So, the Coalition Parties have been receiving donations from the big drug companies. Whoopee do! But I’ll leave the FTA for another day. Today I want to ask the question, "what have the chickens in the former township of Yallourn and the chickens in Darfur have in common?"
In classical words, once upon a time there was a little town called Yallourn. There were families going about their business and, for many, raising a few chickens for food. Then Yallourn wasn’t and so with the chickens. You see, Yallourn was sitting on a very rich coalfield and as such lost its value as a township, unique cultural landscape and home to thousands of families and their chickens. The requirements of capital meant that no matter how valuable the social resources were or how precious those chickens were to little boys and girls, those who would benefit most decided it had to go. What I am yet to hear on any mainstream media reporting of the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Sudan’s Darfur region is a mention of the ‘wealth’ that lies below this piece of land half a world away from the Latrobe Valley.
Sudan was, for many years, the ‘bread basket’ of Northern Africa. It certainly wasn’t free of internal conflict and external interference in its internal politics. However the ‘nation’ of Sudan is a relatively new creation because prior to the 1800s it had been, for the sake of brevity, two nations (there are in fact over 100 language groups and 19 major ethnic groups). The small central Northern region in which the capital of Khartoum is situated, is a majority light skinned ‘Muslim’ population who make up about 70% of the total population of the country, concentrated in the region. Mainly darker skinned ‘Christians’ populate the Southern and other regions.
The population in the Southern, Western and Eastern regions were predominately farmers and nomadic tribes people who, in order to realise the value of their produce, had to deal with the Muslim elites in the North in order to access the main markets in that region and internationally. What the Southerners didn’t know was that they were sitting on a gold mine. Black gold. Oil. Crude oil that is, Texas tea. But they didn’t get to move to Beverly Hills and become millionaires.
Instead, what happened was that in 1974 US multinational Chevron entered into an agreement with the Khartoum government, which was never really accepted as the legitimate government of the South, and began developing the Southern oil fields and a pipeline to deliver the oil to the ports on the Red Sea to the North. However in the mid 1980’s Chevron pulled out due to attacks on its workers and the French company Total took over the concessions Chevron had managed.
In order to protect its investments the oil companies paid militias to ‘guard’ their installations (a practice still going on in West Papua and other places). However, the 1989 coup which saw Islamist militarists take control of the government, brought a brief end to foreign oil interests as the new government took over the oil infrastructure. They also began a process of implementing Shari’a law and by the early 1990s the Christian population was being slaughtered in ever increasing numbers. But the need for cash in order to develop the Southern oil fields and infrastructure meant that the government had to cut a new deal and they did so with Canadian multinational, Arakis in the early 1990s. Arakis soon ran out of cash and did a deal with the China National Petroleum Corporation and Petronis of Malaysia.
While it would be easy to say that the scenario outlined above means that the cause of the conflict is oil, which to a great extent it is, it doesn’t go far enough to explain the depth of the division between the Sudanese communities. The Muslim elites which control the power of the gun are no different that any other group of ruling elite who want to impose their will on those less powerful than themselves (Mmm, sounds familiar doesn’t it?).
The problem with the poor Southerners is that they just happen to live on rich oil fields and for that, the ethnic hatred simmering for decades has been manipulated in order to recruit militias to, firstly, drive the population out of the areas wanted for oil-well development. Secondly, to provide cheap labour for the owners of the oil concessions and thirdly, to provide an excuse by proxy. That is, the government can claim that the militias are autonomous and out of their control while at the same time carrying out the work that a ‘legitimate’ government can’t. That is, genocide, the forced removal of people, the destruction of towns and villages etc etc.
In order to provide a ‘development strategy’ successive governments have adopted the divide and conquer approach and since the 1960s this has been standard government practice. The only variation to this program has been its intensity. Although various ‘peace’ agreements have been brokered and international outrage reached its peak in the late 1990’s, nothing has really changed. Why is it we haven’t heard that between 2000 and 2002 the Russian government sold the Sudanese government 30 armored combat vehicles and 16 attack helicopters? A tripling of the air power the government had in 1999.
What has this meant for the chickens in the back yards of Darfur? The same as it’s meant for the children who fed them. They have become the victims of fundamentalist scorched earth policy funded by international cash, powered by greed and fueled by millennia of intertribal rivalry and hatred. Just like the chickens of Yallourn, the chickens of Darfur are not even considered in the race to provide income streams and divert the wealth of the many to the bank accounts of the few.
Yallourn was never a ‘humanitarian crisis’. But if you listen to the stories of those who were forced to leave in a ‘voluntary relocation program’, you can hear the sorrow and bitterness in many of their voices. One can only wonder at the feelings of the survivors of the ethnic cleansing in Sudan who now sit in squalor in the refugee camps in Chad and Congo.
What our media has told us about Sudan is that there are crazed militias who rampage around killing people willy-nilly. They tell us about the demonstrations in Khartoum that say ‘Westerners keep out’. They tell us about the suffering of the refugees but never explain why they are suffering. They never ask, who benefits and who loses from these events? The corporate and other mainstream media in this country do us a disservice by not telling us the truth. And the truth is that the chickens and the children of Darfur and many other places are expendable if they stand in the way of accessing wealth. Hold no reservations, the true Darwinists of this age are the financial speculators and their masters who roam the globe like hungry lions devouring whatever stands in the way of them increasing their personal wealth and prestige.
While it is true that the Bush administration has gone some way to support UN resolutions (as ineffective as they are) it has done so only reluctantly and only after intense lobbying by some US Christian groups who have sympathies with their spiritual kin in Sudan. However, the US has no real interest in Sudan as it’s oil reserves are not that great and it already has Iraq. Russia certainly isn’t going to hinder its capitalist elites from making a dollar by restricting arms sales (even though international sanctions have been in force for over a decade).
What can be done? The first step to learn about the real reasons behind the conflict – the exploitation of ethnic divides, the greed for wealth by the Muslim elites and Western corporate involvement in ripping the wealth from the land and the lack of will by the ‘most powerful nation on earth’ to do anything about it. China’s oil industry certainly doesn’t want to cut off its profit lines and neither do the Malaysian profiteers. Perhaps Australia’s relations with these two nations and Canada prevents our government and hence the mainstream media, from reporting the truth? So where can we turn to find out the truth? My first suggestion is the independent human rights agencies. A lot of the back ground material for this piece has been collected from Human Rights Watch. Another great source are the oil industry publications. They often reveal more than they intend as the beat their chests in the ever-decreasing game of one-up-manship. The international press are another source as is the Christian press.
In our modern world there can be no excuses for not knowing more about what is happening to the chickens of the world. Sure life is tough and the pressure to perform enormous. All it takes to become even a little more informed about the history of the conflicts we hear about each day is to give up a half hour of TV every day and do some basic research. Perhaps if more of us did that we could save more chickens and, more importantly, the children who raise them. In the process we may find ourselves recapturing what it’s like to be a human and involved in the world around us.