China's pipeline to genocide
FUTURE generations will not understand why today's great powers chattered away at the United Nations over the genocidal annihilation of hundreds of thousands of African villagers in Darfur, but took no effective action to stop it. And now, in this holiday season, attacks on aid workers in that region of Sudan and the spillover of horrors into neighboring Chad raise the specter of millions of new victims perishing in the near future. For this is surely what will happen if the great powers go on lamenting the Darfur massacres while refusing to rescue the men, women, and children who are marked for death in the coming year.
The diplomatic gestures of the UN concerning Darfur are an elaborate pretense. A Security Council resolution from last August, softened by China to require approval by the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum, calls for UN peacekeepers to join the ineffectual contingent of 7,500 African Union monitors currently in Darfur. The new peacekeeping force is supposed to total 22,500 and to have a mandate to protect civilians and relief workers.
But even this minimal intervention has been rebuffed by Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, the ultimate authority behind the use of military planes to bomb tribal villages in Darfur and the ensuing raids by Arab gangs known as Janjaweed. Riding in on horseback and camelback, these proxies for Khartoum murder men and boys of the bombed villages and rape the women and girls.
With China running interference for Sudan on the Security Council, Bashir has been able to thwart the dispatch of UN peacekeepers, denouncing them as forerunners of a Western scheme to recolonize a Muslim land. As Bashir's government continues its policy of exterminating African farmers in Darfur, China's motive for enabling him is purely capitalist: to protect Beijing's $10 billion investment in Sudan, primarily in that country's oil reserves.
Ironically, however, one consequence of Beijing's shielding Sudan has been to expand the violence in Darfur westward into Chad and eastward to the Abu Jabra oil field, which rebels seized at the end of November and held for a few days. For China, this was a worrisome precedent. If China's petroleum assets are at risk, decision-makers in Beijing may find it is in their interest to have international peacekeepers in Sudan to protect Chinese investments.
But if China persists in its complicity with the regime in Khartoum, grass-roots groups around the world ought to brand the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as the genocide Olympics, as professor Eric Reeves of Smith College recently proposed on the Globe op-ed page. Future generations will understand the protesters' reason for disrupting the ceremonial serenity of the Olympics.
