[Media-watch] Sudan is about oil and figures are incorrect, says Laughland

[Sigi D]

Dear MW friends,
Sudan is about oil, says john Laughland in the
Guardian, 
and once again journalists are not checking facts and
figures properly, he says.
 Very interesting read.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,14658,1274182,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,14658,1274182,00.html
Article of guardian from Monday 2. august 2004
enclosed.
Best
S
The mask of altruism disguising a colonial war 

Oil will be the driving factor for military
intervention in Sudan 

John Laughland
Monday August 2, 2004
The Guardian 

If proof were needed that Tony Blair is off the hook
over Iraq, it came not during the Commons debate on
the Butler report on July 21, but rather at his
monthly press conference the following morning. Asked
about the crisis in Sudan, Mr Blair replied: "I
believe we have a moral responsibility to deal with
this and to deal with it by any means that we can."
This last phrase means that troops might be sent - as
General Sir Mike Jackson, the chief of the general
staff, immediately confirmed - and yet the reaction
from the usual anti-war campaigners was silence. 

Mr Blair has invoked moral necessity for every one of
the five wars he has fought in this, surely one of the
most bellicose premierships in history. The bombing
campaign against Iraq in December 1998, the 74-day
bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, the intervention in
Sierra Leone in the spring of 2000, the attack on
Afghanistan in October 2001, and the Iraq war last
March were all justified with the bright certainties
which shone from the prime minister's eyes. Blair even
defended Bill Clinton's attack on the al-Shifa
pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan in August 1998, on
the entirely bogus grounds that it was really
manufacturing anthrax instead of aspirin. 

Although in each case the pretext for war has been
proved false or the war aims have been unfulfilled, a
stubborn belief persists in the morality and the
effectiveness of attacking other countries. The
Milosevic trial has shown that genocide never occurred
in Kosovo - although Blair told us that the events
there were worse than anything that had happened since
the second world war, even the political activists who
staff the prosecutor's office at the international
criminal tribunal in The Hague never included genocide
in their Kosovo indictment. And two years of
prosecution have failed to produce one single witness
to testify that the former Yugoslav president ordered
any attacks on Albanian civilians in the province.
Indeed, army documents produced from Belgrade show the
contrary. 

Like the Kosovo genocide, weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, as we now know, existed only in the fevered
imaginings of spooks and politicians in London and
Washington. But Downing Street was also recently
forced to admit that even Blair's claims about mass
graves in Iraq were false. The prime minister has
repeatedly said that 300,000 or 400,000 bodies have
been found there, but the truth is that almost no
bodies have been exhumed in Iraq, and consequently the
total number of such bodies, still less the cause of
their deaths, is simply unknown. 

In 2001, we attacked Afghanistan to capture Osama bin
Laden and to prevent the Taliban from allegedly
flooding the world with heroin. Yet Bin Laden remains
free, while the heroin ban imposed by the Taliban has
been replaced by its very opposite, a surge in opium
production, fostered by the warlords who rule the
country. As for Sierra Leone, the United Nations human
development report for 2004, published on July 15,
which measures overall living standards around the
world, puts that beneficiary of western intervention
in 177th place out of 177, an august position it has
continued to occupy ever since our boys went in:
Sierra Leone is literally the most miserable place on
earth. So much for Blair's promise of a "new era for
Africa". 

The absence of anti-war scepticism about the prospect
of sending troops into Sudan is especially odd in view
of the fact that Darfur has oil. For two years,
campaigners have chanted that there should be "no
blood for oil" in Iraq, yet they seem not to have
noticed that there are huge untapped reserves in both
southern Sudan and southern Darfur. As oil pipelines
continue to be blown up in Iraq, the west not only has
a clear motive for establishing control over
alternative sources of energy, it has also officially
adopted the policy that our armies should be used to
do precisely this. Oddly enough, the oil concession in
southern Darfur is currently in the hands of the China
National Petroleum Company. China is Sudan's biggest
foreign investor. 

We ought, therefore, to treat with scepticism the US
Congress declaration of genocide in the region. No
one, not even the government of Sudan, questions that
there is a civil war in Darfur, or that it has caused
an immense number of refugees. Even the government
admits that nearly a million people have left for
camps outside Darfur's main towns to escape marauding
paramilitary groups. The country is awash with guns,
thanks to the various wars going on in Sudan's
neighbouring countries. Tensions have risen between
nomads and herders, as the former are forced south in
search of new pastures by the expansion of the Sahara
desert. Paramilitary groups have practised widespread
highway robbery, and each tribe has its own private
army. That is why the government of Sudan imposed a
state of emergency in 1999. 

But our media have taken this complex picture and
projected on to it a simple morality tale of ethnic
cleansing and genocide. They gloss over the fact that
the Janjaweed militia come from the same ethnic group
and religion as the people they are allegedly
persecuting - everyone in Darfur is black, African,
Arabic-speaking and Muslim. Campaigners for
intervention have accused the Sudanese government of
supporting this group, without mentioning that the
Sudanese defence minister condemned the Janjaweed as
"bandits" in a speech to the country's parliament in
March. On July 19, moreover, a court in Khartoum
sentenced six Janjaweed soldiers to horrible
punishments, including the amputation of their hands
and legs. And why do we never hear about the rebel
groups which the Janjaweed are fighting, or about any
atrocities that they may have committed? 

It is far from clear that the sudden media attention
devoted to Sudan has been provoked by any real
escalation of the crisis - a peace agreement was
signed with the rebels in April, and it is holding.
The pictures on our TV screens could have been shown
last year. And we should treat with scepticism the
claims made for the numbers of deaths - 30,000 or
50,000 are the figures being bandied about - when we
know that similar statistics proved very wrong in
Kosovo and Iraq. The Sudanese government says that the
death toll in Darfur, since the beginning of the
conflict in 2003, is not greater than 1,200 on all
sides. And why is such attention devoted to Sudan
when, in neighbouring Congo, the death rate from the
war there is estimated to be some 2 or 3 million, a
tragedy equalled only by the silence with which it is
treated in our media? 

We are shown starving babies now, but no TV station
will show the limbless or the dead that we cause if we
attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be what the Red
Cross always said it must be - politically neutral.
Anything else is just an old-fashioned colonial war -
the reality of killing, and the escalation of
violence, disguised with the hypocritical mask of
altruism. If Iraq has not taught us that, then we are
incapable of ever learning anything. 

· John Laughland is an associate of Sanders Research
Associates 

jlaughland at sandersresearch.com 






	
	
		
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