news to me...,
2004-05-12 16:13:53
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Where's
the outrage?...,
2004-05-14 10:54:12
Sudan:
first draft on this bugger, there's still a lot of reading to do. We prefer to refrain from passing judgement on present policy, but I only recently learned that we've been interfering much at all since the 70s - minus a certain cruise missile and a particular, famous soil sample. If the policy is somehow levelheaded it might be because the interests of the oil cartels are in opposition to the interests of the christian right, or maybe because our leaders are so ideologically devoted *cough* to the cause of peace *cough*.
1979-Present:
Beginning in 1979 - after Jafaar Nimeiry breaks relations with the Soviets (over Angola?), and shortly after Chevron
becomes the first to discover oil in the Sudan -
the USG begins drastically
increasing it's military sales and aid to the Sudan, peaking at $100 million in 1982.
Sudan is divided between a Muslim north and Christian south - a situation inherited from
Britain's Southern Policy during
British rule in the Sudan up until the 50s - and this division has been the underlying cause of subsequent
Sudanese civil wars, the latest beginning in 1983 and continuing to the present.
Jafaar had ended the previous,
brutal civil war between Israeli-supported Southern rebels and the Soviet supported central government
in 1972 with the Addis Ababa accords, which had guaranteed the South autonomy. The Israeli-supported rebel movement
Anya-Nya would also play a role in Idi Amin's
Western-backed Ugandan coup in 1971.
With the discovery of oil deposits in the South Jafaar begins weakening the basis for the peace accords,
dividing the autonomous South into 3 regions and redrawing borders to annex oil deposits into the North, as
well as projects to redirect the Nile river's water resources to irrigation projects in the same.
This move is accompanied by a hard shift to the Islamist right in the early 80s, and Jafaar declares
shari'a law over the Sudan and revokes Southern autonomy in 1983, re-igniting the civil war. Chevron,
facing stiff resistance from Southern militant groups - the SPLA - supported by the Soviet client in Ethiopia,
had failed to develop the fields fully, and after numerous attacks suspended the project in 1984.
The US remains the largest supplier of military equipment to the Islamist Sudanese governent during the 1980s,
supplying some $120 million in military arms and equipment between 1983 and 1988, along with additional
arms from friendly Arab clients.
Military aid is finally suspended by acts of congress in 1990, after a coup in 1989 cancels planned peace talks.
Shortly thereafter, in 1992, Chevron sells it's Sudanese oil concessions.
In the mid to late 90s the US would again involve itself, with the Clinton administration - supported
by
congress - beginning a policy of
US support for the SPLA in the mid to late 90s
with political, humanitarian, non-lethal - and according
to some lethal
- military support. This policy continues to the present.
