THE KHARTOUM REGIME, AND THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST
Sudan Tribune
Feb 5 2015
By Eric Reeves
The “National Prayer Breakfast”–a sixty-two year tradition in
Washington, held annually on the first Friday in February–will this
year commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.
Bringing together a wide range of guests from all fifty states and
more than 100 countries, the event is hosted by the U.S. Congress
and is designed to facilitate engagement between various social and
religious groups. This year President Obama and the Dalai Lama are
headline guests.
But we must wonder about the appropriateness of one of those invited,
Foreign Minister Ali Ahmed Karti of the National Islamic Front/National
Congress Party regime in Khartoum, Sudan. Any perusal of Karti’s
“record of service” to this cabal of genocidaires should make all
in attendance uneasy, particularly given the terrible genocide of a
century ago that is being commemorated on this occasion.
For Karti has long been a key member of the regime and done some of
its dirtiest work, particularly as head of the Popular Defense Forces
(PDF)–a militia organization notorious for its savage attacks on
civilians (Karti was appointed in 1997). The PDF were particularly
active in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, where the Nuba
people were targeted for most of the 1990s in a brutal campaign of
extermination. No student of the period characterizes the actions by
Khartoum and its military and militia forces in the Nuba Mountains
as anything other than genocide.
And Karti is presently the international face of a regime that remains
committed to genocidal counter-insurgency in Darfur. Indeed, efforts
to destroy the lives and livelihoods of the non-Arab or African tribal
populations of Darfur have accelerated dramatically over the past
three years, particularly in 2014, when some 500,000 people were newly
displaced. The UN Panel of Experts on Darfur has recently reported
that in the first five months of 2014, more than 3,300 villages were
destroyed–overwhelmingly those of the region’s African tribal groups.
As has long been the case, displacement and violence in Darfur
correlate extremely highly. North Darfur is presently the region
that is enduring the worst atrocities committed against civilians,
including mass rape, indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets,
village destruction, land appropriation, and murder on a large scale.
Again, the targets are inevitably the African tribal groups of the
region perceived as supporting the long-standing rebellion; and
Khartoum is using not only its regular Sudan Armed Forces (SAF),
but the new Arab militia force known as the Rapid Response Forces
(RSF), a part of the legacy of the PDF that Ali Karti once headed.
Currently some 3 million Darfuris are internally displaced or refugees
in eastern Chad; many more are in critical need of relief efforts,
efforts by distinguished international humanitarian organizations
that Khartoum has, for more than a decade, systematically obstructed,
harassed, expelled, and intimidated.
And yet Karti has attempted during his tenure as Foreign Minister–he
was appointed in January 2010–to minimize the genocidal destruction
in Darfur. In August 2011, speaking to a pending UN resolution–Karti’s
office declared at his behest:
“The resolution is full of negative and obsolete references to be
resolved within the framework of the tripartite mechanism, such as
visa problems and allegations of aerial bombardment and the violation
of human rights,” the foreign ministry said. (Agence France-Presse
[Khartoum], 2 August 2011.
In fact, what Karti referred to as “allegations” had for years been
substantiated by every human rights group working on Darfur (until
they were all expelled, along with all independent journalists). These
include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Physicians
for Human Rights. The civilian bombings were and have continued to be
verified by the UN Panel of Experts on Darfur. To refer to confirmed
atrocity crimes as mere “allegations” tells us that above all, Karti
represents the NIF/NCP regime, not the people of Sudan. And there
is nothing “obsolete” about the daily reports of atrocity crimes
committed in Darfur.
In short, Khartoum continues to wage genocidal counter-insurgency war
in Darfur, and efforts by Karti to minimize these realities make him
deeply complicit.
The regime Karti represents to the world also continues its campaign
of more than three years against the people of the Nuba Mountains and
Blue Nile State. Relentless aerial and ground assaults in the two
areas have left more than one million people displaced and without
humanitarian resources; many are close to starvation because Khartoum
has imposed an embargo on all relief efforts in areas controlled by
the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-North (SPLM/A-N). It is
nothing less than a repeat of the genocidal campaign of the 1990s
in the Nuba. And for this, too, Karti makes no apology–even when
SAF combat aircraft deliberately strike at hospitals, as has been
the case at the Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel and the Doctors
Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Frandala,
South Kordofan. The latter, winner of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize,
has been attacked twice in the past year, despite apprising Khartoum
of their location.
Because Karti is well-spoken, and has made some of the right noises
for Western audiences, he is the point-person in Khartoum’s present
charm offensive, particularly as it is addressed to the U.S. and the
Obama administration. Karti has met with former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and twice with current Secretary of State John Kerry.
The effort, evidently encouraged by the Obama administration, is to
achieve a detente between Washington and Khartoum. So lustful for
counter-terrorism intelligence is the Obama administration that it
is willing to overlook all the crimes this regime must answer for.
Notably, for example, at a meeting on October 1, 2013,
Secretary of State John Kerry met his Sudanese counterpart [Karti] for
talks on Monday on the South Sudan peace process and conflict-hit areas
like Darfur, but did not raise U.S. concerns over the government’s
crackdown on protesters, the State Department said.
(Reuters [UN/New York], 1 October 2013)
This meeting followed immediately upon an extraordinarily bloody
effort by the regime to put down a popular uprising over rapidly
declining economic conditions. Amnesty International reported at the
time that security personnel had been given “shoot to kill” orders in
dealing with demonstrators, and many hundreds were killed or wounded in
Khartoum, Omdurman, and other major towns in Sudan. Kerry knew this,
but chose not to raise the issue with Karti. Karti for his part would
have subsequently reported to the genocidaires in Khartoum that the
U.S. was not inclined to press the regime on human rights abuses
of the worst sort, this in exchange for putative counter-terrorism
intelligence provided by Khartoum (which hosted Osama bin Laden from
1992 – 1996, the years during which al-Qaeda came to fruition).
Nor has the Obama administration pushed for a humanitarian corridor
to be opened to the people of the Nuba or Blue Nile; indeed,
the administration never speaks about these scenes of terrible
human suffering and destruction. Thousands have already died from
malnutrition and disease, and some 200,000 have fled to Ethiopia or
South Sudan. People have fled their homes and villages to live in caves
or ravines–desperate to escape the shrapnel-loaded barrel bombs that
are a daily reality, particularly in the Nuba. For this Karti makes
no apology; indeed, he and other civilians in the regime have long
ceded decisions about war and peace to senior military officials.
One of these men, Defence Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein,
has been indicted by the international Criminal Court for massive
crimes against humanity in Darfur; President and Field Marshal Omar
al-Bashir has been indicted by the Court on multiple counts of crimes
against humanity and genocide.
The failure of the Obama administration to push hard and publicly
for a humanitarian corridor to provide food, medicine, and shelter to
many hundreds of thousands of human beings gives us all too clear a
picture of the cost of doing business with the regime Karti represents.
Karti has arrived in the U.S. for the National Prayer Breakfast with
a visa issued by the Obama administration’s State Department. He
is accompanied by a less conspicuous but no less savage regime
survivalist, political secretary of the NIF/NCP Ibrahim Ghandour, who
was also issued a visa by the State Department. Ghandour’s views are
revealed in the leaked minutes of a secret August 31, 2014 meeting of
the most senior military and security officials, where he reveals his
support for (among other policies) a scorched-earth campaign in the
Nuba Mountains, designed to “starve”–the word accurately translates
the Arabic–the Nuba people by burning their fall sorghum crop, the
staple grain of the region. His comments from the minutes are excerpted
and annotated at . His main task is clearly to
rig the “re-election” of President al-Bashir; and the lengths to which
the regime is prepared to go to orchestrate a “legitimizing” electoral
process are both extraordinary and extraordinarily comprehensive–and
completely corrupt.
The Obama administration has already declared its willingness to stand
by the regime despite its record of serial genocides, which includes
the massive human destruction and displacement of the Nuer people
during the “oil war” (1997 – 2002) in what was then Western Upper
Nile, now Unity State. Karti’s PDF militias were active participants
in the conflict at this point. Former special presidential envoy for
Sudan, Princeton Lyman, declared in late 2011–after the campaigns
of annihilation were well underway in South Kordofan and Blue Nile,
and continuing in Darfur:
“We do not want to see the ouster of the [Khartoum] regime, nor
regime change. We want to see the regime carrying out reform via
constitutional democratic measures.” (Asharq Al-Awsat, 3 December
2011 |
By “we” Lyman meant the Obama administration, which has expediently
indulged this preposterous political scenario. This is the same
administration that decided to “de-couple” Darfur from the issue of
real strategic interest: counter-terrorism cooperation with Khartoum.
The word “de-couple” was used by an unnamed senior State Department
official, but was reported in the official transcript.
The Armenian genocide should be commemorated at a National Prayer
Breakfast; the refusal to recognize this genocide–and the belated
recognition by much of the world–is a failure to acknowledge the
terrible suffering and destruction of the Armenian people a century
ago–it remains a “stain on our soul.” But this is the same phrase
that candidate Obama used to describe Darfur in 2007:
“When you see a genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia or in Darfur, that is a
stain on all of us, a stain on our souls … . We can’t say ‘never
again’ and then allow it to happen again, and as a president of the
United States I don’t intend to abandon people or turn a blind eye
to slaughter.” ( )
Obama’s attendance at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast,
in the company of Khartoum’s Foreign Minister Ali Karti, signals
precisely that he is “turning a blind eye” to realities in Darfur,
South Kordofan, and Blue Nile–that he has “abandoned” them to on
the going slaughter in which Ali Karti is deeply complicit.
It is a day of national disgrace.
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http://wp.me/p45rOG-1AO
http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=3&id=27543
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEd583-fA8M#t=15
http://allafrica.com/stories/201502050448.html