Sudan: Oil Profits Behind West’s Tears for Darfur - Worldpress.org

Sudan: Oil Profits Behind West’s Tears for Darfur - Worldpress.org:

For at least 18 months now, Western governments have quietly stood by as the non-Arabic-speaking black farmers of the Darfur region in western Sudan have borne the brunt of a vicious ethnic-cleansing campaign carried out by state-sponsored bandits known as the Janjaweed.

Refugees report that attacks on farming villages are often preceded by raids by Sudanese air force fighter-bombers and attack helicopters. The Janjaweed, recruited from Arabic-speaking pastoralist tribes, then routinely murder any male villagers they can get their hands on. They systematically rape or kidnap the women, and plunder and destroy the villages and crops.

The attacks and their consequences have resulted in the deaths of up to 50,000 people** (more than that) and the displacement of 1.5 million; aid agencies warn that hundreds of thousands may die from disease or starvation in the coming months.

Why then have the governments of the United States and the European Union (EU) only now begun to express concern over the fate of the people of western Sudan and demand that the Islamist military regime in Khartoum bring the Janjaweed under control?

The answer-as it most often is when rich countries threaten to intervene in the Middle East and Africa-access to invest in and extract profits from Sudan's burgeoning oil export industry.
Pressure on Khartoum

Beginning in July, Washington, backed by the EU, began to ratchet up the pressure on Khartoum to rein in the Janjaweed. On July 1, US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Khartoum, where he sternly warned Sudan's government: "Unless we see more moves soon ... it may be necessary for the international community to begin considering other actions, to include Security Council action."

**(State Department finding that 60,000 to 160,000 deaths: Other surveys had pegged the death toll much higher -- ranging from a low of 180,000 deaths just from health causes to an overall high of 400,000) That is a huge range of uncertainty but with hard figures difficult to get, the toll has been fiercely contested by Sudan.

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