Smiling and "Disagreeing" on Genocide

The photograph of US Special Envoy Andrew Natsios chatting amiably with a Sudanese minister, Ali Karti, perfectly emblematizes the United States' relations with the genocidal National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum. While the Sudanese air force conducts bombing raids on defenseless Darfurian villages - even, and especially, now, when talk of UN "involvement" in a proposed three-phase peacekeeping plan flutters about - Natsios negotiates passively with senior leaders responsible for torturing and decimating selected portions of their country's population. This morally despicable politesse, akin to holding mild tete-a-tetes with Himmler at the height of the Holocaust, is nevertheless utterly in keeping with US policy toward Sudan. Despite widespread acknowledgment of his role in orchestrating the Darfur genocide, Washington has shown preferential treatment to Sudanese security chief Salah Abdallah "Gosh," flying him to Langley for consultations on Sudan's terrorism information, whose import is, according to multiple accounts that I have encountered, most likely negligible (Sudan gave up most of its relevant information in the weeks and months following 9-11, in a rush to curry favor with the US and avoid becoming one of its "War on Terror" targets). Ali Karti, meanwhile, freely traveled the US in May, even visiting a former Congressman, Mark Siljander (R-MI), yet spurned a meeting with Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, apparently simply because he "just decided he didn't want to make it" (Washington Post, "Sudanese Official is a No-Show at State Department," Glenn Kessler, 13 May 2006). Both Gosh and Karti are almost certainly on the list of 51 names given to the International Criminal Court and are staples of the old NIF regime that has attempted to innocuously pass itself off as the National Congress Party. The likelihood of Karti's guilt for war crimes and crimes against humanity was strengthened by his paranoid rejection of ICC jurisdiction in June 2005, a month after the Security Council recommended prosecution in Sudan - "Our decision not to hand any Sudanese national for trial outside the country remains valid and has not changed" (ibid.). Karti's current title is, like the plethora of "presidential advisor" positions created to dilute the SPLA voice of Salva Kiir Mayardit and to surround President Bashir with NIF cronies like Nafie Ali Nafie and Majzoub al-Khalifa, designed merely to disguise his identity as the man who formerly led the deadly Popular Defense Forces paramilitary group. The PDF, which currently poses as a benign security force, but into which Janjaweed soldiers have insidiously been recycled, is also notorious for having waged scorched earth warfare in the Abyei, Nuba Mountains, and Southern Blue Nile oil districts in the late 90's. Yet the consistent response of US officials in dealing with such terrorists - the word is not used lightly - has been to court and cajole them while buying time to concoct a face-saving strategy to simultaneously get the political pressure of their back and exonerate themselves for persistent failure to stand up to genocide and its perpetrators.
Another indicator of the degree to which the United States is prepared to cater to a coterie of genocidaires occurred in Natsios' December 13, 2006 meeting with Bashir. Naively describing the discussion "constructive" and reporting the likelihood of progress based solely on the words of a man who has done nothing but fail to live up to his promises, Natsios made an astonishing statement that the two "agreed to disagree on the history (of the violence)" (AP, "Envoy Reports Progress in Sudan Meetings). The history of over 450,000 innocent Darfurians killed, almost 3 million displaced, out of horrific racial motives and by a cutthroat surivalist regime is not something one can "agree to disagree on." This practically gives equal credence to Bashir's absurd propagandistic account of the "events" in Darfur, according to which a mere 9,000 have died - any deviation from this number being an exaggeration by self-serving humanitarian organizations and Zionist conspirators - and in which Darfur rebels are the only ones responsible for atrocities. Signalling implicit acceptance of this grossly distorted narrative cannot be the basis of negotiations ostensibly meant to bring an international peacekeeping force to the region; on the contrary, it destroys the potential for creating a realistic framework for ending the genocide by continuing to strengthen Bashir's confidence that he can flout international "demands," continue to kill his own people, and even disagree with objective history without any remotely muscular threat of repercussion.