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Today marks the 18th anniversary of the 1989 military coup that brought the Sudanese dictatorship to power. Since that time a horrific genocide and ethnic cleansing has taken place, with hundreds of thousands murdered, many more raped and millions displaced at the hands of the Janjaweed militia supported by the Sudanese government.
The slaughter continues to this day. (background information here, here and here).
The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) met yesterday to try to assemble a peacekeeping force to be sent to the region. The DPKO regarded the meeting as “a constructive start” but it may take 6 months for the force to be deployed, according a a UN spokesman. In any case, the UN’s record on preventing such slaughters gives little cause for optimism.
I’d like to add my voice to the growing campaign to bring this horror to an end by using the 2008 Beijing Olympics to influence and shame China, Sudan’s main sponsor.
How is China involved in the genocide in Darfur?
No country has done more to support the regime in Khartoum than the People’s Republic of China: no country has offered more diplomatic support, nor done more to provide money to buy the weaponry that fuels the engine of genocidal destruction. And no country has done more to insulate Khartoum from economic pressure or human rights accountability.
China is Sudan’s largest trading partner purchasing over 70% of its exports, Sudan’s largest foreign investor and the largest player in Sudan’s oil industry which accounts for 70% of Sudan’s total global exports.
Clearly, China is in a unique position to exert pressure on the Sudanese government.
Can the campaign work?
China has shown itself to be sensitive to commercial pressure.
China’s regulatory standards chief pledged Wednesday to update and boost enforcement of food safety rules as the country faces intense international pressure for exporting unsafe products from toothpaste to pet food ingredients.
China is particularly sensitive when it comes to international perception of its 2008 Beijing Olympics. It has even closed polluting factories in order to create a cleaner environment for the games.
Indeed, with the help of actress Mia Farrow and producer Steven Spielberg the Genocide Olympics campaign has already borne fruit. According to the New York Times:
For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.
But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.
So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.
Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could “go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.
Four days later, Mr. Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region “to bring an end to the human suffering there,” according to Mr. Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy.
China soon dispatched Mr. Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.
However, more needs to be done. From the same article:
China has not agreed to sanctions yet. But there is also plenty of time between now and the opening ceremony of the Olympics Games in Beijing next year, and more plans are afoot in the activist camp.
On Feb. 10, in an open letter on his Web site addressed to “Darfur activists and advocates,” (translations of the letter are available in Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian, according to the Web site), a Darfur activist, Eric Reeves, promised what he called the “full-scale launch of a large, organized campaign to highlight China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide.”
“It’s time now, to begin shaming China — demanding that if the Beijing government is going to host the Summer Olympic Games of 2008, they must be responsible partners”
Bloggers, journalists and individuals, please join the campaign.
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