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    Peace Unattainable in Darfur
    By Michael Chetrit and Mahor Chiche
    Le Monde

    Tuesday 27 June 2006

    For UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Darfur, that province of western Sudan where large-scale massacres have been unfolding since 2003, is "hell on earth."

    During the last twenty years, the international community has stood by, impotent, while massive massacres in southern Sudan have killed 2 million people since 1983. Today, the international community must make the crimes against the black civilian populations of Darfur cease. The Janjaweed militias, allied with the Islamist regime in Khartoum, use "Arab" Muslim tribes to massacre the "African" Muslim tribes who dispute the west of the country.

    According to a devastating report by the International Criminal Court's Procurer General presented to the UN on June 14th, more than 200,000 civilians out of 6 million Darfurians have been killed since 2003, at a rate of 10,000 victims a month. Today, 2.5 million refugees and displaced persons live in battered camps, maintained by hobbled international aid and terrorized by the Khartoum regime. Since June 2004, 7,000 under-equipped soldiers from the African Union have been confined to the difficult role of simple observers in a region as large as France.

    Moreover, the African Union, which is no longer financed by the international community, does not intend to continue its mission beyond September 30. This departure risks sparking an intensification of the attacks, which continue today in spite of a "second" peace agreement for disarmament and democratization signed in May in Abuja, Nigeria, between the Sudanese government and the main Darfur rebel militia, the Movement for the Liberation of Sudan.

    Last May 16, the UN Security Council finally adopted a resolution authorizing the principle of a Blue Helmet operation in Darfur to replace the African Union mission. That resolution was adopted by virtue of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter that makes provision for the possibility of economic or military "coercive measures." But that eventuality remains theoretical, since Russia and especially China remain very "non-committal" about any use of force. Sudan, in fact, represents 6% of Chinese oil imports.

    In consequence, the United Nations desperately seeks to obtain Khartoum's agreement for this peace-keeping operation. Sudan has certainly accepted a UN evaluation mission on Sudanese territory, attracting some thunder from al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri, but it still opposes Blue Helmet access to Darfur. The blockage is total. The assistant UN secretary general has, in fact, declared: "All peace-keeping operations in Africa are effected with the cooperation of the receiving country."

    The UN has been unceasingly active since the beginning of the conflict, and yet, the situation on the ground does not improve. The Sudanese government gains time while the massacres continue. The Khartoum regime - which originated from a 1989 coup d' tat that occurred when its party, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, received only 15% of the votes in the country's first free elections - has distinguished itself by its brutality for close to seventeen years, first in southern Sudan, then in Darfur. In the face of this dictatorship, it is no longer conceivable to imagine a way out other than its ouster from power. Only a united front from the international community will allow the massacres to be stopped and democracy to be restored to Sudan.

    To overcome the Chinese veto, there is, therefore, only one possibility: rally China to an international mobilization by reassuring it about the continuity of its oil operations in Sudan. The lives of the great majority of the Sudanese people, too long oppressed, depend upon it.

    --------

    Michael Chetrit and Mahor Chiche are a member and vice-president, respectively, of Urgence Darfour France.

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    Chinese Africa
    Le Monde | Editorial

    Friday 23 June 2006

    Will Africa be Chinese in a decade? The question may seem fanciful. Nonetheless, it is taken seriously in Western strategic circles, which worry about it. Since the end of the 1990s, the Chinese breakthrough in Africa has taken on spectacular proportions. Beijing leaders court the continent assiduously. In only two months' time, Chinese president Hu Jintao, and his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, effected two much-noted visits. The first plowed through Morocco, Nigeria, and Kenya in April. The second is now in the process of completing a trip that will have led him through Egypt, Ghana, Congo, Angola, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The charm offensive is sustained and systematic.

    The Chinese are not coming there to preach global revolution. That era is over. It is no longer the moment for the ideological messianism that inspired Beijing's diplomacy during the era of the "anti-imperialist struggle" and rivalry with the USSR. The phase of intense struggle for influence with Taiwan - which fostered a handful of client states in Africa - has also been concluded ever since South Africa, then Senegal, ceded to the Popular Republic's Sirens. It's a very crude, some would even say cynical, pragmatism that presently motivates China.

    Like Westerners, China covets the continent's wealth. It is purchasing massive quantities of oil, manganese, cotton, and many other raw materials. And it is discharging a growing flow of made-in-China products, much appreciated by African consumers with their modest purchasing power. Trade volume, which tripled between 2001 and 2004, is exploding.

    Westerners are very ill-placed to denounce this growing influence of Beijing on a continent with respect to which they too have been champions of cynicism. The worries that this inexorable Sino-ization of Africa may arouse are nonetheless legitimate. For Beijing's leaders hardly allow themselves to be encumbered by scruples in this strategy that has no other end than to feed the Middle Kingdom's economic machine. In the name of an anti-colonialist rhetoric that still resonates powerfully in African capitals, they have made "non-interference in domestic affairs" of African governments the cardinal principle of their diplomacy.

    We can understand that repressive and corrupt governments may like one another. But it's not certain that the African public, victim of those governments, will gain from such collusion. The dubious friendship between China and Zimbabwe defines caricature. Anxious to rectify its image as predator, Beijing made a gesture by financing the African Union force in Darfur. It's time for China to take more of an interest in Africans than in their leaders.