The humanitarian
crisis developing in the Darfur
region of Sudan
has led to renewed calls, particularly in Washington,
for international intervention in that country. The U.S.
has begun to throw around the word “genocide” and is pressuring the UN Security
Council to adopt harsh economic sanctions against the Sudanese government.
Supporters of U.S.
policy, such as Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, have been activated to
prepare public opinion for military intervention in Sudan
and to create the illusion that this demand is coming from the “international
community” rather than from the Bush administration. There is a growing danger
that Sudan will
become the next victim of U.S.
imperialist aggression and occupation.
In his address
to the United Nations last week, Paul Martin stated that the failure of a state
to protect its own people from harm should constitute legitimate grounds for
the violation of that country’s right to territorial integrity. If this is a
valid criterion for international intervention, then where were the calls for
international intervention in Russia
during the 1990s when the “shock therapy” of the new capitalists destroyed the
social fabric of the nation and led to widespread hunger, disease and misery,
or when the Russian army destroyed Chechnya
and slaughtered tens of thousands of its inhabitants? Where are the calls for
international intervention in the United States
which condemns a quarter of its population to extreme poverty and deprives it
of proper education and health care? Where are the calls for international
sanctions when the U.S.
refuses to abide by UN resolutions to end its colonial occupation of Puerto
Rico. Where is
the charge of genocide for what the U.S.
did and continues to do to its Aboriginal population? Why is there no talk
about invading Israel
to force it to abide by numerous UN resolutions demanding that it end its
illegal occupation of Palestine?
Does the plight of Palestinians not constitute a humanitarian disaster?
For that matter,
why was there no talk of a humanitarian crisis in Sudan
during the period in which the U.S.
supported the Khartoum regime and
hundreds of thousands of Sudanese were dying from war and famine? In the same
way there was no talk of human rights violations in Iraq
during the period when the regime of Saddam Hussein had the support of the U.S.
government. Why is it that the
“responsibility to protect” the people of a country is not applied to the big
powers and their allies, but only to countries that are too small and weak to
defend themselves?
Humanitarianism
which is selective in its application, which is based on ideological,
commercial or military considerations, is not humanitarianism; it is rank
hypocrisy. However, if that were the full extent of the problem, it would
actually be a relatively minor problem; the U.S.
and other western powers would simply be accused of racism and hypocrisy in
their attitudes towards the value of human life in Africa
and other regions of the world. But the problem goes much deeper than that.
Just as the
thesis of “white man’s burden” was used by the colonial powers to justify the
enslavement of entire peoples and the destruction of their societies, so too
the current rhetoric about humanitarian intervention is a cover for imperialist
marauding. The “humanitarian crises” which are being used to justify
intervention are not the result of internal contradictions and tribal
animosities, as alleged in the media, but rather are actually the creation of
those who profess a concern for human rights and the plight of the victims.
In the case of Sudan,
the British created conflicts between Arab and Black Sudanese as a method of
controlling the region. With the American takeover of much of the former British
Empire, these policies of divide and rule continued. When the
American oil monopoly Chevron withdrew from Sudan
in the late 1990s due to security concerns, the U.S.
government attempted to prevent other companies from entering Sudan
by declaring an
economic embargo of the country. Despite this, the void was quickly filled by
rival oil companies, including the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation. Peace
talks between the southern rebel groups and the Sudanese government, which
began in July 2002, created conditions for a political settlement to the
conflict in Sudan
and the peaceful extraction of oil by this consortium of non-U.S. companies.
However, about the same time a new rebel group appeared in the Darfur region to begin a new civil war. This
group also enjoys the political and financial support of the United
States. Clearly, the current humanitarian
crisis in Darfur was
engineered by the U.S.
as a pretext for military intervention and the expulsion of Chevron’s rivals
from the region. Furthermore, Sudan
is in a strategic location for control of the Red Sea
and all of central Africa.
There is also
extensive evidence that the U.S.
government encouraged Iraq’s
1990 invasion of Kuwait
in order to justify the subsequent U.S.
military occupation of the region. Similarly, the U.S.
first told the government of Yugoslavia
that it would consider military action against Croatia
and Bosnia to
be an internal Yugoslavian matter, then it used the
civil war as a pretext for intervention in the name of “humanitarianism”.
More recently,
the U.S.
supported and armed Haitian gangs in order to create a crisis as a pretext for
the removal of Haiti’s
democratically-elected President Aristide and the occupation of that country.
It is significant that it has been much slower to respond to the genuine
humanitarian crisis in Haiti
which has resulted from hurricanes repeatedly striking that nation. In addition,
for over 40 years the U.S.
has been systematically attempting to create a humanitarian crisis in Cuba
in order to justify a military invasion.
What all of this
demonstrates is that it is precisely those who are shouting the loudest about
their “responsibility to protect” the people of the world from victimization
who are the very ones victimizing those people in the first place. For several
hundred years, the colonialists and imperialists
people have been only too willing to “protect” the people of Africa
and elsewhere in the name of “humanitarianism” and “civilization”. It is this
legacy of “protection” which has created every humanitarian disaster that
currently afflicts the African continent. More intervention in the name of
humanitarianism is not the solution to this problem; the end of imperialist
intervention altogether is the only solution.