Digesting the research about Darfur

My recent focus has fallen on Darfur, but this continues a lifelong theme of focusing on Africa in general. Being African-American and having been to Africa a couple of times, I am interested in the myriad of people there, in my possible ancestry and affinity to those people. I don't know where any ancestors I had might have lived so my connection is general. However, last week when I heard about Ira Newble (of the Cleveland Cavaliers) and his open letter to China about it's involvement in Sudan's oil industry, it suddenly seemed very important to understand something about the situation and become informed. I admire Newble's social consciousness, which stands in stark contrast to other athlete's silence and apparent deafness to social issues.

I'm tackling the effort one day at a time and trying to stay open minded but it's not easy. For one thing, I'm trying to dispel in myself a reluctance to confront a very real, very tragic situation. I don't like the bad news of folks experiencing hell on earth and there is a part of me that wants to continue to bury my head in the sand. But I can no longer, in good conscience, ignore what is getting increased media attention. The democrats commented about it the other night during the debate. http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN0342349720070604 A brief session with Google with Darfur as a search topic reveals so many blogs, so many focused on commenting, many focused on helping in some way, or protesting in some way. It is becoming a hot issue and rightly so.

And late, by the way; I feel really late. A 2004 Washington Post article was very clear about China's investment in Sudan's oil industry and it's role in supplying arms to the government which are used on villagers, labeled rebels, as the government clears the land. [Reading that Post article, I am reminded of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple and the letters from Nettie in Africa. Nettie wrote about a road that approached the village being built directly through the center of it, destroying several houses in the process. The chief went to protest to discover that the tribe now had to pay rent to live on the land, and in addition had to pay a water tax to use their wells. ]

Sudan is China's largest overseas oil project. China is Sudan's largest supplier of arms. China also invests in Iran's oil industry and pursuing oil ties to Angola.

That's a can of worms because China has been likened to a neo-colonial power in Africa, bringing in money so that they can secure their energy future through the oil fields of Africa, and in return get to call the shots similar to the way the white man owned villages in Africa and sat in goverment cabinets after official colonial times were over. Is this true?

China defends its role in Africa ahead of G8
By Ben Blanchard
June 4, 2007
BEIJING (Reuters) - China sought to defend its role in Africa on Monday ahead of this week's G8 summit, saying its long friendship with the continent was a force for good and shrugging off the threat of criticism at the meeting in Germany.

read more at http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2007/06/04/china_defends_its_role_in_africa_ahead_of_g8/

Darfur: Forget Genocide, There's Oil
By F William Engdahl *Asia Times Online May 25, 2007
To paraphrase the famous quip during the 1992 US presidential debates, when an unknown William Jefferson Clinton told then-president George Herbert Walker Bush, "It's the economy, stupid," the present concern of the current Washington administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we look closely, genuine concern over genocide against the peoples in that poorest of poor part of a forsaken section of Africa. No. "It's the oil, stupid." The case of Darfur, a forbidding piece of sun-parched real estate in the southern part of Sudan, illustrates the new Cold War over oil, where the dramatic rise in
China's oil demand to fuel its booming growth has led Beijing to embark on an aggressive policy of - ironically - dollar diplomacy. With its more than US$1.2 trillion in mainly US dollar reserves at the Peoples' National Bank of China, Beijing is engaging in active petroleum geopolitics. Africa is a major focus, and in Africa, the central region between Sudan and Chad is a priority. This is defining a major new front in what, since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, is a new Cold War between Washington and Beijing over control of major oil sources. So far Beijing has played its cards a bit more cleverly than Washington. Darfur is a major battleground in this high-stakes contest for oil control.

. . .

China has just done an oil deal that links it with two of the continent's largest nations, Nigeria and South Africa. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) will lift oil in Nigeria, via a consortium that also includes South African Petroleum Co, giving China access to what could be 175,000 barrels a day by 2008. It's a $2.27 billion deal that gives state-controlled CNOOC a 45% stake in a large off-shore oil field in Nigeria.

Previously, Nigeria had been considered in Washington to be an asset of the Anglo-American oil majors, ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron.

read more at http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/sudan/2007/0525forget.htm

That's quite a bit of explanation about the petroleum politics of the situation. What about the internal government politics of how Sudan's Khartoum central government of President Omar al-Bashir and his governors are going about accepting the big Chinese dollars?

I hope to get more info on that soon. I'm reviewing Reuters' coverage on Darfur.

http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/newsmakerDarfur

One thing catches my eye: Rwanda president "ringing an alarm bell" on Darfur
Wed May 2, 2007 8:43PM EDT

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN0242867420070503?&src=051807_1443_FEATURES

Reuters Darfur Page

A related but perhaps random thought : The Dust Bowl refugee camps of the 30s here in California. Grapes of Wrath showed some pretty money-grubbing farm agents making good money off the misery of the displaced refugees. That disaster had natural causes with human exacerbation to the misery. The stock market crash of 1929, the resulting Great Depression in 1930, and the severe drought and dust storms of 1931 through 1934 set up an involuntary great migration from the plains and midwest to California. A lot of suffering took place then. In 1936 the L.A. Police Chief sent 125 policemen to patrol the borders of Arizona and Oregon to keep "undesirables" out. The ACLU sued the city of Los Angeles. In March of '37, Roosevelt addressed the nation in his second inaugural address, stating, "I see one-third of the nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished . . . the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." In the fall of 1939, the rain comes, finally bringing an end to the drought.

How does that relate to Darfur? Good question.

In the meantime, a social entrepreneur is a person or entity that takes a business approach to solving a social problem.

May 29, 2007
Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor (exhibit at
the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York features inventions
designed to help the world's poor move out of poverty. )
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. from the NY Times \

“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.”
The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.
“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/29cheap.html