Darfur’s War of the Future

I�ve cut and pasted this from the original, which should be
compulsory reading for all. It is high time everybody had their eyes
opened as to the real reasons behind today�s conflicts and began
thinking about their future and their children�s future. The future
depends on decisions we make today, and we should make those
decisions while armed with the truth.

War of the Future
Oil Drives the Genocide in Darfur
By David Mors

A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert
region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan.

This war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the
western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are
burning and pillaging, castration and rape -- carried out by Arab
militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated
technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by
the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack
black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different
weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil
deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.

This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers
whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite
pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael
Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the
consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible
war.
Invisible?
Invisible because it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our
mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think
of all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers and
magazines. Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile
culture, our suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and
famous, the giddy assumption that all this can continue indefinitely
when we know it can't -- and you see why Darfur slips into darkness.

Racism enters into our refusal to even try to understand Africa, let
alone value African lives. And yes, surely we're witnessing the kind of
denial that Samantha Power documents in A Problem from Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide; the sheer difficulty we have
acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it, she observes, we
pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly by. And yes,
turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia, with its
graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the
streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by
something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that
prevents the media from making the connections that would threaten
our petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to
acknowledge the fact that the industrial world's addiction to oil is
laying waste to Africa.

When Darfur does occasionally make the news -- photographs of
burned villages, charred corpses, malnourished children -- it is
presented without context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-
driven crisis in northern Africa. An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians
are dying every day. Yet the message from our media is that we
Americans are "helpless" to prevent this humanitarian tragedy, even
as we gas up our SUVs with these people's lives.
Sudan is now the seventh biggest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria,
Libya, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and Equatorial Guinea.

Oil companies and exploration companies like Halliburton wield
political and sometimes military power. In Sudan, roads and bridges
built by oil firms have been used to attack otherwise remote villages.
Canada's largest oil company, Talisman, is now in court for allegedly
aiding Sudan government forces in blowing up a church and killing
church leaders, in order to clear the land for pipelines and drilling.
Under public pressure in Canada, Talisman has sold its holdings in
Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish company, withdrew under similar
pressure from human rights groups

Last June, following the new seismographic exploration in Sudan and
with the new power-sharing peace treaty about to be implemented,
Khartoum and the SPLA signed a flurry of oil deals with Chinese,
Indian, British, Malaysian, and other oil companies.

In short, Sudan embodies a collision between a failed state and a
failed energy policy. Increasingly, ours is a planet whose human
population is devoted to extracting what it can, regardless of the
human and environmental cost. The Bush energy policy, crafted by
oil companies, is predicated on a far different future from the one
any sane person would want his or her children to inherit -- a
desolate world that few Americans, cocooned by the media's silence,
are willing to imagin
www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=14239

More information on the real policy towards Darfur is worth reading
here:

Appeasement Driven by Oil
The Bush Administration and Darfur
By David Morse
www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=124232

May we send prayers out to the people of Darfur.

Thank you Duende for the article.