While no one in the Save Darfur movement has yet emerged as the heir apparent to the sublimely banal Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman and chief prevaricator during the bombing of Yugoslavia, Ann-Louise Colgan and Marie Clarke-Brill of Africa Action have emerged as top contenders, assuming their wish for ‘intervention that goes beyond humanitarian aid’ is granted by the Bush administration. Groups such as Africa Action have joined the strange hodgepodge of groups ranging from Christian Evangelicals to the International Crisis Group to groups such as the American Jewish World Service, agitating for us intervention in Darfur under the charmimg slogan ‘Out of Iraq, Into Darfur’. Unfortunately, progressive radio programmers such as Pacifica’s Democracy Now, Hard Knock radio and Uprising have all jumped on the bandwagon and have been featuring guests who are advocating intervention or at the very least providing no criticism of the dubious campaign.
KPFA's Hard Knock radio recently featured Marie Clarke-Brill of Africa Action, who complained that the bush administration has remained insensible to their appeals to intervene and stop the genocide. According to Brill, the Bush administration is cynically coddling the Sudanese government because it supposedly provides invaluable intelligence for the war on terror. Brill went on to say that the bush administration should adopt an aggressive Africa policy like the Clinton administration before it and use the 'big stick' approach - presumably referring to Clinton’s callous bombing of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in August 1998.
It is bad enough that Brill should invoke the Clinton administration’s Africa policy as an example to the equally malevolent Bush regime. The bombing of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant was itself a war crime and was probably the cause of death on a scale that potentially rivals the casualty rate in Darfur. Indeed, part of the genius of the Clinton administration lay in its ability to carry forward a nefarious policy agenda in Africa even while creating the impression of benevolence. Clinton himself was received as a hero during his triumphant tour of Africa in March 1998, during which he apologized for ‘failing to intervene' in Rwanda, helping foster the 'never again' trope that drives the Save Darfur campaign. In fact, Clinton’s tour of Africa was a victory tour to survey the battlefield in which the United States had emerged triumphant in its geopolitical battle for control of the region, in which it displaced France from its sphere of influence.
This geopolitical war between France on the one hand and the Anglo-American alliance on the other was one key dynamic in the conflagration in the Great lakes region which began in the early 1990s with incursions by the Ugandan Army, led by revanchist Tutsi exiles (Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front) into Rwanda which in 1994 led to a full scale invasion from Uganda into Rwanda, precipitating a genocidal civil war in that country and later an invasion of the Congo by Ugandan and Rwandan troops in collaboration with United States special forces to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko and install Laurent Kabila, resulting in far more deaths than occurred in Rwanda and civil war that continues to this day, and largely ignored by the same ‘international community’ that is so concerned about suffering in Darfur. Yet it is always Rwanda that is invoked as the point of reference for understanding Darfur; one big lie reinforcing another…
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