China’s oil-related diplomacy is another major factor in the US-Sudan relations. China is Sudan’s largest investor and buys 80 percent of its oil output. Washington accuses Beijing of trying to “secure oil at the sources,” something Washington foreign policy has itself been preoccupied with for at least a Century.
The US sees China as their growing competitor for Sudan’s oil. China has helped Sudan build up its oil exporting industry independently of the US. Not surprisingly, allowing a rival world power such as China to influence an African country with major oil supplies flies in the face of the U.S. goal of outright control of the world’s major oil resources.
Beijing’s China National Petroleum Company, CNPC, is Sudan’s largest foreign investor, with some $5 billion in oil field development. Since 1999 China has invested at least $15 billion in Sudan. It owns 50% of an oil refinery near Khartoum with the Sudan government.
China plays a different role in Sudan and other African countries. China has actually helped Sudan’s economic development while serving its own needs for oil. With its more than $1.3 trillion in mainly US dollar reserves, China has been generous in dispensing its soft loans, with no interest or outright grants to some of the poorest debtor states of Africa. The loans have gone to infrastructure including highways, hospitals, and schools, a stark contrast to the brutal austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank. In 2006 China committed more than $8 billion to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique, versus $2.3 billion to all sub-Saharan Africa from the World Bank. Unlike the World Bank, a de facto arm of US foreign economic policy, China attaches no strings to its loans.
Tellingly, African countries have now begun to argue that the World Bank and the IMF have become irrelevant to them because they can get aid packages and investment from China without the strings that are attached to money from the US-backed international financial organizations.
US Covert Operations
The war in Sudan involves both US covert operations and US trained “rebel” factions coming in from South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia and Uganda. F. William Engdahl, author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,’ provides an insight into the covert US operations in southern Sudan and Darfur:
“The United States, acting through surrogate allies in Chad and neighboring states has trained and armed the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army, headed until his death in July 2005, by John Garang, trained at US Special Forces school at Fort Benning, Georgia.
“By pouring arms into first southern Sudan in the eastern part and since discovery of oil in Darfur, to that region as well, Washington fuelled the conflict that led to tens of thousands dying and several million driven to flee their homes. Eritrea hosts and supports the SPLA, the umbrella NDA opposition group, and the Eastern Front and Darfur rebels.
“The Pentagon has been busy training African military officers in the US, much as it has for Latin American officers for decades. Its International Military Education and Training (IMET) program has provided training to military officers from Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, in effect every country on Sudan’s border. Much of the arms that have fuelled the killing in Darfur and the south have been brought in via murky, protected private “merchants of death” such as the notorious former KGB operative, now with offices in the US, Victor Bout. Bout has been cited repeatedly in recent years for selling weapons across Africa. US Government officials strangely leave his operations in Texas and Florida untouched despite the fact he is on the Interpol wanted list for money laundering.
“US development aid for all Sub-Sahara Africa including Chad, has been cut sharply in recent years while its military aid has risen. Oil and the scramble for strategic raw materials is the clear reason. The region of southern Sudan from the Upper Nile to the borders of Chad is rich in oil. Washington knew that long before the Sudanese government.”
It is known that Ethiopia is one of the most active countries in the 21-year long north-south war.
Eritrea is suspected of having supported the Beja separatist movements in the northeastern part of Sudan. Uganda, which claims that Khartoum supports the God's Resistance Army that fights against the Ugandan administration, is reportedly among the countries that help the opposition groups in Sudan.
There are more than 80 ethnic/religious groups among the 7 million inhabitants of Darfur. Some groups have kin relationships with neighboring country, Chad. Chad President Idris Deby is a member of the Zaghawa tribe in Darfur. It is stated that three presidents, who held power in Chad, directed their fights from Darfur.
According to Engdahl, the present concern of the current Washington Administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we were to look closely, genuine concern over genocide against the peoples in that poorest of poor part of a forsaken section of Africa. No. “It’s the oil, stupid.”
Sudan is Africa's largest geographical state, nearly a third the size of the United States, with a small population of only 30 million.
(*) Oil Discovery Adds New Twist to Darfur Tragedy By Ruth Gidley
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