Darfur: Colonialism's Murderous Legacy

No to UN/Imperialist Intervention in Sudan!

Many people around the world, not least black people in the U.S., are understandably horrified by what is happening in the Darfur region of western Sudan. The conflict has resulted in mass slaughter and the driving of almost two million people from their homes. Its most proximate cause is the unleashing of the janjaweed militias, based on nomadic Muslims, by the central government in Khartoum against guerrilla forces based on a farming population that is also Muslim. A major drought in the mid 1980s had already exacerbated competition for land resources between nomadic herders and settled farmers. Underlying the current conflict are the effects of murderous British colonial rule, which carved Sudan out of a myriad of peoples, setting the stage for years of ethnic and religious bloodletting.

However, the outrage of the U.S. black population over the carnage in Darfur is being cynically manipulated by some of the most reactionary forces in American politics today: Christian rightists, neocons and Zionists. As we noted in “U.S./UN Hands Off Sudan!” (WV No. 870, 12 May), the forces in the unholy alliance making up the “save Darfur” movement “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.”

This alliance includes such prominent Democrats as Madeleine Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration, who joined other Democrats, Republicans and other notables in addressing a rally of tens of thousands in New York’s Central Park on September 17, part of a “Global Day for Darfur.” In 1998, the Clinton White House launched aerial bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan on the pretext of harboring Al Qaeda terrorists, killing dozens and destroying Sudan’s only pharmaceutical factory. In a September 22 interview on Fox News, Clinton boasted that these attacks proved “how hard” he had tried to kill Osama bin Laden. Albright was a leading architect and spokesman for the UN-endorsed economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in the deaths of one and a half million people, many of them children and the elderly. While most black people oppose the brutal U.S. occupation of Iraq, leaders of the “save Darfur” movement include some of the most die-hard partisans of “staying the course” in Iraq.

At this month’s UN general assembly, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and other imperialist leaders, along with their mouthpieces like UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, were united in calling for a new UN “peacekeeping operation” to back up the 7,000 African Union (AU) troops already there. There are already 10,000 UN troops in Sudan, ostensibly to police a peacekeeping agreement between rebellious forces in the south of the country, which has a black African population, and the reactionary Muslim Arab regime in Khartoum, whose bloodsoaked rule has meant the death and imprisonment of thousands of labor activists, Communists and other opponents.

But any imperialist intervention in Sudan, including under the UN flag or through the agency of the AU, only deepens the misery of all the peoples of the region and strengthens imperialism at the expense of oppressed peoples around the globe. The International Communist League demands: All UN/African Union forces out of Sudan! As Congress threatens to impose new economic and other sanctions under the “Darfur Peace and Accountability Act,” we call for ending all imperialist sanctions against the Khartoum regime.

In addressing the Darfur situation, Bill Fletcher Jr., a longtime AFL-CIO spokesman, described the dilemma for himself and other black liberals, writing in “Darfur: What Should the U.S. Do?” (National Newspaper Publishers Association, 12 July): “What does one ask of an administration that lied us into a war and occupation of Iraq; threatens Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria and North Korea with possible military action?” Nevertheless, Fletcher does look to Bush, a man intensely and justly hated by black people, to stop the slaughter in Darfur, although without directly utilizing U.S. military forces. Fletcher writes: “The Darfur crisis must be resolved by Africans.… If the Bush administration wishes to help, then let them support the African Union financially and diplomatically. Provide the AU with sufficient logistical support to deploy more peacekeepers.”

But who are these “peacekeepers”? The AU deployment in Darfur is currently mainly made up of forces from Rwanda and Nigeria. These countries and the other states making up the AU are themselves ruled by monumentally brutal and corrupt neocolonial regimes. Their military forces routinely rape, torture and massacre tribal villagers, committing atrocities similar to those being committed in Darfur, although without the same kind of publicity. It is grotesque to view the bloody capitalist regimes that rule every country in Africa as part of the answer for Africa’s oppressed. Furthermore, the AU is and can only be a shill for the interests of the far more powerful imperialist countries.

In order to gain public support for escalating imperialist intervention in Sudan, the “save Darfur” campaign describes what is happening there as genocide. But what is happening in Darfur is not genocide, an emotion-laden term that has frequently been inflated to cover all national, racial and ethnic atrocities. One of the few liberal publicists who argues against using that label for Darfur is Jonathan Steele, who commented in a British Guardian column (19 September) that “Darfur is not Rwanda” but a brutal civil war. Furthermore, he pointed out, “the [anti-Khartoum] rebels also committed atrocities,” something that has rarely been reported in the Western media. Despite this recognition, Steele pushes the line in favor of more AU “peacekeepers” to Sudan.

Neither the Bush gang nor the Democrats are eager to engage in a serious intervention in Sudan. As U.S. forces are stretched to the limit in the brutal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, Democrats and Republicans both prefer to grandstand about “Muslim atrocities” in Sudan while subcontracting any intervention to other countries or coalitions. However, they do find it convenient to cynically stoke outrage over Darfur to serve their ideological purposes.

Furthermore, the calls for intervention into Darfur have from the outset been characterized by the anti-Communist demonization of China, which has significant investments in Sudanese oil, as supposedly responsible for the carnage in Sudan. 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, against imperialist and domestic counterrevolution.

In the dwindling days before the midterm elections, the Democrats are using the events in Darfur in part to appeal to their black constituency. Denouncing the Bush administration for taking so long to assemble an international “peacekeeping” force, Virginia Democratic Congressman Jim Moran thundered, “Would we be this complacent if the genocide wasn’t in Africa? Would the administration act any differently if claims of ethnic cleansing were in Europe or the Middle East?”

What about the Palestinians?! For decades, the Palestinians have been the victims of mass expulsion and a brutal military occupation at the hands of Israel. As everyone knows, the Zionist state has been the recipient of massive U.S. financial and military aid, while Washington supports Israel diplomatically in forums like the UN. And the Democrats have been just as staunch supporters of Israel, and in many cases even more so, than the Republicans.

The U.S. imperialist government, whether administered by Democrats or Republicans, actively supports the murderous oppression of peoples in various Third World countries when carried out by its allies and client regimes, and is itself the perpetrator of mass murder, most recently in the war against Serbia in 1999 and the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq today. Notwithstanding the Democrats’ attempts to capitalize on anger at the Republicans over Darfur, racist indifference to black life is a constant thread throughout the history of U.S. involvement with Africa. More fundamentally, the systematic oppression and impoverishment of the black population has always been rooted in the bedrock of American capitalism. This was flagrantly demonstrated for all to see by the Democrats’ and Republicans’ abandonment of masses of poor blacks to die a year ago in New Orleans (see article, page one). It is necessary to remember the imperialist “humanitarian” missions undertaken under Democratic administrations, including Clinton’s U.S.-led UN intervention to “help” starving black Somalis. Troops brutalized the population, massacring at least 1,000 Somalis at the battle of Mogadishu in October 1993. The Somalis’ killing of 18 soldiers in that battle led to the U.S.’ ignominious withdrawal the following year, after it was made crystal clear that “humanitarianism” had simply been window-dressing for racist imperialist aggression.

Washington’s humanitarian credentials are clearly threadbare today under the justly hated and feared Bush regime (currently engaged with the Democrats in negotiating acceptable means of torture), so aside from practicality, liberals find international coalitions and bodies like the UN the appropriate vehicle to “help” desperate Darfur. But the UN is—as Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin defined its predecessor, the League of Nations, after World War I —an imperialist den of thieves, joined in the UN by their semicolonial victims. Throughout its history, the UN has served as a fig leaf for U.S. imperialism, including the 1950-53 “police action” against the North Korean deformed workers state, which took the lives of upwards of three million Koreans; the 1960 military intervention into the Congo under whose cover the CIA and Belgian imperialists assassinated nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba; and the starvation sanctions against Iraq.

The dominant members of the UN besides the U.S. are those very European nations—Britain, Germany, France—that along with Belgium historically bled, enslaved and exploited Africa, carving it up to suit their imperialist interests. Britain itself conquered Sudan through the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. Calling on the imperialists to bring peace and freedom to Darfur is like expecting the fox not only to protect the henhouse but to deliver the feed.

Only a revolutionary, proletarian struggle to bring down imperialism itself can pose the road forward for the besieged peoples of Africa. The key to ending the horrific conditions in Darfur and elsewhere in Africa is a series of workers revolutions, in the imperialist countries as well as in key proletarian centers on the African continent, especially the industrial powerhouse of South Africa as well as Egypt. It is the multiracial U.S. proletariat that has the power to bring down the American imperialist beast through socialist revolution. The Spartacist League/U.S. fights to forge the internationalist, revolutionary workers party that is necessary to provide the leadership to accomplish that historic task.