On Sudan and complex issues

March 12th, 2006 at 15:41 Björn Hallberg

Tired of the nickelodeon version of events? Voltaire Network has the solution.

The extremely complex situation in Darfur is being ignored by analysts and by the commentaries published on the western mainstream media, particularly in the United States. US media analysts deal with the Darfur issue only as an ethnic conflict, or more precisely as the “genocide” of “Africans” at the hands of the “Arabs”. If it is a fact that the conflict leads to massacres that cruelly affect sedentary populations, it is false to suggest that confrontation is based on such ethnic or “racial” reasons and that such a division is the cause of the conflict. In effect, nomadic and sedentary populations are all made up of black people with Arabic characteristics (since more or less a long time now) after they largely mixed. However, such a population distinction allows for a rhetoric that better mobilizes western public opinion and helps hide oil-oriented interests in Sudan behind emotion and fear.

Not to mention NATO involvement, which is as they point out, very much in America’s interests. Which of course means that it is not in ours.

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