Will Rice Mislead the U.S.
Into Another Attack on Sudan?
by Lawrence K. Freeman
[PDF version of this article, including graphics]
March 14—The International Criminal Court (ICC) acted unlawfully March 4 in issuing an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir, the head of state of the sovereign nation of Sudan. The world will suffer greatly if this "one world government" court is not forced to dissolve as a result of this heinous violation of national sovereignty. It is beyond any dispute, that the ideological driving force behind the creation of this world court is the still-functioning British Empire. (No, Mabel, the empire is not dead, yet.)
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a fanatical enemy of the United States, who invaded the United States last week to brainwash a number of our elected officials, has played a major role in overturning the Westphalian conception of the inviolability of the nation-state. Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, Minister of State in the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office for Africa, Asia, and the United Nations, along with that notorious collaborator of the Nazis and international drug pusher George Soros, both servants of the Empire, are chiefly responsible for the very creation of the ICC and the antics of ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.
How the United States of America, under the leadership of President Barack Obama, responds to this blatant British effort to use the ICC to break up the nation of Sudan—into multiple ethnic, religious, and tribal entities at each others' throats—is of the utmost importance, for the future of Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and all sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the very existence of the United States.
While President Obama has so far displayed a cautious posture regarding U.S. support of this ICC provocation of Sudan, the immediate danger is that, with key Africa posts still unfilled in his administration, Khartoum-hater Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, is able to exert undue influence over Africa policy, particularly with respect to Sudan.
Rice: a Dangerous Menace
Rice was a dangerous menace in the Clinton Presidency from 1997 to end of his second term, as Under Secretary of State for African Affairs. She was co-responsible for the criminal decision to bomb the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum in 1998. Now she is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a post that Obama has elevated to Cabinet rank. Rice is also included in the small inner circle of advisors to Obama, which includes Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones, and Attorney General Eric Holder, giving her unprecedented influence for a UN ambassador. Perceived as an experienced Africa specialist from her years in the Clinton State Department, she controls the flow of intelligence to Obama, giving her enormous influence to promote her personal vendetta against the government of Sudan.
The Reality
The reality behind the Darfur conflict, which we will elaborate in the next issue, is as follows: In 2003, as the Sudan government was negotiating a settlement with South Sudan to end the more than 40-year-long civil war, a British Intelligence-controlled Muslim Brotherhood network led by Hassan al-Turabi launched a well-armed rebellion in Darfur against the government. President Bashir and his allies in the ruling party had forced Turabi, who had been a leading figure in the government, out of the ruling party, because he opposed the war-ending deal with the South, and because he opposed Bashir's turn to a nationalist policy to unify the nation, as opposed to the ideologically driven policy of radical Islamism represented by Turabi. It was Turabi who had invited Osama bin Laden to Sudan in the 1990s. The charge of genocide was leveled against the Sudan government, because of its efforts to defeat the foreign-sponsored anti-government insurgency.
Influence that Turabi had in Darfur, combined with the tensions and conflicts that had been previously building up in Darfur, provided the basis for the anti-government insurgency. Inter- and intra-ethnic and clan conflicts between sedentary and nomadic populations in Darfur had been flaring up with increasing frequency for several decades, as water supplies necessary for survival became more limited by the expansion of the Sahara.
Rice Cooks Up 'Ongoing Genocide'
In her press conference on her first day as ambassador, Rice blatantly lied to the press when she said, "We remain very deeply concerned about the ongoing genocide in Darfur." There is not a scintilla of evidence of any "ongoing genocide" in Darfur. Every thoughtful intelligence specialist, who is not delusional or suffering from drug use, knows there is not anything remotely like genocide going on in Darfur today. It is unacceptable that there are still as many as 100 to 150 people needlessly dying in Darfur each month, but it is not genocide.
When Rice knowingly makes false claims of "ongoing genocide," is she expressing her uncontrollable rage against the Islamic leadership in Khartoum, which she has maintained since the second half of the 1990s, when she teamed up with former Clinton Administration officials John Prendergast (director of African Affairs at the NSC and Special Advisor at the State Department) and Anthony Lake (National Security Advisor), to form an anti-Khartoum triumvirate? Or is she simply acting out her anglophile slavishness, stemming from her British indoctrination at Oxford?
Either way, Rice is using the "Big Lie" tactic to manipulate the U.S. population, the Congress, and the President into supporting a militarily insane no-fly zone over Darfur or other acts designed to force the dismemberment of Sudan. With the inflammatory impact of the word genocide, it became possible to herd our uninformed, easily impressionable citizens and elected officials like sheep into mindless attacks on one of the most important nations on the African continent. In an interview on National Public Radio on March 6, Rice once again refused to take off the table the idea of a no-fly zone for dealing with Sudan.
Colin Powell's 2004 Election Gimmick
Even during the most intense phase of fighting in Darfur from 2003-04, there was no evidence of genocide.
Some U.S. Congressmen looked dumbfounded when they were told in a hearing March 11, that the only government in the world that has labeled the conflict in Darfur "genocide" is the United States. No other government, regional body, or international body has agreed with this declaration, made in September 2004, by then Secretary of State Colin Powell, as a campaign tactic to help George Bush secure the votes of the Christian fundamentalists, whose un-Christian babbling about genocide is responsible for the deaths of large numbers of Africans in Sudan.
Bush's first special envoy to Sudan, Amb. John Danforth, said of Powell's claim, that it was "for internal consumption within the United States."
The report of the UN International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, conducted in Darfur in November 2004—just two months after Powell's infamous remarks—concluded unequivocally "that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through militias under their control." The report discusses genocide in the following terms: "The crime [of genocide] is horrific in its scope; its perpetrators identify entire human groups for extinction. Those who devise and implement genocide seek to deprive humanity of the manifold richness its nationalities, races, ethnicities, and religions provide. This is a crime against all humankind, its harm being felt not only by the group targetted, but by all of humanity."
The UN report specifies two criteria that must be met to establish a crime of genocide: 1) "proof of genocidal intent," and 2) "do the members of the tribes [who are] victims of attacks and killings make up objectively a protected group?" The report makes clear that the UN investigating team found insufficient evidence to show that the considerable loss of life from the worst years of fighting in Darfur, from 2003 to 2004, met either of the two criteria that are both required to establish genocide.
No Support for Darfur Genocide Claim
In this period of the worst violence, several authorities reached the same conclusion.
- UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, on June 17, 2004: "I cannot call the killing genocide even though there have been massive violations of international humanitarian law."
- President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria said in December 2004: "Now what I know of Sudan it does not fit in all respects to that definition [of genocide]. The government of Sudan can be condemned, but it's not as 'genocide.' "
- An African Union communiqué of July 2004 stated: "Even though the crisis in Darfur is grave, with unacceptable levels of death, human suffering and destruction of homes and infrastructure, the situation cannot be defined as a genocide."
- A spokesman for the European Union's mission to Darfur stated in August 2004: "We are not in the situation of genocide there. But it is clear there is widespread, silent and slow killing going on, and village burning on a fairly large scale."
- The president of Doctors Without Borders (France), Dr. Jean-Hervé Bradol, reported in July 2004: "Our teams have not seen evidence of the deliberate intention to kill people of a specific group."
- Mercedes Taty, a Spanish doctor and Deputy Emergency Director for Doctors Without Borders, returned from a month working in Sudan at the time of greatest violence. In Paris on April 16, 2004, she said, "I don't think that we should be using the word 'genocide' to describe this conflict. Not at all.... [T]here is no systematic target—targetting one ethnic group or another one." She also denied the charge that the government was engaged in ethnic cleansing.
While hundreds of thousands of articles on the Internet cite the figure of 300,000 killed in Darfur, no evidence is presented to substantiate the allegation. The former Clinton Administration official John Prendergast, now a leading spokesman of the Enough Project and Save Darfur campaigns against the government of Sudan, backed away from any responsibility for the numbers his associates throw around so freely, before a Congressional hearing last week, when he told members of Congress that "It could be 300,000 or 400,000, we will never know. The truth lies beneath the shifting sands of Darfur." One would think that such a bold claim, repeated in countless articles, books, and testimonies, would require evidence, but where is it?
The war in Darfur is ugly. Most wars in Africa and elsewhere are brutally ugly, but the charge of genocide demands a higher standard of proof. However, there is genocide going on in Africa. South of Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, almost 6 million Congolese have died over approximately the last 10 years, which the International Rescue Committee has documented thoroughly with periodic updates. All of these deaths could have been prevented by investment in infrastructure and other economic assistance by the western nations. This is deliberate economic genocide, 20 times greater than the alleged figure of 300,000 deaths in Darfur.
Where is the outcry against these deaths by those advocating the destabilization of Sudan? Are the jungles of Congo not as glamorous as the sands of Darfur? The silence is deafening, and grossly hypocritical. Their selective application of the slogan "never again" within Africa, is the proof of a political agenda.
David Cherry assisted in the research for this article.
