society into vast law free zones ruled by 
an ever-changing cast of African proxies (like the son of the late and 
unlamented Idi Amin), all under a veil of complicit media silence 
already constitute the perfect business-friendly environment for 
siphoning off the vast wealth of that country at minimal cost.

Look for the adoption of the Congolese model across the wide areas of 
Africa that U.S. strategic planners call "ungoverned spaces".  Just 
don't look expect to see details on the evening news, or hear about them 
from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.

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