[Mb-civic] Sudan and Venezuela

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/08/15/
583447.html

Sun, August 15, 2004

Tread softly in Sudan

By Eric Margolis

THE HUMAN crisis in Sudan's arid Darfur region, where 30,000 have died and
a million are said to be homeless, has provoked charges of a second,
Rwanda-style genocide and calls for urgent western military intervention
in Africa's largest nation.

The UN Security Council has ordered Khartoum to disband its militias in
Darfur. The U.S. Congress, humanitarian groups, America's Christian
religious right and other foes of Sudan's military regime are demanding
armed action.

Inevitably Sudan has become an election-year political football and media
frenzy. The White House has been currying favour with Christian militants
and blacks by intensifying hostility to the isolated Khartoum regime,
which the U.S. has been trying to overthrow for a decade.

Caution is strongly advised. The Darfur disaster is not -- as
oversimplified by western media -- a case of murderous government-backed
Arab militias, called "Janjaweed," slaughtering helpless blacks. Nor can
Khartoum end the strife at will: Its writ in Darfur is barely existent.
Darfur is not a case of ethnic- religious terrorism as in Kosovo and
Bosnia. The real story is far more complex.

Darfur is Sudan's poorest, wildest region. One of the Islamic World's
first anti-colonial movements, known in the west as the Dervishes, burst
from the wastes of Darfur in the 1880s. Led by the fiery "Mahdi," the
Dervishes drove the British imperialists from Sudan, an event immortalized
in the splendid Victorian novel, Four Feathers. The Dervishes took
Khartoum, slaying Britain's proconsul, Sir Charles "Chinese" Gordon.

The "martyred" Gordon's death roused a storm in Britain, resulting in a
punitive army sent up the Nile (including the young Winston Churchill)
that destroyed the Dervish army at Omdurman. But remote Darfur remained a
hotbed of rebellion.

Arms and money

In recent times, two anti-Khartoum insurgencies simmered in Darfur, backed
by neighbouring Chad and Eritrea, both of whom are U.S. clients. CIA has
reportedly supplied arms and money to Darfur's rebels. Washington recently
developed interest in Chad, which has oil and gas deposits.

Washington is using Darfur's rebels, as it did southern Sudan's
30-year-old insurgency, to destabilize the Khartoum regime, whose policies
have been deemed insufficiently pro-American and too Islamic. More
important to the increasingly energy-hungry U.S., Sudan has oil, as well
as that other precious commodity, water.

Last year the Darfur insurgents launched wide-scale attacks on government
garrisons after receiving new arms and supplies from abroad, gravely
threatening Khartoum's hold on Darfur. Sudan, whose army is weak, raised
local militias in Darfur to fight the rebels. Civilians were caught in the
crossfire.

Far from a case of Arab whites versus African blacks, all concerned are
dark-skinned Sudanese Muslims. The main enmity is between rebels, nomads
and farmers, tribes and clans. As in southern Sudan, most of the violence
stems from land grabs, banditry, cattle rustling, women stealing and local
vendettas.

This is not genocide, a severely overused term. Swiss aid groups, with no
political axe to grind, deny genocide claims.

Law and order

But Darfur is certainly a humanitarian crisis meriting foreign aid and
African Union troops to bring law and order that Sudan's overstretched
army cannot provide. Janjaweed bandits should be punished. But rebel
groups must not be encouraged to avoid peace talks with Khartoum in hope
of outside military intervention.

Foreign meddling in southern Sudan's civil war, particularly supply of
arms and money to Christian and animist separatists by western aid groups
and Protestant charities, prolonged that conflict and delayed a peace
settlement for decades.

Now western intervention in Darfur could meet strong local resistance from
Sudanese, an amiable but tough people, unravel the fragile, painfully
achieved north-south peace accords and re-ignite civil and tribal
conflicts that could tear Sudan apart and turn it into a second chaotic
Congo.

Many westerners imbued with neo-imperialist fervour or a case of white
man's burden are calling for another western army to march up the Nile and
smite the latter-day Dervishes of Khartoum. Such crusading zeal should be
curbed. Sudan is neither a second Rwanda nor a threat to the west.

The worst of Darfur's crisis appears over. Let humanitarian groups do
their work. Continuing U.S. attempts to overthrow Sudan's government are
only making things worse. Allow Africa to solve its own problems.

***
CounterPunch - August 16, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq08162004.html

Why He Crushed the Oligarchs

The Importance of Hugo Chávez

by Tariq Ali

The turn-out in Venezuela last Sunday was huge. 94.9 percent of the
electorate voted in the recall referendum. Venezuela, under its new
Constitution, permitted the right of the citizens to recall a President
before s/he had completed their term of office. No Western democracy
enshrines this right in a written or unwritten constitution. Chavez'
victory will have repercussions beyond the borders of Venezuela. It is a
triumph of the poor against the rich and it is a lesson that Lula in
Brazil and Kirchner in Argentina should study closely. It was Fidel
Castro, not Carter, whose advice to go ahead with the referendum was
crucial. Chavez put his trust in the people by empowering them and they
responded generously. The opposition will only discredit itself further by
challenging the results.

The Venezuelan oligarchs and their parties, who had opposed this
Constitution in a referendum (having earlier failed to topple Chavez via a
US-backed coup and an oil-strike led by a corrupt union bureaucracy) now
utilised it to try and get rid of the man who had enhanced Venezuelan
democracy. They failed. However loud their cries (and those of their media
apologists at home and abroad) of anguish, in reality the whole country
knows what happened. Chavez defeated his opponents democratically and for
the fourth time in a row. Democracy in Venezuela, under the banner of the
Bolivarian revolutionaries, has broken through the corrupt two-party
system favoured by the oligarchy and its friends in the West. And this has
happened despite the total hostility of the privately owned media: the two
daily newspapers, Universal and Nacional as well as Gustavo Cisneros' TV
channels and CNN made no attempt to mask their crude support for the
opposition.

Some foreign correspondents in Caracas have convinced themselves that
Chavez is an oppressive caudillo and they are desperate to translate their
own fantasies into reality.. They provide no evidence of political
prisoners, leave alone Guantanamo-style detentions or the removal of TV
executives and newspaper editors (which happened without too much of a
fuss in Blair's Britain).

A few weeks ago in Caracas I had a lengthy discussion with Chavez ranging
from Iraq to the most detailed minutiae of Venezuelan history and politics
and the Bolivarian programme. It became clear to me that what Chavez is
attempting is nothing more or less than the creation of a radical,
social-democracy in Venezuela that seeks to empower the lowest strata of
society. In these times of deregulation, privatisation and the Anglo-Saxon
model of wealth subsuming politics, Chavez' aims are regarded as
revolutionary, even though the measures proposed are no different to those
of the post-war Attlee government in Britain. Some of the oil-wealth is
being spent to educate and heal the poor.

Just under a million children from the shanty-towns and the poorest
villages now obtain a free education; 1.2 million illiterate adults have
been taught to read and write; secondary education has been made available
to 250,000 children whose social status excluded them from this privilege
during the ancien regime; three new university campuses were functioning
by 2003 and six more are due to be completed by 2006.

As far as healthcare is concerned, the 10,000 Cuban doctors, who were sent
to help the country, have transformed the situation in the poor districts,
where 11,000 neighbourhood clinics have been established and the health
budget has tripled. Add to this the financial support provided to small
businesses, the new homes being built for the poor, an Agrarian Reform Law
that was enacted and pushed through despite the resistance, legal and
violent, by the landlords. By the end of last year 2,262,467 hectares has
been distributed to 116,899 families. The reasons for Chavez' popularity
become obvious. No previous regime had even noticed the plight of the
poor.

And one can't help but notice that it is not simply a division between the
wealthy and the poor, but also one of skin-colour. The Chavistas tend to
be dark-skinned, reflecting their slave and native ancestry. The
opposition is light-skinned and some of its more disgusting supporters
denounce Chavez as a black monkey. A puppet show to this effect with a
monkey playing Chavez was even organised at the US Embassy in Caracas. But
Colin Powell was not amused and the Ambassador was compelled to issue an
apology. The bizarre argument advanced in a hostile editorial in The
Economist this week that all this was done to win votes is extraordinary.
The opposite is the case. The coverage of Venezuela in The Economist and
Financial Times has consisted of pro-oligarchy apologetics. Rarely have
reporters in the field responded so uncritically to the needs of their
proprietors.

The Bolivarians wanted power so that real reforms could be implemented.
All the oligarchs have to offer is more of the past and the removal of
Chavez. It is ridiculous to suggest that Venezuela is on the brink of a
totalitarian tragedy. It is the opposition that has attempted to take the
country in that direction. The Bolivarians have been incredibly
restrained. When I asked Chavez to explain his own philosophy, he replied:

'I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don't
accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that
must be revised. Reality is telling us that every day. Are we aiming in
Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless
society? I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality
you can't do anything to help the poor, the people who have made this
country rich through their labour and never forget that some of it was
slave labour, then I say 'We part company'. I will never accept that there
can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes don't
even like paying taxes. That's one reason they hate me. We said 'You must
pay your taxes'.  I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold
aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing ... That
position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse ... Try and
make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only
a millimetre, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias.'

And that's why he won.

[Tariq Ali's latest book, "Bush in Babylon: The Re-colonisation of Iraq,"
is published by Verso.]



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