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08/18/2004:

"Enough Imperial Crusades"

commondreams.org
The Alternative to Armed Intervention in Darfur is not Passive Resignation, but Support for an African Union-led Solution

by Peter Hallward in the Guardian

What is exceptional about the violence of the government-backed Janjaweed militia in Darfur, is less its scale than the intense - if belated - international attention it has received.

To oppose direct western intervention in Sudan is not to downplay Khartoum's crimes during this latest twist in the catastrophic war that has cost perhaps two million lives since 1983. Over the last 20 years, in order to shore up their exclusive and authoritarian rule, Sudan's succession of military rulers have done everything possible to sustain an often imaginary distinction between "Arabs" and "Africans", pitting Muslims against Christians and herders against farmers .

Before we jump to the conclusion that benevolent invasion, however, is the natural consequence of our new-found humanitarian duties, we should remember that this won't be the first time that either Britain or the US has intervened in Sudan. An earlier moral crusade, the "war against slavery", provided much of the ostensible justification for British colonization of the region at the end of the 19th century. Britain's disastrous southern policy, inaugurated in 1929, made permanent the long-standing division between a relatively prosperous (mainly Muslim) northern territory and a much poorer (mainly animist or Christian) southern territory. The war that began between these two territories even before the British abandoned the colony in 1956 entered its most violent phase shortly after the Americans began backing, in the late 70s, the flagging regime of Sudan's increasingly reactionary General Gaafar Nimeiri.

The resulting chaos created the conditions for the Taliban-style reaction whose effects continue to shape the situation even today. full article