http://www.alternet.org/story/24471/
Darfur as a Resource War
By David Morse, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 24, 2005.
Africa -- whose cultures and landscapes were torn apart by European
colonial powers seeking slaves, ivory and jewels -- is now being
devastated by a 21st century quest for oil.
A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert
region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan. The weapons themselves
are not futuristic. None of the ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic
storm troopers that are the stuff of science fiction; nor, for that
matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones or other high-tech
weapon systems at the cutting edge of today's arsenal.
No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In
the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics
are burning and pillaging, castration and rape -- carried out by Arab
militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated
technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by
the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack
black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different
weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil
deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.
This is what makes it a war of the future: not the slick PowerPoint
presentations you can imagine in boardrooms in Dallas and Beijing
showing proven reserves in one color, estimated reserves in another,
vast subterranean puddles that stretch west into Chad, and south to
Nigeria and Uganda; not the technology; just the simple fact of the
oil.
This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers
whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite
pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael
Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the
consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an
invisible war.
Invisible?
Invisible because it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our
mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think of
all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers and magazines.
Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile culture, our
suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and famous, the
giddy assumption that all this can continue indefinitely when we know
it can't -- and you see why Darfur slips into darkness. And Darfur is
only the tip of the sprawling, scarred state known as Sudan. Nicholas
Kristof pointed out in a New York Times column that ABC News had a
total of 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts all
last year, and that was to the credit of Peter Jennings; NBC had only
5 minutes, CBS only 3 minutes. This is, of course, a micro-fraction
of the time devoted to Michael Jackson.
Why is it, I wonder, that when a genocide takes place in Africa, our
attention is always riveted on some black American miscreant
superstar? During the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago, when 800,000
Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days, it was the trial of O.J. Simpson
that had our attention.
Yes, racism enters into our refusal to even try to understand Africa,
let alone value African lives. And yes, surely we're witnessing the
kind of denial that Samantha Power documents in A Problem from Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide; the sheer difficulty we have
acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it, she observes, we pay
lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly by.
And yes, turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia, with
its graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the
streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by
something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that
prevents the media from making the connections that would threaten
our petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to acknowledge
the fact that the industrial world's addiction to oil is laying waste
to Africa.
When Darfur does occasionally make the news -- photographs of burned
villages, charred corpses, malnourished children -- it is presented
without context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-driven
crisis in northern Africa. An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians are
dying every day. Yet the message from our media is that we Americans
are "helpless" to prevent this humanitarian tragedy, even as we gas
up our SUVs with these people's lives.
Even Kristof -- whose efforts as a mainstream journalist to keep
Darfur in the spotlight are worthy of a Pulitzer -- fails to make the
connection to oil; and yet oil was the driving force behind Sudan's
civil war. Oil is driving the genocide in Darfur. Oil drives the Bush
administration's policy toward Sudan and the rest of Africa. And oil
is likely to topple Sudan and its neighbors into chaos.
The Context for Genocide
I will support these assertions with fact. But first, let's
