Death's Grip on Darfur

[struggle4progress]

Richard Holbrooke and Kenneth Bacon
The Boston Globe
August 6, 2004

<snip>
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan should immediately appoint an internationally known emergency coordinator with full authority to lead all the UN agencies in Darfur and the surrounding region and leverage support from major donor nations. A critical area of focus must be on heading off the outbreaks of diarrhea and cholera and the growing threat of malaria.

The United States must show more aggressive leadership in the UN Security Council on this issue. Last week the Security Council adopted a resolution calling on the Sudanese government in Khartoum to disarm the government-supported Janjaweed militia and facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid. While the United States successfully fought for a tough resolution that permits the imposition of sanctions if Sudan doesn't stop the fighting, the resolution alone is not enough. Now the United States must make sure the Security Council acts if Sudan doesn't comply. Unfortunately, France, which has energy interests in Sudan, raised concerns about possible sanctions, although France did vote for the resolution. The United States must also lead in supporting the international monitoring team from the African Union.

To maximize international burden-sharing and to ensure that the US government is acting in concert and with maximum speed and effectiveness, the president should appoint a US coordinator for this issue. The United States has made generous financial commitments to UN relief efforts in Darfur, but France, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Germany have been slower to commit funds, UN officials say.

The UN and donors should ensure that delivery of relief supplies is maximized on all available channels, including by truck from Libya and Chad, by rail from Port Sudan, and by additional charters of commercial aircraft.
<snip>

http://www.refintl.org/content/article/detail/3126?PHPSESSID=fb8ba58487a7c8d80079e8f4d90ea794

[reorg]

1. additional info from the BBC, opinion from IHT

France calls for help over Darfur
The refugee influx is straining resources in Chad

France has appealed for greater international involvement to help refugees from Sudan's Darfur region.

The French defence minister - after visiting camps for Sudanese refugees in Chad - said more needed to be done.

Meanwhile, the United Nations says that the Sudanese cabinet has approved an action plan to ease the crisis.

It commits Sudan to begin disarming the Janjaweed militia whose attacks on the civilian population have driven more than a million people from their homes.

France has sent about 200 soldiers and begun airlifting relief supplies to eastern Chad - where 150,000 Sudanese refugees have crossed the border to escape the fighting in Darfur.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3543660.stm


Analysis: Reining in the militia
By Koert Lindijer

(...)

"The Sudanese government is asked by the international community to do what it can't do," remarked a diplomat who attended African Union-mediated peace talks in Addis Ababa recently.

"Bashir is under pressure from all sides, and his back has been put against the wall."

Tribal militias

Disarmament sounds odd in the context of Darfur, because no inhabitant would even think of handing over his weapon - the region is much too insecure.

Darfur was a region swamped with arms long before the present conflict erupted. Regulation of arms seems more realistic.

The successive weak Sudanese governments have, since independence in 1956, used tribal militias. The country is too large for the national army.

Sudan may be a dictatorship, but as a police state it has failed, because its security services cannot control the whole nation.

(...)

Bandits

The main clans involved on the Janjaweed side are the Jalul, Ereigat and Mahariya of Musa Hilal.

But the conflict has also attracted bandits from the whole Sahel, who came for free "shopping" in Darfur and will be difficult to stop.

They will fight back when their erstwhile sponsors start turning against them.

Disarmament of the Janjaweed may lead to fighting among Arab militia groups and with the government - a development from which the rebel movements would reap profit.

(...)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3540126.stm


Sanctions on Sudan have little chance of working

The International Herald Tribune
Tracy McNicoll
August 05, 2004

(...)

At the urging of the United States, Britain and the European Union, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution Friday threatening sanctions, albeit in foggy language. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, told reporters that "UN speak" had to be used to appease countries that objected to the word "sanctions."

The skittish vocabulary speaks volumes, however. Political will for sanctions against Sudan is lukewarm at best. And a lack of political will has persistently been the downfall of sanctions. China and Pakistan abstained from the vote Friday. Egypt, which shares a crucial 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) border with Sudan, has warned against sanctions, saying they "will damage the situation." The Arab League, wary of Western interference in another oil-producing Arab state, agrees with Egypt.

(...)

In fact, sanctions tend to restructure societies in the most detrimental ways and their effects linger well after the leaders they sought to punish have been deposed. In Iraq, they encouraged Saddam to reward tribal leaders with bribes and to let vast smuggling networks develop.

... Sanctions are the lifeblood of shady networks of gun runners and drug traffickers. By creating new needs, they open up new opportunities for a country's most nefarious elements.

(...)

Sudan, Africa's largest country, is one-quarter the size of the United States, and its neighborhood is notoriously tough to supervise. Sudan borders nine countries, many even poorer than itself. Sanctions have been tried against many of them, only to fail. If the United States, the United Nations and the European Union rush to sanction Sudan without a unanimous coalition of willing partners - which they don't have now - they will set the scene not only for another sanctions failure, but also for new, even more difficult and expensive problems in the long term.

Tracy McNicoll, a reporter for Newsweek in Paris, recently completed a master's degree in politics at McGill University, Montreal, on the subject of sanctions and peace-building.

http://www.sudan.net/news/posted/9386.html

[gottaB]

2. Holbrooke on genocide and US policy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A46786-2004Apr2¬Found=true

[reorg]

4. interesting that Holbrooke would plainly admit in this article

that when the UN commander in Rwanda had desperately called for more support in order to prevent an impending major genocide:


" (...) On April 15, 1994, in the Security Council, the United States demanded a full U.N. withdrawal. We even opposed helping other nations who might have intervened, (...)

Why did Washington do nothing? The answer lies primarily in events outside Rwanda. (...) Bosnia itself was at the height of a war that seemed far worse (...)"


So he DOES acknowledge that it was mainly the fault of the US? Interesting.

But why? Because they were busy smuggling weapons into Bosnia, as was later revealed in The Guardian:


>>Richard J Aldrich, Monday April 22, 2002, The Guardian

... For five years, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University has had unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files and has stalked the corridors of secret service headquarters in western capitals, as well as in Bosnia, asking questions.

His findings are set out in "Intelligence and the war in Bosnia, 1992-1995". It includes remarkable material on covert operations, signals interception, human agents and double-crossing by dozens of agencies in one of dirtiest wars of the new world disorder. Now we have the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims - some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in "the war against terrorism". Pentagon operations in Bosnia have delivered their own "blowback".

... In both Afghanistan and the Gulf, the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

... Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft. The report stresses that the US was "very closely involved" in the airlift. Mojahedin fighters were also flown in, but they were reserved as shock troops for especially hazardous operations.

... Weapons flown in during the spring of 1995 were to turn up only a fortnight later in the besieged and demilitarised enclave at Srebrenica. When these shipments were noticed, Americans pressured UNPROFOR to rewrite reports, and when Norwegian officials protested about the flights, they were reportedly threatened into silence. ...


Richard J Aldrich is Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. His 'The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence' is published in paperback by John Murray in August.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,2763,688327,00.html

[reorg]

3. Holbrooke on Cambodia (from the same article)

(emphasis in quotes mine)

>>... the emergency in Sudan is similar to Cambodia on the brink of famine in early 1979. The appointment of Sir Robert Jackson as the UN czar, authorized to speak for the secretary general and US leadership, saved hundreds of thousands of lives.<<

What is he talking about?

Excerpt from "THE U.S. RESPONSE TO HUMANITARIAN CRISES, STEPHEN R. SHALOM"

>> (...) In Cambodia in the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot carried out massive atrocities against its own population. Before 1975, the United States had destabilized Cambodian society and subjected its peasantry to one of the most intense bombardments in history, thereby creating the conditions for the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule. Once Pol Pot took power, the United States had almost zero direct influence on the Cambodian government. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke testified in 1977 that one only country carried any weight in Phnom Penh, and that was China, which, unfortunately, had no desire to prod the Khmer Rouge to stop the killings.<157> But Washington had growing ties with Beijing which it could have used as indirect leverage on the Cambodians. However, the Carter administration was more eager to solidify its relationship with China and to punish Vietnam for resisting U.S. domination for two decades than to concern itself with Cambodian deaths. In May 1978, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski discussed with the Chinese the need for "assistance to Southeast Asian efforts to check Soviet support of Vietnamese expansionism,"<158> but the only efforts in this regard at the time were those of the Khmer Rouge.

At the end of the year, Vietnam invaded Cambodia. To many Cambodians, this was a humanitarian intervention, saving them from the brutality of the Khmer Rouge.<159> Hanoi did not officially endorse the humanitarian justification for its intervention, appealing instead to its right of self-defense against continual Cambodian border incursions.<160> There would be reasons to question a humanitarian intervention rationale from Vietnam, even if it had been put forward. Apart from the historic Vietnamese domination of Indochina, there is the fact that Hanoi had publicly supported the Khmer Rouge regime in 1977<161> and even returned refugees to the Khmer Rouge to maintain ties.<162> But however we judge the Vietnamese intervention, the U.S. reaction was clearly devoid of humanitarian considerations.

Though the Vietnamese quickly took Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge were able to regroup over the Thai border and with support from China and Thailand wage a guerrilla war against the new Vietnam-backed regime of Heng Samrin. Brzezinski boasted in 1981: "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot." Pol Pot, he said, "was an abomination. We could never support him. But China could." And while Chinese arms flowed to the Khmer Rouge, the United States according to Brzezinski "winked semipublicly."<163>

As part of its policy of punishing Hanoi, Washington had banned all aid to Vietnam, and even obstructed private American aid agencies from shipping privately donated humanitarian assistance to meet basic needs of the people of Vietnam. Following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the new Vietnam- backed regime in Phnom Penh was subjected to the same restrictions.<164> The U.S. government did send humanitarian aid to the refugee camps near the Thai border from which the Khmer Rouge and other anti-Phnom Penh guerrillas recruited fighters. (...) <<

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/ShalomHumnCri.html

From "Heroes, by John Pilger":

>> (...)

p414

On January 8, 1980, John Gittings reported in the Guardian that the previous November US State Department sources had revealed

. . . their intention of mounting an international propaganda offensive to spread atrocity stories about Vietnamese behaviour in Kampuchea. Within days, presumably on White House instructions, US journalists in Bangkok and Singapore were shown the appropriate refugee stories' and Dr. Brzezinski himself verbally briefed a distinguished foreign correspondent and a Washington columnist over lunch on the contents of 'the latest CIA report'.

The 'distinguished Washington columnist' was James Reston of the New York Times. Under the emotive headline 'IS THERE NO PITY?' he wrote:

The latest US intelligence report to President Carter on the Soviet Union's role in South-east Asia indicates that Moscow is not merely refusing to relieve the suffering of the Cambodian people but is actually blocking the distribution of food and medicine from other countries.

This intelligence report notes that large amounts of desperately needed supplies are reaching Cambodia but they are being diverted from the people who need them most and into the hands of proSoviet Vietnamese and the Heng Samrin military.

Reston went on to say that 'there have been verified reports, according to this report to the president, that chemical warfare is being used against Pol Pot forces and Kampuchean civilians'. He quoted an impassioned plea by President Carter in which he called upon 'Moscow and Hanoi . . . not to feed the flames of war, but use aircraft and airfields to ferry food to feed the people of Kampuchea'. Reston ended his piece by quoting Carter as asking, 'Is there no pity?'

Reston is regarded as something of an elder statesman among journalists in the United States and in that cultivated role he has access to presidents and their advisers. In this case he must have suspended critical judgment; his information was simply untrue.

Moreover, it could be shown to be untrue from US government sources. In 1980 the State Department published an assessment, not an 'intelligence report', of international aid reaching Cambodia. The Russians were listed as the biggest single donor and the 1982 Food and Agricultural Organisation report indicated that Soviet aid to Cambodia between 1979 and the end of 1981 amounted to $300 million.

Since 1979 the United Nations Under-Secretary General in charge of humanitarian operations in Cambodia and Thailand had been Sir Robert Jackson, a distinguished international civil servant and veteran of many disaster emergencies. When asked about the division of aid, he replied:

In terms of the Vietnamese army living in say, Kampuchea, we have never had one complaint from anywhere nor have any of our people. There's been all these allegations; governments come to us and say, 'Our intelligence sources indicate this' - always in very general terms. We've said, 'Look, for heaven's sake, will you give us the time, date and place and we'll follow through.' We've never had one response when we've asked that question.

Reston's was not the only platform for 'the latest CIA report'. Other leading American columnists and editorial writers printed extracts and embroidered them with their own indignation. One Emmett Tyrell Jr wrote in the Washington Post, 'The lesson of Cambodia is the lesson of the Nazi concentration camps and the Gulag. Some people are immune to Western decency.'

To my knowledge, no journalist publicly questioned the 'facts' of this mysterious CIA report, even speculated that it might be in the tradition of the 'disinformation' so prevalent during the Vietnam war and Watergate years. The report was 'Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe' released by the CIA in May 1980 (a draft was leaked in November 1979). Much of it was warmed-over propaganda which replaced an earlier CIA analysis from which only opposite and unpalatable conclusions could be drawn. An author of the original report told a Washington source, 'They misrepresented everything I wrote'.

Shortly after Reston's column appeared, I was asked by a Western foreign minister for my observations on the situation in Cambodia. I began by asking him, 'Have you seen the CIA report?' 'Yes,' he replied. 'The State Department advised us to ignore it, that it was only for the media.'

The 'distinguished foreign correspondent' who, wrote John Gittings, had lunched with Brzezinski and Reston, was Alistair Cooke. In his BBC Letter from America broadcast on December 28, 1979, Cooke spoke of 'a document that has been delivered into the hands of the President of the United States and one that made him furious'. With 'the latest CIA report' as his source, Cooke accused the Vietnamese and the Russians of plotting to block 'great supplies and medicines that could save unaccountable lives in Cambodia'. Cooke had been misled; none of this was true. (...) <<

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pilger_John/Cambodia_Heroes.html


So, after reading this, I still don't know what Holbrooke is talking about in the quote on top of this message. Or would it appear to be a rather selective reading of history?

In his article "Friends of Pol Pot" in The Nation, John Pilger summarizes as follows:

>> ... Cambodia's nightmare did not begin with Year Zero but on the eve of the U.S. land invasion of neutral Cambodia in 1970. The invasion provided a small group of extreme ethnic nationalists with Maoist pretensions, the Khmer Rouge, with a catalyst for a revolution that had no popular base among the Cambodian people. Between 1969 and 1973, U.S. bombers killed perhaps three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist. During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of World War II, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. Evidence from U.S. official documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that this US. terror was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. "They are using as the main theme of the propaganda reported the C.I.A. Director of Operations on May 2, 1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men the propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes."

What Kissinger and Nixon began, Pol Pot completed. Had the United States and China allowed it, Cambodia's suffering could have stopped when the Vietnamese finally responded to years of Khmer Rouge attacks across their border and liberated the country in January 1979. But almost immediately the United States began secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., made a clandestine visit to Pol Pot's operational base inside Cambodia in November 1980. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Reagan. Within a year some fifty C.I.A. and other intelligence agents were running Washington's secret war against Cambodia from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok and along the Thai-Cambodian border. The aim was to appease China, the great Soviet foe and Pol Pot's most enduring backer, and to rehabilitate and use the Khmer Rouge to bring pressure on the source of recent U.S. humiliation in the region: the Vietnamese. Cambodia was now America's "last battle of the Vietnam War," as one U.S. official put it, "so that we can achieve a better result."

Two U.S. relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, "The US. government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed ... the U.S. preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation." In 1980, under U.S. pressure, the World Food Programme handed over food worth $12 million to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. In that year, I traveled on a U.N. convoy of forty trucks into Cambodia from Thailand and filmed a U.N. official handing the supplies over to a Khmer Rouge general, Nam Phan, known to Western aid officials as The Butcher. There is little doubt that without this support and the flow of arms from China through Thailand the Khmer Rouge would have withered on the vine.

If the US. bombing was the first phase of Cambodia's holocaust and Pol Pot's Year Zero the second, the third phase was the use of the United Nations by Washington, its allies and China as the instrument of Cambodia's, and Vietnam's, punishment. With Vietnamese troops preventing the return of the Khmer Rouge and a Hanoi-installed regime in Phnom Penh, a UN. embargo barred Cambodia from all international agreements on trade and communications, even from the World Health Organization. The U.N. withheld development aid from only one Third World country: Cambodia, which lay unreconstituted from the years of bombing and neglect. For the United States the blockade was total. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union were treated this way.

(...)

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/polpot.htm