Over the next several weeks The Suburban, which co-sponsored the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal’s Darfur Conference, will be publishing excerpts from the remarks of many of the speakers. They will cover the political, diplomatic, military and legal issues involved. — Beryl Wajsman, Editor

The headlines flood us. “China continues to provide equipment to Sudan despite the fact Sudan is using these supplies to commit genocide,” said one. “The Olympic Games and China cannot co-exist,” said another.

USA Today reported that, “U.S. actress Mia Farrow leads torch relay against African genocide.” China’s support of the Khartoum regime is blatant. Aside from supplying money and arms China has shielded Khartoum from international sanctions over its actions in Darfur.

Among the global activists trying to stop the Darfur genocide who gathered recently at Montreal’s Darfur Conference was the Hon. David Kilgour.

He is rallying world-wide support to pressure China to stop aiding and abetting the criminal Khartoum regime that is committing these atrocities. He gave a powerful indictment of China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide.  

— Stephanie Stein

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The Government of China plays a big role in Sudan. The Bashir regime has been committing crimes against humanity and genocide in its province of Darfur since mid-2003. There is little doubt that the government of China’s recent sudden interest in stopping the killing, burning and raping, which continues against communities deemed ‘African” in Darfur, is related to offsetting for public relations purposes the “Genocide Olympics” charge about which Darfur supporters like Mia Farrow continue to raise public awareness.

Over the past decade, the government of China has provided the Bashir government with more than $US 10 billion in commercial and capital investment, mostly for oil investments, with crude oil comprising virtually all of Sudan’s exports and much of it going to China. Approximately seven percent of China’s oil imports currently come from Sudan. According to one source within Sudan, up to 70 percent of the Sudanese government’s revenues from oil are spent on arms, a good deal of them from China. Nick Kristof of the New York Times has reported that the government of China has built four small arms factories in Sudan. In February of this year, Chinese President Hu, visiting Khartoum, offered to forgive $80 million of his host government’s debt and promised another $13 million for infrastructure, including a new presidential palace.

The most valuable service Hu has provided to Bashir’s government is using China’s permanent veto at the UN Security Council to protect the Sudanese regime from any robust peacemaking initiatives while the slaughter in Darfur continues. Only following Mia Farrow’s op-ed piece in March, 2007, which accused the government of China of assisting in genocide, did China’s UN representative join in the Security Council initiative to send 26,000 civilian police and soldiers to Darfur.

The specifics of UN Security Council resolution 1769 passed at the end of July demonstrate how well Beijing continues to protect Khartoum: The hybrid UN/African Union force will have no authority to seize weapons from belligerents, thus probably making it impossible to control the Janjaweed and other militias that have been slaughtering African Darfurians; there is no provision for sanctioning the government in Khartoum in the highly probable event that it refuses to comply; the watered down command-and-control provisions will inevitably create problems between the African Union commander on the ground in Darfur and the UN Department of Peacekeeping in New York. Nothing is specified about containing the violence that has spread into Chad, where China is looking for oil.

The resolution says not a word about halting aerial assaults by Khartoum’s helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers. Tragically, the deployment of the peacekeepers is still to be very slow, with Dec. 31, 2007 being the deadline for the transfer of authority from the AU to the AU/UN hybrid, although this itself is merely symbolic and unlikely in practice to save civilian lives in the meantime and quite probably for a considerable period thereafter. The inability of the African Union to solicit enough trained troops and civilian police for the hybrid force remains unaddressed. The AU Commission chair Alpha Konare indicated last week that he wants only Africans to be deployed and that they must be under African command.

Shaming the government of China over its partnership role in Sudan offers the best hope to save civilian lives in Darfur. The key task is to transfer knowledge to those presently unaware of China’s role in Sudan generally and Darfur specifically.  

What would happen, for example, if students and others demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy in Ottawa or the consulate in Montreal, declaring with banners, placards, and T-shirts that China must be held accountable for its complicity in the Darfur genocide? What would happen if such demonstrations are continuous, and grow, and spread to China’s embassies in other countries? What would happen if everywhere Chinese diplomats, politicians and business people travel they are confronted by those who insist on making it an occasion for highlighting China’s destructive role in Darfur?

To succeed, the campaign must be creative and focused. It must take advantage of every means offered through electronic communications. The government of China must be forced to see that there is a stark choice before it: either it uses its leverage effectively with Khartoum to improve and speed up the UN/AU deployment discussed above or it will be the target of one of the most powerful international shaming campaigns in history.  

The general lack of effective advocacy initiatives has not been lost on Khartoum’s génocidaires. Despite the enormous and consequential successes of the American-led divestment campaign, pressure must be ratcheted up even more. Other European companies should follow the lead of Germany’s Siemens and Switzerland’s ABB Ltd., who have both suspended operations in Sudan. Such ongoing loss of European commercial and capital investment certainly has the full attention of the Bashir regime.  

The task is daunting but fully achievable, given the moral passion and creative energies of the Darfur advocacy communities. All success to the campaigns!

The Hon. David Kilgour was Canada’s Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific (2000-2002) and for Africa and the Middle East (1997-2000). He is an international campaigner for Human Rights and with David Matas co-authored the seminal report on China’s persecution of the Falun Gong and the brutal practice of organ harvesting. He is one of the leaders of the worldwide campaign to boycott the Beijing Olympics.