…This past week, the government of Sudan indicated finally that it is willing to accept the UN peacekeepers authorized by Security Council Resolution 1706 of ten months ago, although whether it carries through with its pledge remains to be seen. A visitor from another planet might conclude that one government holds a veto over the Security Council at least in the case of this very long-overdue resolution.

You’ll recall that 1706 authorized the “rapid” deployment of a Chapter Seven force of 22,500 police and soldiers to Darfur in order to protect civilians and humanitarian workers there. As Eric Reeves recently pointed out, a mere 200 UN technical personnel have deployed over the past ten months as “the sole international support for a crumbling and badly demoralized African Union force”.

The government of Sudan has openly defied the international community since the burning of African villages and killing, burning and raping of civilians across the province of Darfur began in February, 2003. Our Canadian humanitarian concept, the “responsibility to protect” which was adopted by a UN Summit, has morphed in this situation into a notion at least temporarily that a genocidal regime in Khartoum can “protect” its own officials from facing the International Criminal Court (ICC) for their numerous crimes against humanity in Sudan.

I’m delighted, however, to note that investigators for the ICC even now are travelling the world, including Canada, looking for evidence from former residents of Darfur about war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. If you know someone in Alberta who might have such eye witness accounts, please let me know (david.w.kilgour@gmail.com).

The ICC will presumably not repeat the serious error of the UN Commission of Inquiry into Darfur, which chose not to draw clear lessons from facts. Some of us attending a university conference a few years ago were dismayed when a police detective from Canada told delegates that the first night she and other international investigators reached Sudan they were told by their UN supervisor that they were not to find genocide in Darfur within the terms of the Genocide Convention.

Some Sudanese History

Global warming, as real as it is in northern Darfur and many other places, is not a sound explanation for what has been occurring there since early 2003. Desertification in the Sahel, including Darfur, has certainly exacerbated tensions between sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralists. The former tend to be Africans, the latter Arabs, although the non-Arab Zaghawa, who are a key part of the rebels, are camel herders.

Eric Reeves is quite right that it is unhelpful for any UN official to attempt to pin the blame on climate change essentially alone as was attempted recently. Some well-documented historical facts suggest a different primary cause for the creation of 4.7 million conflict-affected civilians across Darfur, according to the latest UN estimates, and hundreds of thousands of dead-many murdered and many dead of related causes such as starvation-and the prospect, in Reeves words, of “cataclysmic human destruction looming ever closer.”

Among the unpalatable facts are these:

>Since seizing power through a military coup from the country’s elected government in 1989 and deliberately wrecking the best chance for North-South peace since 1956, the current regime in Khartoum has launched a campaign of “ethnically-targeted human violence and destruction” (Reeves) throughout Sudan. This happened in various regions, but most notoriously in Darfur. The pattern of using Russian-made bombers and helicopter gunships to wreak havoc on African villages before the Janjaweed arrive to murder, burn, rape and steal was developed by the regime first in the Nuba Mountains and elsewhere in the South years ago, There it was militias rather than the notorious Janjaweed, but the methods were the same.

Talisman Energy

This reality is presumably one reason why the Catholic, Anglican and United churches, along with 14 law professors, three members of the Harker commission on Sudan and others of us, are opposing the government of Canada in a US court in respect of Talisman Energy. The plaintiffs are numerous residents of Sudan, including the Presbyterian Church of Sudan.

We say that when it comes to allegations of heinous international wrongs, including war crimes, any country should be able to assert the jurisdiction of its courts. Canada’s government is asserting the same thing right now in the case of Desire Munyaneza, who is on trial in Montreal for alleged war crimes during the Rwandan genocide. It should be added that the Paul Martin government wrongly attempted to do essentially the same thing earlier in the Talisman case with a letter. There is nothing partisan about the position some of us have taken because we opposed Martin too.

>Long before the rebellion in Darfur began in 2003, the government of Sudan was arming Arab militias across the province and forcibly disarming African ones. Professor Reeves notes that the regime had also divided the province into three states in 1994 as a way to deny the non-Arab Fur, being the largest ethnic community in Darfur, a political majority in any part of the province.

>The Bashir government in Khartoum has sided ever more with the most violent elements within the Arab militias in Darfur, which became the Janjaweed. It is true that the ethnic conflict in the province worsened after the famine there of 84-85, but it was only in the 1990s that ethnicity became the defining feature of the conflict. The potential for a genocidal destruction had become clear.

>I might add here that an International Citizen’s Tribunal was held in the UN church across the street from the UN building in Manhattan last year. The six judges, headed by Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate for literature, unanimously found President el Bashir to be guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. You can access the entire trial at judgmentongenocide.org, but if you’re short of time please look at the brief comments by judge Gloria White-Hammond.

China’s Government Buys Alberta Oil Sands land

Permit me here to make here what might seem like an off-topic observation on yesterday’s announcement that the Alberta government will permit a company owned by the government of China to purchase eleven blocks of land in oil sands country in the northeast part of the province. An Energy department spokesperson justified the decision by saying that it’s important to be “open for business”.

Open to whom? Would the provincial government sell 11 blocks to a company owned by the Burmese junta?  The government of Zimbabwe?  The government of North Korea? One certainly hopes not.

Of course, each of these government’s are different in various respects, but each, including China’s, are totalitarian regimes with continuing appalling human rights records. David Matas and I , along with many others around the world, have concluded to our dismay that the government of China is continuing to murder Falun Gong prisoners of conscience without trial or conviction of anything and to sell their vital organs for huge prices often to foreigners, including Canadians. Our revised report (organharvestinvestigation.net) is available in about 18 languages.

In short, I do not think any government of Alberta should be selling oils sands land to a company owned by a government which continues to murder its own people for cash.

Mia Farrow and “Genocide Olympics”

This brings me finally back to Darfur and what Mia Farrow has aptly termed the “Genocide Olympics”. There is little doubt in many minds that the Government of Sudan’s just announced acceptance of the UN peacekeepers under resolution 1706 has everything to do with attempting to make the games a success for Beijing. China’s government is getting more and more oil from Sudan and has been both selling weapons to its government, which are in turn used against African civilians now in Darfur and earlier in the North, and protecting its government at the Security Council.

In his visit to Khartoum a month or so ago, China’s president Hu even promised of all things to finance the building of a palace for Mr. Bashir. Nothing appears to have been said between them about the ongoing catastrophe in Darfur. Within days of Ms Farrow, penning the term “Genocide Olympics”, a senior diplomat was sent from Beijing to Khartoum. There is now a sudden change of heart there about the UN peacekeepers, which is no coincidence.

No-one I hope would more like the killing and raping and burning of civilians across Darfur stopped than David Matas and myself. Does ‘Mighty Mia’ have more clout than the Security Council, the UN Secretary General or any other institution or individual? It certainly seems so. Good for her. She should get the Nobel Peace Prize if Khartoum really does follow through and allow the UN peacekeepers in to stop the tragedy. One report last week said that they will not arrive until next year.

Which celebrity will join many of us in speaking out about the “Bloody Harvest” Games? The killing of innocent Falun Gong practitioners would in such case probably as quickly as the Chinese diplomat went to Khartoum.

Thank you.