Investor's Business Daily, May 30th, 2007
Geopolitics: President Bush has announced tougher economic sanctions on Sudanese companies to stop the bloodshed in Darfur. But without China's support of Khartoum, maybe none of this would be happening.
In the absence of meaningful action by the United Nations, the African Union, or anybody else who routinely lectures the United States on its conduct in the world, President Bush on Tuesday announced he was strengthening U.S. sanctions against government-run companies involved in Sudan's oil industry and three individuals.
Bush wanted to impose the sanctions last month but delayed to give new U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon more time to work his magic and find a diplomatic solution to the carnage that has killed 200,000 and displaced 2.5 million. But when you can't blame the U.S. or Israel, things move slowly over there.
"For too long the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is complicit in bombing, murder and rape of innocent civilians," the president said. "My administration has called these actions by their rightful name: genocide."
Bush's target is the Islamic dictatorship of President Omar al-Bashir. The sanctions cover 31 companies that are to be barred from the U.S. banking system. Thirty of the companies are controlled by the government of Sudan. The other is suspected of shipping arms to Darfur.
One of the individuals targeted is Ahmad Muhammed Harun, Sudan's state minister for -- we kid you not -- humanitarian affairs. He's been accused of war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Sudan's head of military intelligence and security, Awad Ibn Auf, also made the list.
The Sudanese government has little interest in stopping the genocide in Darfur, as shown by its actions after the president spoke last month. "One day after I spoke, they bombed a meeting of rebel commanders designed to discuss a possible peace deal with the government," Bush noted.
"In the following weeks he (al-Bashir) used his army and government-sponsored militias to attack rebels and civilians in south Darfur. He's taken no steps to disarm these militias in the year since the Darfur peace agreement was signed. Senior officials continue to oppose the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force."
Sanctions are all well and good, but nothing much may change unless the 800-pound gorilla in the room is factored in and dealt with. As Heritage Foundation senior fellow Peter Brookes points out, the root of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur lies in China's lust for oil -- in this case, Sudanese oil.
Beijing, armed with a Security Council veto, runs interference in the U.N. for Khartoum's ethnic cleansing. When the U.N Security Council passed Resolution 1564, threatening Sudan with oil sanctions unless it curbed the violence in Darfur, China threatened to veto any effort to impose an embargo on Sudan, which supplies 7% of China's oil imports.
It was no surprise that after Bush's remarks on Tuesday, Liu Guijin, China's special African envoy, defended Chinese investment as a better way to stop the bloodshed than U.S. sanctions. Except that Chinese investment is the root of the bloodshed, propping up a genocidal regime.
Fresh from his first trip to Sudan, Liu said he saw no "desperate scenario of people dying from hunger" and that people in Darfur thank him for Chinese investment in their infrastructure. We are not making this up.
China has not deployed its troops abroad in any significant way for five centuries. Yet, about six years ago it sent 4,000 troops to Sudan to protect its oil interests there. As Brooks points out, while the Chinese-armed Arab-Muslim Janjaweed militia engages in genocide, China buys 70% of Sudan's oil, propping up Khartoum's economy.
China is Sudan's largest supplier of arms, according to a former Sudan government minister, and it is Chinese-made tanks, aircraft, helicopters and other weapons that Khartoum uses to clear civilians and rebels from oil fields rich in petroleum.
Still, Bush's increased sanctions are welcome. As the Chinese might say, even the journey to stopping genocide in Darfur begins with a single step.
