Sudan, Slavery, Oil, and Politics

I have a piece up at Asia Times entitled US, China Brace for Sudan Trainwreck.

Sudan is torn between two competing humanitarian constituencies.

Liberals tend to follow Darfur.

Conservatives, on the other hand, particularly of the Christian Right persuasion, have focused on the conflict between north Sudan (Arab/Muslim) vs. south Sudan (Christian/animist).

Not to say these two groups are  mutually exclusive. 

Anyway, Muslim persecution of Christians is a hot-button issue for American conservatives, particularly those who cherish a martyred crusader perspective on current affairs, and one of the places that button is pushed frequently is in Sudan.

Ethnic hostility and political rivalry seem to have informed the two decade struggle between north and south Sudan more than religious zeal.

However, over two bloody decades of civil war (1985-2005) Muslim-affiliated armies and militias killed and displaced millions of southern Christians (and animists) and provided ample cause for U.S. Christian concern.

Geopolitics entered the picture because a) virtually all of the oil that the government in Khartoum exports to China and other thirsty countries comes from the south and b) the leader of the southern forces was a charismatic, capable, English-speaking Christian, John Garang.  Indeed, Garang had studied infantry tactics at Fort Benning (while in the Sudanese army) and pursued graduate studies in Iowa.

The George W. Bush administration saw an opportunity to demonstrate its conservative Christian credentials, create a pro-American counterweight to a troublesome Islamic regime in Khartoum, and create an oil-rich ally by succoring the southern Sudanese.

Therefore, the Bush administration inserted itself into a stalled  peace process sponsored by Kenya and promoted the signature of the “Comprehensive Peace Agreement” or CPA between north and south. 

The CPA seems to have been a rush job that papered over the existential disputes and deep-seated hostility and mistrust between north and south.  The south signed on because the CPA stipulated that the south could vote on secession in January 2011.

The north signed on, apparently because President Bashir desired a rapprochement with the United States that would lift Sudan out of the pariah category.

The south is quite satisfied with the agreement.  It has muscled up over the last six years with the overt support of anti-Khartoum allies Kenya and Uganda (it now boasts an arsenal of over 100 T72 main battle tanks) and enjoys the tacit support of the United States.

The north, on the other hand, is expected to lose almost all of its oil and a third of its territory and population when the referendum goes through.

And it certainly hasn’t gained better relations with the United States.

The reason, of course, is the depredations of the janjaweed, the Sudan proxies fighting a savage campaign to stamp out the secessionist stirrings in Darfur.

Now, with the referendum only 100 or so days away, the north is desperate and the south is supremely confident. 

The United States and China would both like to see a peaceful referendum and aftermath, but neither can dictate to Khartoum on this existential issue.  The United States, in particular, is hamstrung by the need to ostracize Bashir because of his Darfur misdeeds.  China, which realizes that sooner or later the oil fields will fall under control of the south, is likewise unable to fill the bill of Khartoum’s BFF and its eagerness and influence suffer as a result.

The article gives me the opportunity to resurrect one of my favorite anecdotes from the Bush administration, courtesy of the website Debkafile in 2004.  Since the Debkafile link is dead, I feel that I’m all that stands between the story and the memory hole.

Here’s the meat of the item:

For the first time ever, American diplomacy will have succeeded in converting a country dominated by radical Muslims – in Sudan’s case since the 17th century - into a secular democracy – in a period, moreover, when fundamentalist Islam is at its most militant and only a few years after Khartoum played host to Osama bin Laden’s headquarters.

Bush also has a special occasion in mind with an eye on the African American vote where his support is relatively weak. He will step forward as the first US president to plunge deep and head-on into problems endemic to the African continent. … On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.


As noted above, Sudan was a Christian preoccupation.  It also became something of an ideological battleground for proponents of a struggle of civilizations between the West and Islam as promoted by David Horowitz and Jihad Watch.

The Christian Right resented what it considered racial guiltmongering over the slave trade, particularly directed at the unambiguously racist origins of the Southern Baptists, who split from the northern Baptists before the Civil War over the issues of slavery and abolition.

Judging from the Debkafile report, I  would think that a slave-trading mea culpa by Omar Bashir would have achieved a few conservative/religious goals beyond promoting the image of the Bush administration to the African-American electorate:

It would have challenged the popularity of Islam among African-Americans by demonstrating that Muslims were also implicated in the U.S. slave trade;

By highlighting Muslim involvement, the Southern Baptist Congress’s racist origins would be more easily dismissed as a historical lacuna, and not its defining characteristic;

Muslim/slave-trader branding would have been reinforced (reports of ongoing Muslim enslavement of Christians in Sudan and Mauritania is an emotional and, for organizers of evangelical redemption campaigns, perhaps profitable issue);

Maybe some right-wing economist was going to come up with a supply-push explanation of American slavery by which Muslim entrepreneurs cultivated and supplied a slave sale business to otherwise indifferent American plantation-owners; I don’t know.

However, the White House ceremony was not to be; Bashir’s Darfur difficulties and the death of John Garang in a helicopter crash combined to place celebration of the north-south peace agreement on the back burner…

…until today, when the whole deal looks like it might unravel into a civil war and the U.S. is scrambling to try to keep a lid on things.

Below the break, I reproduce my piece The Twisted Triangle from 2006, with a wealth of detail on the Bush administration’s forgotten courtship of Omar Bashir and American and Chinese involvement in Sudan.  Go to the original post if you wish to identify and follow links.

Rewriting the History of the Sudan Calamity

Winners write history.

Losers rewrite history continually as bills come due, consequences surface, newly revealed errors and shortcomings must be excused, and heavier blame must be shifted onto backs sturdy enough to bear it.

Case in point: Michael Abramowitz’s insider-propelled backgrounder in the Washington Post, U.S. Promises on Darfur Don’t Match Actions tries to explain why, despite its brave talk, the Bush administration isn’t getting anything done on Darfur.

A considerable effort is made to make President Bush look good on this issue by painting him as the guy who wants to do the right thing but was thwarted by distracted, risk averse bureaucrats.

At one point, one senior official said, Bush wanted action to crimp Sudan's booming oil business, a move that would have severely aggravated relations with China -- and that no one else in the government favored.

There was stunned silence in the room, the official said, when Hadley disclosed Bush's idea to other government officials. Hadley made clear he was not interested in having a discussion, but the administration never went as far as the president seemed to be demanding. Instead, Treasury officials came up with a sanctions plan aimed at tracking and squeezing key individuals and companies in the Sudanese economy, including the oil business.

At an appearance in Tennessee this summer, Bush raised a question many have asked about the situation in Darfur: "If there is a problem, why don't you just go take care of it?" But Bush said he considered -- and decided against -- sending U.S. troops unilaterally. "It just wasn't the right decision," he said.

Unable to compel the attention and obedience of his advisors, unwilling to resort precipitously to military action, and bereft of an outlet for his idealism.

Doesn’t sound like our President Bush, does it?

Actually, I think there’s a good argument that, on Sudan, President Bush was guilty of doing too much, not too little. Not in Darfur, but in another, more strategically important area of the country that receives one-tenth of the attention the Darfur sideshow does: the South.

A full understanding of Mr. Bush’s problem can be seen in the context of the twenty-plus year civil war between the oil-rich South and Khartoum that claimed two million lives.

The president commendably invested considerable prestige, attention and energy to broker a peace deal that, after hopeful beginnings, is now on the point of collapse.

The ironic legacy of the North-South deal may turn out to be that it only provided the template for the political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur--and demonstrated the limits of unilateral foreign policy, even by the world's only superpower, in one of the world's more intractable trouble spots.

This gives me a chance to unpack a long piece I wrote last year, The Twisted Triangle: America, China, and Sudan .

I argued that the Bush administration was hostage to the policy of rapprochement with the Sudan regime that had brought about the cessation of the North-South civil war;

that, because of the outcry over Darfur, President Bush had not been able to deliver on the deal promised to Sudan’s President Bashir in return for accepting a risky power-sharing arrangement;

that Bashir was extremely unhappy with the Bush administration as a result;

and that the United States nevertheless, in its best “hope is not a plan” mode, incorrectly assumed it still possessed the leverage to act unilaterally and outside the UN and other mechanisms to impose a Darfur settlement that turned out to be dead on arrival;

and that therefore the Bush administration’s efforts—as further retailed in the Abramowitz article—to blame the U.N. and China for the lack of progress on Darfur is supreme example of sour grapes and hypocrisy.

I wrote:

Rather ironic that Sudan, which was supposed to serve as the keystone of Bush administration engagement with Africa, has turned into an exclusive sandbox for the Yellow Peril.

More to the point, it should be recalled that the United States has consistently pursued Sudan as its exclusive Great Power trophy, most recently when it decided that it would pursue its Darfur diplomacy directly with Khartoum and use the African Union as its vehicle, excluding China and bypassing the UN.

But that didn’t quite work out....

Its credibility and clout diminished by the failure of its DPA initiative, the U.S. government is reduced to impotent table pounding by its media proxies and indignant finger wagging by humanitarian and evangelical groups trying to somehow coerce China into helping out.

Talking about Darfur also gives me an opportunity to present the acme of Bush administration second term hubris to a new audience:

Anticipation of the juicy [North-South] deal coming down the pipe had evoked this remarkable headlinein the Sudan Tribune on the occasion of the 2004 U.S. presidential election:

Sudan prayed for Bush victory.

Israel’s Debkafile is perhaps not the most accurate reporter of news. But it is a faithful chronicler of grandiose neo-con fantasies and this report from 2004 catches some of the giddy enthusiasm of the Bush White House over the new Sudan policy:

For the first time ever, American diplomacy will have succeeded in converting a country dominated by radical Muslims – in Sudan’s case since the 17th century -into a secular democracy – in a period, moreover, when fundamentalist Islam is at its most militant and only a few years after Khartoum played host to Osama bin Laden’s headquarters.

Bush also has a special occasion in mind with an eye on the African American vote where his support is relatively weak. He will step forward as the first US president to plunge deep and head-on into problems endemic to the African continent. The Sudan peace will show the way to accommodations of other conflicts. He has allocated liberal sums for the fight against AIDS and steps for raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions of Africans.

On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.

If the US president has his way, the White House lawn will be fully booked this year with ceremonies centering on the Sudanese reconciliation, which he rates more highly than the Israel-Palestinian handshake hosted by Bill Clinton eleven years ago.

“It has to be a ceremony even more impressive than the 1993 White House signing of declarations of principles by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat,” said a senior US official preparing the event. “It will be an ‘African Camp David’, but one that will not fail.”

Bush’s advisers are preparing to stage a truly gala reception for the two Sudanese leaders, the first of a series showcasing the presidency’s breakthroughs in Africa in full sight of the American electorate and culminating in a splashy signing ceremony in March or April.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice has set up a committee with heads of the African American community. Working out of an undisclosed location in Los Angeles, they are assess the next moves on Sudan and their impact on voting patterns in November.

As Danforth’s mission draws to a successful conclusion, the president’s senior political adviser Karl Rove is taking charge of strategy on Sudan and its exploitation as campaign fodder.

Let’s highlight a truly wonderful passage:

On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.

Sudan would not only be reclaimed for the Christian God and Big Oil.

It would also help exorcise the guilt of the GOP’s white southern base for its slaveholding past, and place the onus firmly on the backs of those troublesome but ultimately contrite Muslim Arabs.

Now, that’s a peace deal for the ages!

None of that stuff ever happened, of course.

Read the rest of the piece to find out what really happened to what, under different circumstances, could have been a genuine achievement in Bush administration diplomacy. It’s a perspective on Sudan that is pretty much absent from the major media and, I’m afraid, Mr. Abramowitz’s article.

Darfur Sideshow

It’s Time to Focus on the Key Elements in the China-Sudan-US Equation

The Christian Science Monitor does the usual handwringing over Darfur and fingerpointing at China in Danna Harman’s article How China’s Support Shields a Regime Called Genocidal.

But before she can move on to Darfur and provide a hook for the genocide tag in the article, Ms. Harman does the public a service by devoting a few paragraphs to the true driving force in Sudanese security affairs—and China’s involvement: Sudan’s conflict with the oil rich south, an old fashioned, brutal, and desperate but non-genocidal incipient once-and-future civil war.

When it comes to what makes Sudan tick, Darfur is simply a tragic, terrible sideshow.

It’s a sideshow that the Western media has fixated on, perhaps because the Bush administration is unwilling to draw attention to the fatal rot at the heart of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) it brokered between the South and Khartoum in January 2005.

I blogged in detail on the Bush administration’s remarkable, even bizarre engagement with Sudan’s Islamicist, bin-Laden-friendly regime in the service of its African objectives last year, but here’s the gist:

The Bush administration reversed the Clinton administration’s ostracization of Khartoum and went to enormous lengths to close a deal between Khartoum and rebels in the south that includes provisions for power sharing, revenue-sharing—and also for a referendum in 2011 that virtually guarantees the partition of Sudan between the Islamicist north and the pro-U.S. south.

In order to maintain its post-2011 viability, the Sudanese regime, with the help of China, is desperately and duplicitously creating “facts on the ground”: hogging the oil revenues, encroaching on oil fields on the southern side of the future border zone, destabilizing the area through the use of supposedly arms-length militias, and amassing a war chest, weapons, and dual-use infrastructure that will deter the south from contesting Khartoum’s aggression.

On one level, the catastrophe in Darfur can be seen as unexpected blowback from the North-South deal, with some forces in the west of Sudan playing the civil war card to place a me-too claim to oil revenue sharing—a ploy that backfired as Khartoum pushed back hard and tipped the whole country into failed-state status with a brutal anti-insurgency campaign conducted through its janjaweed militia proxies.

The Bush administration’s Sudan diplomacy, though in many ways the antithesis of the militarized coercion displayed in Iraq, shares in its execution much of the “hope is not a plan” fecklessness that doomed our adventure in Mesopotamia.

Washington has consistently appeased the Khartoum regime, citing its supposed contributions in the war on terror but probably anxious to forestall its repudiation of the CPA, the one clear-cut success in six unhappy years of Bush administration diplomacy.

If DEBKAfile is to be believed, in 2004 the Bush administration entertained Sudan-fueled fantasies almost too puerile and embarrassing to credit:

For the first time ever, American diplomacy will have succeeded in converting a country dominated by radical Muslims – in Sudan’s case since the 17th century - into a secular democracy... On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.

If the US president has his way, the White House lawn will be fully booked this year with ceremonies centering on the Sudanese reconciliation...National security adviser Condoleezza Rice has set up a committee with heads of the African American community. Working out of an undisclosed location in Los Angeles, they are assess [sic] the next moves on Sudan and their impact on voting patterns in November...the president’s senior political adviser Karl Rove is taking charge of strategy on Sudan and its exploitation as campaign fodder.

Once the agreement was in place, the State Department apparently gave little thought to preserving and enhancing the leverage needed to ensure its proper implementation, let alone achieve dramatic displays of Arab penance for the slave trade on the White House lawn--or Rove-orchestrated gains among the African-American electorate.

The State Department’s anxiety to protect the CPA has apparently translated into an anxiety to do nothing vis a vis the South—such as meaningful economic and infrastructure support—that might antagonize Khartoum.

With the CPA as its hostage, no wonder Khartoum feels free to flout us and the world on Darfur.

If execution of the CPA is meant to be a demonstration project for the advantages of soft-power diplomacy by the career professionals at the State Department, it almost makes one wish the middle-finger hardliners with their brutal zeal were running the Sudan show.

Preoccupied with America's staggering problems in the Middle East, the State Department has been unable to focus its attention and resources on Africa. But even within this context, U.S. neglect of South Sudan is striking.

Our special envoy for Sudan, Andrew Natsios fills the position part-time while teaching at Georgetown. The U.S. presence in the South has actually been reduced while our staffing in Sudan’s capital has been boosted. USAID's chief resides in Khartoum, not the southern capital of Juba. Little has been done to help reorganize the South's chief rebel force, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army or SPLA, into a regular army and viable counterweight to Khartoum's military.

According to Sudan analyst Eric Reeves, turning our back on the South and giving Khartoum a free hand to undermine the CPA could have devastating consequences:

[The SPLA] is the key guarantor of the security arrangements (and hence all terms) of the CPA--and yet the SPLA is probably weaker today than a year ago, and Khartoum continues an aggressive policy of purchasing advanced weapons systems. The oil roads in southern Sudan would allow for all-weather projection of mechanized military power in the event of resumed war---something without precedent. When in 2003 I was talking with SPLA commanders on the ground in southern Sudan, and with John Garang personally, all made the same statement: if war resumes (a shaky ceasefire was in place while I traveled to various locations), then it will be the most destructive phase of a civil war that had at that point killed over 2 million and displaced as many as 5 million. [e-mail to China Matters, 6/30/07]

Contra the hopeless muddle in Darfur, we’ve got real assets and opportunities in the South: a functioning state, viable, pro-American government authority with battle-hardened leaders, legitimacy, and, thanks to its Christian element, a reservoir of potent political clout among the evangelical base in the United States.

And the South has got oil, of course.

South Sudan’s leaders came to the United States in January to testify before Congress and sound the alarm concerning Khartoum’s duplicity in implementing the CPA.

In supporting testimony , Roger Winter, the former special envoy to Sudan, also called for strengthening South Sudan’s army and drew, I believe, a proper distinction in between bolstering the SPLA as a genuine nascent national army versus the generally irresponsible and/or malicious U.S. practice of arming of useful factions around the world:

It is in the U.S. interest to invest significantly in the conversion of the SPLM’s military force, the SPLA, into a modern, well-trained and well- managed military. Unlike many situations in the developing world, the SPLM is a positive rebel political force that, despite many limitations and liabilities, was recognized by the U.S. as the key to creating a new, democratic Sudan. Similarly, with the SPLA, all the forces of Khartoum, formal and informal, collectively could not defeat the SPLA. In a very real sense, the very existence of a strong SPLA is the best guarantor of CPA implantation. Policy realism would, I believe, indicate that, of all the military forces in Sudan, only the SPLA has both the vested interest in seeing the CPA scrupulously implemented(i.e. so the Referendum is actually held) and, having fought off the NIF forces already, the capacity to protect the CPA without foreign military intervention. U.S. efforts in this regard are too limited and moving too slowly.

He concluded his testimony with a message to President Bush that our preoccupied lame-duck supremo will probably be unable to heed:

A note to President Bush: Achieving peace in Sudan was a goal you set for your Administration at the very beginning of your tenure. Your initiative succeeded beyond expectations in the South. The CPA, your legacy to all of Sudan, was a solid win, but is now at risk. It needs your personal attention.

Given the major investment of American prestige in the Sudanese powersharing arrangement and Khartoum’s serial malfeasance in the matters of the South and Darfur, one might think that the United States would muster the will and resources to maximize our leverage in Sudan and buttress the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

Instead, we get impotent jawboning from the Bush administration and griping that China is not doing enough to save our bacon in Sudan—the nation that was supposed to be America’s foreign policy beachhead in Africa but has turned into another one of our geopolitical headaches instead.


If the Bush administration had expended half the effort it committed to the lost cause of coercive diplomacy against North Korea and China—an effort doomed to failure in North Asia, where China is the 800 pound gorilla with vital interests and every conceivable military, economic, and diplomatic lever—and bolstered the South instead, we might be looking at a different situation in Sudan.

For all the blather about China’s soft power in Africa, China lacks the ability to force its way in Sudan.

It can only expand its influence when American neglect and incompetence leave a vacuum.

We might have seen a situation in which China—a long way from home, with zero military power projection and linked to an unsavory and unpredictable ally—would back away from backing Sudan in a proxy war against a U.S. client, and think twice about opportunistically enabling Khartoum’s encroachment upon the military, political, and economic security of the South...

...and Darfur.

Instead we are passive, deluded, and despairing spectators at the Darfur sideshow--while the decisive tragedy of Sudan unfolds elsewhere.