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.