Vol. 71/No. 23      June 11, 2007

Under the cloak of “peacekeeping,” the U.S. and British rulers are pressing to reinforce the 10,000 UN troops in southern Sudan with another 22,000 troops in the western region of Darfur. The real purpose of these forces—as has been the case with all UN-sponsored military interventions, from Congo to Korea to Haiti—is to safeguard the profit interests of Washington, London, and other imperialist powers.

The tightened sanctions are not only designed to put the squeeze on Sudan economically. They are punishment for Khartoum’s failure to fall in line with Washington’s global “war on terror.” The Sudanese government sided with Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1991 U.S.-led war in Iraq. It voted at the UN to condemn Israeli aggression against the Palestinians and maintained close ties with the then “rogue” regime in Libya. In 1998 the Clinton administration bombed Sudan’s capital to destroy an alleged “chemical weapons” factory, which proved to be a pharmaceutical plant.

“Fighting terrorism” is the banner Washington uses to lead its imperialist allies in a long war against any government that doesn’t bow to the dictates of finance capital. It’s a war that ultimately targets working people—abroad and at home.

The U.S. and British governments hypocritically charge the regime in Khartoum with organizing an “ongoing genocide” against the peoples of Sudan’s Darfur region, playing on the just revulsion of millions at the atrocities the Sudanese government has had its hand in. But these are crocodile tears by Washington, London, and their imperialist allies. These civilized hyenas have plundered Africa, fostered divisions to keep its countries as semicolonies, and have been brutally occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, costing the lives of thousands of civilians each month.

Prominent Democrats and other backers of the reactionary “Save Darfur” campaign give cover to imperialist intervention in Sudan by calling the new sanctions “too little, too late.”

For more than a century the dominant imperialist powers have promoted divisions in Sudan by language, religion, national origin, and geography—pitting one group of the population against another. These divisions have fueled a decades-long civil war.

The imperialist powers have no interest in and are incapable of overcoming these conditions, through which they rob the wealth Sudanese toilers produce and plunder the country’s oil and other natural resources. Only Sudan’s workers, peasants, and other exploited produces can develop the leadership they deserve and liberate themselves. They need to get the imperialist troops and sanctions off their backs to have a chance.
 
 
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