Sudan is Bush's big African headache - Business Day (South Africa), June 20
FOR President George Bush, the most pressing problem in Africa is not AIDS or Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe or whether the Democratic Republic of Congo can be salvaged.
It is Sudan and the chronic conflict between the Islamic government in the north, which is part of the Arab world, and rebels in the south, where Christianity comingles with traditional beliefs, and which is part of Africa.
The fighting has been going on since 1955. In the latest phase, which began in 1983, the standard estimate is that 2million have died of war-related causes and more than 4million have been displaced.
What has made Sudan a priority for Bush are the evangelical Christians whose support he needs at election time. Many are hot for a crusade against the regime of Gen Omar Hassan alBashir. Ultimately, they would like to arm John Garang's Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
In the meantime, in combination with human rights activists from the other end of the political spectrum, they have stoked up a campaign against Khartoum very reminiscent of that which led to the anti-apartheid act in 1986 and the overriding of Ronald Reagan's veto.
Last week, the House of Representatives adopted, by a seemingly definitive margin of 422 to 2, the Sudan Peace Act as amended to bar "any entity engaged in the development of oil or gas in Sudan from raising capital in the US or from trading its securities (or depository receipts with respect to its securities) in any capital market in the US".
This is without precedent in the US. Hitherto, promoters of sanctions have pressed the owners of stock in offending companies to divest, but not even at the height of the antiapartheid campaign did anyone propose mandatory delisting of Mobil because of its SA refinery interests.
That said, US companies are not the target in the present instance. They are already barred from Sudan under sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration. Rather, the goal is to mete out extraterritorial punishment on Canada's Talisman Energy, which has a listing on the New York Stock Exchange and Sweden's Nasdaq-traded Lundin Oil, among others.
The others include China's National Petroleum Company, which the Sudan act is unlikely to touch, and whose principals are not known for scrupulous observance of human rights. More broadly, the act will have no effect on Sudan's production currently about 200000 barrels a day or the 300-500m a year the regime is earning from it.
There is no question Bashir is using these proceeds in pursuit of a final, military solution to his southern problem. When the act does not deter him, Bush will face demands from a key constituency to ratchet support for Garang from nonlethal to lethal, or at least turn a blind eye as certain evangelicals help the rebels the way they helped Renamo in Mozambique.
Net result: more death, increased sympathy for Khartoum and antiAmericanism in the Islamic world, and further regional destabilisation as the regime backs insurgencies against neighbours for letting supplies reach the rebels. During the Clinton administration, Bashir backed attacks on Uganda from Congo and Sudan itself when President Yoweri Museveni, at US urging, helped arm the SPLA.
Appalling regimes often provoke deranged policy responses. Evidently, the present lot in Khartoum are pretty appalling. They stand accused of bombing civilians, permitting an internal slave trade and using mass starvation as a tool to subdue areas they do not control.
The case for engaging them constructively, while the only rational option, is difficult to sustain politically. So, while valid, is the observation that neither Garang's hands nor his war aims are spotless, either.
What Secretary of State Colin Powell and his assistant for African affairs, Walter Kansteiner, would like to do is appoint a high-level envoy to mediate an end to the war and, picking up on commitments the combatants have made at various points, the start of a Codesa-like process aimed a producing a federal solution.
Former assistant secretary of state for Africa Chester Crocker, Mr Constructive Engagement himself, had all but accepted the assignment after seeking assurances that pro-Garang political operatives at the White House would not try to undermine him as their equivalents during the Reagan era did when they thought he was selling out SA.
Last week, after the house vote on the Sudan act, he backed away, leaving some to conclude he had not received the assurances he sought. Others thought it may have had to do with the several hours he spent with Sadiq el-Mahdi, the prime minister Bashir deposed in a 1989 coup, whose Umma party has lately been given space to act as a loyal, as opposed to exile, opposition.
Mahdi, great-grandson of the Mahdi whose forces beheaded the Christian fundamentalist Gen Charles Gordon in 1885, came to Washington to say the time was ripe for the US to jump in as peace broker. Not ripe enough, Crocker clearly concluded.
bday.co.za |
