Appeasement Driven By Oil

The Bush administration is now in the habit of hurling the charge of"appeasement" at critics of its Iraq war. Anyone who has followed thePresident's stance toward Sudan closely will appreciate the deep irony.

President Bush has targeted "Islamo-fascists" across the globe assuccessors to the Nazis, while likening his own position to that of Rooseveltand Churchill in World War II. "We're in a war we didn't ask for," herecently declared, "but it's a war we must wage and a war we willwin."

Never mind that the war he "didn't ask for" began with a preemptiveshock-and-awe strike on Iraq, based on fabricated evidence, or that hisadministration has done more to fan the flames of Islamist extremism around theworld than to contain it. Just focus on that charge of "appeasement."Only when we shift the spotlight from the President's critics to George Bushhimself and his stance toward Sudan's troubled western province, Darfur, doesthe charge make any kind of sense.

Identifying the Islamo-fascist Enemy

Let us speak plainly and in George W. Bush's own terms: Giving him thebenefit of the doubt, let's assume that in his label of choice, "Islamo-fascist,"his implied adjective is not Islamic, referring to the world's 1.3 billionMuslims, but Islamist, referring only to those fundamentalist Muslims who seekto impose their worldview on others.

Certainly, if any Islamist government deserves the epithet"fascist," it is the one established by the National Islamic Front (NIF),which seized control of Sudan in a military coup in 1989 and installed thecountry's current ruler, Lt. General Omar al-Bashir. The Front took over with agrandiose agenda that assumed the racial superiority of a northern Arab elite ina country that historically enslaved, and continues to enslave and marginalize,black Africans. Dominating the central government in the capital, Khartoum, theNIF Party sought to impose sharia, Muslim fundamentalist law, on all Sudan,including Christians and practitioners of indigenous African religions who livedin the South.

The Front's ambitions were too large even for a country of just under amillion square miles, the largest in Africa. They extended to the rest of thecontinent and the Middle East as well. In the 1990s, Khartoum became anincubator for international terrorists, Osama bin Laden among them. Bashirviewed Sudan as the gateway for the Arabization and Islamification of all ofAfrica. His party's "totalitarian ideology," coupled with greed,prompted Khartoum to grab oilfields newly discovered in South Sudan by thesimple expedient of redrawing jurisdictional boundaries in the early 1980s todeny them to the South. This triggered a bitter civil war that lasted twenty-twoyears and claimed the lives of an estimated two million Sudanese civilians,mainly poor, black subsistence farmers in the South. Most died of starvationwhen food supplies were cut off. Now, for similar reasons, a reprise of thattragedy has been unfolding in Darfur, the poorest region of Sudan.

If Khartoum's racism was muddied by the religious dimension of theNorth-South civil war, it is starkly evident in Darfur, where Arab Muslims arekilling black Muslims. For the past three years, Arab militias on horseback andcamel-back, armed and supported by Khartoum, and accompanied by aerialbombardment by government planes, have attacked non-Arab farming villages inDarfur—murdering and raping, poisoning wells, seizing cattle and householdgoods, burning houses and mosques, and driving survivors from their land in ascorched-earth campaign of ethnic cleansing. Now some 3.5 million displacedDarfuris, roughly half the population, are wholly dependent on outside food aid.

Meanwhile, the NIF-controlled government prevents the citizens of Khartoumfrom grasping the genocidal nature of the campaign in Darfur—by censoring theSudanese media, shutting down newspapers, torturing activists, and denying visasto foreign journalists.

Here, in short, is a totalitarian regime with significant parallels to NaziGermany, even if hardly on the same economic or military scale. It is also aregime arguably more murderous than that of Saddam Hussein, with a moreexpansionist agenda; a rogue state that has sponsored terrorism in the past andthreatens to launch a jihad if the UN intervenes in Darfur. Earlier this year,Osama bin Laden issued a world-wide call for terrorists to go to the aid ofKhartoum. Sudan has bona fide—not fabricated—ties to al-Qaeda. Khartoumis, in other words, everything Mr. Bush could wish for in an "Islamo-fascist"enemy.

The Bush response to a real "Islamo-fascist" threat

In September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell famously describedwhat was happening in Darfur as "genocide," with the caveat that theU.S. would not intervene militarily because we had "no vitalinterests" in the region. For the past two years that realpolitik twist oflogic has underpinned U.S. policy in Sudan. The claim of "no vitalinterests" seemed credible because of the sanctions imposed by PresidentBill Clinton in 1997, when he added Sudan to the State Department's list ofstates sponsoring terrorism. These sanctions, which are still in place, includeheavy fines and jail sentences for U.S. citizens doing business with Sudan.

Powell's startling use of the word genocide suggested at the time a moralforthrightness lacking in his European counterparts, even while the "novital interest" caveat assured Khartoum's leaders that we would notinterfere. President Bush used the word in an address before the United NationsGeneral Assembly on September 21, 2004, saying that "the world iswitnessing terrible suffering and horrible crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan,crimes my government has concluded are genocide."

Strong pronouncements. In hindsight, however, these can be seen as acarefully scripted pre-election sop to conservative Christians who had longcomplained about Khartoum's attacks on Sudanese Christians in the south duringthe civil war.

After the 2004 elections, the administration fell silent on Darfur, even asthe slaughter continued. In early March 2005, Khartoum stopped granting visas,effectively preventing foreigners from witnessing the ongoing carnage. Two topofficials from the NGO Doctors without Borders were jailed for"treason" simply for delivering a report in the Netherlands onKhartoum's use of rape as a military weapon. President Bush kept silent.

Without leadership from the Oval Office, Congress spent most of 2005dickering over the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act. In its original version,the bipartisan bill had formidable teeth. It provided a broad new set ofsanctions, in addition to the existing Clinton-era ones which had been limitedto trade. The new sanctions would have put the U.S. government on record asseeking a UN resolution embargoing arms sales to Sudan, establishing a no-flyzone over Darfur, seeking unspecified measures affecting "the petroleumsector in Sudan," and guaranteeing humanitarian aid workers' access tothose suffering in Darfur. Even more to the point, additional sanctions wouldtarget individuals in the Khartoum government who were responsible for thegenocide, freezing their assets abroad and imposing travel restrictions on them—exactly the sort of hamstringing that such men fear, especially if they arelikely to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.

Taken together, these powerful sanctions, if approved by Congress and thenadopted by the UN Security Council might conceivably have stopped the genocidein its tracks. Whether it all could have gotten past the Security Council isquestionable. Russia and China are selling weapons to Sudan; China, Britain, andFrance are heavily involved in exploiting its oil resources. Indeed, consideringthat U.S. firms were already prevented from trading with Sudan under the 1997sanctions, such a resolution from the U.S. might have appeared self-serving.

But the relevant question is this: Did President Bush support the bill?

The answer is: Quite the opposite. Under pressure from the White House,virtually all the sanctions were seriously weakened or eliminated inCongressional committee. The reference to a possible embargo aimed at thepetroleum sector was deleted. The provisions for targeting individuals werereplaced by a single provision giving the President discretion to referindividual war criminals to the International Criminal Court, a highly unlikelyprospect considering the administration's hostility to the ICC. In its finalform, the bill was toothless. It offered modest funding—guilt money—to theunder-funded African Union mission in Darfur, and little else.

The President, by failing to support a bill that would certainly have definedthe nation's moral position, and might even have saved tens of thousands oflives, was choosing to appease, not confront the very "Islamo-fascists"against whom he rails in the abstract.

This was the same George W. Bush who, shortly after taking office, hadscrawled the phrase "Not on my watch!" in the margin of a briefingpaper that referred to former President Bill Clinton's inaction during thegenocide in Rwanda. That phrase has been interpreted by Samantha Power and otherwriters as Bush's declaration that he would never countenance such a horrorduring his presidency. If so, then his retreat during the past two years is allthe more pathetic. A different interpretation can, however, be offered for thatscrawl. It can be seen as an expression of relief that Rwanda happened onsomebody else's watch.

Oil Enters the Picture

Exactly how much oil lay beneath the dusty red savannas of Darfur wasunclear, at least to the outside world, back when the Bush administration tookoffice. (If Khartoum had commissioned preliminary geologic surveys, it wasn'ttelling.) Darfur is three-quarters the size of Texas, and the violence there hadleft large swaths of the country inaccessible to geologists. By early 2005,however, the destruction of villages and the clearing of inhabitants from theland had opened the way for oil exploration.

Until April 2005, it was said that whatever oil deposits existed in Darfurwere confined to its southeastern corner. However, new seismographic studiesbrought a surprise. On April 19, 2005, Mohamed Siddig, a spokesman for the SudanEnergy Ministry, announced that a new high-yield well had been drilled in NorthDarfur—several hundred kilometers northwest of the existing fields.Seismographic studies indicated that a huge basin of oil, expected to yield upto 500,000 barrels of crude per day, lay in the area. This Darfur discoveryeffectively doubled Sudan's oil reserves.

Perhaps as astonishing as the oil discovery, reported in brief by Reuters,was that it was not picked up by the world press. You are probably learningabout the discovery for the first time here at Tomdispatch. Yet it may explainin part Mr. Bush's puzzling retreat on Darfur.

The Bush administration had already been developing a closer relationshipwith Khartoum, based (it was claimed) on the sharing of intelligence aboutpotential operations in the President's Global War on Terror. The announcementof the new find in April 2005 seemed to accelerate these efforts, and mayexplain why, a month later, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a jet toKhartoum to ferry Sudan's chief of intelligence, Major General Salah AbdallahGosh, to a clandestine meeting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

This provoked a political tempest when the Los Angeles Times revealed themeeting (as well as a split within the State Department between those whothought Gosh should be arrested as a war criminal and others who toed theadministration line). Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had the unenviabletask of explaining that our government sought "closer ties" with aterrorist regime because of its cooperation in the "war on terrorism."Khartoum voiced hopes that U.S. sanctions would soon be lifted.

June 2005 saw oil companies from India, France, Malaysia, China, GreatBritain, Japan, and Sweden flocking to sign contracts in Sudan, while U.S.companies were officially sidelined by the 1997 sanctions. The rush wasoccasioned partly by the new oil finds in Darfur, but also by a long-awaitedNorth-South peace agreement, scheduled to be implemented in July, that ended thecivil war.

As part of a power-sharing agreement, rebel leader John Garang was to beinstalled as vice president of Sudan, and oil revenues were to be dividedbetween the government of Sudan in Khartoum and the now semi-autonomousgovernment of South Sudan. Garang had already signed an oil deal with a newBritish oil company called White Nile, and had rescinded an earlier contractconcluded by the government of Sudan and the French oil giant, Total. The Frenchcompany had pulled out of South Sudan when fighting got fierce during the civilwar. Shares of White Nile on the London stock exchange now shot up. Totalthreatened to sue.

"No Vital Interests"

Although U.S. oil companies could not openly join the scramble for Sudan'soil, many were finding ways to circumvent the sanctions. One method was byminority ownership. For instance, Marathon Oil, based in Houston and a majorcontributor to the Bush re-election campaign, is a partner in the French companyTotal. Before John Garang thwarted such expectations by signing the White Nilecontract, Marathon had resumed payments to the Khartoum government in theexpectation that it would take part of Total's operations in the oilfields.

In addition, certain foreign companies—including some that exist only onpaper—were probably serving as place-holders for large U.S. firms until thesanctions could be lifted. One such "foreign" company is registered inthe Virgin Islands, uses a Swiss business address, and is owned by an Americanoil tycoon, Friedhelm Eronat, who has fronted for Exxon Mobil in the past. BBC 4discovered Eronat was at the heart of a deal to get at Darfur's oil. Eronatavoided prison and a fine only by swapping his U.S. citizenship for Britishcitizenship just before signing a lucrative contract with the government ofSudan for drilling rights to a huge tract that spreads west from South Sudanacross the middle of Darfur. As a result of the new Darfur discoveries, thatcontract is now worth billions of dollars. The deal provoked outrage from humanrights groups in Britain. U.S. media showed little curiosity.

"Eronat is not interested in Darfur or political issues," a formercolleague told BBC. "He's interested in making money."

But was Eronat acting only on his own behalf or was he the middle-man forsome third party?

Here's the rub. While various subterfuges can be employed to skirt U.S.sanctions, most involve fraud, bribery, or worse. Individuals like Eronat maythrive in this shadowy world, but oil giants like Exxon Mobil cannot afford toget too deeply into projects that are effectively "off the books." Forthis reason, the same industry that bankrolled Bush's presidential campaigns andcrafted his petroleum-driven energy policy is undoubtedly now pressuring hisadministration to normalize relations with Sudan. And soon. As the globalscramble for Africa's oil intensifies, the price exacted by wheeler-dealers likeEronat will only get higher.

In July, 2005, John Garang was inaugurated as Sudan's vice president before ahuge crowd of cheering supporters. A new era had dawned. Three weeks later, hewas killed in a helicopter crash. Riots broke out in Khartoum and in Juba, thecapital of South Sudan. The crash is still under investigation. Thus far, thepeace has held in South Sudan, but barely. Oil remains at issue between northand south—and Khartoum keeps its troops in the oilfields.

All this is to suggest that the stakes in Darfur are extremely high and thatthe claim the U.S. has no "vital interests" in Sudan is entirelybogus. Quite apart from oil, Sudan is a huge nation, and one of the poorest inAfrica, with untapped mineral wealth that may include gold and uranium. Itoccupies a strategic geographic position, dominating the Horn of Africa andsharing borders with ten other countries. Its largest trading partner is nowChina.

Although activists and pundits continue to quote Colin Powell's"genocide" finding, the Bush administration has backed away from theword. When Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick visited Sudan last April,he back-pedaling furiously on Darfur: "It's been a terrible series ofevents," Zoellick said, "and as you know, there's a debate. The [UN]did a legal analysis of whether this was a genocide, and their conclusion wasthat it was crimes against humanity, as opposed to genocide."

This was not idle word-niggling on Zoellick's part. A finding of genocidewould have required the UN to honor its 1948 convention against genocide.Zoellick's evasion seemed to signify a shift in Bush administration policy.Asked how many Darfuris had died, he suggested that the figure might be60,000-160,000. The numbers estimated by responsible analysts range widely, tobe sure, from 200,000 to 500,000. But it was as though someone had instructedZoellick to cut the deaths by one-third. On the other hand, Bush himself usedthe word in addressing the UN last week. The administration may be seesawing.

Appeasement by Oil

All that stands between U.S. oil companies and Sudan is the genocide inDarfur.

Why, then, does the White House not take bold steps to stop the slaughter—for pragmatic reasons, if not moral ones? And why, last May, did theadministration help broker a treaty between the government of Sudan and theseveral rebel groups in Darfur that was clearly doomed to fail?

The answer to the second question is easier. The Darfur Peace Agreement wasnegotiated in great haste. The delegates from Khartoum threatened to pack theirbags and leave the talks. Tensions flared between rebel factions. Egos and fearswere involved, differences papered over, all in the haste to produce a documentwhich only two of the four rebel groups signed. (In contrast, the comprehensivepeace agreement that officially ended the North-South civil required multiplesessions over a period of years.) All the Darfur Peace Agreement really offeredwas political cover to Khartoum and Washington, who could say they had tried.

Now for the deeper question: Why does President Bush not use his clout toseriously attempt to stop the slaughter?