The Presidential Candidates and Darfur: What You Need to Know

Hello fellow STANDers! Hope everyone had a great week. First, a quick reminder to register to vote! The deadline is October 10, so if you’re not registered at your university-area address, get on the ball! Whatever your political leanings, this is an important election, the most important in many years. Go fill out a ballot at any public libraray, the county board of elections headquarters, track down one of the people registering voters on campus, just get it in there!

Now that I’ve gotten off that soap-box, anyone who watched the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday night heard Alaska Governor mention Darfur. She said, “When I and others in the legislature found out we had some millions of dollars in Sudan, we called for divestment through legislation of those dollars to make sure we weren’t doing anything that would be seen as condoning the activities there in Darfur.'”

My first thought was “Right on, Governor! Every state needs to completely divest from Darfur.” However, it turns out that there’s more to the story than that. There was a bipartisan bill (HB 287) in the Alaska state House to do just that.

The problem is that the bill ran into opposition–from the governor’s office. In February 2008, at a hearing on the bill, a representative from the governor’s office spoke against the divestment proposal, saying that “The legislation is well-intended, and the desire to make a difference is noble, but mixing moral and political agendas at the expense of our citizens’ financial security is not a good combination.”

Two months later, the governor changed her mind and said “We have a moral responsibility to condemn the genocide in Darfur.” Her Revenue Commissioner spoke out publicly for SB 227, a state Senate companion bill to the one in the House. But by that point, the legislature was about to end its session and did not have time to take up the bill. As of this moment, the Sudan Divestment Task Force calculates the Alaskan government still has at least $22 million in investments in Sudan. Let us all hope that Governor Palin either puts this bill at the top of her legislative agenda when she returns to Juneau after November 4 or that she directs her lieutenant governor and successor to put it at the top of his agenda if she heads on to bigger and better things. Either way, it is important that we continue to hold our politicians accountable, that we say not just “Never Again,” but also “Not With My Money!”

With that in mind, I thought it might be useful to jot down quickly where the candidates stand on Darfur and what they’d do as president. The good news is that Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama issued a joint statement in May 2008 declaring that, “Today, we wish to make clear to the Sudanese government that on this moral issue of tremendous importance, there is no divide between us. We stand united and demand that the genocide and violence in Darfur be brought to an end and that the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] be fully implemented… If peace and security for the people of Sudan are not in place when one of us is inaugurated as President on January 20, 2009, we pledge that the next Administration will pursue these goals with unstinting resolve.”

Great words… but just words. No matter the outcome on November 4, we must make sure that our next president follows through on his promises.

McCain supports the divestment movement and has called for all Americans to divest from the Sudanese government, saying “that government obviously is one that has done virtually nothing to prevent the genocide that is taking place in Darfur.” Obama has said “The United States has a moral obligation, anytime you see humanitarian catastrophes… And when you see a genocide, whether it’s in Rwanda, or Bosnia, or in Darfur, that’s a stain on all of us, that’s a stain on our souls.” McCain and Obama both support enforcing a “no-fly zone” over Darfur to protect the civilians there.

Darfur Scores, a project of the Genocide Intervention Network, has given McCain a C and Obama an A+ on Darfur. While McCain has voted for many pieces of legislation aiming to deal with the crisis and co-sponsored one of them, Obama has taken more of a leadership role by co-sponsoring almost all of them, including co-sponsoring the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2006 with Republican Seantor Sam Brownback. While McCain has demonstrated that his heart is in the right place, Obama has put forth more detailed plans on dealing with Sudan, which are available on his website, under the heading “Foreign Policy.” McCain’s website does not have a “Foreign Policy” page, the closest to it being his “National Security” page (a revealing statement about the different nominee’s preference for diplomacy vs. military action), which does not mention Darfur or Africa at all.

None of this should be taken to constitute an endorsement on the part of UNC-Charlotte STAND for any candidate. While my own political leanings are well-known, here I aim merely to present the facts on the candidates’ positions and records on Darfur. One would be ill-advised to vote for any candidate based solely on one issue (McCain’s website, for example, has a prominent page on “Space Exploration” – something I personally definitely support – which Obama’s website lacks). Such things merely indicate the different priorities that candidates have and the emphases they place. To those concerned about Darfur, the important work will take place after the election. The new president, no matter who he is, will already be favorably disposed to take strong action right off the bat. Ensuring that he does so will be the greatest priority of Darfur activists in 2009.

China… Why is it always China?

Greetings fellow STANDers! This is Michael Smith. After a very hectic first several weeks of summer, things are settling down somewhat, providing much needed time to reflect. I thought for my first post, I’d briefly look at the elephant in the room: the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

China’s own human rights record is abysmal: no other nation on Earth executes more of its citizens every year (over 3000, though the Chinese government does not keep precise statistics). China’s record with minorities is comtemptible. While China has more than 100 registered ethnicities, over 90% of China’s population is of the Han ethnic group. Much of what is percieved of by the West as Chinese nationalism when it is manifested on a world stage is more clearly seen in an internal context as Han chauvinism. During China’s long 4000-year history, it has contracted and expanded many times, at various points exercising control over non-Han areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang (East Turkestan), Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. In order to solidify the control of the Beijing government over these areas, the government has over the last half-century imported hundreds of thousands of Han families into these areas to change their demographic balance and tie them more closely to China. Any expressions of non-Han ethnic or cultural pride can be capital offenses and are labeled by the Chinese government as “splittism” or violent separatism. The Chinese military and government will tolerate only one supreme authority with absolute power over all the lands they claim, and even demands for autonomy are repressed as harshly as armed insurrections, as was seen in the Tibet crackdown back in March.

In many ways, Han chauvinism has become the ruling ideology of China, with the discrediting of communism. But Han chauvinism is primarily, if not exclusively, a problem for those non-Han minorities unfortunate enough to reside within the borders of the PRC. The guiding principle of the PRC’s foreign policy is resource-acquisition.

The horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in which millions died in an attempt to implement communist principles chastened the generation of leaders who came after Mao. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, Chinese leaders began a transition to a market based economy. The highest virtue under socialism, that of sacrifice for the common good and the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, was abandoned in favor of Deng’s maxim: “To get rich is glorious!” While China today is far from a free market economy, it is also far from its Marxist roots. Where once China’s foreign policy was guided largely by ideology, with China supporting Maoist movements around the world, today its foreign policy is devoid of any principle except Deng’s: to gloriously enrich the state and the state-owned monopolies.

And there lies the crux of the problem: China’s foreign policy is unusually amoral, with the regime having no compunctions about working with the most repressive rulers on Earth to secure ever larger amounts of mineral resources to fuel the Chinese economic modernization and the improvement in living standards of many ordinary Chinese. It is through this lens that we must view Darfur, where the Sudanese government is propped up and shielded from international pressure by Chinese oil contracts. The same holds true for Zimbabwe, where the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe is able to immiserate his subjects, beat and intimidate opposition supporters, rig elections, and convert the breadbasket of Africa into a desert–all with the complete support of the Chinese government which has invested heavily in Zimbabwe’s industries and has sold millions of dollars of military hardware to Mugabe’s regime. Tacit Chinese support for the repressive junta in Burma (styled by that illegitimate clique as “Myanmar”) has kept the regime in power as it continues to repress its citizens, persecute Buddhist monks and pro-democracy activists in the wake of last August’s protests, compel more than 800,000 Burmese into forced labor, and ethnically-cleanse non-Burmese in the country’s mountainous north, not to mention refusing to let international aid workers in to help the hundreds of thousands affected by Cyclone Nargis. A number of other autocratic regimes from Equatorial Guinea to North Korea are also kept in power by the Chinese government.

These are all spokes on a giant wheel: and at the center of it all sits Beijing. This is not an argument for isolating or demonizing China; such a strategy would be a catastrophic and counterproductive folly. Instead, we must see that China is the indispensable actor. We CAN end the genocide in Darfur, and force repressive governments to respect human rights in Burma, Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea and other nations–but only if we keep the pressure on China.

Beijing has already shown that it is keenly susceptible to international pressure: in response to international pressure, Chinese President Hu Jintao pointedly avoided Zimbabwe on a trip to Southern Africa in February 2007 in which he visited most of Zimbabwe’s neighbors. This underscores the importance of our divestment drives, which could force a change in the policy of the Chinese government if and only if the costs, both in both money and bad-publicity, of doing business as usual with Khartoum are higher than the benefits to Beijing. The upcoming Summer Olympics in Beijing in August will present an unparalleled opportunity for human rights activists to put Beijing’s relationships with odious regimes front and center. This is a topic to which I will return later, but I think it’s important to step back occasionally from the narrow focus on Sudan and Darfur and look at the broader international context. By pressuring the PRC on Darfur, we may be able to improve human rights in Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, and many other nations as well.

For the Voiceless,
Michael