Oil is driving the disaster in Darfur

By W F Deedes


How concerned we were about apartheid in South Africa: how determined to compel its practitioners to change their ways. We eventually defeated them by means of sanctions, which were only partially successful, and disinvestments. Would we have done it if South Africa had owned rich oil resources?

I raise the question because what has been happening in Darfur, and still goes on, is crueller than apartheid. Yet the government of Sudan, which carries heavy responsibility for the ethnic cleansing, for the deaths and displacement of thousands and for unimaginable human misery, can shrug its shoulders at the world's protests over its support for the Janjaweed militia that inflicts much of the bloodshed.

Like civil war in Sudan itself, the persecution in Darfur has become more complex as time goes by; but behind both lies the implacable determination of Khartoum to bring the whole country to its own way of thinking. Read more >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>