Mask Of Altruism Disguising Colonial War
by John Laughland, August 2, 2004, The Guardian

Oil will be the driving factor for military intervention in Sudan

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