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At the huge, inspiring antiwar march in New York (on May 10), I noticed many placards with the massage, ‘Out of Iraq, Into Darfur.’ They were held by members of a group called ‘Volunteer for Change,’ described as ‘a project of Working Assets.’ I wasn’t sure what to make of the slogan. Was it somehow satirical, playing on ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’ and warning about a future Somalia-like intervention in Africa? Or was this really a call to take U.S. troops out of Iraq and deploy them instead in ‘humanitarian’ ‘peacekeeping’ in western Sudan?
   (On May 11 morning I did) some Google searching and found the answer. It is, unfortunately, the latter. Since at least last year Working Assets has been urging people to petition President Bush to support ‘urgent international action’ through the UN to ‘protect innocent civilians’ in Darfur. Plainly the organisation finds no contradiction between opposing imperialist military deployment in Iraq and supporting it in Sudan. Nor, perhaps, do many of those marching in Washington D.C. today to demand such U.S. intervention.
   For many months now I’ve occasionally received emails asking me, ‘Why are you spending so much time attacking Bush Middle East policy, and ignoring the atrocities in Darfur?’ There are many reasons I haven’t written on it, including the fact that I put opposing imperialist wars with their murderous consequences at the top of my list of things to do in my spare time, and the fact that I haven’t much studied the situation in Darfur. But I’ve sensed for awhile that some forces are using the alleged ‘genocide’ in that region to divert attention from the ongoing slaughter in Iraq (and ongoing brutalisation of the Palestinians by Israel), and to depict another targeted Arab regime as so villainous as to require what the neocons call ‘regime change.’ They’ve mischaracterised the conflict as one between ‘Arabs’ and ‘indigenous Africans’ whereas (as I understand it) all parties involved are Arabic-speaking black Africans –– ‘Arab’ ‘African’ and ‘black’ being distinctions more complicated than most Americans realise.
   I’d ask those holding those signs (on May 10) to recall that in November 2001 a general at the Pentagon told Gen. Wesley Clark that in the wake of 9/11 the administration had ‘a five-year campaign plan’ to attack not only Afghanistan but ‘Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.’ I’d ask Working Assets to observe that the Iraq War it opposes and the Sudan intervention is endorses are in fact part of that same empire-building campaign plan.
   Last June a UN commission determined that what has been taking place in Darfur, however awful, does not constitute a genocidal policy by the Sudanese government. But Washington decided otherwise, and used the highly emotional concepts of genocide and ‘holocaust’ to describe the situation. It has since pushed NATO to train African Union troops to provide peacekeeping operations in Darfur and advocated a direct NATO presence in the region, unprecedented in Africa. Last November, John Bolton, the bullying, bellicose, unconfirmed U.S. ambassador to the UN who has no history of concern for human rights, blocked a briefing by a UN envoy on Darfur to the Security Council prepared by Juan Mendez, Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special adviser for the prevention of genocide. In doing so he joined nations like China and Russia for their own reasons not inclined to take action against Sudan. But Bolton unlike the Russian and Chinese ambassadors pushed for such action. We know enough already, he says, now it’s time to move! Washington isn’t really much interested in the facts of the Darfur situation, any more than it was about the facts in Iraq before it attacked that country. It’s interested rather in what the neocons call ‘perception management,’ and is doing a good job of managing the perceptions of even some progressives on the issue.
   (May 10) demonstration in Washington was organised by a coalition called ‘Save Darfur.’ It describes itself as ‘an alliance of over 130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian, and human rights organisations.’ The Jerusalem Post provides additional information: ‘Little known is that the coalition was actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community.’ The American Holocaust Museum has been conspicuously involved, and while many people feel that the term ‘genocide’ should be used very sparingly the Museum hasn’t hesitated to draw parallels between the Shoah and the Darfur situation. Joining Jewish organisations are evangelical Zionist Christian groups who see Sudan as a prime mission ground in these Latter Days.
   And as advertised, diverse organisations were capable of drawing someone like the admirably progressive actor George Clooney into give an address at the rally.
   We’re talking about a rally urging a U.S./NATO intervention in Africa’s largest country, legitimated by the UN strong-armed by a thuggish neocon-led administration in Washington. We’re talking potentially about regime change in Africa’s second-largest oil producer, in the context of planned U.S. strikes against Syria and Iran. Should anyone in the antiwar movement with a minimal knowledge of recent history be comfortable with that, or suppose that it could be fully benign?
   A good contingent of students from my university took the bus to New York to participate in the New York demo. But other progressive students elected instead to bus down to the Washington Darfur demo the following day to demand, in effect, that Bush do something about Darfur. As though oppressors could be liberators.
   I have no doubt that the Sudanese regime is vicious; a close friend from Sudan indeed assures me that is true. I think it likely 200,000 people have, as charged, been killed by the Janjaweed forces. But I also know the viciousness of which ‘my’ government is capable, and its proclivity for jumping on humanitarian crises (Kosovo, 1999, for example) to advance its own geopolitical strategic interests, which have nothing to do with anybody’s human rights. (In occupied Iraq, about 200,000 civilians had, according to Andrew Cockburn, been killed as of January 2006.) When President Bush meets ‘Darfur advocates’ in the White House before the rally and tells them, ‘Those of you who are going out to march for justice, you represent the best of our country,’ he indicates pretty clearly that they’re playing a supportive role in his effort to remake the ‘Greater Middle East.’
   Throughout the country (US), the pious-sounding campaign on behalf of Darfur simultaneously prettifies U.S. imperialism –– if only by asserting the latter can despite itself do some good in this world. The honest campaigners are like Boromir, in the Lord of the Rings, asking, ‘What if we were to use the Ring ... for good?’ But you can’t use it for good! You can’t go ‘Out of Iraq, Into Darfur’ without bringing the principles governing the former illegal intervention into the latter intrusion you’re so naively recommending. Imperialism’s not a friendly tool kit that can be used to fix the problems its own lackeys jot down on the collegiate ‘peace and justice’ to-do list. It’s the problem itself.
   By all means, may the people of Darfur, including those in the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army (if indeed they represent liberation), using any means necessary, fight their oppression and seek international allies in the process. And let those Americans who’ve really studied the situation and wish to assist the struggle of Darfur’s oppressed provide such help as they can –– especially if they do so while fighting oppression globally without any skewed agenda. But let the U.S. antiwar movement not confuse friends with enemies, and in that confusion help those Martin Luther King once called ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’
   ZNet, May 11, 2006. Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history.

The United Nations has characterised it as ‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.’ The United States of America has called it a genocide. The European Union recognises it as ‘tantamount to genocide.’ The Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League evasively call it a ‘crisis.’ It doesn’t matter who calls it what because the crime is: a group of people is being premeditatedly butchered by another for their ethnicity. This savagery has been going on for the last three years. What has the Muslim ‘Ummah’ done to halt this atrocity? Nothing. When the Pakistani brutes came to our land in 1971, it wanted to accomplish only one thing. Their goal was to wipe out the Bengalis once and for all. As a result, three million people were killed. It was India which came forward to rescue us from the blood-thirsty Pakistanis. What did the Arab-Muslim world do to stop the genocide? Nothing.
   When Slobodan Milosevic began his first sadistic operation of ethnic cleansing, the victims were the Bosnian Muslims. Scores of people had to perish before the United States garnered support from the Western world and launched an effective military campaign to stop the killings. Because of the American actions, the Dayton agreement, which was signed by the Serbs, the Bosnians and the Croats, is now regarded as a sacred symbol of power sharing. But, what did any Arab-Muslim country actually do to stop the conflict? Nothing.
   When Kosovo, soon after Bosnia, became a subject of yet another Serbian purification madness, the prey were the Muslims that have been living there for centuries. A large number of Muslims fled to Albania to seek refuge. But those who decided to cling to their land were hacked like animals. Again, it was the United States which had to step in and militarily end the strife. What did the Arab-Muslim world do this time around to stop the extermination? Nothing.
   When the Janjaweeds (an Arabic colloquialism, Janjaweed means ‘a man with a gun on a horse.’ Janjaweed militiamen are primarily members of nomadic ‘Arab’ tribes who’ve long been at odds with Darfur’s settled ‘African’ farmers, who are darker-skinned.), backed by the Sudanese government, took up arms to neutralise the Darfurians, the victims were and still are the Muslims. Again, it is the United States that has been working to stop the genocide and secured a peace agreement in Abuja, Nigeria. How participatory was the Arab-Muslim world during the process? Almost absent.
   The duplicity of the Muslim world as a whole is sickening. In Darfur, Sudan, more than 200,000 people have been slaughtered; 2 million people have been displaced; hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from malnutrition; 1.2 million people need food now, but the supply is dwindling fast; there is no access to water; no treatments are available; the care providers are barred from entering the region; pledges for aids are nowhere in sights; the genocide is causing regional instabilities. And yet, the Muslim world is comfortably mum.
   The victims of this genocide are the indigenous African people who are Muslims. The attackers are the light skinned Arab Janjaweeds, who are also Muslims by faith. The Janjaweeds are the proxy warriors of the Sudanese government which provides welfare strictly to its local Arabs and their causes. The premise behind this diabolic genocide is totally zany. The Janjaweeds are light skinned all right, but to the whites, they are all the same, coloured. When people suffer from imaginary superior complexities, they get utterly incinerated by their self-lit fire. Hence, they try to salvage themselves by torching others. And this is exactly what the Janjaweeds are inflicting on to the Darfurians.
   Based on the records of the Arab nations, it appears that they are not willing to come forward to help the non-Arabs. From the examples I mentioned above, one may find a pattern. The Bengalis are dark skinned, the Bosnians and the Kosovarians are white, the Darfurians are black; and so, the light skinned Arabs find themselves out of the league. It is a sad snapshot of the ‘Ummah,’ but it is the truth.
   The Palestinians enjoy the privilege of being Arab. They receive endless support from the Arab-Muslim world. Their cause merits attentions, which the world profusely pays to. However, genocide supersedes everything. All support and attention should be focused on it so that the genocide doesn’t linger, rather, it ends. The following examples illustrate how this simple logic is being habitually defied by the Arab leaders.
   Egypt is the stalwart when it comes to Middle Eastern issues. It has the strongest military power amongst the Arab nations. Sudan is its neighbour. No Sudanese government can possibly dream of running the country going against the wishes of the Egyptian policies. So, Hosni Mubarak could bring an end to this genocide even before it got under way. Unfortunately, he hardly opened his mouth about Darfur.
   Libya, another Arab power in North Africa, is bordered by Sudan. On many occasions, Colonel Gaddafi vociferously raised objections to various international issues, especially if they concerned Arab nations. His loud voice became even louder when the U.S. was getting ready to attack Iraq. Perhaps, Gaddafi deemed the lives of the Darfurians are not as precious as the Iraqis thus he didn’t even make a cursory request to Sudan to stop the carnage.
   King Abdullah of Jordan, a Georgetown graduate and an influential Arab leader who is often invited to give speeches on international issues, never found any occasion to recognise the killings of the Darfurians as genocide, let alone appealing the Sudanese government to end supporting the Janjaweed slayers. The King obviously gives speeches on matters more important than Darfur. How, conventionally, kingly!
   Qatar is the sole Arab country in the Security Council at present. It is supposed to advocate interests of the Muslim world. One would think that Qatar will proactively work with other council members to punish Sudan if it doesn’t stop the genocide. But it doesn’t –– it doesn’t even believe that the Arabs in Darfur are murdering the black Muslims. What is even more startling is that Qatar has pledged to donate about $117 million dollars to the reconstruction of Louisiana after the Hurricane Katrina. It contributed a mere $1 million to the Darfurians. A solid sign of care for the ‘Ummah!’
   The almighty Saudi Arabia has chosen to be deaf while thousands of fellow Muslims are being butchered. This country too doesn’t recognise the fact that what’s happening in Darfur is genocide. Therefore, it didn’t even bother to demand Sudan to stop the mass murders. If you visit the website of the Saudi Information Ministry, all you will find there are some generic statements about how the government has provided humanitarian help to the near dead people of Darfur through one of its relief agencies. Its donation to Darfur in dollar amounts to a scant 3 million.
   The Iranians are notorious for taking matters to the streets of Tehran. They are always marching against something. But did they ever scream a bit on the capital for their fellow Muslim brothers who are summarily executed in Darfur by the Sudanese Arabs? That has yet to happen.
   The Arab League, comprised of 22 nations, will not call it a genocide. Besides making some empty rhetoric and perfunctorily attending the Abuja mediation, its inactiveness reflects the obtuse positions of the Arab nations. Catering to the wishes of the Sudanese government, it found nothing wrong to stage a summit meeting in Khartoum this year. Furthermore, the League doesn’t support the plan of sending 20,000 UN soldiers to take over the responsibilities from the 7,000 soldiers of the African Union that are in Darfur now.
   This is what the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), on the International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination observed: ‘Diversity perceived as threat leads to racial contempt, conflict, exclusion and racial discrimination. Xenophobia and related intolerance are among the root causes of armed conflicts.’ Aren’t the dark-skinned Muslims in Darfur precisely going through these? Of course, they are.
   Lofty goals which are out of reality are pathetic. If OIC indeed believed what it professed, then there would have been some actions already taken by it to end the discriminatory exclusions. Since it doesn’t practise what it preaches, therefore a hypocritical silence is all it offered to the Muslims of Darfur.
   The Muslim ‘Ummah’ is a motley colour one. People of all races are part of this ‘Ummah.’ A communal spirit exists only in the writings and speeches. In reality, one is far from another. The cold truth is that there has always been a giant chasm in this community. The Arab-Muslim world apparently believes that all politics are local. The victims of the Darfur genocide are not the Arabs. Thus, the Arab countries don’t feel any pressure from their citizens to intervene in the Darfur conflict.
   History has an amazing way of offering a second chance to those that seek for it. When previous genocides took place, the Muslim world, especially the Arab-Muslim nations, stood on the sidelines and remained indifferent. Systematically, they open their mouths only for the Palestinians because they are also Arabs. This slanted attitude must be changed. When a house is divided within, it cannot be reconciled without. Claiming it to be a community and acting like strangers is not the way to preserve unity. The lives of the so-called black Muslims in Darfur are as precious as any other race. They deserve to be saved from this ruthless hatred and murders committed by none other than the Arab Muslims of Sudan. Muslims killing Muslims is not what the ‘Ummah’ is supposed to tolerate.
   Since the Muslim world could not make any dent in stopping the Darfur genocide, the burden once again fell on the United States. It has at least secured a tentative peace deal. Now, the failure of the Arab-Muslim world can be addressed by jettisoning its superfluous supremacist attitudes and beginning the work to rebuild the lives of the Darfurians. If the Muslim ‘Ummah’ means anything, then it has to forge a colour-blind union. Otherwise, it will keep creating unwarranted cleavages within the ‘Ummah.’ This is the lesson the Arab-Muslim world should learn from Darfur.
   The writer, who is a human resources administrator, writes from Jamaica, New York. He can be reached at: ahsantutul@aol. com

Strange things happen when a reporter strays off his beat. Vast regions of the earth turn out to have different priorities. The latest conspiracy theory for the murder of ex-Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri ––that criminals involved in a bankrupt Beirut bank may have been involved –– doesn’t make it into the New Zealand Dominion Post.
   And last week, arriving in the vast, messy, unplanned city of Sao Paulo, it was a Brazilian MP corruption scandal, the bankruptcy of the country’s awful airline Varig –– worse, let me warn you, than any East European airline under the Soviet Union –– and Brazil’s newly nationalised oil concessions in Bolivia that made up the front pages.
   Sure, there was Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s long letter to President Bush –– ‘rambling’, the local International Herald Tribune edition called it, a description the paper’s headline writers would never apply to Mr Bush himself –– and a whole page of Middle East reports in the Folha de Sao Paulo daily about the EU’s outrageous sanctions against the democratically elected government of ‘Palestine’ –– all, alas, written from wire agencies.
   But then in steps Brazil with its geographical immensity, its extraordinary story of colonialism and democracy, the mixture of races in Sao Paulo’s streets –– which outdoes the ethnic origins of the occupants of any Toronto tram –– and its weird version of Portuguese; and then suddenly the Middle East seems, a very long way away.
   Brazil? Sure, the Amazon, tropical forests, coffee and the beaches of Rio. And then there’s Brasilia, the make-believe capital designed –– like the equally fake Canberra in Australia and fraudulent Islamabad in Pakistan –– so that the country’s politicians can hide themselves away from their people.
   One thing the country shares with the Arab world, it turned out, is the ever constant presence and influence and pressure of the US ––never more so than when Brazil’s right-wing rulers were searching for commies in the 1940s and 50s. They weren’t hard to find.
   In 1941, a newly belligerent America –– plunged into a world war by an attack every bit as ruthless as that of 11 September 2001 –– had become so worried about the big
   bit of Brazil that juts far out into the Atlantic, that it set up military bases in the north of the country without waiting for the authorisation of the Brazilian government. Now what, I wonder, does that remind me of?
   Well, Washington needn’t have worried. The sinking of five Brazilian merchant ships by German U-boats provoked huge public demonstrations that forced the right-wing and undemocratic Getulio Vargas government to declare war on the Nazis. Hands up those readers who know that more than 20,000 Brazilian troops fought on our side in the Italian campaign right up to the end of the Second World War. Even fewer hands will be raised, I suspect, if I ask how many Brazilian troops were killed. According to Boris Fausto’s excellent history of Brazil, 454 died in combat against the Wehrmacht.
   The return of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force helped to bring democracy to Brazil. Vargas shot himself nine years later, leaving a dramatic suicide note which suggested that ‘foreign forces’ had caused his country’s latest economic crisis. Crowds attacked the US embassy in Rio.
   Well, it all looks very different today when a left-wing Brazilian leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva –– who also found himself threatened by ‘foreign forces’ after his popular election –– is trying to make sense of the Bolivian nationalisation of Brazil’s oil conglomerates, an act carried out by Lula’s equally left-wing chum up in La Paz, Evo Morales.
   I have to say that the explosion inside Latin America’s fashionable leftist governments does have something in common with meetings of the Arab League –– where Arab promises of unity are always undermined by hateful arguments. No wonder one of Folha’s writers this week headlined his story ‘The Arabias’.
   But can I let that place leave me? Or does the Middle East have a grasp over its victims, a way of jerking their heads around just when you think it might be safe to immerse yourself in a city a world away from Arabia? After two days in Brazil, my office mail arrives from the foreign desk in London and I curl up on my bed to go through the letters.
   First out of the bag comes Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage with a photocopied page
   from Lawrence of Arabia’s ‘Seven Pillars
   of Wisdom’. Lawrence is writing about Iraq in the 1920s, and about oil and colonialism.
   ‘We pay for these things too much in honour and innocent lives,’ he says. ‘I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials ... delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours.’
   My next day’s Brazilian newspaper shows an American soldier lying on his back in a Baghdad street, blasted to death by a roadside bomb. Thrown into the fire to the worst of deaths, indeed. Ouch.
   Then in my mail bag comes an enclosure from Antony Loewenstein, an old journalistic mate of mine in Sydney. It’s an editorial from The Australian, not my favourite paper since it’s still beating the drum for George W on Iraq. But listen to this:
   ‘Three years ago ... elite Australian troops were fighting in Iraq’s western desert to neutralise Scud missile sites. Now, three years later, we know that at the same moment members of our SAS were risking their lives and engaging with Saddam Hussein’s troops, boatloads of Australian wheat were steaming towards ports in the Persian Gulf, where their cargo was to be offloaded and driven to Iraq by a Jordanian shipping company paying kickbacks to ––Saddam Hussein.’
   And I remember that one of the reasons Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard gave for going to war against Iraq –– he’s never once told Australians that we didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction –– was that Saddam Hussein’s regime was ‘corrupt’. So who was doing the corrupting? Ho hum.
   So I prepare to check out of the Sao Paulo Maksoud Plaza hotel. Maksoud? In Arabic, this means ‘the place you come back to’. And of course, the owner turns out to be a Brazilian-Lebanese. I check my flying times. ‘Sao Paulo / Frankfurt/ Beirut,’ it says on my ticket.
   Back on the inescapable beat.
   CounterPunch, May 13/14, 2006. Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent/UK