CIA Training Sudan's Spies

By Jeff Stein
Posted at 1:15 PM ET, 08/30/2010
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"

American officials may be at odds over U.S. policy toward Sudan, but the CIA is soldiering on there.

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Despite that, the CIA is continuing to train and equip Sudan’s intelligence service in the name of fighting terrorism.

The irony is not lost on critics of the arrangement.

“The U.S. government is training the Sudanese intelligence services and conducting bilateral operations with them -- all in the name of the long war,” said a former intelligence officer who served in Sudan.

“We also refer to the Sudanese as a state sponsor of terror, have called their activities in Darfur genocide, and supported the issuance of arrest warrants for the Sudanese president for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, as defined by the International Criminal Court.”

“Certainly," the former intelligence officer added, "the CIA is providing training to the National Intelligence and Security Service,” known as the NISS. “I suspect it was begun … in the very early days after September 11.”

Others say it began in the 1990s.

In the beginning, the CIA-NISS relationship was very close-hold, he said, even shielded from other CIA personnel in the embassy because of concerns over Sudan’s grievous human rights record. Training sessions were probably done outside the country, he guessed.

“There has also been transfers of equipment” to the NISS, he said, “computers, etcetera.”

Another knowledgeable former U.S. intelligence official said the CIA-NISS partnership began even earlier, in the Clinton administration, and called it "incredibly valuable."

"We have a had a long term relationship with the Sudanese, even when they closed the embassy for a short period in the late 90s," the official said on condition of anonymity because the topic is so sensitive.

"We do not do much training with the Sudanese, except in the field of counterterrorism, and they have been an exceptional partner in helping us against the terrorist target."

The CIA's curriculum with the NISS "is pretty much the same as regular humint/CO [human intelligence/case officer] training, with a focus on targeting the terrorist, i.e., setting up meetings in secure places with surveillance and countersurveillance, knowing what info to look for, keeping all pocket litter, not allowing them to erase cell phones or computers," the former official said. "It also involves 'take downs' of terrorists or their organizations ..."

In 2005, Bush administration CIA director Porter Goss nurtured the connection.

“The CIA flew Salah Gosh, head of the NISS, here to the U.S. in one of their jets during 2005,” the former intelligence officer who served in Sudan said. "He is up to his butt in the genocide in Darfur."

Only last month, Amnesty International charged that "the Sudanese National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) is carrying out a brutal campaign of killings, torture, arbitrary detentions, and mental and physical intimidation against opponents and critics of the government."

"The NISS uses a variety of torture methods," it added, "including: beating detainees while held upside down against a wall, electric shocks, whipping, sleep deprivation, kicking and stamping on detainees and beating them with water pipes."

CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the agency's relationship with the NISS, saying, “This agency does not, as a rule, comment on reports of relationships with foreign intelligence services.”

Likewise at the White House, National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said, "We are not going to speak about our ongoing counter-terrorism and intelligence programs with any specific country other than to say that we face significant terrorism related challenges in East Africa, and it is essential that we be able to work in partnership with the countries of the region to identify and disrupt potential terrorist networks."

Some U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the CIA's program contend that the spy agency's relationship with the NISS actually fosters human rights.

"The intelligence channel has been one tool our government has used to try to influence the Sudanese in terms of human rights and the rule of law,” said one such official. “That was a deliberate policy decision, made with inter-agency support, and—while everyone has their eyes wide open to everything that still needs to happen—the dialogue has had its benefits."

Another, a senior administration official, said, "We're not blind" to the reality of Sudan. "Everybody understands what's going on there."

"If the Sudanese go outside the box," he maintained, "we can pull the plug."

Such explanations evoke the darkest days of the Cold War, when successive U.S. administrations used the same rationales for allowing the CIA to have close relations with the security services of some of the world’s worst human rights violators, from South Africa to Argentina, Guatemala and Chile, saying they were necessary for the shadowy fight against Soviet-backed communism.

And as during that time, Obama administration officials have barely concealed their sharp differences over what to do about Sudan.

Darfur Aid Dollars Funding West Bank Settlements

By Thomas C. Mountain
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Mar 19, 2010, 00:21
Courtesy Of The Online Journal

ASMARA, Eritrea -- Persons working with aid organizations assisting the victims of the Darfur conflict have passed on the news that they have confirmed through their contacts in the so called “Save Darfur Coalition” that millions of dollars raised to help the Darfur refugees have ended up in Israeli bank accounts. These accounts help fund programs that include illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

These sources inside the pro-Israel organizations that control the “Save Darfur Coalition” estimate that over $100 million was raised for Darfur, though the exact amount may never be known due to the murky nature of the financial statements these organizations submit. What is known is that over half the money raised for Darfur was consumed by “operational expenses” for these organizations, meaning bloated salaries, expense accounts and the multimillion dollar publicity campaign that helped generate the donations. Only about 10 percent of the donations received ever made it to the Darfur refugees, with several million ending up in Israeli bank accounts.

The Darfur funds were diverted to Israel by either co-mingling the funds with those used to support the Israeli projects or through a more complex system of grants to other “aid” or “relief” organizations that allowed the eventual destination of the funds to be almost impossible to trace.

For some time now, aid workers in Darfur have been quietly pressuring the Save Darfur Coalition to turn over more of the tens of millions of dollars they have been collecting on the behalf of the Sudanese people in Darfur. People working inside the organizations that make up the coalition became upset when they discovered that aid raised on behalf of Darfur was being diverted to Israel and began supplying information to the aid workers on the ground in Darfur. Some of these aid workers finally broke their silence on the matter and passed on to us what they had confirmed from these Save Darfur insiders.

As previously reported, the so-called “Darfur Genocide” was a myth, or more accurately, a fraud, perpetuated by the Western media and governments along with the pro-Israel “human rights” NGOs to raise over a $100 million. UN and international aid workers involved in the Darfur relief effort are quietly proud of the fact that Darfur refugees are the beneficiaries of one of, if not the largest, best run relief works in history. These aid workers also acknowledge the fact that the Sudanese government played a critical role in support of the relief effort, which could not have succeeded without such support. It doesn’t add up that, on one hand, the Sudanese government was committing genocide against the people of Darfur while at the same time playing a critical role in operating the largest best run relief works in history in support of the Darfur people.

As previously reported, a Western funded genocide is being committed in the Ethiopian Ogaden by the Ethiopian government, but no genocide has ever been committed in Darfur. The whole “Darfur Genocide” campaign is nothing more than a smokescreen to vilify the Sudanese government in an attempt to promote Western military intervention in oil and mineral rich Sudan, Africa’s largest and potentially wealthiest country, as well as to help divert attention from the real, Western-funded genocide being carried out in the Ogaden by the Western cop on the beat in East Africa, Ethiopia.

The brazenness and breadth of this propaganda campaign has even surprised experienced observers of the long, dirty history of aid diversion in the Horn of Africa. Western governments, the UN, the Western media, even Hollywood became part of the act with story lines “exposing” the Darfur “genocide” appearing in dramas such as Boston Legalamongst others.

Bernie Maddoff went to prison for his fraud, but it is highly unlikely that an investigation will be launched into the “Darfur Genocide” scam. And only an investigation by the US Justice Department has the power to search, seize and subpoena that will be required to expose this whole criminal fraud.

So next time you hear about a campaign to “save” Africans be suspicious and remember just how big a lie was told about Darfur and how your hard earned money ended up somewhere you least expected, helping building Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Stay tuned to Online Journal for more news that the so-called Free Press in the West refuses to cover

Thomas C. Mountain was, in a former life, an educator, activist and alternative medicine practitioner in the USA. Email thomascmountain at yahoo.com.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

Christian Extremist LRA Heading To Darfur

Notorious Ugandan Christian Radicals Suspected Of Committing Attacks In Sudan's Darfur.

First Published 2009-11-01
Courtesy Of Middle-East-Online

KHARTOUM - Uganda's Christian extremist rebel Lord's Resistance Army, the feared abductors of children who have spread fear in east-central Africa, are now rumoured to be heading into new terrain in Sudan's troubled Darfur.

A brutal guerrilla group, whose chief Joseph Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court, the LRA has already expanded into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic (CAR) and south Sudan.

Earlier this year in south Sudan, LRA men attacked several food aid distribution stations, killed hundreds of civilians and kidnapped children for use as soldiers, forcing thousands of people into Western Equatoria.

And two incidents, possibly involving Kony's men, have been reported in recent weeks in the south's Bahr al-Ghazal region, which is wedged between the CAR and the Darfur region of western Sudan, sparking the rumours.

South Sudan's army said the LRA killed two of its men. It also accused it of being behind an attack last week against Darfur refugees in a camp in western Bahr al-Ghazal that killed five people.

"It is the LRA ... They captured 21 people. Soldiers were able to release the kidnapped people," west Bahr al-Ghazal governor Mark Nyipoch said, adding it bore the LRA hallmark of kidnapping children and women.

"Members of the LRA were seen in western Bahr al-Ghazal. I wouldn't be surprised if they continued into south Darfur," said south Sudan's information minister, Paul Mayom.

But some observers doubt the LRA , would venture any deeper into Sudan.

The Ugandan rebels have therefore "gone up a bit into western Bahr al-Ghazal" but there is no confirmation that they are in Darfur, said one Western diplomat.

"We have no information that the LRA is in South Darfur," said Fateh Rahman, the region's head of police.

The LRA in Darfur "is like the Loch Ness monster, everyone talks about it but no one has ever seen it," said a UN official from the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur (UNAMID).

UNAMID has several bases in Darfur but its presence in South Darfur which borders western Bahr al-Ghazal and the CAR, is limited .

"I'm not saying the LRA is not in Darfur, only that we have no proof it is there," the official said.

Sudan expert Gerard Prunier was also sceptical. "The LRA are now 'killers without borders', but they must still work in something they recognise. At a geographical level, how would they operate" in the Darfur deserts?

"They must be comfortable in their surroundings. When they are in (the forests and bush of) the CAR or Congo, it's ok, they know it. But Darfur, it's like being on the moon. I don't believe it," he said.

Some LRA forces are present in the areas controlled by mainly Christian south Sudan.

Human Rights Watch had previously accused the mainly Christian regional government of southern Sudan of ignoring an International Criminal Court’s warrants for the arrest of four top Ugandan rebel leaders.

In one occasion, Kony, who was in southern Sudan, had even met the Christian region's Vice-President, Riek Machar.

Kony had asked the government of southern Sudan to facilitate talks between him and President Museveni of Uganda.

Busting The Darfur Myth

The Real Genocide is Playing Out in Ethiopia--And the West is Funding It

By TOM MOUNTAIN
October 22, 2009
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

Asmara, Eritrea.

As one of the first to write about the problems in West Sudan/Darfur, in mid 2003, and living side by side here in Asmara for three years with representatives of the Darfur, and other Sudanese resistance, my investigation has found no evidence of genocide. Of course, genocide has and is being committed by Ethiopia against the Somalis in Ethiopia, but there has been no genocide in Darfur.

Let us start by comparing the two situations, the first being Darfur and the second the Ethiopian Ogaden.

The refugees of the Darfur conflict were and are the beneficiaries of one of the largest, and most effective relief works in history.

In contrast, relief aid to the Somalis living in the Ethiopian Ogaden, what little there was to begin with, has been effectively shut down now in almost all of the Ogaden for several years, despite one of the worst droughts in history.

Darfur has had an international police force in place for years, who work along side Sudanese security forces and most of the violence has ended.

In the Ogaden, Ethiopian death squads, funded by western “aid” have spent the better part of the past decade spreading murder and mayhem across the countryside. With almost everyone from the International Committee of the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders being expelled, there has been miniscule coverage of this genocide in the western media let alone any exposure of the western role in funding the Ethiopian regime. Compare this to the saturation of the western media with the “Save Darfur” propaganda campaign and the tried and true golden rule of “show me the money” needs to be applied to explain what is really going on.

The Darfur genocide myth has been promoted by western “human rights” NGOs who have collected tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars under the rubric of “Enough” and “Preventing Genocide”. The claims of genocide are based on estimates of the number of deaths that were rapidly inflated as the dollars started rolling in. First it was 100,000, then 200,000, then 300,000 and finally, in a claim so ludicrous that even the British government media watchdog yanked it off the air, 400,000 people were supposed to have been victims of genocide in Darfur. None of the Darfur reps I have heard here in Asmara ever gave any credibility to the western figures. In fact, most everyone here in the Horn, at least those not on the western payroll, all agree the real number of those lost in the violence in west Sudan is in the tens of thousands, a tragic number but far surpassed by what has befallen those suffering in Somalia and the Ogaden where a real genocide has been taking place.

Today, the humanitarian situation in Somalia, where aid workers still operate, has been declared the worst in the world (and with what is happening to the Tamils in the concentration camps in Sri Lanka that is saying a lot). Next door in the Ethiopian Ogaden, conveniently there are almost no aid agencies, other than in a few towns, to witness what is as bad or more likely worse than in Somalia. Yet what do we hear from those who are collecting so much loot on behalf of suffering Africans about the real genocide going on in the Ogaden?

As I mentioned earlier, I first wrote about what I believed was happening in Sudan and Ethiopia back in mid 2003. Sudan is estimated to have suffered some two million deaths during its decades long civil war between the north and the south. After many years of hard work, peace has slowly, almost tortuously, been nurtured in Sudan, with the major ground work laid during negotiations held here in Asmara. In contrast to this what is the program of action demanded by the “Save Darfur” lot? A western-led military invasion and occupation a la Iraq and Afghanistan! With half a million or more dead in Iraq and Afghanistan thanks to western military “intervention” who in their right mind could think that sending western soldiers to Sudan will do anything other than destroy the peace so painfully built these past few years and cause even more suffering?

While peace has been slowing taking hold in Darfur, in the Ogaden peace is a long lost memory. War, famine and disease are spreading across the Ogaden and is becoming a situation that is increasingly the norm in growing areas of Ethiopia. While the western hucksters rake in beaucoup millions of dollars while peddling their “Save Darfur” bunkum , Sudanese have seen peace break out. In contrast, Ethiopians, suffering under a regime that is the largest recipient of western aid in Africa see only a future of growing ethnic and religious conflict and worse, active programs of genocide.

The problems developing in Ethiopia can invariably be traced back to the west, mainly the USA. The west, in particular the USA are hell bent on keeping Africa in a state of crisis, the better to exploit. And the “Save Darfur” lobby is all for bringing more violence to Africa under the guise of “humanitarian intervention”, while little of the tens of millions they collect ever reaches the Sudanese who it was intended for.

Busting the Darfur genocide myth is long overdue. If people in the west really want to help Africa they should stop donating to the Save Darfur fraudsters and start demanding accountability for the tens of billions of western aid that is paying for a real genocide in the Ethiopian Ogaden.

Tom Mountain lives in Eritrea and can be reached at: thomascmountain@yahoo.com

Darfur 'Genocide' Lies Unravelling

African Union Says Only 1,500 Darfuris Died In 2008

By Bruce A. Dixon
2009-07-16, Issue 442
Courtesy Of Pan-African Voices For Freedom and Justice

Stopping genocide is apolitical, purely a matter of conscience and goodwill. At least, that's what the Save Darfur campaign would have us believe, says Bruce A. Dixon. While Save Darfur's good-vs-evil battle has consistently touted a total figure of 400,000 dead in Darfur, sources on the ground indicate that there were actually around 1,500 deaths last year. That people are dying is not to be minimised or downplayed, Dixon contends, but the notion that the US's global might is needed to slay a unified evil is increasingly revealing itself as purely a means to establish domestic consent for military intervention in Africa.

For more than five years, the Save Darfur coalition has used a slick and star-studded multimillion dollar ad campaign to paint a horrific vision of 400,000 dead in a black vs. Arab war of extermination in Sudan. No historic or political causes are offered for this scenario; it's a case of 'genocide' involving good vs. evil and demanding our attention and action. But the big lies underpinning the Save Darfur campaign are coming undone. Reporters, scholars and even US envoys are returning from the region affirming that if there ever was a genocide in Darfur, and there may not have been, there isn’t one now. The British government has even ruled that Save Darfur cannot, in that country, use the figure of 400,000 dead which it throws around in all its US advertisements, 'cause it just ain’t true.

A hundred years ago, in the 'Souls of Black Folk', W.E.B. DuBois observed that '… the country’s appetite for facts on the Negro question has been spoiled by sweets'. If he was around today, DuBois would be able to say the same for America’s appetite for facts on Darfur, the rest of Africa, Iraq, and most of the world. Facts are messy things. Facts come with historical contexts and uncertain consequences. Eternal truths, like good vs. evil are sweet like candy, simple and comforting.

Since its founding in 2004, the Save Darfur coalition has spent tens of millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art advertising campaign to paint us a picture that is exactly that. Sweet and simple, easy-to-understand, and most of all, we get to be the good guys. Darfur is, to use Samantha Power’s phrase, 'a problem from hell', a piece of pure, unambiguous evil in which the global power of the US can be put to use constructively, because stopping a genocide calls for action, not for politics. Stopping genocide, we are told, is above politics. The lesson of genocide is that great powers must act; people of conscience and goodwill must intervene.

There are several problems with this, both as a general proposition, and specifically as it applies to Darfur. In the first place genocide is defined as the attempt to wipe out a nation or a people. There is so little evidence that mass killings on the scale necessary to be called genocide have occurred in Darfur that back in 2007 Save Darfur’s UK operation was prohibited from using the figure of 400,000 dead that routinely appears in its advertisements in the US. Britain has a government truth-in-advertising agency called the Advertisement Standards Authority. They looked at Save Darfur’s massive death toll. They took into account a 2006 US General Accounting Office (GAO) report in which the GAO assembled a number of death and casualty estimates, high and low for Darfur, and summoned a panel of experts to determine which were accurate.

The GAO study found the low estimates of 50,000 to 70,000 dead from a variety of causes – including disease and starvation due to desertification on all sides of the conflict – to be more accurate than the high estimates of 200,000 to 400,000 by direct armed violence on one side alone claimed by Save Darfur. The GAO report maintained that the peak death toll occurred in 2004 and early 2005 and had been trending downward since. This was compelling enough evidence for Britain to ban the inflammatory claims that Save Darfur still makes with impunity in the US, which have no truth in advertising laws.

Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani has travelled extensively for many weeks in Sudan and Darfur as part of the African Union’s Dialog for Darfur project, interviewing officials, activists and ordinary people on all sides of the conflict. In a talk at Howard University on 20 March 2009 he reported that only days before the general in charge of the African Union’s peacekeeping forces in Darfur had pegged the death toll for the entire year in and around the refugee camps at a mere 1,500. While the deaths of 50,000 to 70,000 people several years ago on multiple sides of an armed conflict are a grievous matter – not to be minimised or brushed aside – they don’t count as the ongoing genocide of helpless civilians.

Around the same time that several members of the US Congress got themselves arrested at the Sudanese embassy in Washington, DC, Afshin Rattansi – a reporter and broadcaster for Al Jazeera, CNN, The Guardian, Bloomberg News and other outlets – toured Sudan, speaking to Africans as well as the representatives of Western women's organizations in the country who attested that they were able to travel and speak freely and had seen 'no evidence' of genocide.

Even USAF (United States Air Force) General Scott Gration, travelling in the region as a special envoy, returned to Washington last week saying that the situation in Darfur was at worst 'the remnants of genocide', clearly implying that the worst violence had been over for some time. Gration’s remarks may have exposed a divide in the administration, since UN Ambassador Susan Rice stoutly maintained only two days before that genocide was 'ongoing' in Darfur. Clearly, the genocide story is becoming less and less tenable.

But Save Darfur is all about advertising, and in the US, advertisers are under no obligation to tell the truth. Save Darfur is in fact not a mass movement but an advertising campaign, headed by the CEO of a public relations company that boasts such clients as Dupont, the company responsible for murdering tens of thousands when one of its chemical plants exploded at Bhopal, India, sending a cloud of poison gas rolling downhill into a city.

As Black Agenda Report revealed in a 2007 story, 'Ten Reasons Why Save Darfur Is A PR Scam to Justify Oil and Resource Wars In Africa', according to a copyrighted Washington Post story in 2007:

'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 US 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 (public relations) campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movements 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.

The construct of genocides, 'problems from hell' popping up around the world in which the US is obliged to intervene, is a very useful one. It appears to be the successor to the so-called 'War on Terror' as the justification for American military adventures around the world. Hear it from the lips of UN Ambassador Susan Rice herself:

'The Responsibility to Protect or, as it has come to be known, R2P represents an important step forward in the long historical struggle to save lives and guard the wellbeing of people endangered by conflict. It holds that states have responsibilities as well as interests and that states have particularly vital duties to shield their own populations from the depraved and the murderous. This approach is bold. It is important. And the United States welcomes it…

'The Responsibility to Protect is rooted in the principle that states have a fundamental responsibility to protect their populations from such atrocities as genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. It holds that other states, in turn, have a corollary responsibility to assist, if a state cannot meet its fundamental responsibility to its citizens or to take collective action, if a state will not meet that fundamental responsibility…'

Like the War on Terror, stopping genocides, real or imagined, is above politics. It’s a cause that absolves Americans of any responsibility to understand either their own history or that of the countries they intervene in.

The real Darfur is a complicated place with complicated politics that Save Darfur does not help us understand. What Save Darfur doesn’t tell us is that there is a many-sided civil conflict of insurgency and counterinsurgency, not a one-sided slaughter in progress. Save Darfur never mentions how the area was flooded with arms by the US, France and Israel on one side, and by Libya and the Soviet Union during decades of civil war in neighbouring Chad. And in volumes of briefing papers and advertising copy, Save Darfur invariably forgets to tell us that the lines between which Darfuris are 'black' and which are 'Arab' have been fluid for centuries, and as Mahmood Mamdani in his book Saviors and Survivors explains, have more to do with culture and status than with 'race' in Western terms.

The stark and horrific picture painted by the Save Darfur coalition in fact prolongs the civil conflict in that unhappy country, encouraging one faction or another to avoid negotiations for a settlement in the hope that Western intervention will put them on top. The 'responsibility to protect' doctrine espoused by Ambassador Rice ensures that regardless of the facts, Save Darfur will have the ear of policymakers for some time to come as they look to sweeten the public excuses to intervene in other countries, and to spoil America’s appetites for unpleasant truths in which it is not always the good guy.

* Bruce A. Dixon is Black Agenda Report's (BAR) managing editor. He can be contacted at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
* This article was originally published at BlackAgendaReport.com.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Genocide In Darfur: Psyops Deconstruction

It Is Ultimately China Which Is The Primary Target

By Richard Kurdt
July 10, 2009
Courtesy of Global Research

In has been reported that the African Unity will not cooperate with the ICC indictment of Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir.

This is a positive development, and I would like to submit my own analysis and testimony on behalf of Sudan, in a spirit of defiant resistance, and for the cause of truth.

The AU leaders decided that "in view of the fact that the request to the African Union has never been acted upon that AU member states shall not cooperate pursuant to the provisions of Article 98 of the Rome Statute on the ICC...or the arrest and surrender of African indicted personalities"

Background

Presently, we have a planet Earth straining under the extreme stress of the Pentagon's "Full Spectrum Dominance" ideology, a phenomena which we will here conceptualize in psychiatric terms. Reflecting a distinct and peculiar hyper-neurotic drive to control everything and everyone in the universe. The American Establishment and the "international community" has leveled the "genocide" charges against Sudan's president.

Accordingly, the primary preoccupation of the Pentagon is preventing other countries from becoming powerful enough to challenge the US, and the "Genocide in Darfur" campaign being directed against Omar al-Bashir's government in Sudan, and their partner China, occurs in this context. Indeed, it is ultimately China which is the primary target, and we can recall the self-righteous US operatives throwing their "genocide supporter" daggers at China prior to the Olympics. Thanks Mr. Spielberg.

The Surface Appearance Script

Here is the settled-upon manuscript for the Sudan project, in all its counterintuitive eye-popping demented absurdia. The "Genocide in Darfur" narrative goes something like this:

''The "Arab-dominated" government of Sudan, headed by the stereotypical Black African tyrant Omar al Bashir, in response to an uprising, has conducted a genocidal pogrom characterized by racist brutality; incidents of mass rapes, sexual slavery, mass killings and a whole manner of different acts of obscene human depravity have been committed against poor, helpless "ethnic Africans" at the hands of the dreaded, government-sponsored, camel-riding "Janjaweed militia", Bashir's army of racist Arab killers. Perhaps as many as 400,000 have perished in the great horror. The intention behind this ethnic-cleansing pogrom is to replace the uprooted and killed Africans with Arabs imported from other countries.

The entire terrifying calamity has been captured magnificently in the sweeping documentary "THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK", featuring former Marine Brian Steidle, a dashing and heroic do-gooder American, swollen with compassion for the poor, suffering, native Black ethnic African persons.

Omar al Bashir is currently under indictment for war crimes in the International Criminal Court, a juridical institution impeccable with integrity, concerned only with responsible international adjudication and humanitarian intervention, in accordance with the highest ideals and greatest principles.''

Glorious, isn't it? Glorious and titillating. Racist conflict between Arabs and Africans, with Africans as the "good guys" and Arabs as the "bad guys". Anglos swollen with empathy and nobility documenting the shocking scenes, attempting to bring the perpetrators to justice.

The reader should note how in the script the "uprising" is hardly mentioned, and the actions of the "rebels" are not discussed at all.

UNDERSURFACE PATTERN

So what actually happened in Darfur? How can we put the puzzle pieces back together? Let us begin:

The first impulse of imperial subterfuge is always to "divide". Always, a division to exploit is the first thing sought, and in Sudan we have a Turabi-Bashir division. Husan al Turabi has been a prominent political figure in Sudan for many years and had a falling out with Omar al Bashir in 1999, making him a prime candidate for recruitment. Turabi's presence in the Darfur affair is important to highlight as he enjoys a great deal of popular support and his involvement gives the operation an apparent legitimacy, or authenticity. In other words the people of Sudan see the unfolding Darfur conflict in terms of a political battle between Turabi and Bashir, between two factions of Sudan's Islamist movement, as opposed to seeing a covert Pentagon-inspired operation. Turabi and his gangs - along with an assortment of other players including foreign soldiers - are given cash and weapons, likely channeled through Chad, and are best characterized as corrupt individuals compelled by a lust for the power promised them by the imperialist masters of the universe. Further, I can recall one video in particular of a former Sudanese soldier turned "rebel", describing how he is fighting the government because he was angry about not being promoted. These are important facts to bear in mind, as the two main insurrectionary groups, the Sudanese Liberation Army or SLA(not to be confused with John Garang's SPLA) and the Turabi-led Justice and Equality Movement or JEM both masquerade themselves as popular uprisings fighting against ethnic discrimination and economic inequality at the hands of the government. Turabi would be arrested in March 2004 and held for over a year in a Khartoum prison.

SLA and JEM: Fighting the power?

Beginning in early 2003, these two groups attacked and destroyed 80 or so police stations, killing upwards of 700 innocent policemen. They attacked government garrisons and killed civilians. They have also attacked a number of different key developmental, educational and infrastructural projects, and have murdered a number of engineers working on those same projects. They attacked even a school examination center, stealing the national examination papers and affecting the lives of tens of thousands of school students. Later in the conflict they can be seen attacking oil development projects and kidnapping and even killing Chinese citizens working on those projects, demanding that the Chinese oil companies be replaced by "Western" companies. The "rebels" can be found again and again expressing hostility toward China, accusing them of supporting the genocidal Sudanese government.

Note that the "rebels" are very-well armed, with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, all-terrain vehicles and satellite communications.

So what kind of popular uprising is this, exactly? Destroying developmental projects in the name of fighting economic marginalization? Killing innocent people for being in the employ of the government's clean water project? Attacking agricultural projects, telecommunications projects? Does that sound like responsible, rightful revolt, people power in action? Not in the least.

Moreover, is there any truth to the claim that the various "ethnic Africans" have been marginalized in some way? Politically or economically? Just the opposite is true in fact. The Zaghawa, Fur and other tribes at the forefront of the "rebellion" have been prominent, even dominant, in the economic and politic scene in Darfur( 'dar' meaning 'abode', Dar-Fur meaning 'home of the Fur').

So we see how the chaos and ensuing public misery experienced throughout Darfur is primarily because of the actions of the "rebels" themselves, and is to be expected when you blew up police stations and kill all of the policemen, along with destroying the community's infrastructure and killing engineers. Not very bright, these "rebels".

The government of Sudan then engaged its military against the "rebels", and also recruited an all-volunteer 'Popular Defense Force' from the local and national communities.

Into this mix we can add the "Janjaweed" phenomenon("jinn" meaning devil or evil, combined with "jowad" meaning horse). The expression "janjaweed" simply translated means "armed bandits on horseback", and the reader's brain should compute something like "organized crime" upon hearing it, but they are a kind of irregular community in their own right. The specifics regarding the Janjaweed element are not important for our purposes here, and the reader only need understand that the Janjaweed are certainly not a racist Arab army employed as genocidaires by the government. These charges come from the "rebels" themselves and from the US military/intelligence script writers, who have seized upon the term 'Janjaweed' primarily because it sounds chilling and creepy, having a useful Hollywood-horror type of impact upon the ears of the intended audience. The Janjaweed are naturally emboldened by the absence of security occuring in the wake of the violent assault against police forces, and the reader should understand that there was already a kind of Wild West quality to life in Darfur, prior to the rise of the SLA and JEM.

Quickly, to better understand what the scriptwriters have done here with the Janjaweed phenomenon, we might imagine an agent of Sudanese military intelligence travelling to a US ghetto and hearing people discussing the "crackheads", drug-fiends who steal to support their drug habit. The agent hears people saying things like "man, some crackhead busted out my car window and stole my CD player" and "I guess government welfare checks ain't enough for those damn crackheads" and "some crackhead shot and killed my cousin last year". The Sudanese agent then returns to Sudan and writes an editorial for a prominent Sudanese newspaper detailing how American citizens are being brutalized by the "Crackheads", a government-sponsored army of crazed, killer drug fiends, paid to terrorize and murder the populace.

There is a clever trick being played here. Because the Janjaweed are a real phenomenon, the scriptwriters are able to insert their distortion with a straight face. In other words, if a US intelligence operative posing as a journalist were to ask of Bashir "what are you doing to stop the Janjaweed attacks, why haven't the Janjaweed been disarmed?" the question has an air of legitimacy, as the people are abused by the Janjaweed criminal element. But the purpose of the operative is to advance the notion that 'Janjaweed' refers to racist Arab killers employed by the government. If one is familiar with this entire affair, it is quite clear that the introduction of this distortion of reality has caused a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding.

How did the operation unfold?

Here is the timeline:

- After a year or so following the SLA/JEM attacks beginning in early 2003, the "Arabs genocide-ing Africans" propaganda narrative is disseminated through reports issued by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. It is worth mentioning that both of these institutions issued chilling reports on the same day on April 1st 2004, or "April Fools Day". It is within these reports that the fundamentals of the genocide narrative are seeded. Mass rapes, mass killings, Arabs vs Africans, government-sponsored Janjaweed etc. etc.

-On July 14th 2004 a "Darfur Emergency Summit" is organized by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, featuring Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel as guest speaker. This is the genesis of the "Save Darfur Coalition", the various professionals and specialists behind the media campaign, masquerading as "concerned citizens" and "charities" and such. We can mention here that this is primarily a Jewish-American affair, with little Afro-American representation or input. These so-called charities would be exposed later by mainstream US media as being involved only with public relations. Whatever donations they received only served to perpetuate the media campaign, the displaced people of Darfur seeing not one penny.

- On July 23rd 2004 the US House of Representatives passes a resolution encouraging then- president Bush to employ the word "genocide" in describing Darfur. It further suggest a need for intervention there. Said Bush on the same day:

"We made our position very clear to the Sudanese government - they must stop Janjaweed (militia) violence, they must provide access to humanitarian relief for the people who suffer".

This is followed by impassioned statements from a number of prominent US political figures. One of these is Colin Powell. It is worth pointing out that Powell had originally refrained from applying the term "genocide" to Darfur, and was not brought on board until early September 2004, when he for some reason changed his mind and begins spewing the "government-sponsored Janjaweed" narrative.

- On July 30th 2004 the UN Security Council passes its own resolution, threatening sanctions against Sudan if it does not "disarm the Janjaweed" and restore order.

This is followed by the usual stream of propaganda disinfo; video testimony of alleged Darfuris describing the horror, broadcast news television specials, the aforementioned "documentary" propaganda film "THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK" featuring former Marine Brian Steidle(a laughably crude production) and there is even a "darfur-is-dying" website featuring a video game that allows the viewer to play the part of a Darfuri child searching for firewood, the object of the game being to avoid the dreaded Janjaweed and return safely to the refugee camp.

IN SUMMATION

The Darfur project consists in destroying Sudan and it's government via proxy militia's and a psychological warfare campaign. On the Sudan homefront, the reality is hidden underneath a public perception of a conflict between two factions of Sudan's Islamic movement, while on the Western homefront the reality hides underneath the genocide narrative. The actions and activities of the proxy rebel groups themselves accounts for the collapse of order and ensuing chaos and displacement, in a region where there was already a kind of Wild Wild West quality to life.

Out of this reality, the particulars of the "genocide in Darfur" unreality have been drawn. Omar al Bashir is eventually indicted by the International Criminal Court, an institution explicitly designed to get rid of troublesome African leaders or to dispose of former US-supported African agents who for whatever reason have since lost their usefulness.

Rwandan Parallel

Comparatively, the Pentagon's anti-Bashir Darfur campaign bears a strong resemblance to the campaign carried out against the Habyarimana government and the people of Rwanda, beginning in 1990 and continuing to this very day.

Now, for most people, when you say the name "Rwanda", the mind immediately recalls the events beginning in April 1994, wherein a ferocious outburst of genocidal violence accounted for the killing of 800,000 or so people - all hacked to death with machetes - over a period of three or four months. The mind also seems to recall some type of ethnic conflict, centered around a majority 'Hutu' population terrorizing a minority 'Tutsi' population.

This narrative is also utterly false from beginning to end, another gigantic, fabricated unreality.

The Pentagon in 1990 initiated an invasion and war against the government of Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda, by way of a proxy army, the primarily Ugandan "Rwandan Patriotic Front" associated with the current President of Rwanda Paul Kagame, and with the militaristic help of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira and President Habyarimana were both assassinated in April 1994, as a part of this offensive.

Kagame studied under the Pentagon's Joint Combined Exchange Training program over at Fort Leavenworth beginning in 1990, and was dispatched to Rwanda, in time for the RPF's takeover of the country in 1994. The RPF was comprised mostly of Ugandan soldiers and Kagame himself was a citizen of Ugandan. The RPF is guilty of committing all kinds of egregious and very brutal crimes against humanity from 1990 to this very day. The RPF was/is a cold, calculating human rights-violating machine. A merciless, lying, sociopathic governmental administrative apparatus.

The people of Rwanda were brutalized by the RPF for years, an invading proxy army. In April 1994 an offensive was undertaken by very desperate, victimized Rwandan citizens after their president was killed when his plane was destroyed in what was then reported as a "mysterious plane crash". It was right at this time that the US began running the "genocide" hype, through public pronouncements from prominent political figures. In the Rwanda script the "Hutus" are the bad guys, while the "Tutsis", along with "moderate Hutus", are described as the victims. Note that the term "moderate Hutus" is identical to "ethnic Africans", making no sense at all. The conflict is in truth between the Habyarimana-led government and the invading US-supported RPF, between Rwandans who support the government and those who support the invaders.

In the propaganda film "Hotel Rwanda" we see how reality is turned upside-down as the RPF is portrayed as the heroic-rescuers, while the brutalized resisting Rwandan citizens and the Rwandan military are portrayed as the hate-filled "genocidaires".

We should note that all the Rwandan military oficers were found not guilty of planning and committing genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a "victors justice" court if there ever was one. The only convictions were based upon particular acts of atrocity. We should also note that the high court of Spain issued international indictments against 40 different RPF officials.

The Kagame goverment benefits mightily from the popular "Rwandan genocide" narrative. It acts as a powerful mechanism for crushing political opposition and silencing critics of Kagame's regime. Dissenting Rwandans in asylum and critics of the Kagame regime live in a state of constant fear of being hunted down, kidnapped and killed, or of being accused as "genocide" apologists and accessories. Kagame has reportedly dispatched hundreds of his agents worldwide for the express purpose of finding and neutralizing opposition.

We can safely assume that the "genocide in Darfur" project was patterned after the "genocide in Rwanda" project, and hoped to achieve the same end.

The writer is Richard Kurdt and resides in Long Island, New York. He can be e-mailed at enemy-of-the-state@live.com

Global Research Articles by Richard Kurdt

"We Saw No Evidence Of Genocide"

Women In Darfur

By Afshin Rattansi
June 1, 2009
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

George Clooney, Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Cindy Crawford, Bono, Michael Caine, Claudia Schiffer, Bob Geldof, Hugh Grant, Mia Farrow, Mick Jagger and so many others have expressed their solidarity with the people of the oil-rich region of Darfur. A few weeks ago, Democrats John Lewis of Georgia, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Lynn Woolsey of California, Donna Edwards of Maryland, and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts were all arrested as they demonstrated against the Sudanese government. When Colin Powell used the word genocide in 2004, it kicked off $1 billion-a-year international aid program, much higher than that afforded Somalia or Congo.

But why?

In the past few months, the International Criminal Court has charged Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with crimes against humanity and war crimes. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo is appealing the setting aside of genocide charges, claiming that there is "ongoing genocide" in Darfur. The Sudanese government has expelled some foreign aid groups, accusing them of espionage. They include Oxfam, Save the Children and Medecins Sans Frontieres. According to the Save Darfur Campaign, it was the relief organizations that provided clean water, food, and medical attention to roughly 1.5 million people. The Sudanese government claims these aid-agencies deliberately exclude Arab Darfuris in their ranks, exacerbating sectarian tensions.

And at the moment, President Obama’s Special Envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration is on a diplomatic tour and Britain is sending $185m in aid and $140m in “peacekeeping” money.

Collette Valentine, a TV producer visiting from the United Kingdom, and Ali Gunn, a British media consultant, last week returned from Darfur where they attended the first “International Conference on the Challenge Facing Women in Darfur” in Al-Fasher in the north. Valentine says that articles about Darfur in the international press make her feel as if she visited a completely different region, a completely different country. It all adds weight to the thesis of Columbia University’s Professor Mahmood Mamdani that there is something very murky about Western aid agencies’ insistence that there has been genocide in Darfur, that at the heart of campaigns for Darfur is the culmination of a powerful, imperial desire to suppress citizenry from U.S. high school classrooms to right across the developing world.

Afshin Rattansi: Tell me about your visit and how your experience differed to the portrayal in the corporate media. I understand you went at the invitation of Rajaa Hassan Khalifa from the largest women’s union in conjunction with Bakri O.Saeed from Sudan International University.

Collette Valentine: Ali Gunn and myself and a group of journalists were lucky enough to be invited to Sudan by the Sudanese Women General Union. The women’s union in Sudan has got 27,000 branches all over Sudan, including Darfur. They have representatives in all the rural villages, across all different communities consisting of around 80 tribes and clans. The women of Sudan are a real force. Historically, there have been female leaders. They are wives, mothers, farmers, they build, they grow the vegetables and basically run the communities and are respected by their men folk. A third of families in the camps are headed by women. In recent years, some members of the women’s union have been elected as ministers in the Sudanese government and a quarter of the seats in the Sudanese parliament are occupied by women.

They are all members of the union and they have direct links right down from the most educated academic women from the professional classes to grassroots people. This chain of open communication is active and alive from bottom to top and top to bottom. Because the women have such a strong role in the communities, the women themselves have decided to take action for peace and security in Darfur. They have seen the failure of external, international agencies and NGOs and they know that peace can only come from within their own communities via reconciliation talks.

The IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) in the refugee camps are people who have fled trouble in their own areas of Sudan. They didn’t want to leave but had no option but to flee. Before the international NGOs got involved, the IDPs were provided with camps by Al-Bashir’s government, provided with wells, administrators, bureaucratic structures, materials for shelter and local doctors, clinics, and health services paid for by the Sudanese government.
When women fled their villages, active male rebels from every community that were fighting each other remained. Those conflicts rage on even as there is peace and stability in the camps. We saw no evidence of any genocide. We were not embedded by the government nor with any NGO. We had absolute freedom to talk with whomever we wished. And we randomly talked to as many men, women and children as we could.

One man, a village leader who led 4,000 of his community , separated in two camps, said he had been there six years. His home was 50km away. We asked about genocide and he said that he wouldn’t have remained in the Sudanese government camps for six years if he hadn’t been looked after. When we asked about the issue of rape, he did not deny there wasn’t an issue. The women we spoke to said that unfortunately, rape exists everywhere in the world and some we spoke to quoted statistics about the prevalence of rape in the U.S. and how in developed nations, women are too frightened to press charges. One woman told me that allegations of wide and systematic rape crimes against Darfur women constitute a type of war against Sudan. Historically, in areas of conflict, they maintained, cases of crime and rape are bound to increase. Rape is not a weapon of the government and women are being told to report instances of rape. But the ICC is using the prevalence of rape and giving it undue importance, helping NGOs fill their coffers.

Afshin Rattansi: Were you concerned about safety in Darfur?

Ali Gunn: I understood the situation had settled and that there was quite a lot of fighting down south but that the situation in Darfur was more stable since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. However, I had been warned off by expert security consultants who feared for my safety.

We went to two camps in Darfur and we saw people eeking out a simple existence. No bullet holes, no tanks and no fighting. The only military vehicles belonged to the United Nations. We were given carte blanche to wander around the camps as we pleased and talk to anyone we liked. Many spoke English. I was appalled that so much reporting in our newspapers has no basis in reality. Cheap and lazy journalism at its worst.

Afshin Rattansi: What about the United Nations’ presence on the ground?

Collette Valentine: When we were actually in one of the two camps, we looked up and saw an American tank approaching, followed by a patrol of around 15 UN vans and two more tanks. They drove up, parked the cars outside the office of the administrator of the camp. We didn’t know what was happening.

We were told that three times day, this happens at the camp and that UN officials come to ask whether everything is alright. Women told us that the camps are peaceful places. While we played football with children in the camp at around 9am, men and women setting out market stalls selling tomatoes and oranges, and as the UN personnel talked to the administrator, the soldiers lined up with guns, five meters apart facing us and the rest of the people in the camps.

It was obvious that the soldiers were protecting UN bosses whilst we kicked a football with the children. It was extraordinary. Women were making yoghurt with goat’s milk even as the UN troops pointed their guns at us. I asked one of the women, Maha Feraigon, why guns were being aimed and whether they were scared that we might throw a tomato at them and she just laughed. As Ali says, quite a few people could speak English. Maha was first assistant to the Secretary General of the Sudanese Women General Union, independent of the government. All the people we spoke to were furious about UN personnel arriving in this way and wanted the UN to leave. The UN personnel left their engines running and people resented how much that money for the UN was being wasted in front of their eyes. They asked about what they could be doing with the money. I was disgusted. They asked why these personnel were not in the villages where the fighting continues and their ‘dar’ or land was. People said that NGOs did not want the fighting to stop so that they can continue to be paid. None had seen any money from the Save Darfur campaign and they resented that money was being raised in their names.

Ali Gunn: At the conference, we spoke to opposition leaders and women at the conference. There was no sense of urgency about any “genocide” in the camps themselves. Our concern for our trip was to look at the living conditions of the people in the camps and look at the future of Darfur and the future for families there. And there was very little evidence of external aid. Darfur is the size of France so we didn’t go to all the camps. We have photographic evidence of families and women making their own bricks. You would have to ask the aid agencies about where their money has been sent.

Afshin Rattansi: What about how the Sudanese perceive outside, external forces?

Collette Valentine: I was lucky enough to sit beside Mafa on the flight from Khartoum to Darfur. I emphasize that she has no connection to any NGO or the government. She spoke very good English and explained the anger of the people. Her general feeling, having been all over Darfur, speaking to women at all levels from all communities throughout the region was that they did not want foreign interference because they know that it is all about oil and water – the “oil of tomorrow”.

She told me about how Sudan was sitting on the biggest underwater lake in Africa giving rise to the best arable land. Despite the desertification, responsible for so many of the deaths in recent years, the lake holds great promise. She told me about how Chevron was thrown out of the country and how Chevron executives took all their drilling and exploration maps with them. They still believe that the NGOs in concert with the U.S. are only involved because of water and oil. She pointed to Congo, Sierra Leone and other African countries, firmly believing that there were no good intentions when it comes to great power involvement on the continent.

Afshin Rattansi: Not a day goes by without the word genocide being used when Darfur is in the corporate media.

Ali Gunn: The Western media has totally misrepresented the situation subsequent to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. In Darfur, they are desperate for long term measures to alleviate the cycle of non-delivery in Darfur. Some believed that there were a significant number of people who would never return to their homeland areas.
Living conditions in the camps were spartan but clean and people were very aware of their personal space. There was a market with a butcher, vegetable-sellers, a makeshift restaurant…many different rows of shops. It was very much like a souk you would see in any country of this type, with domestic goods on sale. The people we saw were not starving and pretty healthy.

Afshin Rattansi: Do you see money from oil being used for the benefit of the people?

Collette Valentine: Oil is all-important for Sudan and is vital to the infrastructure-building plans of the country. They are planning schools and health centers. Free medical care is available to everybody but not every village has a clinic so people have to travel to the next village. There is a lot of work to be done in Sudan. This is not a bed of roses, by any means but only oil money is going to be able to change things. I saw in Khartoum how development is beginning. They have big plans for the areas around the Blue Nile in Khartoum and it looks to me like Pudong in Shanghai where I made some documentaries when it was developing, a decade ago.

Maha told me that there was a rail system in Sudan that you could time your watch by but U.S. sanctions starting in the 1990s destroyed it as parts to fix trains and tracks dried up. Sanctions prevented people being able to travel. But, now the Sudanese government has done a deal with the Chinese who they feel are completely different to the Americans. I was told that Chinese involvement was trusted where the U.S. wasn’t. The Chinese are not interested in hegemonic power. I could see the development present in Khartoum. When I later met the president, he said that growth should be across Sudan and not just limited to an elite in Khartoum. The work is in progress and the president’s popularity has gone through the roof after the ICC indictments.

Afshin Rattansi: What about signs of corruption?

Ali Gunn: People had told us the President was a humble and modest man and he certainly seemed like that in person. I was very wary of signs of corruption and wealth. The palace looked like any municipal building in a developing nation. The furniture was all very normal. We were told that he was a modest man who had come up the ranks of the army and as such was possibly less concerned about the ICC than about rebuilding his nation. He is much more popular after the ICC indictments.

There was a feeling that the country has been picked on in comparison to what has been happening in surrounding nations. I saw that people were being actively encouraged to vote. I mentioned that I work in the British parliament and stressed the need for people to register to vote and there was certainly no problem in people understanding the importance of voting.

Like people in Britain, many of the people we spoke to had a healthy skepticism about politicians per se. But they did believe that the next elections would be free and fair.
Collette Valentine: The president knew that the conference was taking place but he had no knowledge of which camps we were visiting. The women were careful not to tell him because they were aware that we were looking for any signs that we were being embedded in any way.

Afshin Rattansi: And the perception is that the ICC has aided the president of Sudan?

Collette Valentine: On the night before we left, we met with President Al-Bashir and his advisor, Dr Ghazi Salahuddin Atabani. Everything they said backed up what we heard on the ground. He admitted that the ICC has aided his reelection chances. He admitted that rape was present in Darfur but he blamed outside aid agencies for putting petrol on the fire and he highlighted the external supply of arms. He also blamed the classic British divide-and-rule tactics of colonialism for the roots of trouble in Sudan. Attabani said “Sudan is politically isolated and that when the ICC indictment was first raised 4 years ago the president offered to step aside, to abdicate – he said 16 years was too long. Our policy in that the National Congress Party (NCP) is that we don’t believe in a’ president for life.’ The made him look like a villain but internally it boosted his popularity. .. now the NCP can’t consider any other candidate.”

From my experience of seeing western leaders in London, there is a cavalcade of security. Al Bashir when he goes from his house to local weddings, funerals and the mosque, seems to have no security at all. One of our delegates went to the mosque and was baffled by the lack of security on seeing him there.

Afshin Rattansi: What about what the president of Sudan expects from the change of administration in Washington?

Ali Gunn: We were attacked about international media coverage of Darfur as the people saw the situation very different to how it is portrayed. They saw the West as patronizing the Sudanese people. On Obama, President Al-Bashir said “He’s much more pragmatic. The old guard from Clinton’s days are still around – in the 90s they were hostile..they’ve not changed, but they have toned down their rhetoric…we believe that the US has been exploited by certain undercurrents .” I would suggest that people go and see for themselves what is happening.

Collette Valentine: Dr. Ghazi said that they are hopeful about Obama but they don’t trust the Clinton people, the Susan Rices and Samantha Powers. Continuation of the ICC path would be seen as vindictive and alien and could result in turning Darfur into a real conflict.

The women in the camps are focused on talking to their men and they believe that the only hope for peace and reconciliation lies with their ability to encourage forgiveness. They believe no international organizations can persuade the men to reconcile with each other. Before this conflict happened, tribal elders would meet to settle conflicts between nomadic and peasant communities. Right across Darfur, women are campaigning on the ground for reconciliation talks. This was the first peace conference. All the women from all the communities are coming together to urge reconciliation talks with women from each community given their time to speak. Security was on top of the agenda as well as education and healthcare.

Ali Gunn: After we came back from the camps, we were both shocked about the disparity of what was happening on the ground and what was in the media.

Afshin Rattansi has helped launch and develop television networks and has worked in journalism for more than two decades, at the BBC Today programme, CNN International, Bloomberg News, Al Jazeera Arabic, the Dubai Business Channel, Press TV and The Guardian. His quartet of novels, “The Dream of the Decade” is available on Amazon.com. He can be reached at afshin@afshinrattansi.com

The Darfur The West Isn’t Recognizing

The Darfur The West Isn’t Recognizing As It Moralizes About The Region

(Book Of The Times Review)

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 29, 2009
Courtesy Of The New York Times

For many who survey an African landscape strewn with political wreckage, nowadays merely to raise the subject of European colonialism, which formally ended across most of the continent five decades ago, is to ring alarm bells of excuse making.

Clearly, the African disaster most in view today is Sudan, or more specifically the dirty war that has raged since 2003 in that country’s western region, Darfur.

Rare among African conflicts, it exerts a strong claim on our conscience. By instructive contrast, more than five million people have died as a result of war in Congo since 1998, the rough equivalent at its height of a 2004 Asian tsunami striking every six months, without stirring our diplomats to urgency or generating much civic response.

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-born scholar at Columbia University and the author of “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda,” is one of the most penetrating analysts of African affairs. In “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror,” he has written a learned book that reintroduces history into the discussion of the Darfur crisis and questions the logic and even the good faith of those who seek to place it at the pinnacle of Africa’s recent troubles. It is a brief, he writes, “against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.”

Mr. Mamdani does not dismiss a record of atrocities in Darfur, where 300,000 have been killed and 2.5 million been made refugees, yet he opposes the label of genocide as a subjective judgment wielded for political reasons against a Sudanese government that is out of favor because of its history of Islamism and its suspected involvement in terror.

At his most provocative Mr. Mamdani questions the distinction between what is often labeled counterinsurgency and genocide, saying the former, even when it kills more people, is deemed “normal violence” while the latter is considered “amoral, evil,” and typically it is the West that does the labeling.

Although he uses the United States war in Iraq as an example, with the International Criminal Court recently issuing an arrest warrant for Sudan’s leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Mr. Mamdani’s most compelling example is the treatment of a crisis in neighboring Uganda.

In Uganda, long one of Washington’s closest African friends, Mr. Mamdani traces the history of ethnically targeted “civilian massacres and other atrocities” against the brutal insurgency known as the Lord’s Resistance Army. In 1996, under President Yoweri Museveni, a second phase of that war began “with a new policy designed to intern practically the entire rural population of the three Acholi districts in northern Uganda,” Mr. Mamdani writes. “It took a government-directed campaign of murder, intimidation, bombing and burning of whole villages to drive the rural population into I.D.P. (internally displaced persons) camps.”

In 2005 Olara Otunnu, a former Ugandan ambassador to the United Nations, denounced the government’s tactics, saying, “An entire society is being systematically destroyed — physically, culturally, socially and economically — in full view of the international community.”

But as elsewhere in Africa, Mr. Mamdani says, the International Criminal Court has brought a case against only the enemy of Washington’s friend, the Lord’s Resistance Army, remaining mute about large-scale atrocities that may have been committed by the Ugandan government. In this pattern the author sees the hand of politics more than any real attachment to justice.

Many argue that what makes Darfur different from other African crises is race, with the conflict there pitting Arabs against people often called “black Africans,” but here again Mr. Mamdani takes on conventional wisdom. “At no point,” he states flatly, “has this been a war between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs.’ ”

Much foreign commentary about Sudan speaks of its Arabs as settlers, with the inference that they are somehow less African than people assumed to be of pure black stock. If whites in Kenya and Zimbabwe, not to mention South Africa, vociferously maintain their African-ness, what then to make of the Arab presence in Sudan, whose slow penetration and widespread intermarriage, Mr. Mamdani writes, “commenced in the early decades of Islam” and “reached a climax” from the 8th to the 15th century, “when the Arab tribes overran much of the country”?

More interestingly, the author maintains that much of what we see today as a racial divide in Sudan has its roots in colonial history, when Britain “broke up native society into different ethnicities, and ‘tribalized’ each ethnicity by bringing it under the absolute authority of one or more British-sanctioned ‘native authorities,’ ” balancing “the whole by playing one off against the others.”

Mr. Mamdani calls this British tactic of administratively reinforcing distinctions among colonial subjects “re-identify and rule” and says that it was copied by European powers across the continent, with deadly consequences — as in Rwanda, where Belgium’s intervention hardened distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi.

In Sudan the result was to create a durable sense of land rights rooted in tribal identity that favored the sedentary at the expense of the nomad, or, in the crude shorthand of today, African and Arab.

Other roots of the Darfur crisis lie in catastrophic desertification in the Sahel region, where the cold war left the area awash in cheap weapons at the very moment that pastoralists could no longer survive in their traditional homelands, obliging many to push southward into areas controlled by sedentary farmers.

He also blames regional strife, the violent legacy of proxy warfare by France, Libya and the United States and, most recently, the global extension of the war on terror.

This important book reveals much on all of these themes, yet still may be judged by some as not saying enough about recent violence in Darfur.

Mr. Mamdani’s constant refrain is that the virtuous indignation he thinks he detects in those who shout loudest about Darfur is no substitute for greater understanding, without which outsiders have little hope of achieving real good in Africa’s shattered lands.