Courting Western Rage
- From: "Jason P" <jaspetr@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2007 06:11:22 -0800
Sudan leaders court Western rage
By Jonah Fisher
BBC News
All the words of protest from Gordon Brown and the British government appear
to have done little to help Gillian Gibbons in the dusty courtrooms of
Khartoum.
Sudan's leaders are rather used to the sound of western outrage - and have
come to realise that, for them, it rarely amounts to much.
Power in Khartoum rests with the combined machinery of national security,
police intelligence and the interior ministry.
For the most part these agencies do not meet with Western diplomats - and
they have little interest in improving Sudan's relationship with the West.
Shadowy organisations
Running these shadowy organisations are men who have been blamed and in some
cases named for arming militias and organising the conflict in Darfur.
What men like them fear most is having to account for their role in
atrocities that have killed over 200,000 Darfuris over the last four years.
Their strategy appears to be to keep the Sudanese government at odds with
the West and to try and minimise the international presence in the form of
both aid workers and peacekeepers.
As part of this the security apparatus seizes on any opportunity to
discredit westerners in the eyes of the Sudanese public and Ms Gibbon's
detention now seems to fall into that category.
During the two-and-a-half years I lived in Sudan, expatriates were regularly
targeted by the authorities.
Aid workers who provided information about human rights abuses in Darfur
were often arrested or expelled as spies.
On one occasion a small private party of aid workers and peacekeepers in
Darfur was violently broken up by national security and one of the women was
sexually assaulted by an officer.
The story that appeared in newspapers the next day was of a Western orgy
having been halted.
An interesting recent example of the strategy came after the arrest of
French aid workers on child abduction charges in Chad.
Most of the children appear to have come from the Chadian side of the border
but Nafi Ali Nafie - one of Sudan's most powerful politicians - still gave a
calculatedly inflammatory comment.
"The question is why these children were being taken to the West? Perhaps to
provide organs such as hearts and kidneys to elderly patients."
Peacekeepers blocked
The disconnect between the public face of the Sudanese government and the
reality on the ground has been seen clearly on the international stage.
Despite Sudan's president having given his approval to the deployment of a
large African Union/United Nations peacekeeping force into Darfur it remains
plagued with problems.
In part that is because of a reluctance on the part of Western countries to
contribute helicopters.
But it is also clear that at a national and state level, security agencies
are blocking their arrival every step of the way.
Refusals to accept troops from non-African countries, delays in the
allocation of land for military bases and the denial of landing rights are
just a few of the problems.
In Ms Gibbons' case she has primarily been dealt with by the Ministry of
Justice.
That is the same Ministry of Justice that was referred to the International
Criminal Court in the Hague by the UN Security Council in 2005, which
described it as unwilling and incapable of dealing with Darfur's atrocities.
Having been so publicly dismissed as weak, it comes as little surprise that
the ministry has now seized on Ms Gibbons' case as a chance to flex its
muscles in the face of its critics.
Oil revenue
The idea of cutting UK aid to Sudan has been mooted as a possible
retaliatory measure for Ms Gibbons' detention.
Perhaps surprisingly, nothing would please the hardliners more.
Throughout the Darfur conflict, Sudanese officials have accused donor
countries of perpetuating the crisis with their aid, rather than reducing
its severity.
The reason why the UK and the West feeds about four million Darfuris every
day is not because the Sudanese government is too poor to do so itself.
On the contrary - Khartoum receives billions of dollars a year in oil
revenue.
It just believes its priorities lie elsewhere.
The uncomfortable truth is that if the estimated billion dollars a year in
Western aid dried up, the food would stop too - with potentially serious
consequences for the millions of victims of the conflict.
It took concerted international pressure to get aid workers permission to
enter Darfur.
Every step of the way since then, humanitarian workers have had to struggle
to gain access to refugee camps and displaced people.
For those hoping that Gillian Gibbons will be released before the end of her
15-day sentence, perhaps the most optimistic precedent lies in the case of
an American journalist called Paul Salopek.
Detained for illegally crossing the border into Sudan in 2006, he was held
in a Darfur jail - on charges of being a spy.
After a month in detention he was released owing to the intervention of US
politician Bill Richardson, during a visit to Khartoum.
This release was portrayed as a "humanitarian gesture" from the Sudanese
president Omar al-Bashir to his longstanding friend the New Mexico governor.
British diplomats will be hoping that Lord Ahmed's visit can have the same
effect.
--
(c) BBC MMVII
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