[Mb-civic] Sudan--oil involoved?? and rightwing offensive fails in Georgia

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

These 2 articles from Ed:  a different take on Sudan, and a report on victory by 
Cynthia McKinney in Georgia.  The first is prefaced by Ed's intro....

-------

Hi.  We're faced with a genuine dilemma.  There's much to admire in this
astute evaluation of the imperial process and the complexity of the
problem But there has been a very long, severe and deadly repression of
the Black population of the South by the North, which is controlled, as
usual, by a few, Arab families.   Now, in almost a carbon copy of the
Saddam vs Kurd (and his own people) situation, the US and Britain are
fanning the flames of intervention to get at the oil and to save their own
asses. I'm not offering a solution, just outlining the macro-countours of
what we're now experiencing, but I sure would welcome lots more objective
specifics on the North, the South, the resistance, the oil and the rest.
We're not likely to get much from our subservient media - this is only a
start.



The Guardian - August 2, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1273982,00.html

THE MASK OF ALTRUISM DISGUISING A COLONIAL WAR

Oil will be the driving factor for military intervention in Sudan

by John Laughland

If proof were needed that Tony Blair is off the hook over Iraq, it came
not during the Commons debate on the Butler report on July 21, but rather
at his monthly press conference the following morning. Asked about the
crisis in Sudan, Mr Blair replied: "I believe we have a moral
responsibility to deal with this and to deal with it by any means that we
can." This last phrase means that troops might be sent - as General Sir
Mike Jackson, the chief of the general staff, immediately confirmed - and
yet the reaction from the usual anti-war campaigners was silence.

Mr Blair has invoked moral necessity for every one of the five wars he has
fought in this, surely one of the most bellicose premierships in history.
The bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, the 74-day bombing of
Yugoslavia in 1999, the intervention in Sierra Leone in spring of 2000,
the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, and the Iraq war last March
were all justified with the bright certainties which shone from the prime
minister's eyes. Blair even defended Bill Clinton's attack on the al-Shifa
pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan in August 1998, on the entirely bogus
grounds that it was really manufacturing anthrax instead of aspirin.

Although in each case the pretext for war has been proved false or the war
aims have been unfulfilled, a stubborn belief persists in the morality and
the effectiveness of attacking other countries. The Milosevic trial has
shown that genocide never occurred in Kosovo - although Blair told us that
the events there were worse than anything that had happened since the
second world war, even the political activists who staff the prosecutor's
office at the international criminal tribunal in The Hague never included
genocide in their Kosovo indictment. And two years of prosecution have
failed to produce one single witness to testify that the former Yugoslav
president ordered any attacks on Albanian civilians in the province.
Indeed, army documents produced from Belgrade show the contrary.

Like the Kosovo genocide, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as we
now know, existed only in the fevered imaginings of spooks and politicians
in London and Washington. But Downing Street was also recently forced to
admit that even Blair's claims about mass graves in Iraq were false. The
prime minister has repeatedly said that 300,000 or 400,000 bodies have
been found there, but the truth is that almost no bodies have been exhumed
in Iraq, and consequently the total number of such bodies, still less the
cause of their deaths, is simply unknown.

In 2001, we attacked Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and to
prevent the Taliban from allegedly flooding the world with heroin. Yet Bin
Laden remains free, while the heroin ban imposed by the Taliban has been
replaced by its very opposite, a surge in opium production, fostered by
the warlords who rule the country. As for Sierra Leone, the United Nations
human development report for 2004, published on July 15, which measures
overall living standards around the world, puts that beneficiary of
western intervention in 177th place out of 177, an august position it has
continued to occupy ever since our boys went in: Sierra Leone is literally
the most miserable place on earth. So much for Blair's promise of a "new
era for Africa".

The absence of anti-war scepticism about the prospect of sending troops
into Sudan is especially odd in view of the fact that Darfur has oil. For
two years, campaigners have chanted that there should be "no blood for
oil" in Iraq, yet they seem not to have noticed that there are huge
untapped reserves in both southern Sudan and southern Darfur. As oil
pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq, the west not only has a clear
motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has
also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do
precisely this. Oddly enough, the oil concession in southern Darfur is
currently in the hands of the China National Petroleum Company. China is
Sudan's biggest foreign investor.

We ought, therefore, to treat with scepticism the US Congress declaration
of genocide in the region. No one, not even the government of Sudan,
questions that there is a civil war in Darfur, or that it has caused an
immense number of refugees. Even the government admits that nearly a
million people have left for camps outside Darfur's main towns to escape
marauding paramilitary groups. The country is awash with guns, thanks to
the various wars going on in Sudan's neighbouring countries. Tensions have
risen between nomads and herders, as the former are forced south in search
of new pastures by the expansion of the Sahara desert. Paramilitary groups
have practised widespread highway robbery, and each tribe has its own
private army. That is why the government of Sudan imposed a state of
emergency in 1999.

But our media have taken this complex picture and projected on to it a
simple morality tale of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They gloss over the
fact that the Janjaweed militia come from the same ethnic group and
religion as the people they are allegedly persecuting - everyone in Darfur
is black, African, Arabic-speaking and Muslim. Campaigners for
intervention have accused the Sudanese government of supporting this
group, without mentioning that the Sudanese defence minister condemned the
Janjaweed as "bandits" in a speech to the country's parliament in March.
On July 19, moreover, a court in Khartoum sentenced six Janjaweed soldiers
to horrible punishments, including the amputation of their hands and legs.
And why do we never hear about the rebel groups which the Janjaweed are
fighting, or about any atrocities that they may have committed?

It is far from clear that the sudden media attention devoted to Sudan has
been provoked by any real escalation of the crisis - a peace agreement was
signed with the rebels in April, and it is holding. The pictures on our TV
screens could have been shown last year. And we should treat with
scepticism the claims made for the numbers of deaths - 30,000 or 50,000
are the figures being bandied about - when we know that similar statistics
proved very wrong in Kosovo and Iraq. The Sudanese government says that
the death toll in Darfur, since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, is
not greater than 1,200 on all sides. And why is such attention devoted to
Sudan when, in neighbouring Congo, the death rate from the war there is
estimated to be some 2 or 3 million, a tragedy equalled only by the
silence with which it is treated in our media?

We are shown starving babies now, but no TV station will show the limbless
or the dead that we cause if we attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be
what the Red Cross always said it must be - politically neutral. Anything
else is just an old-fashioned colonial war - the reality of killing, and
the escalation of violence, disguised with the hypocritical mask of
altruism. If Iraq has not taught us that, then we are incapable of ever
learning anything.

[John Laughland is an associate of Sanders Research Associates]

***

RIGHT-WING ELECTORAL OFFENSIVE FAILS IN GEORGIA

By Dianne Mathiowetz
Atlanta

The results of the primary election in the state of Georgia are in.

On July 20 Cynthia McKinney won more than 51 percent of the vote in the
Democratic Party primary. She had more than twice as many votes as her
closest opponent in the field of six candidates. McKinney is the outspoken
five-term African-American congressmember who had lost her seat in 2002
after being targeted by pro-war and Zionist forces.

By handily defeating Liane Levitan, the former DeKalb County Democratic
chairperson, and Cathy Woolard, who resigned as Atlanta City Council
president to run for the 4th Congressional seat, McKinney surprised the
political pundits of the Atlanta establishment who had predicted a run-
off. Headlines in the major newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution,
declared she had won a "stealth" victory by conducting a campaign "below
the radar."

McKinney's campaign did not spend huge amounts of money on television ads.
Instead, an army of volunteers, including some from around the country,
galvanized her mass base of support by going door-to-door. She carried
precincts she had lost in the last election, swept the predominantly
African-American neighborhoods of south DeKalb and received a substantial
number of votes in majority white areas.

In the 2002 election, her criticism of the Bush administration
concerning information about the 9/11 attacks and the reasons given for
war on Iraq were distorted by right-wing talk show hosts. She was
lampooned as a "loonie" by other Georgia elected officials, such as Sen.
Zell Miller, and was repeatedly called "divisive" and "controversial" in
the media. In the 2002 race, won by Denise Majette, thousands of
Republican Party members voted in the Democratic primary to ensure her
defeat.

Now, with more than 900 U.S. troops dead in Iraq, no weapons of mass
destruction found, and evidence of massive cost overruns by Halliburton,
McKinney's concerns about what was behind the drive to war are echoed
across the country.

Her campaign organized a rally and news conference following a showing of
"Fahrenheit 9/11" at a multi-plex theater to underscore McKinney's public
stance against the war and occupation.

Patricia Roberts, the mother of Jamaal Addison, the first Georgia
soldier to die in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, often accompanied McKinney as
she campaigned. Roberts, who has spoken out against the war, always calls
for the troops to be brought home now.

McKinney will face a Republican opponent in the November election, but
there is little doubt she will win back her seat in Congress.

AFRICAN AMERICAN JUDGE WINS BY LANDSLIDE

In another defeat for right-wing politics, a number of women judges,
most of them African American, were re-elected despite an intense effort
by backers of the Republican governor, Sonny Perdue. These elections are
supposedly "non-partisan," but this year's campaigns were marked with
extremely misleading, inflammatory ads and rhetoric.

In particular, Perdue had called for the ouster of Georgia Supreme Court
Justice Leah Ward Sears in a speech before the Christian Coalition. Her
opponent char ged that she was an "activist" judge who supported gay
marriage. The Georgia legislature very narrowly voted to include an
amendment to the state constitution prohibiting equal marriage on this
November's ballot. Using this issue to attack Sears was seen by some as a
way to gauge its effectiveness in rallying right-wing voters.

Sears easily won re-election statewide with over 60 percent of the vote.
She is in line to become the first African American woman to be chief
judge of the Georgia Supreme Court.

Civil rights groups, women's organizations, trade unions and many other
community leaders worked in support of Judge Sears and the other women
judges in pushing back the agenda of the religious and political right-
wing.

- END -


                                *

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