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 Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur (Re: Mohamed Omer)
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China can't make it rain
China can do some good in Darfur but we need to be realistic about what can actually be achieved
Daniel Davies
As far as the timing goes, Steven Spielberg's decision to pick this precise moment to make a big high-profile protest about Darfur is pretty good. There are no currently active peace talks, and there are a number of areas in which China could do some good by telling the al-Bashir gang to knock it off
For one thing, the Chadian government's claims that the rebels there are Sudan-backed is looking quite credible, given that the attacks there were so very conveniently timed to tie up the Eufor peacekeeping force that Sudan doesn't want deployed on its borders. For another, although the recent assault into West Darfur has been less murderous than the run rate for the Darfur conflict to date, the Sudanese army are still burning villages and claiming that rebel troops were "sheltering" there; I did not like this tactic when Israel used it against Hizbullah and I don't like it any better when it's used in Darfur
China has a little bit of influence in these matters through the special envoy they appointed, and did manage in the past to pressure al-Bashir into agreeing to the deployment of Unamid (the UN/African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur). I can conceivably see how they could, for example, make it clear that the People's Republic has an interest in maintaining stability in the region and that attempting to spread the Darfur civil war outside the western border is a total no-no. But I think people need to be realistic about what can actually be achieved here. Let's think of some of the things that China can't do
China can't make it rain. The Darfur war has become ethnicised, but the root of it is a resource conflict between semi-nomadic herders and farmers. The Darfur rebellion ignited because the rebel groups felt that Darfur was not getting its fair share of transfer payments from Khartoum, which is a problem that has its roots in the fact that farming in Darfur is less profitable than it used to be, because of the rain. Meanwhile, Khartoum was able to bribe the Arab-speaking nomads to form militias and turn on neighbours who they'd formerly got along with, and this is a problem that has its roots in the fact that being a nomad in Darfur is also less profitable than it used to be, because of the rain
China can't make the Sudanese state commit suicide. The one priority of the Sudanese state is to keep a fragile, fissiparous state together. The al-Bashir government has spent the last 10 years trying to cut deals with anyone who would make them (he was trying to be a pal of the US before Darfur made him politically radioactive, and remains an embarrassing ally in the war on terror). His priority is to keep the money flowing from the oilfields in the south of Sudan, to the commercial centre in Khartoum. For this reason, he lashes out with horrific violence at any secession movement
This is a life or death issue for the Sudanese state, and is massively more important to them than any single minerals deal. It is possible that the only long-term solution to the problems of the region is a partition of Sudan (albeit that this would hardly be good news for the Darfurians as it would leave them with a state with hardly any assets at all, a rapidly dwindling water supply and an unstable Chad on their western border). But something as huge as that can hardly be carried out by a quiet word from the Chinese
China can't use any influence on the rebels. As Alan Kuperman has regularly pointed out, it is hard to escape the conclusion that for at least some of the Darfur rebel movements, the civilian deaths are part of the plan. Ever since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, there has been a trend for secession movements all over the world to attempt to provoke genocidal violence, in the hope that this will draw a humanitarian intervention from western powers and give them the state they want. The rebel groups have behaved absolutely scandalously - they have committed atrocities against civilians, fired on aid vehicles, used child soldiers and turned the refugee camps into hell on earth (at one point, they were actually preventing refugees from returning to their farms in parts of south Darfur where fighting had ended; as far as the rebels were concerned, the refugees' patriotic duty was to stay and die of cholera in front of some cameras)
But worse than all of this, they have constantly sabotaged the peace process. The reason that there are no peace talks going on at present is that the rebel groups can't form a coherent negotiating body. This is, obviously, not something that China can do anything about, and it is the really worrying thing about Darfur - as bad as things are there, they're not as bad as Northern Uganda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, yet. The general pattern of African civil wars is that getting really bad in DRC when the rebel armies stop caring about the war and just turn into roaming bandits, and there are distinct signs that some of the Darfur rebel groups are heading that way
Finally, China won't make its entire national interest subject to the Olympic Games. We're on the ground in Iraq, which is a conflict in which at least as many civilians have died as there have in Darfur, and we're going to be hosting the Olympic Games in 2012. What do you think would happen if somebody started a campaign to create bad publicity for the London games as an effective policy lever to make us change our policy in Iraq? Frankly, I don't think that they'd be taken very seriously. China is a massive economy with next to no hydrocarbons of its own. It is not as if our track record is really good in regions of the world in which we have mineral interests, so we need to be realistic about how virtuous a standard we can expect from China
Basically, as this rather good article in Foreign Policy makes clear, the Sudanese government doesn't have a magic off-switch for the Darfur crisis, and the Chinese government doesn't have a magic off-switch on the Sudanese government. This is everyone's problem, not just China's, and the main focus of protests going forward ought to be the continued scandal of the underfunding of the Unamid
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الكاتب |
Date |
| A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 04:51 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 05:06 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 05:12 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 05:21 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 05:26 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 05:44 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 07:07 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 07:28 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 07:46 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 07:52 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 08:02 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 08:07 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 08:11 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 10:37 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-14-08, 10:56 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-15-08, 03:48 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-15-08, 04:51 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-15-08, 06:01 PM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-16-08, 02:50 AM |
| Re: A letter from the world's Nobel laureates to China: You must act on Darfur | Mohamed Omer | 02-16-08, 02:03 PM |
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Mohamed Omer
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