Darfur: Bush and Blair plan no-fly zone and consider air strikes against Sudan

[Jcrowley]

Darfur: Bush and Blair plan no-fly zone and consider air strikes against Sudan

By Ann Talbot
20 December 2006

The Bush administration is considering imposing a no-fly zone over the Darfur region in western Sudan. It would be backed up by the threat of air strikes, a naval blockade and an extension of the existing sanctions regime.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has endorsed the plan. Blair announced his support for “tougher action” on his return from a trip to Washington. A UK official was reported in the Financial Times as saying, “The Americans mean business.”

The plan seems to be to work with France, which has 1,200 troops in Chad and units of its air force in the Central African Republic. French mirage jets have already carried out air sorties over the last two weeks in the Central African Republic and Chad. A spokesman from the French Ministry of Defence warned of the danger of “Somalisation” of the region. He told the Independent, “We want to ensure that the Darfur crisis does not take on a further dimension. The region is crucial if we want to put a peace force in Darfur.”

According to local reports, thousands of civilians were forced to flee from the town of Birao in the Central African Republic as a result of a French air strike. If France were to join with the US and UK in imposing a no-fly zone it would mean a joint attack on one of the poorest countries in the world by three major powers.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/darf-d20.shtml

[hobbit709]

1. Just how many aircraft

do the nutjobs attacking the people in Darfur have. What good is a no-fly zone when the other side has nothing flyable except maybe a kite.

[Jcrowley]

2. Are the U.S. and Britain seeking a pretext for intervention

Sudan, Oil, and the Darfur Crisis

Are the U.S. and Britain seeking a pretext for intervention in order to take advantage of Sudan's oil?
by Enver Masud

The situation in Darfur is tragic, but it is not genocide - oil may be the real target of those seeking military intervention.

According to Alex de Waal, the "world authority" on Sudan,
Characterising the Darfur war as 'Arabs' versus 'Africans' obscures the reality. Darfur's Arabs are black, indigenous, African and Muslim - just like Darfur's non-Arabs . . . Until recently, Darfurians used the term 'Arab' in its ancient sense of 'bedouin'. These Arabic-speaking nomads are distinct from the inheritors of the Arab culture of the Nile and the Fertile Crescent.

<snip>

Sudan, largely undeveloped, and barely emerging from colonial oppression, has been given a virtually impossible task of pacifying an area the size of France. This may be the pretext for yet another U.S.-British intervention for oil.

In 1996, the U.S. sent nearly $20 million in surplus U.S. military equipment to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda to topple the government of Sudan (The Washington Post, November 10, 1996), and it would appear that the U.S. and Britain are now competing with China, Sudan's largest trading partner, for Sudan's oil.

http://www.twf.org/News/Y2004/0807-Darfur.html

[ContraBass Black]

5. They've been known to fire on grounded civilians with their MIG's.

But why do this now instead of years ago?

[MidwestTransplant]

3. Sudan is horrible and we should do what we can to help.

In the meantime, this seems like Bush trying to do a poppy humanitarian mission a la Somalia just before leaving office. Though even if he is not sincere at least this could help.

[Jcrowley]

6. You misunderstand what this is all about

What Sudan, and Darfur in particular, need now are humanitarian assistance - not avarice masquerading as altruism.

This will not help nor is it even meant to.

More background:
SUDAN: Oil profits behind West's tears for Darfur

17 November 1993

Norm Dixon

For at least 18 months now, Western governments have quietly stood by as the non-Arabic-speaking black farmers of the Darfur region in western Sudan have borne the brunt of a vicious ethnic-cleansing campaign carried out by state-sponsored bandits known as the janjaweed.

Refugees report that attacks on farming villages are often preceded by raids by Sudanese air force fighter-bombers and attack helicopters. The janjaweed, recruited from Arabic-speaking pastoralist tribes, then routinely murder any male villagers they can get their hands on, systematically rape or kidnap the women, and plunder and destroy the villages and crops. The attacks and their consequences have resulted in the deaths of up to 50,000 people and the displacement of 1.5 million; aid agencies warn that hundreds of thousands may die from disease or starvation in the coming months.

Why then have the governments of the United States and the European Union (EU) only now begun to express concern over the fate of the people of western Sudan and demand that the Islamist military regime in Khartoum bring the janjaweed under control? The answer — as it most often is when rich countries threaten to intervene in the Middle East and Africa — is access to invest in and extract profits from Sudan's burgeoning oil export industry.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2004/593/32013

The report, "Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights," investigates the role that oil has played in Sudan's civil war. This 754-page report is the most comprehensive examination yet published of the links between natural-resource exploitation and human rights abuses.  

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/11/25/sudan6528.htm

[Javaman]

4. Oh the irony...

So they want a no fly zone in the Sudan, but yet decried Clinton's no fly zone in Iraq as ineffective.

moron* makes my brain hurt.

[NNN0LHI]

7. Christ they are going to Shock And Awe them too n/t