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	Workers Vanguard No. 870	12 May 2006

Imperialist Hypocrisy over Darfur

U.S./UN Hands Off Sudan!

“Out of Iraq Into Darfur.” That was the plea on placards distributed by a phone service company and liberal outfit called “Working Assets” and scattered throughout the April 29 demonstration against the occupation of Iraq. The protest, held in New York City, was initiated by United for Peace and Justice. The next day, Washington, D.C. was the site of a massive rally, addressed by numerous Democratic and Republican politicians, celebrities like actor George Clooney and notables like Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Their central message was for the Bush regime and United Nations to intervene on behalf of the terrorized population of Darfur, in the western region of Sudan. The demonstration in D.C. came two days after five U.S. Congressmen and several others were arrested for staging a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy.

The conflict in Darfur has set groups of Muslim nomadic peoples, backed by the central government in Khartoum, against a largely pastoral Muslim population, resulting in mass slaughter and displacement. It is a truly horrific situation, and, particularly within the black population in the U.S., there is great sympathy for the victims of this carnage and devastation. However, as we underlined in “Imperialist Crimes in Rwanda and Sudan” (WV No. 845, 1 April 2005), regarding calls for imperialist intervention into Sudan: “There is profound anger and desperation over these tragedies, but this anger is being manipulated in defense of forces who are profoundly culpable.”

An article in the liberal In These Times (16 February 2005) by Eric Reeves complains, “Without robust humanitarian intervention...Khartoum’s genocide in Darfur will continue.” It is grotesque to uphold the U.S.—which is today carrying out bloody occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening missile strikes, possibly a nuclear attack, against Iran—as the instrument for a “civilizing mission” in Africa. In fact, the Bush administration is clearly not eager to send U.S. troops to Darfur. U.S. envoys were instrumental in getting Sudanese officials and the main rebel faction in Darfur to agree to a “peace deal” earlier this month, though two other rebel factions have rejected the deal. What the liberals calling for U.S. intervention into Darfur want is a return to the Clinton-style “humanitarian” interventions of the 1990s.

The racist U.S. rulers, who left the black people of New Orleans to die, will not intervene to help black people in Africa. Recall the U.S.-led UN intervention to “help” starving Somalia. In November 1992, the lame duck Bush Sr. administration sent 30,000 U.S. troops to Somalia, supposedly to help distribute food and other relief supplies. Under the Democratic Clinton administration, “Operation Restore Hope” was expanded. Somalis were bullied, shot at roadblocks, and massacred when they resisted the occupiers. In a battle in Mogadishu in October 1993, at least 1,000 Somalis were slaughtered. The deaths of 18 soldiers there led to an outcry in the U.S., and in 1994 the Clinton administration withdrew American troops from Somalia.

Clinton’s next bloody wars around the globe included the 1994 invasion and five-year occupation of black Haiti and the 1999 U.S./NATO war against Serbia, carried out in the name of stopping “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo. These wars were widely supported by liberals who sought to bolster the “human rights” credentials of the U.S. The face of “human rights” imperialism was also bloodily expressed in Clinton’s aerial bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 for supposedly harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. Clinton’s act of terror against Sudan killed dozens of people and destroyed the country’s only pharmaceutical factory. The U.S.-enforced UN starvation sanctions against Iraq, carried out overwhelmingly under the Clinton regime, killed some 1.5 million people, far more than have died since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The imperialist powers that dominate the UN, which are now beseeched to bring “peace” to Darfur, are the very same forces that have bled, starved and exploited Africa. Britain, France, Belgium and other European powers carved up Africa to suit their interests, drawing the boundaries to divide and set populations against each other. Britain, which colonized Sudan in the 19th century, pitted its northern and southern regions against each other, setting the stage for the civil wars that have ravaged the country since independence in 1956.

In his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916 amid the slaughter of World War I, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin laid out that imperialism is the stage of capitalism in its decay, where massive military force is used to “settle” the inevitable economic rivalries between major capitalist states. These rivalries throw humanity into interimperialist world wars of massive devastation, such as the First and Second World Wars. The drive to control markets and spheres of exploitation also leads to predatory wars by imperialists against colonial and semicolonial countries.

Rhetoric about “humanitarianism” notwithstanding, foreign intervention by the U.S. and other imperialists is driven by what best promotes the interests of the imperialist rulers. Indeed, the main criticism of the Bush administration by the Democrats is that its war-crazed, “unilateral” actions have hurt U.S. imperialism’s abilities to pursue its interests. The In These Times article urging Western intervention in Sudan laments: “The war in Iraq continues to take its toll on U.S. efforts to act effectively within the United Nations—efforts that have been hobbled by the profligate squandering of diplomatic capital.”

Behind the campaign for U.S. intervention in Darfur is an unholy alliance of liberal forces and a sinister cabal of Zionist and Christian fundamentalist groupings, such as the National Association of Evangelicals. These forces reduce the complex conflict in western Sudan to “Arabs” oppressing “Africans” in order to whip up anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chauvinism, which has greatly intensified since the launching of the reactionary “war on terror” after the September 11 attacks.

One of the most prominent figures in the Darfur protest movement is one Charles Jacobs, who for years has been central in pushing universities to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. Jacobs is also president of the Zionist outfit the David Project that was the force behind the 2004 video, “Columbia Unbecoming,” which launched a witchhunt against pro-Palestinian rights professors at Columbia University, particularly targeting Professor Joseph Massad (see “Defend Columbia Professor Joseph Massad! Down With Zionist Witchhunt on Campus!” WV No. 837, 26 November 2004).

A component of this movement’s attempt to uphold U.S. imperialism as the champion of global “democracy” and “peace” is to hold the Chinese deformed workers state responsible for the carnage in Sudan. The campus divestment movement in fact got started in October 2004 when Harvard announced it had invested in the state-owned Chinese oil company, PetroChina, which has interests in Sudan. Following a public outcry, Harvard sold its stake, and at least eight other campuses have followed suit, including the University of California system, Yale, Stanford and Brown. Divestment measures have also been passed by city and state governments, including Illinois, New Jersey, and Oregon, and further legislation is pending.

As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state, where capitalist rule was overthrown by the 1949 social revolution. In contrast, in February 2005 the supposed Trotskyists of Socialist Alternative (SAlt) co-signed a leaflet by the “Coalition for an Anti-Sexist Harvard” that demanded that “Harvard support justice and human rights campaigns by divesting from corporations like Unocal and PetroChina.” The campaign against PetroChina is an anti-Communist campaign that predates the atrocities in Darfur. By signing on to it, SAlt joined with forces that are exploiting outrage over Sudan to push for capitalist counterrevolution in China.

Ending the hideous oppression in Africa will take a series of workers revolutions, in the imperialist countries as well as in key proletarian centers on the continent—in northern Africa and the industrial powerhouse of South Africa. American capitalism was built by bleeding the labor of African slaves. Today, it is the multiracial American proletariat that has the social power and the interest to bring down the U.S. imperialist beast through socialist revolution. It is necessary to build an internationalist, revolutionary workers party that fights on behalf of all the oppressed to build a socialist society in which today’s horrors will become a distant memory. No to U.S./UN imperialist intervention! U.S. hands off the world!