In the past several weeks, media reports
of the atrocities being perpetrated against civilians in Sudan have been appearing regularly.In general, these reports cite Arab militia,
funded by the government, carrying out brutal attacks against Christian
civilians, and end by quoting activists calling for immediate intervention to
resolve the situation.Many have even
called on the U.S. to intervene based on the fact that they invaded and are occupying
Iraq on the pretext (or actually the post-text, since it was after the fact),
of putting an end to a brutal dictatorship.
The problem with these calls for
intervention is that they ignore the lessons of even recent history, assuming
that somehow the imperialist powers are interested in preventing genocide,
dictatorship, rape, torture and oppression in Africa, or for that matter, in the world.
Before the African people won freedom
from colonial enslavement, it was the major imperialist powers of the day,
including Germany, Britain, France, Portugal, Italy and Belgium, that organized
genocide and massacres in the region as they ruthlessly enslaved the population
and robbed the continent of its bountiful natural resources.Towards the beginning of the 20th
century, the U.S. also began to intervene in Africa, and stepped up its involvement after
the Second World War, propping up a number of murderous regimes in the region.
Most recently, the factions at war in Sudan have received arms and financial backing
from different imperialist powers, with the U.S. providing weapons to forces opposed to
the central government.A few years ago,
under the Clinton administration, the U.S. bombed a pharmaceutical complex in
Sudan, killing civilians and destroying critical infrastructure.At the time, it claimed the attack was
supposed to be against an al-Quaeda training camp but it had received faulty
intelligence about its location.
Given this history, calls for the
imperialists to intervene and “solve” the problem in Sudan are reminiscent of the theory of the
“white man’s burden” used by British imperialists in the 19th and 20th
centuries to justify their crimes around the world.
The only people who can find a solution
to the problems in Sudan are the African people themselves.To date, the African Union (AU) has sent a
small force into Darfur to monitor and report on the situation taking place
there.The international community
should support these efforts and assist the AU to co-ordinate a larger,
pan-African force to keep the peace in the Sudan and then establish talks to bring an end
to the Sudanese civil war.Any
interventions by the Americans or other western powers will only result in the
further brutalization of the people of Sudan.