The capitalist media drums are beating again. This time, it is over China’s supposed role in supporting the “genocide” in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
A flurry of anti-China, anti-Sudan reports have come forth over the past two weeks. These have been closely coordinated with increasingly inflamed government rhetoric and actions.
In early February, Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg resigned from his post as artistic advisor for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. Spielberg said, “While China’s representatives have conveyed to me that they are working to end the terrible tragedy in Darfur, the grim realities of the suffering continue unabated.”
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said he “respected” Spielberg’s decision, adding “I like his films.” Human Rights Watch, an organization that routinely demonizes governments that are targeted for “regime change” by Washington, praised Spielberg’s decision. So too did the CIA-backed anti-communist, pro-theocratic “Free Tibet” campaign. All of this was covered ad nauseam in the bourgeois press.
China responded strongly. “This renowned film director is famous for his science fiction. But now it seems he lives in a world of science fiction and he can’t distinguish a dream from reality,” said the Chinese Youth Daily.
But Hollywood bigwig Spielberg is not a leader of the attacks on Sudan and China. He simply bowed to pressure organized by Mia Farrow, George Clooney and others in a liberal-conservative coalition that is spearheading the campaign against China in favor of U.S. intervention in the Sudan.
A similar liberal-conservative bourgeois coalition led the crusade to bomb Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. Wittingly or not, these campaigns for “humanitarian intervention” provide a useful mask for brutal imperialist invasions preceded by equally brutal economic sanctions.
It was no coincidence that Spielberg resigned around the time that the U.S. Congress and a coalition of Nobel Peace Prize winners, politicians and athletes launched bitter attacks on Beijing about Darfur.
Just days later, President Bush—on a brief tour through Africa—equated the mass ethnic killings in Rwanda in the 1990s with the war in Darfur, pledging greater aid to African nations that go along with the anti-Sudan campaign. (allAfrica.com, Feb. 19)
What is the U.S. government’s goal? The United States clearly has wanted to overthrow the Khartoum government since the early 1990s. Sudan refused to cooperate with the US in the first war against Iraq in 1991. That is when the US imposed economic sanctions on Sudan as a punishment. Under President Clinton, Washington designated Sudan a “terrorist” state, continued economic sanctions, and bombed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, which produced 50 percent of Sudan’s medicine.
President Bush has increased the attacks on Sudan. The imperialists want a friendly regime in Khartoum. They want Sudan to be completely opened to foreign capital—in the main, they want Sudan’s oil.
U.S. oil companies have known about Sudan’s oil wealth since the 1970s when Chevron discovered big oil reserves in the south. The corporation estimated that “Sudan had more oil than Iran and Saudi Arabia together.”
The corporate oil companies and the Pentagon cannot justify an intervention against Sudan based on wanting to dominate the country’s natural resources. They must resort to humanitarian slogans. “Stop Genocide” or “Protect the Rights of Ethnic Minorities” has a better ring.
The U.S.-engineered campaign is nothing new. People in the United States have been bombarded regularly with the alleged crimes committed by the Sudanese government. Never far behind is the smearing of Sudan’s ally, China, as somehow complicit because of their friendly trade and diplomatic relations.
By most media accounts, at least 200,000 people have died in Sudan’s Darfur region since the conflict began in 2003. Whatever the real numbers are, there is a humanitarian crisis. Lack of food, water and arable land in the region has contributed to the situation. But even the United Nations acknowledges that the conflict is not “genocide.” It is a war stemming from the economic realities of Sudan. The current conflict is rooted in the brutal, colonial pillaging of the African continent by now-imperialist powers.
The war in Darfur was launched in 2003 by rebel groups with ties to pro-imperialist former rebels in southern Sudan who fought a decades-long civil war against the central government in Khartoum.
The Sudanese government has wanted to resolve the war for years. A peace accord was reached in May 2006 with some of the rebel groups, but other factions refused. The rebels have since splintered, making a deal virtually impossible. And the U.N. has sent “peacekeepers” into the sovereign country at the strong urging of the United States.
Chinese official Liu Guijin told the China Daily, “Major rebel groups still refuse negotiations and are offering no conditions. That’s the major reason why political progress lags behind the African Union-U.N. peacekeeping mission.” (AFP, Feb. 20)
“Western powers can exert more positive influence on those rebel leaders because many of them live in Western capitals,” revealed Guijin.
None of this is mentioned by the media. Omitting murky political realities is part of their game. The capitalist press emphasizes spurious allegations against a declared U.S. enemy while ignoring the actual genocidal policies of the U.S. government. Take Iraq, where over 2.5 million Iraqis have died from U.S.-led sanctions and war since 1991. Instead of highlighting this, they attack Sudan and China.
Washington is incensed that China helped Sudan build up its oil exporting industry independently of imperialism.
Allowing a rival world power such as China to influence an African country with major oil supplies flies in the face of the U.S. goal of outright control of the world’s major oil resources.
This is what is really behind the outcry over Darfur; not genuine humanitarian concern. A system that only exists to extract profits never cares about people. Its driving interests are antithetical to those of workers and oppressed people from Sudan, China, the United States and beyond.
