Who funds China?

China is just as repressive as ever, no matter what they say. My brother (a professor) just came back from a month in the backcountry of China. He said that the repression of the ethnic minorities is very evident, and that he was assigned a government "minder" who shadowed him constantly- speaking with anyone that he spoke with. And who could forget Tianamen Square?

whatfools we all do pretty much everytime we make a purchase.

As usual, no mention of the massive Iraqi Holocaust engineered by the US/UK Axis.

Let's see, in Sudan:
450,000 people killed, out of a population of 39.4 million. Clearly genocide, caused by a superpower ruthlessly focused on securing part of its oil supply.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq:
1.2 million people killed, out of a population of 27.5 million. Clearly *not* genocide, this is just collateral damage, and sectarian violence that was in no way caused by an illegal invasion. And it all has *nothing* to do with a superpower ruthlessly focused on securing part of its oil supply.

Johann Hari:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari
He was a prominent liberal supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hari later said his support had been a 'terrible mistake'.
I guess poor Johann wants to get on the right side of the mess in Sudan, and it sure is easier to criticize the Chinese than the Americans and British...

Maybe Spielberg can use his influence with Israel to get them to apply pressure on China in the UN, tell China to stop thumbing their nose at World Opinion and do the right thing.

:-)

Too bad Bolten is no longer at the UN, he could scream at China, tell them to stop causing so much death and destruction for oil.

:-)

Next, Spielberg needs to speak out against Israel's position of genocide against the Palestinians, especially those in Gaza and the West Bank.

But don't hold your breath for THAT to happen anytime soon....

Spielberg's actions are only the latest sign that Israel and its supporters are the ones truly most truly behind the campaign to take the heat off the US government's own actions in Africa and elsewhere, by blaming Arabs on horseback and the evil Chinese for one small component of the bloodshed in Africa.

Yes, I too want to stop genocides where they are occurring. I want to stop torture and terrorism, too. The day when Spielberg is a true voice against his own government's genocides, torture, and terrorism is the minute we should start paying this guy some attention.

I await the day he speaks out against the US genocide attempted against the Iraqi and Afghan peoples. I await him speaking out against Israel's efforts at genocide in Gaza, and its destruction of Lebanon that it repeatedly engages in. Instead, he is silent about all this.

Here is Spielberg in 2002...

In response to questions about his views on the impending assault on Iraq, Spielberg told Italian journalists, "Bush's politics has been solid, grounded in reality, willing to uproot terrorism wherever it may be found." He continued: "We don't receive daily reports from the CIA, we watch TV like you, we wait to see what happens. But if Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam is making 'weapons of mass destruction,' I cannot not support the policies of his government."

Note... The above paragraph was taken from a report on the WSWS site. Note too that Spielberg is a long time Clinton supporter, and that includes back when the Clinton regime carried out its murderous economic sanctions against Iraq's children. In short, this guy is no saint at all, and by publishing this commentary, commondreams merely seems to be adding its voice to help support a campaign for military interventionism by the European and US governments into Africa.

Wasnt Spielberg talking during the Minority Report press junket? I remember reports that he supported an attack on iraq but later there was talk that it was not reported correctly and he was being hypothetical.
Regardless, what was Spielberg doing being artistic director in the first place? Why didnt China choose a chinese artistic director?
I cant recall what other Olympics have done but it strikes me as kitsch-y if I spelled it correctly. If China has to go to America for help then it makes them look especially artificial.

I hate a lot of things China does, but it does seem odd that China gets criticized for Darfur when the US doesnt get the same heat when it hosts an Olympics.
The human rights violations in Tibet and China are a far more serious issue in that this is direct--not an "investment" like Darfur is for China. Why not focus on that?

Anyway Spielberg is just a commercial director--he's a McDonalds kind of artist who has never made a movie that really says anything(Schindler's was not anything special except he directed it after doing all sorts of kiddie fare). In that sense he was probably a good fit for the shallow and pointless Olympics. Its a joke.

Chudan????
Chud is a curse word in some languages, meaning "F**k"
How appropriate

The chinese dictatorship assisted in selling body parts of its citizens in the US.

They know power and they know money.
That is how they control a nation of a Billion 200 mill.
They tout Chinese supremacy, and their people buy in, go along.

They are already playing an international power game that they are winning on their own terms - and the morons in the White house are clueless.

The Chinese are the only Powerful Nation in the world who have never known Democracy. They hav either had a monarchy or Communism. I hope Falun Gong makes some real inroads - they are the only hope the Chinese currently have.

What about the genocide in Palestine?
I keep hearing how the majority of Jews were against the invasion of Iraq and the whole Zionist game plan...but other than the usual voices I just don't hear them--I don't hear them opposing the Israel homeland-Fatherland and their genocide of the Palestinians--BUT I hear an awful lot of Jews concerned about the genocide in Darfur.

Some irony.

karlof1 February 14th, 2008 12:51 pm
How very true, karlof1.

Johann Hari seems to have a problem with the Chinese in Darfur and the Olympic Games in China, which seem to be his pet topic. Yet, he hasn't written anything about the genocide being carried out in Iraq. He refers to Darfur as 'the first genocide of the 21st century' - this isn't honest or credible journalism. He could try to be both these, and then, perhaps, people may take him seriously. Where's the trail (one could call it an ocean) of blood from Iraq leading to, Mr. Hari? Perhaps he could convince Mr. Spielberg to speak about the other holocaust as well, which would be a lot closer to home.

'Why do you look at the speck in someone else's eye, and pay no attention to the plank in your own?'

Hard to condemn China for their holocaust in Darfur without condemning the USA for theirs in the Middle East...

Of course, Speilburg and his "chosen people" are benefitting from the USA's slaughter

Who will play Shindler for the Iraqi's?

Bush defends US record on Darfur

US President George W Bush defends his decision not to intervene in Darfur's "genocide", in a BBC interview.

Could it be that Speilburg and his "chosen people" are unamerican?

While I don't want to diminish the injustices going on in Darfur, I have always found it rather odd that it is given such disporportionate attention by US Jews. What is the reason for this? Maybe because the victims, for once arean't Arab and/or Muslim?

The people of Sudan are working the kinks out after two decades of civil war. Those in the North (Khartoum) are mostly Muslim.
It dosen't help the suffering in Darfur now but where was Speilburg and the world during the civil war? Selling arms to both sides?

"Steven Spielberg has finally decided he does not want to be part of a holocaust stamped "Made in China". It's an overdue decision - but one that could now begin an Olympic chain reaction to save the starved survivors in Darfur."

FROM WHAT I recently learned, Spielberg is only contributing to hellbent propaganda for "Western" elites' cover-up, in this. And from recent reading, he's strongly or very pro-Israel and therefore pro-hell's Zionism, anti-Palestinian, anti-human rights, anti-intl laws and conventions, morality, etc.

As for China in Sudan, Johann Hari either doesn't know more than drip about what he's talking about, or he is another lying propagandist.

People should carefully wonder about the "West" again [demonizing] non-whites, foreigners, Asians, .... The demonisation attempt or "touch" that Hari has herein provided is immediately obvious; particularly when we've read from truthful analysts and writers on what's really going on in Africa.

Try the sub-Saharan subindex or index at www.globalresearch.ca , where there are articles by Keith Harmon Snow, among other writers who should be also read. He also has more at his own website, www.allthingspass.com .

The following recent piece by Snow provides a serious realisation on the question of why a Zionist, so someone like Spielberg, among many others, could want to lie to us all and to additionally demonise of China.

"Gertler's Bling Bang Torah Gang: Israel and The Ongoing Holocaust In Congo. Part 1",
by Keith Harmon Snow, Feb 7 2008,

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_keith_ha_080207_the_gertler_steinmet.htm

Or the copy at his website:

http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/
html-250GERTLERS%20BLING%20BANG%20TORAH%20GANG%20-%208%20February%202008%20%5B1%5D.htm

Just join those two lines together for the complete url.

Quote: "Maurice Templesman is one of the top funders of Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all hidden by the Western media.

The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.[1] But while the Africans are the victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending they are the saviors. Who is responsible?

...".

The "elites" Snow names and describes in this Feb. 7th article of his are all ... EVIL. Nothing short of [evil].

Isn't odd that there is NO genocide in Sudan, that only the U.S. has claimed that there's genocide there, while nearly [everyone] is SILENT about the very real and severe holocaust in Congo?!?!!

Spielberg's surely aware that the U.S. is the only country that's claimed that there supposedly is genocide occurring in Sudan, and that the rest of the world sure does not combined for dumber than the dumbest of all beasts on this planet, i.e., the USA. He is surely aware that it's not the worst case situation in the world, doesn't say a word against hellbent Israeli actions against innocent and very defenceless Palestinians, war of aggression on Lebanon, Israel's predatory operations for profit in African countries, and so on! Spielberg is not unaware of these realities, or if he is, then he's not someone with any respectability on important world issues and crises.

Spielberg surely knows that he's lying, while either Hari either knows he or she is also lying, or else he or she is one hellishly stupid idiot for pretending that he can supposedly write in authoritative (i.e., topic-authority, iow, expert) terms on a topic he demonstrates either nearly nothing about. It's very likely, however, that he or she is deliberately lying and trying to spread "Western" propaganda.

Britain also stands to profit big time from helping the U.S., NATO, and UN outing Russia and China from Africa.

The problem in Sudan is as usual; the USA and NATO, and the UN (as in every time it sides and operates with the USA and NATO). CHINA is NOT the problem; the West is!

If China's particularly guilty of crimes in any African country, then SEE Keith Harmon Snow; he'll cover this. If it's not true of China, then he also addresses this in some of his articles; just that I don't recall reading any mention (by him) of China being guilty of crimes there.

It's about bs "Western" efforts to OUT China and Russia from doing business with African countries for the NATURAL RESOURCES (TRY PLENTY OF OIL IN SUDAN, f.e.) that China and Russia both pay fairly for and help with setting up the resource exploitation or extraction operations, and shipping. Snow also previously said that China does not only arrange very fair and attractive business deals with African states, but has also gone beyond this, to pour money into communities for medical needs, food, etc. Like he's said, there are African states of which the leaders would much prefer to deal with China than with the USA or simply West, but they know that the West employs covert black ops for assassinating or otherwise overthrowing and replacing ethical leaders, etc.

The USA and Western ruling elites want natural resources that of serious profit potential everywhere these exist, and the USA, et al, constantly employ LIES, demonisation of others, etc., and wars of aggression, to achieve their racketeering goals.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again, shame on me!"

Americans like to use that quote, but like much else of intelligent nature, they don't want to live by what they preach.

Good comment Thadstone.

How's this for a solution? Send in some globally marginal force like Canada and Denmark for example to Darfur. Just a few thousand troops under no mandate and armed with just enough helicopter gunships and aircraft to wipe out the Janjaweed. It shouldn't take more than a few weeks. Then back up the victims with a massive food/housing relief and train and arm them to prevent a reoccurence. Not for oil, not to spite China, not for any ulterior motive except to prevent genocide.

" alexnosal February 14th, 2008 5:40 pm

Good comment Thadstone.

How's this for a solution? Send in some globally marginal force like Canada and Denmark for example to Darfur. Just a few thousand troops under no mandate and armed with just enough helicopter gunships and aircraft to wipe out the Janjaweed. ... Not for oil, not to spite China, not for any ulterior motive except to prevent genocide."

NO Western solution in African countries in conflict! It's the Western imperialists' fault that these conflicts exist to BEGIN WITH!! NO Western SCHMUCKS!!!

Canada and Denmark are fully in "bed" with the West's top imperialists; these two countries aren't going to do any good anywhere. As for Canada, it won't do any good until it gets another Pierre E. Trudeau or Lester B. Pearson kind of national leadership, and that day does not seem near yet.

And it's nonsense to suggest Canada and/or Denmark, instead of African countries for helping African countries!!

After reading the article, it is very clear to me that both Johann Hari and Spielberg are not only mistaken, but clearly frauds, liars, propagandists, ...

It'd be difficult to make oneself obviously pro-Western imperialism, along with its associated evils, than Hari has done about himself and for us to have the proof he's presented to us.

And it's another strike of or by The Independent UK against itself. Way to go; discredit yourself and thereby make it unnecessary for others to try to discredit you. The Independent's doing a bang-up job on its reputation.

I wonder if somebody found coltan in southern Sudan? I mean these tribal people were going about their pastoral way for eons and all of a sudden somebody wants the area cleared of all people for some damned good reason. It makes no sense, unless the soil has hidden riches.

Coltan is needed in every cell phone in the world and PSP and x-box etc. The implications are huge and these Africans are sitting atop billions without a clue or legal backing.

I remember when Rwanda and Burundi went all to hell, I asked myself, "Now what imperial objective could this civil war possibly be serving?" It wasn't until years later that the world learned about the area's coltan-rich soil.

"The Dogs of War" is a great read that explains Africa's chronic civil wars (with a lot more detail than "Lord of War" or Hotel Rwanda) and the widespread use of mercenaries on the continent by private Western mining companies.

is it not possible that the u.s. in Iraq and China in Darfur are BOTH bad? the
u.s. obviously has lost whatever moral credibility it might once have had, so we can hardly boycott the olympics. but our own monstrous behavior in Iraq does not justify what China is doing in Sudan. I like the idea of our athletes running around with banners and flags to embarrass the Chinese. they could at the same time wave Palestinian and Iraqi flags.

Like it or not, people who complain today about U.S. imperialism will have two imperialisms to complain about in the next 20 years. While we're mucking about in Iraq, China is securing access to raw materials all over the world without firing a shot. Ahhh, back to bipolarism. Or maybe tripolarism if you include India a little later. Or a quartet if Brazil becomes a serious player. Or a quintet if Russian power returns in a big way. And that's reckoning without the EU and Japan.

The US as the "world's only remaining superpower"...enjoy it while it lasts.

And never forget that over ONE MILLION Tibetans have died as a result of the Chinese invasion and occupation along with the systematic destruction of Tibetan culture, which if understood and allowed to flourish, would go a long way towards creating an improved and less violent world. The thugs who run China are barbaric and greedy, being a new mutant species of capitalists and totalitarian fascists and human rights violators without equal !

One simple ethical action we can do is to never purchase Chinese goods.

Om Mani Padme Hum ! May compassion be invoked for all sentient beings !

No way can Canada get involved in sending "peacekeepers" since we were part of the original problem that divided Sudan/Darfur. It was a Canadian oil company that caused the schism between the north and south. The public protest was such that the company was forced out and sold their interest in the works. I cannot remember exactly who bought it at the time, but for some reason, China doesn't come to mind. I didn't have internet at the time so I didn't get as much info as probably was available. (No links or references either, sorry).

Keep Canada's nose out of the Darfur issue because we surely will not be seen as "friendly." The best we can do is to point out ALL the geographical areas that are presently experiencing genocide and pressuring our government reps to apply pressure internationally.

It looks pretty ugly when the Chinese use the exact same tatic's as the US. Only on a smaller scale. Evil is still evil. Oil in most 3rd world countries is more a curse than a blessing. They must be [Christian] Chinese or something.

Spielberg, help the Palestinians please, the Jewish State of Israel is killing them, you must have some influence, don't you?

Spielberg is just another establishment stooge today.

So now China is the big bad boy because they are looking for access to oil, and are dealing with a government that might not be so kind. Gasp, we would never deal with governments who treat their people poorly, no matter how much oil they have. What is this garbage?.

Here what our VP had to say in his Halliburton days (June 23, 1998)

"[W]e oftentimes find ourselves operating in some very difficult places. The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

China gets 10% of their oil from Sudan, so they do business with them, otherwise they can not make the stuff we buy from them. If we are so upset, we could threaten to cut off all imports, and pressure them to stop buying from Sudan. Right?

They loan money to African nations with no strings attached while we use the IMF/World Bank to loan money with so many strings we make them our debt slaves. Who is worse?

We get more oil from Africa than Saudi Arabia today and by 2015 will get more than 25% of our imports, so talk of genocide in Sudan is just an excuse to justify military intervention.

The biggest country in Africa we import from is Nigeria (5th largest overall) and they are hardly the model of human rights. From wikipedia.

"In its 2005 report on human rights practices around the world, the U.S. Department of State found that Nigeria's human rights record was "poor." According to the report, Nigerian government officials and police were responsible for "serious abuses," including politically motivated killings; the use of lethal force against suspected criminals and hostage-seizing militants in the Niger Delta; beatings and even torture of suspects, detainees, and convicts; and extortion of civilians. Other abuses included violence, discrimination, and genital mutilation directed against women, child labor and prostitution, and human trafficking.[1]

Compounding these abuses was the application of Islamic law (sharia) in 12 northern states. Sentences imposed under sharia included amputations, stonings, and canings, but no death sentences were carried out. In addition, the U.S. Department of State noted restrictions on the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion, movement, and privacy.[1]"

Over the last 30 years, we have plundered Latin American and African nations to the point they all prefer dealing with China. This is much like the situation after WW II when France and the British found none of their former colonies wanted anything to do with them given their past history, preferring to cut deals with the US in the hope we would be a better partner. Didn't work out. Today, countries are looking for a new partner, since we have not been good to them, and China and Russia are looking more attractive.

As for the situation in Sudan, below is a link to a good article by William Engdahl

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5714

This has little to do with 'genocide' in Dafur. It has more to do with 'stop China' at all costs. The HYPOCRISY of the people involved, ( eg. Hari and Spielberg) confirms that.

As for Hari his venom makes it appear that he's more anti-Chinese than really saving Sudanese lives. The poor fellow must have had a bad MSG experience in some Chinese restaurant and has decided to take it out on the entire Chinese nation, race, peoples etc.

I know the basics of Chinese 20th Century history, but I still don't get why if their government is so repressive, these BILLION people don't do something about it?

Is the repression only Political, not General?

This would not seem to be bourn out by the recent example of the snowstorm related stranding of so many hundreds of thousands, -why do they all sit there patiently?

The failure of the Chinese peole to overturn their repressive system is telling us something about the Nature of Humanity.

Are we listening?

-matti

Oh, matti, matti, matti:

Obviously you've never been to China. I have and have taught there for almost two years. Suprise! Surprise! Surprise! The country simply isn't what you describe it as being. And any honest person who has worked or lived in China would attest to that...
Another surprise, the majority of Chinese DO support their government and are PROUD of their rise in the world's eyes...

Oh, matti, matti, matti, the western propaganda you've swallowed is far worse than the propaganda in China... I hope you're able to travel to China soon. We all need some education...(*-^)

China is collaborating with a government that mistreats the black part of the population and has done so for a long time. The US systematically CREATES repressive governments whereever it needs them, fomenting coups and assasinations. China hasn't done that. The US invades other countries routinely, China hasn't done that. I agree they are nasty with Tibet which they believe is part of China. But the fact is that the nastiness of China does not compare to the nastiness of the US and Israel. Spielberg, like the overwhelming majority of jews has a blind spot with respect to Israel and the US. He cares about jews, not about people in general. The Darfur issue is an attempt to whitewash US and Israeli action by making it seem that everybody does it so it's ok. Jews have an exceptional position, they can do anything and it is justified because of the holocaust. Nobody else is justified. The attack on Iraq and Afghanistan is justified because it is to protect Israel and the West, Darfur is not because it isn't about protecting Israel or the West, i.e. there is no excuse, so it is much worse. That's the twisted thinking.

ONGOING AMERICAN CRIMES:

Support of Israel and its rape of Palestine
Occupation of Afghanistan, millions dead
Occupation of Iraq. millions dead
Attempted coups and assasinations in Venezuela
Control of Colombia to use against other south american countries
Persistant embargo of Cuba
Support of the Nigerian government repression
Support of electoral fraud in Mexico
Support for a separatist movement by the rich to undermine the Bolivian government.
Attack on the world trade center and ongoing terrorization of the US population through scare tactics
Use of the IMF and world bank to impoverish countries to the benefit of the US
Support for the repressive regime of Saudi Arabia and its mistreatment of the minority Shia
Persistant interference and destabilization of Lebanon

This is an incomplete list of ONGOING US abuses. The history is even worse. How can any country compete with that?

Darfur: THE POLITICS OF NAMING
Mahmood Mamdani: Columbia Professor
18 March 2007

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims, too, are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as "Arabs" confront victims clearly identifiable as "Africans".

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in The New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under "a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel". That intervention should not be subject to "political or civilian" considerations, and the intervening forces should have the right to shoot -- to kill -- without permission from distant places: these are said to be "humanitarian" demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for "force as a first-resort response". What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, "Out of Iraq and into Darfur".

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics -- a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the West calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late Seventies, cooperation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.

As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia -- the Janjaweed -- that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjaweed, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at state level and resource-sharing at community level, with land being the key resource.

Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first by the United States, the second by the United Nations. The US verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington's proclamation began with "a genocide alert" from the management committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on June 24 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.

The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chairperson of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the AU. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on September 23, Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear: "Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing."

By October, the Security Council had established a commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report in three months on "violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties", and specifically to determine "whether or not acts of genocide have occurred". Among the members of the commission was Dumisa Ntsebeza, former head of the investigative unit of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In its report, submitted on January 25 2005, the commission concluded that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide ... directly or through the militias under its control". But the commission did find that the government's violence was "deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians". Indeed, "even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels". These acts, the commission concluded, "were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity" (my emphasis).

At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces -- namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement -- which it held "responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes" (my emphasis).

The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof's Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.

Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of "ethnic cleansing": "Sudan's Arab rulers" had "forced 700 000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages" (March 24 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. "Right now," he wrote on March 27, "the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region." He continued: "The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government" and "the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes". He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on May 29, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that "at best, 'only' 100 000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease", but "if things go badly, half a million will die".

The UN commission's report was released on February 25 2005. It confirmed "massive displacement" of persons ("more than a million" internally displaced and "more than 200 000" refugees in Chad) and the destruction of "several hundred" villages and hamlets as "irrefutable facts"; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had "allegedly killed over 70 000 persons".

The publication of the commission's report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign.

The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on May 3, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had "Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration's past judgement that the killings amount to genocide", he had "also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur's total death toll: 60 000 to 160 000".

Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320 000 for 2004 (June 16 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70 000 and 220 000 (February 23 2005). The number began to climb once more to "nearly 400 000" (May 3 2005), only to come down yet again to 300 000 (April 23 2006). Each time, figures were given with equal confidence, but with no attempt to explain their basis.

In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as "war crimes".

Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology ("race") and, if not that, certainly in "culture".

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday's victims are today's perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.

The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign's constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: "Arabs" are trying to eliminate "Africans". But both "Arab" and "African" have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of "Arab". Locally, "Arab" was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become "Arab" over time. The third meaning of "Arab" was "privileged and exclusive"; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence.

"African", in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an "African" was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic). The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur.

The Save Darfur campaign's characterisation of the violence as "Arab" against "African" obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of "Arab" and "African": a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion "Arab", as against "African", has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.

The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.

To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: How could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It's tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides -- Hema and Lendu -- are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?

Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question: "When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It's a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200 000 to more than 500 000. In contrast, 4-million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two." But, instead of answering the question, Kristof -- now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell -- moved on: "And malaria annually kills 1-million to 3-million people -- meaning that three years' deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria."

And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: "We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That's what makes genocide special -- not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria."

That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias -- many of them no more than child soldiers‚ were trained by the US's allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur -- but not the violence in Kivu -- is named as a genocide?

It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict.

If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds.

With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war that intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement.

The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny "Arab-ised" elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly which has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces which continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.

The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur. The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a "civilising mission".

Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them.

Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

Excellent article by dcbeltway. Correct me if I'm mistaken but the word 'China' does not even appear once! Indicating that the linking of China to this so-called 'genocide' is a deliberate ploy to 'stop China' at all cost.

And who's behind it? Look carefully at the zionist jews, like Perle and Wolfowitz, who are part of the neo-con cabal. The neo-cons have always had China in their sights, as China is the only country that can potentially challenge the 'supremacy' of the U.S. In fact China was their first and primary target until 9/11.

And, now Spielberg, the jewish hypocrite, has joined the neo-con anti-China choir...

Now for a small history lesson: During the 2nd World War China was the only country that allowed jews fleeing Hitler sanction. Yup! That's right! Check it out. The rest of Europe, including Britain, refused them such sanction. Oh, by the way, so did the 'democractic, freedom loving, human rights defender' U.S. of America... Talk about having no gratitude!

Well, after reading both this article and the posts generated by it, at least now I understand why Spielberg endorsed Hillary Clinton.