In Sudan, China focuses on oil wells, not local needs

By Danna Harman
The Christian Science Monitor
June 25, 2007

Paloich, South Sudan – Li Haowei’s girlfriend gave him a silver ring when he left Liaoning, his home province in China, nine months ago. Before he boarded the flight to Sudan, Mr. Li had never even left Liaoning before. “You are so lucky,” his girlfriend said, then, enviously.
“I was happy to go abroad and see the world,” says Li, an accountant for Petrodar, a multinational oil consortium. “But I did not know enough to know I did not want to come here.”

Paloich is not a particularly welcoming place. The heat surrounds and suffocates you like a plastic bag. The dust in the dry season sticks to your eyelashes and fills your nostrils. Mosquitoes buzz in your ears relentlessly.

Li is making three times the salary he would at home. But he misses his girlfriend, he says, twisting his ring around. He misses Liaoning. He misses real Chinese food.

Sometimes he can’t sleep. Fear of malaria is a constant. He broke down crying when he read a tender letter from his mother last month. He does not like it here.

The local Sudanese are not too keen on his presence here, either.

Sudan’s oil production averages 536,000 barrels a day, according to estimates by the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Other estimates say it is closer to 750,000 barrels a day. And there is an estimated 5 billion-barrel reservoir of oil beneath Sudan’s 1 million-square-mile surface, almost all of it in the south of the country, an area inhabited mainly by Christian and animist black Africans who fought a 21-year civil war against the Arab-dominated Muslim government of the north.

The vast majority of this oil, 64 percent, is sold to China, now the world’s second-largest consumer of oil. And while neither Khartoum, China, nor Petrodar release any statistics – this is generally believed to be an oil deal worth at least $2 billion a year.

China’s National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is the majority shareholder in both Petrodar and the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, two of the biggest oil consortiums in Sudan.

CNPC has invested billions in oil-related infrastructure here in Paloich, including the 900-mile pipeline from the Paloich oil fields to the tanker terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a tarmac road leading to Khartoum, and a new airport with connecting flights to Beijing.

But they have not invested in much else here.

Locals live in meager huts, eating peanuts with perch fished out of the contaminated Nile. There is no electricity. A Swiss charity provides healthcare. An American aid group flies in food and mosquito nets. Most children do not go to school. There is no work to be found. Petrodar, for one, has its own workers – almost all of whom are foreigners (mostly Chinese, Malaysians, and Qataris) or Sudanese northerners. The consortium hires Paloich residents only rarely, for menial jobs.

It’s a picture of underdevelopment not unusual in Sudan’s semiautonomous south. While some pockets – like the regional capital of Juba and the bigger towns of Rumbek and Wau – have seen some economic revival since the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, the majority of the south remains mired in abject poverty.

Locals blame their lot on oppression by Sudan’s Islamist government and the long war with the north. But they also blame the Chinese.

“[The Chinese] moved us away so we would not see what was going on. They were stealing our oil and they knew it,” says Abraham Thonchol, a rebel-turned-pastor who grew up near Paloich. “Oil is valuable and we are not idiots. We were expecting something.”

US-based Chevron was the first oil company to arrive here, setting up operations in the 1980s. “They employed us,” says Mr. Thonchol. “We helped with the drilling, drove them around, and worked as cooks. “

The second group of oilmen to show up was not as benevolent, say many locals. Thonchol’s cousin, Peter Nyok, a 6-foot, 6-inch, member of the Dinka tribe with traditional lines carved on his forehead and six missing front teeth, says it took a while for locals to differentiate between Westerners – and the Chinese that came later. “They looked like whites to us. We could not detect any difference, except, maybe, that they were shorter,” he says. “But then we found they behaved differently.”

Chased out by civil war in the mid 1980s and ’90s, and later kept away by pressure from human rights groups, Chevron and other Western companies left the oil fields for others. Canadian Talisman Energy, faced with a divestment campaign, was forced to sell its 25-percent stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company in 2002.

Chinese firms were more than happy to fill the void.

But the Chinese operations were marked “from the beginning,” by a “deep complicity in gross human rights violations, scorched-earth clearances of the indigenous population,” says Sudan activist Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Giving expert testimony before the congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission last August, Mr. Reeves claimed the Chinese gave direct assistance to Khartoum’s military forces which, in turn, burned villages, chased locals away from their homes, and harmed the environment while prospecting for oil.

Brad Phillips, director of Persecution International, an aid group working in South Sudan, has seen the destruction firsthand. “The Chinese are equal partners with Khartoum when it comes to exploiting resources and locals here,” he says. “Their only interest here is their own.” He would love to see the Chinese sponsor a school here, he says, or a clinic, or an agricultural program, or “anything for the people.” But there is nothing like that in sight. Just miles of desolate land.

“The Chinese simply do not care about us,” says Martin Buywomo, Paloich’s mayor. “They have no contact. They never even came to my tent to pay respects. They think we are lesser people.” A member of the Shilluk tribe who attended British mission schools, Mr. Buywomo puts down the worn copy of George Eliot’s 19th-century classic “Silas Marner” he is reading and continues sadly. “We see them in their trucks but they overlook us. If they saw us dying on the road, they would overlook us.”

Buywomo rearranges the Chinese-made plastic pink flowers on his desk. “This is colonialism all over again.”

THABO MBEKI, for one, might not rush to correct such an impression. Last December, the South African president – whose country is Beijing’s largest trading partner on the continent – cautioned against an unequal and “colonial relationship” with China.

Across the border, in neighboring Zimbabwe – a country that can ill afford to offend the few friends it has – Trevor Ncube, a respected newspaper publisher, devoted a recent issue of his Zimbabwe Standard to whether doing business with China was “merely swapping our old colonial master for a new one.”

Perhaps most worrying for the Chinese is the grass-roots reaction to their advances in the southern African nation of Zambia.

China, the world’s largest copper consumer, has pledged $800 million in investments in Zambia, one of the world’s largest copper producers. Beijing has written off nearly $8 million of Zambia’s debt and announced the establishment of a showcase free-trade zone which, according to China’s ambassador to Zambia, will create tens of thousands of jobs.

Nonetheless, in the lead-up to Zambia’s Sept. 28 elections, presidential candidate Michael Sata turned lack of safety at Chinese owned mines (50 Zambian mine workers were killed by an explosion in 2005) into a major campaign issue. Mr. Sata fumed about what he called the plunder of the country’s mineral wealth and disregard for the environment – and promised to kick out the Chinese and recognize Taiwan if he won. He did not. But a few months later, Chinese President Hu Jintao cancelled a visit to the Zambian copper-mining town of Chambishi due to fear of mass demonstrations against him there.

This negative image of Beijing as a neo-colonizer could not be further from the way China – a country never involved in either the colonial “Scramble for Africa” of the 1800s or the African slave trade – wants to be perceived here.

“Over the last half decade, the Chinese and African people have built a deep friendship in the course of the struggle for national liberation, development, and rejuvenation,” then Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told reporters after Mr. Hu’s Zambia mine visit was canceled. “African friends, from leaders to civilians … called China a ‘brother of Africa,’ an ‘all-weather friend,’ and the ‘most important partner,’ ” waxed Mr. Li.

The Chinese, who, unlike the European powers who came before them, have no direct rule over any population here and negotiate the terms of their stay with the ruling government, say abuses of power are exceptions to the way they do business.

“We always encourage Chinese enterprises to be in equal-footed cooperation with their African counterparts, to abide by local laws and regulations,” Liu Guijin, China’s new special representative to Africa told journalists in Beijing in April. “If they did something not so pleasant, that is not consistent with government policy.”

Xu Weizhong, director of the department of African studies at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank in Beijing, refines this point. First of all, he says, many Chinese enterprises are independent and cannot be controlled. “Now even state-owned enterprises have room to maneuver … and will sometimes refuse government policies. This is a dilemma for the Chinese government.”

But furthermore, he says, while China is indeed aiming to be a fair business partner, the definition of what “good practice” might be should not be set by outsiders. “The Chinese government respects African rules and regulations if there are any, [but] it is less willing to respect rules that Western governments impose on African issues,” he states.

Petrodar accountant Li dismisses the whole debate, calling the stories about stealing oil, degrading the people and the environment, and becoming new age colonizers “Ali Baba tales.”

“I am here to make money. My company is here to do the same,” he says. “I know this is a very poor and insecure place, but I am not responsible for fixing all the things that are wrong in Sudan,” he adds, not quite understanding the complaints. “That’s life. That’s business.”

• Peter Ford contributed to this report from Beijing.

Iraqi court sentences “Chemical Ali” to death

By Ross Colvin
June 24, 2007

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced to death Saddam Hussein’s cousin, widely known as “Chemical Ali”, for masterminding a genocidal campaign against Iraq’s ethnic Kurds in the 1980s.

“Chemical Ali”

A tired-looking Ali Hassan al-Majeed, wearing traditional Arab robes, trembled as the judge read the verdict, one witness said. As Majeed left the courtroom, he said: “Thanks be to God.”

Majeed, whose very name once sparked fear among Iraqis, directed a military campaign against the Kurdish north in which chemical weapons were used, villages demolished, agricultural lands destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.

The court also sentenced to death two former military commanders under Saddam for their roles in the campaign. Two other commanders were sentenced to life in prison, while charges were dropped against the former governor of Mosul province for lack of evidence. Saddam was the seventh defendant, until his execution in December in a separate trial.

Kurds have long sought justice for the so-called Anfal or “Spoils of War” campaign that has left lasting scars on their mountainous region. Prosecutors say up to 180,000 people were killed in the seven-month “scorched-earth” operation in 1988.

A forensic specialist uses a trowel to remove sand away from human skulls in the al-Samawa desert in Muthanna province, 270 km (168miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, April 25, 2005. Skulls and bones, clothing and other belongings found in shallow graves here offer up valuable clues to investigators gathering evidence against Saddam Hussein and others from the former regime. Dates on medicine found in the graves indicate the people were killed around the time of the 1987-1988 ‘Anfal campaign’ that saw Kurdish villages razed and hundreds of people relocated south, said Sonny Trimble, archaeologist in charge of the excavation. The verdict is expected on Sunday, June 24, 2007 against Saddam Hussein’s cousin, known as Chemical Ali, and other defendants who could face the death penalty for a 1980s crackdown against the ethnic minority. (AP Photo/Ali Al-Saad, Pool)
**************

The populations of entire villages disappeared.

Majeed was viewed as Saddam’s main enforcer, a man with a reputation for brutality who was used by the president to crush dissent. He also played a leading role in stamping out a Shi’ite rebellion in the south after the 1991 Gulf War.

During Anfal, thousands of villages declared “prohibited areas” were razed and bombed. Thousands of villagers were deported, many executed.

Mustard gas and nerve agents were used to clear villages, earning Majeed his grim nickname “Chemical Ali”. Many of those killed in the poison gas attacks were women and children.
Majeed admitted during the trial he ordered troops to execute all Kurds who ignored orders to leave their villages but did not confirm ordering the use of chemical weapons.

The defendants have said Anfal had legitimate military targets — Kurdish guerrillas who had sided with Iran during the last stage of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war.

Historians say Saddam sought to make an example of the rebellious Kurds, who make up 20 percent of the population, to deter opponents of his regime and show them what happened to those who defied his authority.

It was the “logical if brutal conclusion of the policies pursued by the regime towards the Kurds”, wrote historian Charles Tripp in his book, a “History of Iraq”.

The trial heard evidence from survivors, some still bearing the scars of the poison gas attacks, and prosecutors presented forensic data unearthed from mass graves across Iraq.

International human rights groups say the trial was marred by procedural flaws and political interference — the government replaced the chief judge after he made remarks interpreted as favoring the defendants.

Beijing’s role in Darfur genocide

By Nat Hentoff
The Washington Times
June 11, 2007      
    
President Bush has told Sudan’s genocidal president, Lt. Gen. Omar Bashir, that “the time for promises is over.” Gen. Bashir must act “to end the genocide.” Mr. Bush said this at the Holocaust Museum in Washington on April 16.

Also there was Elie Wiesel, who never lets the world forget the Holocaust he survived. “Darfur,” Mr. Wiesel said, “is the capital of human suffering in the world.” Referring to the president’s ultimatum to the primary source of that suffering, Mr. Wiesel said: “I am a Jew who believes in miracles.” 
    
The next day, instead of a miracle, the Sudanese government began bombing Darfur villages for 10 days, the United Nations reported, leveling a school.
    
Undaunted, Mr. Bush, who says the genocide in Darfur must stop, ordered new sanctions against Sudan on May 29, accusing Gen. Bashir of being “complicit in the bombing, murder and rape of innocent civilians.” These sanctions prevent 31 additional firms owned or controlled by Sudan from engaging in business with U.S. companies and our banking system.
    
Speaking for China, to which Sudan sells 60 percent of its oil and 40 percent of its total exports, Liu Guijin, China’s special representative in Darfur, said on the same day: “These willful sanctions and simply applying pressure is [sic] not conducive to solving the problem… It will only make achieving a solution more complicated.”

With China the world’s chief protector of Sudan, it is increasingly evident that a worldwide boycott of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will be much more effective than sanctions against Sudan. But Mr. Bush keeps trying.
    
In addition to economic sanctions, Mr. Bush pledged that we will urge the U.N. Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Sudan, and a prohibition against military flights over Darfur to end the bombing not only of the black Africans’ villages, but also of meetings of rebel groups trying to end the fighting among themselves. (The latter armistice is also essential for any chance of long-range peace in Darfur.)

Mr. Bush did not detail how he will persuade China and Russia (each on the U.N. Security Council) against vetoing these American proposals. Since his plan does not include any sanctions against those countries, the U.N. Security Council will, as always, be useless in ending the genocide.
    
In all the press coverage of our president’s clearly sincere but ineffective threats against Gen. Bashir, I saw no mention of the May 23 story in The Washington Post, “Flights Between U.S., China to Double.” Not only will daily flights be more than double, but also, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, by 2011, China (by lifting limits on cargo flights and carriers) will provide U.S. cargo carriers “virtually unlimited access.”
    
Among those celebrating this new expansion of our economic ties with China was U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. who, The Washington Post reported, “said the Chinese government agreed to remove a block on new foreign securities firms and will resume licensing them this year” as well as allowing “licensed foreign banks to immediately begin offering yuan-denominated debit and credit cards.” Since China is the only nation in the world that can compel Gen. Bashir to end the genocide and disarm his Janjaweed militia (described by their victims as “the devils on horseback”) who have killed and raped untold numbers of black Africans in Darfur, I suggest Mr. Bush introduce the secretary of the Treasury to Mr. Wiesel, who will instruct him on genocide.
    
Not all disagreements between China and the United States on trade were ended in the two-day economic dialogue, but U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab was pleased: “Suffice to say we had a healthy exchange of views.” How this summit meeting on the business of increasing profits for both countries affects the very lives of the surviving people of Darfur was not cited.
    
I guess business is business, as noted by Jody Williams and Mia Farrow in their May 23 Wall Street Journal column on “Sudan’s Enablers.” They point out that “China’s interests in Sudan are represented almost entirely by China National PetroleumCompany and PetroChina… two faces of the same entity.” Yet the admirable philanthropist Warren Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway firm, “which has roughly $3 billion invested in PetroChina voted earlier this month not only against divesting (in those two enablers of Sudan’s genocide), but also against taking any shareholder action on the issue.”
    
Mrs. Williams and Miss Farrow ask of Mr. Buffett how “a man can be a true humanitarian while offering billions of dollars to a company that is underwriting Khartoum’s crimes.” I expect that with the expansion of daily flights to China, Mr. Buffett will enjoy the very best accommodations, as will Mr. Paulson.
    
Meanwhile, every day, the devils on horseback will be riding in Darfur.
    

Genocide diplomacy from Washington to Beijing and Darfur

The Christian Science monitor
Opinion
May 30, 2007

President Bush ratcheted up US sanctions Tuesday against Sudan for its atrocities in Darfur or, specifically, for not allowing in UN peacekeepers. His action, done on behalf of “the conscience of the world,” just might force China, Sudan’s main supporter, to find more of a conscience in helping end a genocide.

In April, when Mr. Bush was ready to impose these tougher sanctions, China, along with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, sought additional time for diplomacy. Bush agreed, reluctantly. More attempts were then made to persuade Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, to approve a 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force for Darfur.

Such persuasion, without teeth, didn’t work.

Mr. Bashir simply referred to UN peacekeepers as “neocolonialists.” The Khartoum regime kept up its campaign of violence against the 2.5 million refugees in its western region of Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been killed since 2003 in this civil war. The regime took no steps to disarm local militias committing most of the atrocities. And the UN discovered Sudan flying arms into Darfur in planes painted white, making them appear to be UN aircraft.

With a G-8 summit next week, Bush decided to announce the tougher sanctions in hopes that the forum of rich nations would join his drive for more pressure on Sudan. One part of the Bush plan is a ban on an additional 31 Sudanese companies (from more than 100) conducting any dollar transactions within the US financial system. That step may have some effect, but an assist from European banks would help.

And the US also seeks a nod from the UN Security Council for two other, noneconomic sanctions: imposing a broad arms embargo against Sudan and barring the government from conducting any offensive military flights in Darfur. That action will require China to not cast its veto in the Council.

But Beijing buys more than half of Sudan’s oil, a part of its global grab for raw materials to fuel a superheated export economy. If China now jeopardizes oil imports from Sudan by standing up for human rights in Darfur, it may face similar scrutiny over imports of resources from (and aid to) dictators in Burma (Myanmar), Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.

Western countries often link trade and aid to good governance and human rights, but China doesn’t. That’s an increasingly difficult stand to take, especially when China will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.Beijing hopes to use the spotlight on the Games to showcase itself as a global player. In recent months, however, activists have branded these “the genocide games,” aiming to muster a boycott unless Beijing acts tougher on Sudan.

That pressure has had some effect on Beijing, but now Bush’s call for harsher sanctions should force China to exercise a stronger hand over its friends in Khartoum. If China doesn’t go along, the humanitarian crisis and the genocide in Darfur may only worsen.

What Beijing ultimately does will send a signal to nations in Africa that it has recently courted as economic partners: Regimes such as Sudan’s can’t abuse diplomacy when atrocities against innocents are going on.

Challenging China on genocide

Los Angeles Times
Editorial

May 30, 2007

PRESIDENT BUSH tightened the screws on the Sudanese government Tuesday, stiffening U.S. financial sanctions aimed at ending the ongoing genocide and displacement in Darfur. It was a long-overdue move, though Bush’s tough talk may be aimed at the wrong country. The Darfur crisis probably won’t be resolved until more pressure is brought to bear on China, and the real impetus for that pressure isn’t coming from Washington but from Hollywood.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir clearly doesn’t lose much sleep over threats of international sanctions. For four years, he has presided over a campaign of murder and rape against the people of Darfur to punish rebel factions seeking a share of the nation’s oil wealth. Despite continual attempts to negotiate a peace treaty or send in a 22,000-member-strong United Nations force to protect civilians, there has been no letup to the killing and only one small breakthrough on peacekeeping: In April, Bashir agreed to allow 3,000 U.N. personnel to join the 7,000 overstretched African Union troops in the region.

On Tuesday, Bush targeted several Sudanese companies and individuals for U.S. financial sanctions and vowed to seek tougher U.N. sanctions against the country. This was probably met with a yawn in Khartoum.

China, the biggest buyer of Sudan’s oil and a prime source of development aid, is the only country whose opinion really matters to Bashir. China has blocked sanctions against Sudan in the U.N. Security Council and will doubtless do so again unless the rest of the world imposes a price for its support of the genocidal regime.

In recent months, Hollywood celebrities have been more successful than world leaders in exacting that price. Show-biz people are in a unique position to rattle China because it is about to put on the biggest show in its history: the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Thus, when director Steven Spielberg, an artistic advisor to the Games, sent a personal letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao requesting a change in policy toward Sudan, it got attention. Shortly afterward, Bashir permitted the 3,000 U.N. peacekeepers, and the timing may not have been coincidental. Meanwhile, calls from actress Mia Farrow for a boycott of the “Genocide Olympics” and efforts by actors Don Cheadle and George Clooney to point out China’s role in the conflict are generating anxiety in Beijing.

China, which sees the Games as a sort of coming-out party, is desperate to avoid an embarrassment like the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Yet it can’t pretend to be a world leader, or even a responsible member of the international community, while funding a genocide. If it doesn’t change its stance toward Sudan, there will be a bloodstain on next year’s Games visible around the world, boycott or not.

Bush Takes Stand As “Human Rights President”

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
May 30, 2007

Yesterday the President of the United States, George W. Bush, staked his claim as the “Human Rights President.”

Yesterday, President Bush took strong action against Sudan and welcomed to the Oval Office some of Vietnam’s most vocal critics.  Bill Clinton never achieved such a day. 

After many diplomatic overtures to the United Nations, China and Sudan, the President of the United States said that he was acting more harshly and unilaterally against Sudan for ongoing Human Rights abuses in Darfur.

“The people of Darfur are crying out for help, and they deserve it,” he said. “The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world.”

Human Rights activists believe up to 450,000 people have been killed and some 2.5 million displaced as a result of a campaign of violence waged since 2003 in Darfur.

China is Sudan’s number one foreign investor and protector.  China has practically denied there is a problem in Darfur.

The President called the wrongdoing in Darfur “genocide.”

This is a giant slap in the face to President Hu Jintao of China, who has attempted to downplay China’s involvement and complicity in the genocide in Darfur while China pumps out of Sudan its precious natural resource: oil.

If he is smart, President Hu of China will imediately take action to alleviate the suffering inSudan.

Why?

BecauseChina has planned for itself a gigantic coming out party at next summer’s “Beijing Olympics.” But just as China is calling this the “Beijing Olympics,” influential Hollywood celebrities are already calling them the “Genocide Games.”

China’s actions in the Sudan now look inexcusable. President Hu: Time to reverse course.

Tuesday afternoon, President Bush went a step further in his Human Rights effort by welcoming to the White House four of communist Vietnam’s most hated critics. The President of the United States welcomed into the White House Cong Thanh Do, founding member, Peoples Democratic Party of Vietnam; Diem Do, Chairman, Vietnam Reform Party; and Nguyen Le Minh, Chairman, Vietnam Human Rights Network; Quan Nguyen, Chairman, International Committee For Freedom To Support The Non-Violent Movement For Human Rights In Vietnam.

This is the same President Bush who in 2005 welcomed into the Oval Office Vietnam’s Phan Van Khai, the leader of one of the most repressive and intolerant regimes in the communist world.

Khai is gone now and replaced by younger and some might think more tolerant men. On July 4, 2006, Honglien and I published an article in The Washington Times which stated: “The top political leadership of Vietnam just changed. A new team of economic reformers emerged; but their ability to move Vietnam toward a more open and democratic future remains uncertain. The question, as we celebrate Independence Day in America, is this: can democratic governments like the U.S. influence Vietnam toward more freedom and democracy?

Last week in Vietnam, Nguyen Tan Dung was chosen by the communist ruling body as Vietnam’s youngest post-war prime minister, arguably the most significant leadership position in the government. Nguyen Minh Triet, the Communist Party head in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC, formerly Saigon), was chosen as Vietnam’s new president, a more ceremonial position. Nguyen Phu Trong was named as new chairman of the national assembly.

The leaders named nine new cabinet members, who were confirmed by the national assembly, including two deputy premiers and the foreign, defense and finance ministers.”

Our hopefulness didn’t bear fruit.

Vietnam, especially in the last several months, has instituted a deadly round of repression.

So President Bush has accepted the Vietnamese minority into the White House. He has welcomed home the Freedom Fighters. He has extended his hand to those that represent Human Rights in Vietnam.

Yesterday’s actions by the President of the United States on Human Rights are cause for celebration and joy.

Related:
Bush concerned about Vietnam human rights

Genocide diplomacy from Washington to Beijing and Darfur

U.N.: Russia, China have Little Interest in U.S. Darfur Actions

Challenging China on genocide

President Bush imposes new sanctions on Sudan

By Deb Riechmann, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Bush ordered new U.S. economic sanctions Tuesday to pressure Sudan’s government to halt the bloodshed in Darfur that the administration has condemned as genocide.

“I promise this to the people of Darfur: the United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world,” the president said.

The sanctions target government-run companies involved in Sudan’s oil industry, and three individuals, including a rebel leader suspected of being involved in the violence in Darfur.

“For too long the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is complicit in the bombing, murder and rape of innocent civilians,” the president said. “My administration has called these actions by their rightful name: genocide.

“The world has a responsibility to put an end to it,” Bush said.

The conflict erupted in February 2003 when members of Darfur’s ethnic African tribes rebelled against what they considered decades of neglect and discrimination by the Arab-dominated Khartoum government. Sudanese leaders are accused of retaliating by unleashing the janjaweed militia to put down the rebels using a campaign of murder, rape, mutilation and plunder — a charge they deny. The fighting in Darfur has displaced 2.5 million people.

Bush had been prepared to impose the sanctions last month, but held off to give U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon more time to find a diplomatic end to the four-year crisis in Darfur where more than 200,000 people have been killed.

Beyond the new U.S. sanctions, Bush directed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to draft a proposed U.N. resolution to strengthen international pressure on the Sudanese government of President Omar al-Bashir.

“I call on President al-Bashir to stop his obstruction and to allow the peacekeepers in and to end the campaign of violence that continues to target innocent men, women and children,” Bush said.

Bush said delaying sanctions to allow more time for diplomacy had not been effective.

“President Bashir’s actions over the past few weeks follow a long pattern of promising cooperation while finding new methods for obstruction,” the president said.

“One day after I spoke, they bombed a meeting of rebel commanders designed to discuss a possible peace deal with the government.,” the president said. “In the following weeks he used his army and government- sponsored militias to attack rebels and civilians in south Darfur. He’s taken no steps to disarm these militias in the year since the Darfur peace agreement was signed. Senior officials continue to oppose the deployment of the U.N. peacekeeping force.

“The result is that the dire security situation on the ground in Darfur has not changed,” Bush said.

Al-Bashir agreed in November to a three-phase U.N. plan to strengthen the overstretched, 7,000-strong African Union force in Darfur.

After five months of stalling, the Sudanese president gave the go-ahead in April for the second phase — a “heavy support package” with 3,000 U.N. troops, police and civilian personnel along with six attack helicopters and other equipment.

Over the weekend, however, al-Bashir reiterated his opposition to the deployment of a 22,000-strong joint U.N.-AU force, saying he would only allow a larger African force with technical and logistical support from the United Nations.

The new sanctions target 31 companies to be barred from the U.S. banking system. Thirty of the companies are controlled by the government of Sudan; the other one is suspected of shipping arms to Darfur, the officials said.

Nearly 10 years ago, the United States cut off about 130 Sudanese companies from the U.S. system over a different dispute, forcing them to find ways to do business outside the sanctions framework.

The U.S. also is targeting three individuals, cutting them off from the U.S. financial system to prevent them, too, from doing business with U.S. companies or individuals.

The Treasury Department said that Ahmad Muhammed Harun, Sudan’s state minister for humanitarian affairs, has been accused of war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Sudan’s head of military intelligence and security, Awad Ibn Auf, was also designated, along with Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, a rebel group that has refused to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement.

“Even in the face of sanctions, these individuals have continued to play direct roles in the terrible atrocities of Darfur,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Jr. “We are working to call attention to their horrific acts and further isolate them from the international community.”

The U.N. resolution Bush is seeking would apply new international sanctions against the Sudanese government in Khartoum. It also would seek to impose an expanded embargo on arms sales to Sudan, prohibit Sudan’s government from conducting offensive military flights over Darfur and strengthen the U.S. ability to monitor and report any violations.

Meanwhile, Liu Guijin, China’s new troubleshooter on Africa, defended Chinese investment in Sudan Tuesday as a better way to stop the bloodshed rather than the sanctions advocated by the U.S. and other Western governments.

Fresh from his first trip to Sudan since his appointment this month as a special government envoy, Liu said he saw no desperation in refugee camps in Darfur last week and found that international and Sudanese groups were working together to solve humanitarian problems there.

“I didn’t see a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger,” Liu said at a media briefing. Rather, he said, people in Darfur thanked him for the Chinese government’s help in building dams and providing water supply equipment.

Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir

Tyrant of the Month http://www.crusade-media.com/leader.html

China’s World View: Genocide in Darfur is O.K. and Nuclear Iran Too

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
March 10, 2007

Despite almost universal world condemnation of the government of Khartoum in Sudan over the starvation and human rights abuses in the Darfur region of that nation, President Hu Jintao of China visit Sudan last month and announced major Chinese investments.

Zhang Dong, China’s ambassador to Khartoum, told Xinhua news agency on Thursday that China “never interferes in Sudan’s internal affairs.”

Even thought the war in Sudan ended in 2005, the conflict in Darfur is estimated to have caused the deaths of some 200,000 people and made more than 2 million homeless.

The United States has called the situation in Darfur “genocide.”

The United Nations and the European Community have travel bans on Sudan, hoping to persuade Khartoum to mend its ways in Darfur.

“The blunt truth is China hasn’t begun to use any of the irresistible diplomatic, economic and political leverage it has with the Khartoum regime,” said U.S. Darfur expert Eric Reeves.

“And until it does, there will be … no halt to the intolerable deterioration in security for civilians and humanitarians.”

So it should be no surprise that China is now blocking U.N. action against Iran for its nuclear weapon development program.

China’s “main difficulty is with the financial and the trade sanctions against Iran because we feel that we are not punishing the Iranian people. We should punish the Iranians for their activities in the nuclear field,” China’s U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya said after Friday’s talks.

“I don’t think we will be ready by next week,” Wang said, although Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said there was some hope of a text next week.

“We went through the whole list of elements. There are some on which we are quite close, there are some on which there is some serious concerns and differences,” Churkin said.

China is a huge trading partner with Iran.

When Iranian radical students invaded and captured the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran on November 4, 1979, the action sparked a long confrontation with the U.S. which continues to this day.  Although the 52 American hostages were released after 444 days, the U.S. had frozen all Iran’s assets in the U.S. and prohibited American businesses from doing any trade or business with Iran.

Consequently, Iran’s largest trading partners became China, Russia and France: the same nations implicated in the Iraqi “Oil for Food” scandal managed by the U.N.

The U.S.’s refusal to allow trade with Iran has hurt the nation.  The Iranian airlines, for example, us all russian aircraft and equipment.  Iran has the worst commercial aviation safety record in the world. [When a few in the elite run the nation and don't have to answer to a free press or voters, human life has a diminished value and aircraft maintenance has little priority.]

Other envoys close to the negotiations in New York said as the weekend started that Western nations had offered several ways to accommodate China and others on the financial sanctions against Iran but the draft was not ready.

Because China is a big business partner with Iran, as in the case of Sudan, anything can be overlooked by China when there is money to be made.

Alejandro Wolff, the acting U.S. representative to the United Nations, acknowledged that the scope of financial sanctions were “the main point of concern” in negotiations. But he insisted that no measures under discussion would punish the Iranian people.

“Frankly, any sense that this is designed to penalize the Iranian people is completely mistaken,” he said. “This is an effort to put the focus on the government for being in noncompliance with the Security Council resolutions.”

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/03/06/us.human.rights.ap/index.html

International Woman’s Day: Taking Stock of Abuse

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
March 9, 2007

Human Rights Watch believes that women face vastly more forms of sexual abuse, violence, rape and discrimination than do men.

“Girls are at risk of violence on the streets, in schools, at home, where they work, and in government institutions,” said Jo Becker, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch’s children’s rights division.

“In far too many cases, girls are betrayed by the very individuals who are supposed to protect them – guardians, teachers, employers and the police.”

A grievous example of this occurred in 2003 when Human Rights Watch provided proof that United Nations peacekeepers were guilty of raping women on a systematic scale throughout Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war.

It happened again in 2004 in the Congo.

In March 2005 the Washington Post reported that the United Nations faced new allegations of sexual misconduct by U.N. personnel in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia and elsewhere.

Last November, Sudan’s president rejected plans for a joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Omar al-Bashir said he would only accept African troops under African Union leadership. He also denied reports that more than 200,000 people have died in Darfur, putting the death toll at under 9,000.

The United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says President al-Bashir’s distortions of the truth are “tragically off the mark.”

Nations such as China are complicit in some of this wrongdoing and abuse.Despite almost universal world condemnation of the government of Khartoum in Sudan over the starvation and human rights abuses in the Darfur region of that nation, China continues to very publicly send the world the middle finger.

President Hu Jintao made his first visit to the Sudan last month. Some had hoped that President Hu and China might speak out against what the U.S. has called the “genocide” in Darfur.

Billions of dollars of Chinese investment, particularly in the oil sector, have provided crucial support to President Omar al-Bashir’s regime, enabling it to join the ranks of oil exporters and improve decaying infrastructure.

The abuses in Darfur are particularly harsh against women. 

“In some areas, girls are making enormous strides, but violence stops many from enjoying their basic rights,” said Becker. “Governments need to back up words with action, and show that violence against girls won’t go unpunished.”

Human Rights Watch urged governments to take immediate steps to:

–Create confidential, fully staffed and toll-free hotlines to receive reports of abuses against girls, including mechanisms accessible to students, domestic workers, and children in detention;

–Ensure the prompt and effective investigation of such complaints, and prompt and appropriate action against perpetrators, including counseling, termination and criminal prosecution when warranted;

–Ensure that medical examinations, trauma counseling, emergency contraception, and post-exposure HIV prophylaxis are available to sexual assault survivors;

–In situations of insecurity, devise and implement a strategy to monitor, prevent, and respond to attacks on education, with special attention to the effects of attacks on girls’ education;

–and Ensure that children in conflict with the law are only detained as a last resort and for the shortest possible time. Prohibit the excessive use of force, and any disciplinary measures that may compromise the health of the child.

We at Preace and Freedom salute Human Rights Watch for their work.

Suspect named in Darfur War Crimes case

By Mike Corder
Associated Press

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor on Tuesday named a former Sudanese junior minister and a janjaweed militia leader as suspects in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the country’s Darfur region.

It was the first time the court has unveiled details of its investigation, which was launched in March 2005.

Ahmed Muhammed Harun is accused of helping recruit janjaweed militias responsible for murders, rapes and torture, prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said.

Harun, the former junior interior minister responsible for Darfur, and a janjaweed militia leader, Ali Mohammed Ali Abd-al-Rahman, who also is known as Ali Kushayb, were suspected of a total of 51 counts of war crimes, the prosecutor said.

Harun recruited janjaweed, “with full knowledge that they, often in the course of joint attacks with the (Sudanese) armed forces, would commit crimes against humanity and war crimes against the civilian population of Darfur,” Moreno-Ocampo said in a 94-page document filed with the court’s judges.

While the prosecution document is not an indictment, it does say that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Harun and Kushayb “bear criminal responsibility” for the offenses including murder, rape, torture and persecution.

There was no immediate reaction from the Sudanese government to the allegations against Harun.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million forced from their homes in Darfur since fighting erupted in February 2003, when ethnic African tribesmen took up arms, complaining of decades of neglect and discrimination by their government.

Khartoum is accused of using the janjaweed militias of Arab nomads to retaliate, but the government denies backing or arming the janjaweed. Members of the janjaweed have told the media that they were armed by government forces.

The White House has labeled the attacks genocide.

After reviewing the prosecutor’s evidence, judges can issue arrest warrants or summonses to the suspects to appear in The Hague. If they are charged, tried and convicted, they face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment at the court, which does not have the death penalty.

However, the court has no police force and relies on other countries to carry out arrests. That could be a problem in Sudan, which has not signed the Rome Statute creating the court and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the court, which came into force in 2002.

Moreno-Ocampo’s investigators have carried out 70 missions in 17 different countries, taking statements from more than 100 victims and witnesses and collecting documents.

They have been unable to carry out investigations in Darfur itself because of the ongoing violence there.

Prosecutors on Tuesday said the offenses occurred in four villages.

The “janjaweed did not target any rebel presence within these particular towns and villages.

Rather, they attacked these towns and villages based on the rationale that the tens of thousands of civilian residents in and near these towns and villages were supporters of the rebel militia.”

The strategy, “became the justification for the mass murder, summary execution, and mass rape of civilians who were known not to be participants in any armed conflict,” prosecutors said. “Application of the strategy also called for, and achieved the forced displacement of entire villages and communities.”