The council moved the venue of this all-important deliberation to enable its members to consult with the UN General Assembly, also scheduled this week. Whatever the African Union has decided about Sudan, most likely was determined by the hypocrisy of international diplomacy.
What do I mean? The 7,000-member African Mission in Sudan (AMIS) was deployed in 2004 in Darfur as a result of an intra-African Union compromise that basically guaranteed that the defanged troops would play boy scouts in a very hostile environment. It could intervene to protect civilian life, but without the robust mandate required to confront armed groups nor the funding and equipment to carry out even its limited responsibilities.
AMIS’s constrained mission was crafted as a concession to the vigorous lobbying efforts of Egypt and Libya. A handful of Black African countries, most notably Senegal and Gambia, unsuccessfully tried to fight for a stronger mandate for the peace keeping force.
So, essentially, the Egyptians and Libyans got what they desired for Sudan, a watered-down mission that would diplomatically save the Arab regime in Khartoum
Darfur’s misfortune is that the African Union, which inherited the empty coffers of the Organization of African Unity that it succeeded in 2002, has a congenital weakness.
It was rescued from neonatal penury by the largesse of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who even paid the arrears of OAU membership dues of several African countries.
Nevertheless, AMIS performed much better than intended by Egypt, Libya, and Sudan.
Despite a lack of resources, the troops were highly motivated. They monitored the security situation and bore witness to the ordeal of the 2 million-plus Darfurians displaced by the janjawid (nomadic government-armed Arab militia), and, protected, wherever possible the vulnerable civilians.
It is therefore surprising and disappointing that instead of strengthening the mission, the United States, Britain, and western media, kept harping away at the alleged incompetence of AMIS.
My pan-Africanist brother Tajudeen Abdul Raheem, pointed out in his well-articulated Pan African post card (published on www.Pambazuka.org) of September 6, that the mission’s challenges helped bolster the “misconception that Africans cannot resolve their problems themselves.”
So, the cynical and hypocritical maneuvering of north African nations to protect Arab interests in Sudan tied up the mission’s hands and supplied ammunition to Afro-pessimists everywhere.
The U.S. and British governments know very well that they have squandered all their political capital in Iraq, but because they feel compelled to respond to pressures from some of their domestic constituencies (largely religious and human rights groups) they have been making empty noises.
Whatever conscience-numbing promises are made, no western nation is ready to commit troops for deployment in Sudan. Hypocrisy, in other words, is written all over the wringing of hands about genocide and suffering in Darfur.
With gum Arabic and oil deals to make in Sudan, niggers in danger (excuse my French) are the least of the priorities of the business-led western governments. All they want is to put some diplomatic fig leaf on the feast of contracts they are all chomping on their bits to snap up.
The commendable performance of AMIS gives me hope that slowly the scales are falling from our collective eyes. I was especially pleased that rather than compromise and humiliate itself by taking the Arab League’s money to finance an extension of AMIS instead of deploying a proposed UN force which Sudan fiercely opposes, the African Union honorably rejected the petrodollars.
The ruthless policies of the Sudanese government ought to cause more outrage. But Khartoum has managed to deftly manipulate Arab solidarity and Africa’s colonial history to carry on an elaborately cruel political hoax in Sudan -- that Sudan is an Arab country. Now, that combustible fiction is falling apart, albeit catastrophically.
Sudan likes to cast itself in the role of an anti-imperialist bulwark, lately even evoking to its advantage Hezbollah’s resistance to Israeli aggression in Lebanon. All of this of course is hogwash. What we are witnessing is the violent if slow death of a racist, minority Arab-supremacist, and crypto-apartheid regime. After 50 years of abuse, alienation, and neglect, the majority indigenous African peoples in southern, eastern, western, and central Sudan have all launched long overdue armed rebellions.
But the Arab world that helped manufacture the fiction won’t let go of their cultural colony. It is up to us, whose first allegiance is to Africa, to make sure that this mad supremacist dream doesn’t claim any more sacrificial victims.