By Jeff Roquen

Ten years ago, tales of rape and murder began to leak out of Sudan and into the wider world.  A campaign of terror upon the peoples of Darfur, in western Sudan, had been launched by the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Janjaweed militia.  By the time the international community was able to fully respond, 300,000-400,000 Darfuris had been slaughtered in the first genocide of the twenty-first century. While Darfur has receded from the headlines in recent years, the conflict has not ended, and the possibility of a new campaign of mass violence by Khartoum against Darfur still exists.  In order to come to terms with the crisis in Sudan over the past quarter-century, it is necessary to understand the international dynamics behind the conflict – particularly the deleterious roles played by China and Russia.

In 1989, the world was turned upside-down. While the West focused on political upheaval stretching from Berlin to Beijing against communist dictatorships, a little-known colonel in the Sudanese Army – Omar al-Bashir – orchestrated a successful coup against his government without bloodshed.  By 1991, Bashir had erected a totalitarian regime based on the radical Arab-Islamic teachings of Hassan al-Turabi – the head of the National Islamic Front.  All dissent was criminalized with an extreme version of sharia law.  Due to Bashir’s increasing use of coercive measures against non-Arab populations (i.e. Darfur and southern Sudan), his sponsorship of terrorism, and subjugation of women, the Clinton administration rightly prohibited U.S. companies from doing business in Sudan.  When U.S. oil giant Chevron pulled out of the country, China immediately moved in to develop the vast oil reserves in the south, and no one seemed to calculate the long-term geostrategic ramifications.  In the context of shaping the post-Cold War order, events in central Asia and Africa received insufficient attention from Washington.  The reconfiguration of Europe and relations with Moscow overshadowed Sudan in the first eclipse of Darfur – a missed opportunity to promote security for the region.

As China’s economy grew exponentially year-by-year in the early 2000s, it required larger amounts of energy to fuel its teeming cities and robust industrial base. In Khartoum, Beijing had found an ideal partner.  Not only was Bashir anti-Western and anti-democratic but his nation was able to furnish China with needed oil supplies.  In return, Beijing could provide Bashir with oil infrastructure investment and stockpiles of weapons to wage war against the recalcitrant western and southern areas of Sudan. From 2003 to 2006, oil sales from Sudan to China spiked sixty-three percent, and Bashir used the revenue to purchase $55 million of small arms along with military trucks, tanks and up to twenty Fantan fighter-jets from China.  Beyond arms and military hardware, Beijing also dispatched military advisors and pilot trainers to assist Khartoum in carrying out its genocidal campaign against Darfur.  China, however, was not alone in supplying Bashir’s government with weapons of mass destruction in the most horrific sense of the term.  From 2004-2007, Sudan took delivery on fighter planes, attack helicopters, armored vehicles and air-to-ground rockets from Belarus and Russia.  The United States, which had been preoccupied with waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither immediately appreciated the extent of the crisis nor took the timely measures necessary to stem the violence. In short, Darfur had been eclipsed by other events once again.

Since the establishment of UNAMID (African Union – United Nations Mission in Darfur) in 2007, a peacekeeping force of approximately 20,000 military, police and civilian personnel has brought a modicum of stability to the area. In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity.  One year later, the ICC added three counts of genocide.  Despite the intervention of the international community, however, Bashir, who remains in power, continues his illegal war in and around Darfur with fresh arms deliveries from Belarus, China and Russia.  As a result, thousands of people throughout Sudan have been displaced in recent years and live as refugees in the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt and elsewhere.  In March, a UN panel confirmed that the Sudanese Armed Forces had breached Security Council resolutions by conducting new air raids on Darfur with assault aircraft supplied by Minsk and Moscow.

The conflict in Darfur and throughout Sudan is deteriorating while the rest of the world turns to the continuing Syrian civil war and the recent coup in Egypt.  The international community must take action and immediately 1) conduct a comprehensive security review of the region, 2) tighten existing sanctions and intercept any and all arms shipments en route to Khartoum, 3) continue to seek the arrest and criminal prosecution of Omar al-Bashir, and 4) officially rebuke Belarus, China, and Russia for aiding and abetting an indicted war criminal. While there are many ongoing crises throughout the world, a third eclipse of Darfur cannot be allowed to occur.

About the Author

Jeff Roquen is an independent writer and PhD student in the Department of History at Lehigh University (Pennsylvania, USA).