Last Wednesday, while delegates at the US Africa summit tucked into their grilled beef with coconut milk sauce and cappuccino fudge cakes, Omar, aged 3 and Haroun, aged 4, died of starvation in Darfur.
Sudan’s president Bashir was not invited to the summit which took place in Washington this week. He’s wanted by The Hague on charges of genocide in Darfur, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It is right that Bashir was excluded from the summit, but it’s wrong to silence the voices of Sudanese citizens who are crying out to be heard. To hide the first genocide this century in the corner of the room marked “off limits” is an affront to humanity. In Darfur alone, it’s estimated that half a million people have died from violence, disease, and starvation. Approximately 4 million are living in “displaced person’s” camps, all of whom are dependent on aid.
In 2009, when Khartoum expelled 13 aid agencies from Darfur, rather than condemn the regime, Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly reassured Darfuris that the agencies would be reinstated imminently. They were not, and now hundreds of thousands of people are dying of disease and starvation, as a direct consequence of what has become known as a genocide of attrition. Kerry’s actions arguably served to deflect the media glare from the escalating humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur, thus emboldening the genocidal regime. Perfidy, incompetence and impunity have become the trademarks of the US’s calamitous role in Sudan.
In 2010, it was reported that the U.S. signaled its willingness to remove Sudan from the state sponsor of terrorism list, if Khartoum fully implemented the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. When the Bush administration made similar overtures in 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama reportedly fulminated, “This reckless and cynical initiative would reward a regime in Khartoum that has a record of failing to live up to its commitments”.
Why the change of heart? There are those who believe that US foreign policy in Sudan is driven, not by its “Responsibility to Protect” endangered civilians, but by a counter-intelligence agenda, as reported in the Los Angeles Times in June 2005;
“The CIA and Khartoum's intelligence and security officials have met regularly over the last few years, but Gosh [then head of Sudan’s national security service] had been seeking an invitation to Washington in recognition of his government’s efforts”, sources told The Times. The CIA, allegedly hoping to seal the partnership, extended the invitation.
In August 2010, the Washington Post reported; “The CIA is continuing to train and equip Sudan’s intelligence service in the name of fighting terrorism” said a former intelligence officer who served in Sudan. He notes the duplicitous nature of the arrangement, “We also refer to the Sudanese as a state sponsor of terror and have called their activities in Darfur genocide”. If this is true, the failure to recognise, or care, that this armoury could be turned on defenseless Sudanese civilians is unconscionable.
As presidential candidate, Obama said, “When you see a genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia or in Darfur, that is a stain on all of us…We can’t say ‘never again’ and then allow it to happen again, and as a president of the United States I don’t intend to abandon people or turn a blind eye to slaughter.”
It seems that being the first African American President to turn a blind eye to the genocide of black Africans is not the legacy Barack Obama planned to bequeath. Yet, he seems bent on doing just that.
Obama’s betrayal of black Africans in Darfur hit a heart breaking low last week when he vowed to act decisively in Iraq in order to prevent a “potential” genocide there. What about the one you vowed to stop 7 years ago, if only you were president and had it within your gift? Where the power now exists it seems the will is lacking.
How many more starving, slaughtered Sudanese children must be sacrificed at the alter of (misplaced) self interest before we call in Obama’s promise of “never again” in Darfur?
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