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Bill Clinton, the genocider who just might get away

4 Jun

Attracted by the immense mineral wealth of Congo, the U.S. supported Gen. Paul Kagame’s 1990 invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, expecting Kagame to facilitate access to Congo. Note that the only city marked on President Bill Clinton’s map besides the Rwandan capital Kigali is the border city of Goma, Congo, center of the fighting over and plundering of Congo’s mineral wealth. More than 6 million civilians would later die under Bill Clinton’s eight-year reign – with American money, weapons and political support.

by Aimable Mugara

There are some who will claim that Bill Clinton was the first African president of the United States. Those people clearly do not know that Bill Clinton is the one who established the stranglehold that the murderous gang of Gen. Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda have on the people of central Africa. Those people clearly do not know that as American military satellites showed evidence of the millions of civilians being butchered by Gen. Kagame’s and Museveni’s forces, Bill Clinton doubled down on his financial, political and military investment in this gang of murderers.

Unless of course these people mean that Bill Clinton has the same cold-heartedness that many African presidents have when they order their troops to kill innocent African civilians. The kind of cold-heartedness where your troops come to report that today they butchered an entire village of unarmed civilians because they do not support your dictatorship and you respond: “Great job! Other villages now got a good lesson that you’re either behind me or you’re dead.”

In 1990, Gen. Kagame, who was the chief of military intelligence in Uganda, led a violent invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, with the approval and support – financial, military and political – of the United States government. This violent war changed the landscape of that region forever.

By landscape, I also mean the number of mass graves that dot every of inch of that region now. The two final years of President Bush, the father, during which his American government supported the murderous gang of Gen. Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, resulted in the deaths of many innocent Rwandan and Ugandan civilians. During those two years, there are thousands who lost their lives at the hands of Gen. Kagame’s soldiers and Yoweri Museveni’s soldiers.

But this was nothing compared to the more than 6 millions of civilians who would later die under Bill Clinton’s eight-year reign – with American money, American weapons and American political support.

A Sept. 30, 2010, New York Times article titled “Dispute Over U.N. Report Evokes Rwandan Déjà Vu” mentions how in the fall of 1994, a United Nations investigation discovered that Gen. Kagame’s forces had killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians that year. Under pressure from Bill Clinton’s government, the United Nations was forced not to publish that report. The New York Times article reports that the 1994 U.N. report describes Gen. Kagame’s soldiers “rounding up civilians and methodically killing unarmed men, women and children.”

But that was 1994, a year that is famous for extremist Hutus who went on a rampage and butchered hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsi and Hutu civilians. The fact that extremist Tutsis under Gen. Kagame went on a rampage in 1994 killing innocent Hutu and Tutsi civilians was totally blacked out due to pressure from Bill Clinton’s government. The existence of that 1994 U.N. report was denied by some American officials and was only revealed recently.

1994 is famous for extremist Hutus who went on a rampage and butchered hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsi and Hutu civilians. The fact that extremist Tutsis under Gen. Kagame went on a rampage in 1994 killing innocent Hutu and Tutsi civilians was totally blacked out due to pressure from Bill Clinton’s government.

One would think that after that, Bill Clinton’s government would have kept a tighter leash on its African stooges, Gen. Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Far from that, the two stooges used American money, American weapons and, with American political support, attacked neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where their forces butchered so many millions of civilians that it is in fact surprising that there is anybody alive left in that country today.

Paul Kagame joins Bill Clinton as he tours Clinton Foundation projects in Rwanda.

As American military satellites recorded evidence of millions of civilians being butchered by this gang of murderers, Bill Clinton smiled away as his government gave more money and more weapons and more political support to these two stooges so they can use this support to keep doing what they do best: kill a multitude of unarmed civilians. They just kept killing and killing and Bubba kept making sure they had the money and weapons necessary to continue the killings and provided political cover whenever anyone asked questions.

Fast forward to 2010. On Oct. 1, 2010, the United Nations released a report on the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003. Regarding Gen. Kagame’s extremist Tutsi forces’ behavior during the 10 year period, especially 1996 to 1998, the report says:

“The extensive use of edged weapons (primarily hammers) and the apparently systematic nature of the massacres of survivors after the camps had been taken suggests that the numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage. The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces. Numerous serious attacks on the physical or mental integrity of members of the group were also committed, with a very high number of Hutus shot, raped, burnt or beaten. If proven, the incidents’ revelation of what appears to be the systematic, methodological and premeditated nature of the attacks listed against the Hutus is also marked: These attacks took place in each location where refugees had allegedly been screened by the AFDL/APR over a vast area of the country. The pursuit lasted for months, and on occasion, the humanitarian assistance intended for them was allegedly deliberately blocked, particularly in the Orientale province, thus depriving them of resources essential to their survival. Thus the apparent systematic and widespread attacks described in this report reveal a number of inculpatory elements that, if proven before a competent court, could be characterized as crimes of genocide.”

How did Bubba react to this latest report? The report was published on Oct. 1, 2010; however, its contents had been leaked earlier and published in the media a month before. So, on Sept. 23, 2010, the Daily Beast site asked Bill Clinton about this report.

Bill Clinton said this about his buddy Gen. Kagame: “Right now I’m not going to pre-judge him because there’s this huge debate about what happened in the Congo and why, and I don’t know.” To which human rights researcher Carina Tertsakian responded to the Daily Beast: “It is not a matter of pre-judging. … The facts are well-established. … There is no doubt that Rwandan troops, together with their Congolese allies, committed large-scale massacres and other grave human-rights violations against Rwandan and Congolese civilians. The evidence is there for all to see. What more does Clinton need?”

But then again, when you are Bill Clinton, whose government provided the money, the weapons and the political cover for Gen. Kagame’s forces to commit that genocide, I don’t know what else you can say.

There is a high chance that the long arm of justice will catch up with Gen. Kagame and his commanders in our lifetime. As for Bill Clinton, the enabler, whose government’s financial support, military support and political support were crucial in perpetrating this genocide against Africans and covering it up afterwards, I am afraid he will retire peacefully at some mansion.

But for those of us Africans who lost many of our loved ones to Bill Clinton’s African gang of murderers, Gen. Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, we will always remember. We will always remember that Bill Clinton smiled away and gave more support to those butchers as they murdered more and more of us.

Aimable Mugara

About himself, Aimable Mugara writes: I grew up in Rwanda in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. In my short lifetime, I have seen that country go more and more backwards with time. As other nations around the world progress, Rwanda remains mired in ethnic hatred that has been exacerbated by the violent wars that have been waged by the extremist Hutus and the extremist Tutsis led by Gen. Kagame. The wars between the extremist Hutus and the extremist Tutsis have at times been open wars and at other times silent wars such as today. Extremist Hutus are famous for the massacres that took place between April and July 1994 that resulted in the massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Extremist Tutsis are not very far behind, having killed 40,000 innocent unarmed Hutu civilians in one day on Feb. 8, 1993, in northern Rwanda and millions of Hutus between Oct. 1, 1990, and December 2003.

I used to be silent about the challenges facing Rwanda. I used to think that with time, these issues will resolve themselves. This year, as I saw Kagame’s extremist Tutsi government becoming even more extreme, I could not take it anymore. Kagame’s extremist supporters have offered various excuses as to why Rwanda should not be a democratic nation that abides by fundamental human rights. I have joined the chorus of people speaking out for democracy and human rights in Rwanda. I truly believe that making sure that Rwanda abides by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that every single Rwandan citizen is guaranteed the fundamental human rights enshrined in it, is the only way to move forward as a nation.

I speak out to let the extremist Hutus and the extremist Tutsis led by Gen. Kagame know that we moderate Rwandans have had enough of their extremism and that they need to stop taking us hostage in their struggle for power. We do not want extremist Hutus to terrorize us; we do not want extremist Tutsis to terrorize us. We want to live together in a democratic society where every single article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applies to every Rwandan citizen.

Source

Central Africa: Don’t Elevate Joseph Kony

11 Mar

ANALYSIS

Put yourself in Joseph Kony’s shoes: imagine you are a fugitive leader of a rebel band in the forests of central Africa, travelling on foot and avoiding encounter with any organized military force. You have spurned peace talks and bribes because the only existence you know is surviving off the land and its fearful people.

Every high profile offensive by the armies of three neighbouring countries, or international Special Forces, that fails to capture or kill you, adds to your mystique. Your army is run as a cult, using charisma and fear. For a quarter century your reputation has grown, even while your political agenda has dwindled. In fact, since the killing of Osama bin Laden, you are arguably the most wanted man on the planet.

Today, eight years after abandoning northern Uganda, the LRA’s depleted band of a couple of hundred barefoot fighters is somewhere in the borderlands between the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Central African Republic. According to the ‘LRA Crisis Tracker’ they have killed 98 civilians in the last 12 months and abducted 477. That’s an impressively high infamy-to-atrocity ratio, testament to the effectiveness of terrorist advertising. In earlier days, the LRA achieved spread terror throughout northern Uganda by its gruesome mutilations. Severed lips and noses spread the message better than a radio station.

Today, Kony’s supernatural powers are newly validated by his newest enemy, the earthly superpower, which is staking its power and prestige on catching or killing him. The LRA’s new echo chamber is an advocacy group, Invisible Children.

The armies of Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, backed by American advisers, may yet succeed in putting handcuffs on Kony and delivering him to The Hague. But there are plenty of dismal precedents for failure. In 2002, following the U.S. declaration that the LRA was a terrorist organization, the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) won the reluctant cooperation of Sudan and launched Operation Iron Fist on both sides of the Uganda-Sudan border. It didn’t succeed. In 2008, after the LRA had relocated to north-eastern Congo and the adjoining areas of southern Sudan, a joint offensive by the armies of Uganda, Congo and South Sudan also failed. Another episode was a 2006 operation by Special Forces attached to the UN mission in Congo. Experts in jungle warfare, Guatemalan commandos, were dispatched to the Garamba national park with the objective of executing the recently-unveiled ICC arrest warrant against Joseph Kony and senior commanders. The operation ended in disaster with the UN soldiers fatally shooting each other.

The problem hasn’t been that Kony isn’t well-known. Compared to the host of other rebel groups and militia that have inflicted comparable or greater destruction on the region over the last quarter century, he enjoys by far the highest profile. The problem is that he is hard to catch, and that his adversaries have too often colluded in keeping the war going.

The Ugandan army had an incentive for keeping the LRA alive and kicking – it justified a high defence budget and gave the generals plenty of opportunities for getting rich. Principle and profit have also driven Ugandan military adventurism across its borders. Invisible Children’s solution to the LRA is for the Ugandan army to pursue them through the jungles of Congo. It doesn’t mention that fifteen years ago, Uganda and Rwanda invaded Congo (then called Zaire) to pursue Rwandese genocidaires and Ugandan rebels through those same forests. The world hadn’t cared enough to stop the Rwandese killers regrouping and rearming in Zairean refugee camps, so the leaders of the Uganda and Rwanda, with a nod from Washington DC, took unilateral action themselves. It didn’t work out so well for the Congolese people. Let’s hope that this time Ugandan soldiers and their proxies kill fewer than 98 Congolese civilians.

Since peace and stability began returning to northern Uganda six years ago, the agenda has been reconstruction and reconciliation. There are programs of social healing to address the roots of the LRA rebellion, which lie in a complicated history of marginalization and the traumas of the war and massacres of the 1980s. Demystifying Kony – reducing him to a common criminal and a failed provincial politician – should be part of this effort to normalize life.

During these years, the LRA has survived in the frontierlands of central Africa because the reach of government doesn’t extend there, and because the inhabitants of these places have as much reason to distrust the depredations of officialdom as they have to fear the cruelties of the LRA. If Kony dies or is captured, the few hundred LRA fighters may disband, but the lawlessness that made possible his reign of fear, will not be so easily resolved.

In elevating Kony to a global celebrity, the embodiment of evil, and advocating a military solution, the campaign isn’t just simplifying, it is irresponsibly naive. ‘Big man’ style rulers – of which President Yoweri Museveni is one – prefer to dismiss their opponents as disturbed individuals, and like to short-cut civil politics by military action. The “let’s get the bad guy” script is a problem, not a solution.

Millions of young Americans are being told about a bizarre and murderous African cult. They are also being told that for 25 years Africa has been waiting for America to solve this problem, which can be done by capturing Africa’s crazed evildoer and handing him over to international justice. And they are led to believe that what has stopped this from happening is that American leaders don’t care enough. The apologists for Invisible Children call this “raising awareness.” I call it peddling dangerous and patronizing falsehoods.

Alex de Waal is Director of the World Peace Foundation.

Source

Turkey Slams France Over Genocide Bill

19 Dec

Image from the Armenian Genocide, 1915

by The Associated Press

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey’s prime minister on Saturday sharply criticized France for a bill that would make it a crime to deny the World War I-era mass killing of Armenians was genocide.

Saying France should investigate what he claimed was its own “dirty and bloody history” in Algeria and Rwanda, Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted Turkey would respond “through all kinds of diplomatic means.”

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks as their Empire collapsed, an event many international experts regard as genocide and that France recognized as such in 2001. Turkish leaders reject the term, arguing that the toll is inflated, that there were deaths on both sides and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

On Dec. 22, the lower house of French Parliament will debate a proposal that would make denying that the massacre was genocide punishable by up to a year in prison and euro 45,000 ($58,500) in fines, putting it on par with Holocaust denial, which was banned in the country in 1990.

Erdogan lashed out at France during a joint news conference with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil — the chairman of Libya’s National Transitional Council — saying there were reports that France was responsible for the deaths of 45,000 people in Algeria in 1945 and for the massacre of up to 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994.

“No historian, no politician can see genocide in our history,” Erdogan said. “Those who do want to see genocide should turn around and look at their own dirty and bloody history.”

Genocide and French atrocities in Algeria

“The French National Assembly should shed light on Algeria, it should shed light on Rwanda,” he said, in his first news conference since recovering from surgery three weeks ago.

France had troops in Rwanda, and Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused the country of doing little to stop the country’s genocide.

There was no immediate reaction from France. Ties between the two countries are already strained by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s opposition to Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.

Erdogan’s criticism comes a day after an official said the Turkish leader had written to Sarkozy warning of grave consequences if the Armenian genocide bill is adopted. A Turkish diplomat said Turkey would withdraw its ambassador to France is the law is passed.

“I hope that the (French Parliament) steps back from the error of misrepresenting history and of punishing those who deny the historic lies,” Erdogan said. “Turkey will stand against this intentional, malicious, unjust and illegal attempt through all kinds of diplomatic means.”

Erdogan called the proposed bill a “populist” act, suggesting it was aimed at winning the votes of Armenian-French in elections in France next year.

A Turkish parliamentary delegation is scheduled to travel to France on Sunday to lobby French legislators against the bill.

Turkey has long argued that parliaments should not be left the task of deciding whether the killings constituted genocide, insisting on the creation of a joint independent committee of historians to look into the events that started in 1915.

Several countries have recognized the killings as genocide, including Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Russia, Canada, Lebanon, Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Vatican, Switzerland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania and Cyprus.

In 2007, a Swiss court convicted a Turkish politician under its anti-racism law and fined him for denying that the killings of Armenians was genocide. The case caused diplomatic tensions between Switzerland and Turkey.

Source

Review: Genocide, War Crimes and the West

1 Aug

Adam Jones’ book Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity is an incredibly revealing anthology containing accounts of atrocities carried out by Western imperial capitalism and those who serve its interests abroad. Articles describing the little-known and little-understood history of imperialist actions from Algeria to Vietnam, Armenia to Yugoslavia, and even the genocide of Native peoples by colonialism in the United States and Canada are reproduced in this essential text. Jones’ book serves as an important lesson to its readers about the reality behind the United States and other powers’ attempts to “spread democracy and civilization” at gunpoint, as well as to remind those who advocate “peaceful resistance” to imperialism of the futility of their position.

Imperialism at the Forefront

One strength of this work that makes it useful to those who seek to understand and resist imperialism is how the authors of this text never forget the broader context behind the events chronicled. Unlike some more traditional perspectives on genocide and war crimes that seek to address the issue via the psychology of the perpetrators, these authors correctly connect the geopolitical agenda of capital as the root of these events. In essence, this text provides not only the what, but the why, behind the greatest crimes of the 20th century – and the why is capitalism. Several chapters discuss US interventionism in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and while outlining the extent of crimes committed by Henry Kissinger and other imperialist agents, the context of the Cold War and the yearnings of US capital to maintain its hegemony over what it saw as its “back yard” are not forgotten. Rather than merely catalog the violence in Somalia under Siad Barre, the text talks about how funds and arms from the United States made it possible. Behind the many horrors being perpetrated all over the globe at any given moment, there is the presence of capital, the influence which leads to war, genocide and poverty for much of the world’s peoples, and Jones’ book is faithful in recognizing this connection.

Understanding Vietnam and Iraq as Genocide

This book makes an important contribution to the understanding of the Vietnam War and the sanctions against Iraq as genocidal actions. This is important, because these direct attacks on civilian population centers have yet to be admitted as genocidal actions by the United States. Apparently, the targeting of defenseless villages in Vietnam and the starving of 500,000 Iraqi children do not count as genocide because it was the United States who perpetrated it. If the Soviet Union is perceived as being slow to provide aid to the Ukraine during famine, then it was clearly Stalin who intended to starve the populous into submission, yet when the United States imposes crippling sanctions after bombing raids targeting sanitation facilities and other essentials to civilian life, starvation and illness are merely a convenient accident. And, when it comes to the bombing of civilian population centers within “free fire zones” in Vietnam, the United States would attest that in wartime such atrocities are unavoidable. The double standard put forward by Western propaganda in the context of Cold War does well to whitewash the crimes they committed, and in engaging these accounts of mass murder, Jones’ text serves to reveal the true nature of imperialist violence. Capitalism: Itself a Genocide

The most important chapter of this anthology is an article entitled Collateral Damage: The Human Cost of Structural Violence in which the author, Peter G. Prontzos, outlines how international capitalism itself is a genocide. In this chapter, Prontzos compiles a wealth of statistical data about death associated with poverty world-wide, and argues that this structural violence is generated by the capitalist system itself; that since there is no material reason for the disparities in this world, the ultimate source of this death and despair is imperial capitalism’s imperative to reap profits from the labor and material resources of the rest of the world. Even without warfare, without bombing raids on civilian population centers in the name of profit margins, capitalism itself functions as a system of the organized exploitation and murder of the world’s laboring masses. Prontzos begins his essay quoting Darwin, saying, “If poverty is not a result of nature, then great is our sin.” This quote is appropriate, being that the misery of world capitalism is not the cause of nature and the sin of its structural violence and imperialist warfare falls on the capitalist exploiters themselves.

What about Israel?

This text does well to incorporate important examples of genocide and war crimes throughout the 20th century, but unfortunately makes no reference to the crimes perpetrated by the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. This myopia towards a nationalist state which sees fit to drop white phosphorus on schools and hospitals, or impose an illegal blockade which is driving the standard of living of Palestinians to incredible squalor, cannot be viewed as anything other than intentional. Jones admits that his work is not exhaustive, and makes reference to the fact that material regarding Israel and British crimes in Ireland have been left out, though we at the APL must protest to this decision, being that not addressing such crimes is what allows them to be perpetrated.

Conclusion: This Text is Essential

This book is essential for those who wish to understand the true nature of Western imperial capitalism. Capitalism is a system of organized crime; an economic construction built to allow a small minority of the population plunder and exploit the laboring masses. When this system doesn’t break out into earnest warfare against the world proletariat by shooting and bombing men, women and children at will, it seeks to reinforce its hegemony through structural violence. Adam Jones and the authors of the various articles included in this anthology do a great service by offering these accounts. Poverty and imperialist war, genocide and the multitude of atrocities presented by both, are the crimes of capital. Only when one understands this essential truth is one able to wage an effective resistance to it, and this book is incredibly useful in bettering that understanding.

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Rwanda, Zaire & Sudan

16 Mar

“Out of Iraq, Into Darfur”: Humanitarian or Warmongering?
 The ongoing campaign for intervention in Sudan has resulted in the reduction of a complex political problem to a morality tale populated by villains and victims. Newspaper and television reports are a pornography of violence; the Sudanese Civil War is called a genocide falsely as the media focuses on the gory details, describing atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in their number.

In a world where atrocities mount globally, there now seems to exist villains so evil and victims so helpless that the only possible solution is a “rescue mission” spearheaded by the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, France, Canada and other imperialist powers. Why is the Sudanese Civil War named a “genocide?” Darfur can fit perfectly into the global War on Terror, since Darfur gives a valuable opportunity to demonize the enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arab Muslims against Christians.

Comparisons to Rwanda
The Save Darfur campaign presents itself as not political but moral, concerned only with the lives of the Sudanese. Only a single-issue campaign such as this could bring together such opposed groups as the Christian right, the Zionist lobby and the university-based anti-war movement. How else could it be that so many that oppose the American and British invasion of Iraq now demand an invasion of Darfur?

The answer lies in plays on emotion: all of the leading organizations in the Save Darfur campaign are motivated by the memories from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. The Save Darfur campaign has drawn only a single lesson from these two events: the problem was that the United States failed to intervene to stop the genocide quickly enough. This is the wrong lesson. It ignores that the Holocaust and the events in Rwanda cannot be compared to the Sudanese Civil War.

Unlike the Rwandan ethnic cleansing, the Sudanese Civil War is being fueled by conflicts between herders and landowners. There is doubtlessly ethnic violence involved, but this is not the main cause of the conflict. The regime in Rwanda was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis around the year 1994. During the entire operation to kill Tutsis, France backed the government. When the regime fell due to domestic armed struggle, French troops invaded and protected the Hutu regime responsible for the genocide. What does this say about the imperialists’ concern for stopping ethnic violence? The imperialists have stolen whole continents for profit; they have financed death squads, bombed nations to the Stone Age and financed weapons deals with the most bloodthirsty of governments. They have forced the world to destroy itself for their profits and class interests.

A History of Violence

The examples of imperialism on the African continent are endless—just next door to Rwanda lived the autocratic head of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most infamous, corrupt and shockingly brutal rulers Africa has ever seen. Mobutu’s rule, the result of a CIA-orchestrated coup to remove former anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba, was marked by widespread torture, executions and the starvation of millions of citizens even as he embezzled billions from the Congo. Mobutu received enormous aid from the US, France, the United Kingdom and other imperialist countries for decades.

Mobutu With Nixon

Connecting the Dots
 Behind imperialism lies capitalism and the bourgeoisie. The demand for a key metal (coltan) used in electronic devices such as iPods and PlayStation 2′s was a driving force behind international capital playing different sides off each other in the ongoing wars in sub-Saharan Africa, which have involved eight nations, killed over 5 million people to date and displaced many more. During the war, massive amounts of the rare metal, found predominately in the Congo, were stolen at the price of countless lives.

This is also not to mention the entire history of Africa itself, which is marked by centuries of colonialism, relaxed in only the smallest ways since World War II. History must be looked to—imperialist coalitions once invaded Somalia to “end famine” just like they invaded Haiti to “bring democracy” and Bosnia to be “peacekeepers.” In every instance, the situation was made worse and exacerbated by the presence of foreign powers. Why is this? Is it because the United States is incompetent? Perhaps it is because the United States is simply foolish, or it doesn’t try hard enough? No such magic. The truth is that the United States and other imperialist powers can do no good in these countries because they do not wish to. Western countries have vast material interests in Africa, particularly resources such as oil, copper and diamonds. Powers like the US government have no intention or interest in helping the people of Sudan carry through a genuine solution to the Civil War.

Peace in Sudan cannot be built on occupation—to argue that it can is the talk of imperialists in the West. Every major colonialist intervention in history was built upon the excuse of a “civilizing mission.” Iraq should stand as a warning about the imperial government’s ability to stop ethnic violence. An occupation would certainly spread the Civil War further into the other regions of Sudan and make the entire country yet another victim of the so-called “Global War On Terror.”

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