Democratic Party politicians, from presidential candidate John Kerry to Rep. Charles Rangel, have gone further, calling on Washington to organize a “multinational” military force to intervene in Sudan.

The latest U.S. moves against Sudan are part of Washington’s broader “war on terror,” through which the U.S. ruling families seek to strengthen their domination of the Mideast, as well as Africa and other parts of the world, at the expense of their imperialist rivals.

The offensive against the Sudanese government, which U.S. officials label “radical Islamist,” began under the Clinton administration. In 1993, the White House put Sudan on its list of “terrorist nations” targeted for hostile actions. On Aug. 20, 1998, the Clinton administration ordered warplanes to bomb an industrial area in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. U.S. officials said they were targeting “terrorist facilities” belonging to Osama bin Laden, who they claimed was responsible for the bombing two weeks earlier of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The missiles actually destroyed a factory that produced medicine.

Sudan, nearly the size of Alaska and Texas combined, is the largest country in Africa geographically. A nation of 39 million, it is strategically located across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. It borders with Egypt, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The country’s main exports are oil and cotton. Despite a wealth of resources, Sudan is one of the most impoverished nations in the world because of more than a century of imperialist domination.  
 
Conflict in Darfur
The focal point of conflict in Sudan today is Darfur, a region in western Sudan. In early 2003, antigovernment forces in Darfur launched a revolt demanding autonomy. The insurgency is led by two groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). They are linked to a prominent northern opposition figure, Hassan al-Turabi. These groups accuse the central government of treating the largely Black population in the south, which belongs to various national minorities, as second-class citizens.

Seeking to crush the revolt, Arab-speaking militia groups known as the Janjaweed, which the rebels say are backed by the government, have carried out bloody attacks on the civilian population. The national authorities deny any links to the militias and, in face of U.S. government pressure, have pledged to disarm them.

According to press reports, at least 10,000 people have been killed in Darfur over the past year and a half. An estimated one million people have been driven from their homes by the pro-government militias and are living in precarious camps. About 100,000 have fled across the border to Chad.

At the end of June, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell traveled to Sudan, where he visited Darfur and met with government leaders, demanding they disarm the Janjaweed and allow African Union troops and “human rights monitors” into the region. The same day, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan arrived in the country with the same message. In face of the threat of UN Security Council sanctions, the government of Gen. Omar el-Bashir agreed to their demands.

The French government has opposed Washington’s proposal for UN sanctions against Sudan. “It would be better to help the Sudanese get over the crisis so their country is pacified rather than sanctions that would push them back to their misdeeds of old,” Deputy Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier told French radio. Paris is concerned about Washington’s rising influence in Africa, particularly in a region that includes Chad and the Central African Republic—former French colonies that Paris continues to dominate.  
 
Democrats call for troops to Sudan
Democratic Party politicians have seized on the Sudan crisis to go even further than the White House. Speaking at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia July 15, Democratic contender Kerry said the Bush administration was ignoring genocide in Sudan and was overextending U.S. troops in Iraq in a way that hindered Washington’s ability to intervene in other countries such as Sudan. He declared, “This administration must stop equivocating” and push for a UN Security Council resolution approving military intervention in Sudan, including with U.S. troops, as a “humanitarian” operation. The NAACP leadership applauded Kerry’s call.

On July 13, Democratic congressman Charles Rangel of New York got himself arrested in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C., to condemn that country’s government. He argued U.S.-backed sanctions were not enough. “We need to get an international peacekeeping force on the ground to save lives immediately,” he said.

Communist Parties around the world, as well as youth groups and other organizations affiliated to them, oppose what they call the “Islamist” government in Khartoum. They have echoed the call for imperialist military intervention under the banner of backing an “international” force to stop the killings of civilians. A statement by the World Federation of Democratic Youth issued in early July, for example, called for “action by the whole world” in face of the critical situation in Darfur. “For a long time, the international community has turned a blind eye on the atrocities in Darfur,” it said. “However, nowadays the drums of the international intervention are so loud to the degree that one can say it is no longer avoidable.”

For more than a century the dominant imperialist powers—first the British colonial rulers, and today Washington—have fostered divisions in Sudan by language, religion, national origin, and geography. The inhabitants of the north are predominantly Arab-speaking and Muslim. In the south most speak languages other than Arabic, and are Christian or belong to tribal religions. The south has historically been more backward economically than the north, where the government has its base.

These imperialist-promoted divisions and regional differences have led to decades of civil war. Fighting began in 1983 between government forces and an insurgent group in the south, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), led by John Garang, which demanded self-determination for the south. The U.S. government pressed Khartoum to negotiate with the SPLM, and the two sides have been engaged in talks for several years. In May of this year they signed a U.S.-backed peace agreement. The deal reportedly includes power-sharing terms and an arrangement on the sharing of oil wealth.

The Sudanese government has accused Washington of backing the SPLM insurgency in the south. The U.S. government has given funds to the opposition National Democratic Alliance, which includes the SPLM, various bourgeois parties in the north, and the Communist Party of Sudan.  
 
U.S. ‘war on terror’ targets Sudan
In 1969 a coup in Sudan by radical nationalist forces, politically inspired by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, brought to power a government headed by Gaafar al-Nimeiry. At first the U.S. rulers were hostile to the new government and backed the Anyana rebels in the south against Khartoum, but as Nimeiry clamped down on trade unions and working-class parties in the 1970s, instituting imperialist-ordered austerity measures, his regime won Washington’s confidence.

Nimeiry was ousted in a 1985 coup in the wake of popular protests over increases in food prices. In another coup in 1989, a group of military officers headed by Gen. Omar el-Bashir took over the government. The new regime earned Washington’s hostility for not following U.S. dictates. It sided with Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf war, pursued closer ties with Libya, and joined in voting at the United Nations to condemn Israeli repression against the Palestinian people.

In 1993 the Clinton administration branded Sudan a “terrorist state,” claiming that the government had allowed Palestinian and Lebanese guerrillas to train on Sudanese soil. Washington imposed a trade embargo on Sudan in 1997, accusing the government of “support for international terrorism” and “human rights violations, including slavery.”

In 1998, after the car bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Washington ordered unannounced military attacks on both Sudan and Afghanistan. U.S. warplanes launched 79 cruise missiles on Khartoum. The White House claimed these bombings were in “self-defense” against a Bin Laden “terrorist network.” The target, which Washington claimed was a chemical weapons factory, was later proved to be a plant used to produce medicines. The architect of the bombing was Clinton’s counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, today the darling of liberal critics of the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war.

The Bush administration has continued this hostile policy. In October 2001 the White House named Sen. John Danforth as a special envoy to Sudan to pursue its campaign against that government under the guise of seeking resolution of the civil war. The following month it extended the sanctions against Sudan.

In face of this pressure, the Sudanese government has made concessions to Washington, such as inviting the FBI and CIA to open “antiterrorism” offices. In June 2003, Sudanese authorities arrested 17 Saudis on charges of “unauthorized arms training” and extradited them to Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. government has now seized on the conflict in Darfur to step up the pressure on Khartoum.  
 
 
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