Gearóid Ó Colmáin Offical site of journalist Gearóid Ó Colmáin.
A popular protest movement in the Republic of Sudan ousted President Omar Bashir in April. The mainstream media have portrayed the events in Sudan as a popular uprising against an oppressive dictator. However, closer scrutiny of the country’s complex geopolitical history reveals that globalist forces played a crucial role in changing a regime hostile to US/Israeli strategic interests. In part one of this series, I discuss US/Israeli engagement in Sudan in the context of Zionist policies in Africa, while part two exposes the principal actors involved and techniques deployed in another globalist-baked regime- change operation.
The Crisis in Darfur
There are two words which most people now associate with Sudan: Darfur and genocide. The conflict in Southern Sudan and Darfur has received extensive media coverage since 2003. Yet the complex geopolitics that underpins this conflict zone is rarely if ever explained by the mainstream media.
What is the origin of the conflict in Darfur? What is the role of the international community in this conflict? Why have humanitarian organisations in the West been pushing for military intervention by either the United States or the United Nations to protect human rights?
While some political analysts have highlighted the covert role of the United States and Britain in destabilising the region in order to gain control over Darfur’s vast oil reserves — which are currently being exploited by China — Israel’s participation in the Darfur crisis has been largely ignored.
Charles Onana’s book Al Bashir & Darfour, La Contre enquête, deals with the origins of the Darfur crisis as well as the rebellion in South Sudan in terms of Israel’s role in arming and training the Darfur and South Sudanese rebels as well as organising a highly impressive international media campaign against the Sudanese government.
The book lays particular emphasis on the hands-on role played by Israel in Sudan as part of a wider Anglo-American/ Israeli or Zionist imperialist agenda in Africa as a whole. Onana situates Israel’s involvement in the destabilisation of Sudan in the context of Israel’s foreign policy objectives in Africa as a whole.
Onana’s thesis is that:
‘Contrary to official discourse on their contribution to the peace process in Sudan, the United States, Britain and Israel never intended to help or encourage peace in Sudan. Rather, in order to pursue their own interests, each one of them participated in fomenting this conflict between the North and the South, or to profit from the conflict by demonizing the Muslims and pretending to defend the animists and Christians, while always arming one against the other.’
What follows is an attempt to summarise some of the disturbing facts which Onana lays out to show how Western imperialism, through its vast media, NGOs and transnational corporations have unrelentingly hounded Sudan from its very inception as an independent state in 1956, resulting in the murder of over a million and a half people and destitution of millions more.
With the secession of the oil-rich South in 2011 and conflict still brewing in Darfur, Sudan risks paying a heavy price for its opposition to globalism and globalism’s most powerful state, Israel.
Israel’s problem with Sudan
Ethnic tensions between Arabs and blacks in Sudan have their roots in the divide and rule policy of British imperial rule in the country until its independence in 1956.
Under British rule, Northern Sudanese Arab Muslims were favoured over their darker-skinned Animist and Christian neighbours in the South. British divide and rule policies in Sudan involved splitting the country according to ethnic identities.
Christian missionaries were predominantly active in the South of Sudan where English became the official language, while Arabic was the official language in the predominantly Muslim north. The British used the ruling clans in the North as a proxy governing class over their neighbours in the South.
This meant that investment and economic development was concentrated in the North to the detriment of the South.
Onana situates Israel’s interest in Sudan in the context of the Zionist state’s overall foreign policy in Africa, particularly the states bordering on Sudan.
After Sudanese independence in 1956, Britain and America hoped to prevent Sudanese unity with Egypt by escalating tensions between the two states. After the nationalist Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser had expelled MI6 (the British secret service) from Egypt during the Suez War of 1956, British agents operated against Egypt from neighbouring Sudan, helping to bring the pro-Western Sayed Abdallah Khalil to power. Khalil was the leader of the Ummah (nation) party which was staunchly anti-Nasser.
Mordechai Gazit, the First Secretary of the Israeli embassy in London, established close contacts with the Sudanese Ummah party, facilitating the introduction of Ummah representatives to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. Israel’s relationship with Sudan was off to a good start.
The 1960s and 70s in Sudan were to see many military coups and an ongoing -civil war in the South. However, the accession of Omar Hassan Al Bashir to power in 1989 would radically change Sudanese-Israeli relations.
Since his support for the Arab forces in the Six-Day-War in 1967 between Egypt and Israel, Omar Hassan Al Bashir has been a supporter of Palestinian liberation.
Al Bashir also served as an officer in the Egyptian army during the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel. Since his rise to power in Sudan in 1989, Israel has been determined to oust his pro-Palestinian regime in Khartoum. This Israeli enmity for the Sudanese government has taken the form of military support for Darfur insurgents against the Sudanese government.
But to understand Israel’s involvement in Sudan, Onana takes us on a tour of neighbouring African states in the context of Israel’s geostrategic interests. What emerges is a deeply complex nexus of Israeli destabilization extending throughout the African continent.
Israel and the Congo
Sudan shares a border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. During the brutal colonisation of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold II in the 19th century, Jewish bankers such as Raphael Bauer, Franz Philippson, and Léon Lambert as well as Jewish consultants, lawyers and businessmen played a key role in managing the Belgian colony for the Belgian king.
Jews from Russia, Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states flocked to the Congo to exploit the vast wealth of the country which included diamonds, gold, colt and other raw materials.
Much of this wealth went towards the construction of modern Belgium and was extracted through slave labour, torture and mass murder.
However, Belgium was never forced to pay reparations for its crimes against humanity in the Congo, unlike post-war Germany, which was justifiably forced to pay reparations to Israel for its enslavement of the Jews.
By the early twentieth century, the Jewish community in the Congo had become extremely wealthy, so wealthy in fact that it became the chief fundraiser for the emergent state of Israel in 1948.
The Jewish diaspora of the slave colony of the Congo raised more money towards the construction of Israel than the Jewish diasporas of America, Switzerland or South Africa.
After Congolese independence, Israeli officials served as proxies for US Cold War foreign policy in the country. After the CIA and Belgian intelligence murdered the democratic leader of the Congo Patrice Lumumba, forcing the mineral-rich Katanga province to secede in accordance with Western interests, Israel trained 800 elite Congolese soldiers who would defend Western pillage of the Katanga mines.
Israel’s role as a middle man for Western interests in the Congo soon became a matter of deep concern for Arab states who would describe Israel’s activities in the Congo as ‘neo-colonial’.
The Congo was not just an important source of wealth for Israel, its presence there also enabled it to expand its influence in Central Africa and Sudan.
Israel and Chad
From its independence in 1960, Chad’s first President Francois Tombalbaye had close relations with Israel. The ethnic situation in Chad was similar to that in Sudan, except it was the French-speaking Southerners, rather than the Northern Arabs, dominated after independence.
Thus Israeli policy in Chad involved manipulation of these ethnic tensions in pursuit of Zionist geostrategic interests, in particular, destabilisation of neighbouring Sudan after the pro-Israeli Abdallah Khalil was ousted in
In 1965, a rebel Chadian group Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad (FROLINAT) established itself in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.
Tensions between the N’Djamena(capital of Chad) and Khartoum were diffused, however, when the latter agreed to expel the Chadian rebels from Sudan.
Israel, sensitive to the brewing ethnic tensions in Chad, had just the right man for their diplomatic mission.
Quadia Soffer was an Iraqi born Jew who became Israel’s chief diplomat in Chad. Soffer’s fluent Arabic enabled him to manipulate both sides of the ethnic divide in Chad to Israel’s advantage. Soffer persuaded President Tombalbaye to support Israel in the UN.
However, after the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel’s popularity sank to an all-time low, with most African countries condemning the Zionist entity’s occupation of Arab lands. As a consequence, Chad and Sudan began to unite in their opposition to Israel.
However, in reality, the Ugandan and Chadian governments have been lending assistance to the Darfur rebels on behalf of Washington, Tel Aviv, France and the UK.
President Idris Déby of Chad and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda are key allies of the United States, Israel and France in North Central and Central Africa.
Idris Déby of Chad came to power in 1990 with help from the French secret service, after the previous dictator began to favour US oil companies over their French counterparts.
Since the rise of Déby poverty has continued to increase; so have the profits of French oil companies who continue to pillage the country.
Kept in power by the French military, Déby has been instrumental in the destabilisation of Sudan. However, the Western media has, unsurprisingly, echoed the propaganda of Western governments, namely that the violence in Darfur could spread into Chad.
During the conflict with the South, which ended with the creation of the South Sudan state in 2011, Western media repeatedly described the war as an ethnic conflict between the hegemonic Arab Muslims in the North and the Black Christians and Animists in the South.
Israel and Uganda
To the South of Sudan lies Uganda. In the 19th century, Uganda had been suggested by the British prime minister to the head of the World Zionist Congress Theodor Herzl as a possible homeland for the Jews.
Although the idea was subsequently rejected by the World Zionist Congress, Israeli-Ugandan relations remained strong after the country’s independence in 1962.
Uganda’s first president Milton Obote initially had good relations with Israel. The armed forces of the independent state had even been trained by Israel.
However, Israel’s Six-Day War had outraged African states and the Arab resolution of 1967 in Khartoum calling for an end to the Arab lands seized by Israel in that year as well as the call on African nations not to recognise the Jewish state, troubled Tel Aviv. Moreover, Ugandan President Milton Obote’s’ “move to the left” worried the cold warriors in Washington, London and Tel Aviv. Obote had to go.
A suitable replacement for Obote was found in the form of Idi Amin. Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché was instrumental in the coup which brought Amin to power in 1971. Amin had been trained in Israel after Ugandan independence.
Part of Amin’s pact with Israeli intelligence was to supply arms to the rebels in South Sudan. Israel was determined to punish Khartoum for its support for the Arabs during the Six-Day War.
By persuading its client regime in Uganda to supply Southern Sudanese rebels with arms, Israel hoped to cause a civil war in Sudan. Tel Aviv, however, had no intention of helping the rebels to take power in Khartoum. Civil war would be sufficient to weaken a regime hostile to Israel’s imperialist politics in the Middle East. The Sudanese civil war would go on to claim the lives of over 1.5 million people.
Israel and the geopolitics of the Nile Delta.
The River Nile has long been the source of tension between many states in Africa. The Nile runs through Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, DRC, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania.
In the nineteenth century, the father of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl attempted to persuade the British government to drain water to a proposed Jewish settlement in Sinai. But the plan was subsequently abandoned after the First World War.
In 1979, the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat offered Israel access to the Nile in exchange for withdrawal from East Jerusalem. Israel refused the offer.
On 14th of May 2010, an accord was signed in Entebbe, Uganda between Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania in which they agreed to seek a larger share of the Nile’s water supply.
Under colonial-era accords, Egypt and Sudan had received over 90 % of the water. Egypt and Sudan refused to attend the Entebbe conference. Both countries depend heavily on the Nile for agriculture and are not prepared to forgo their share of this vital resource for the benefit of countries who enjoy far more abundant annual rainfall.
The four signatories to the Entebbe agreement have all signed hydroelectric and desalination construction projects with Israel.
Israel is the only country that does not border the Nile, yet it has extensive plans for a pipe-line under the Suez Canal which would supply Nile water to Israel.
An alliance between a strong and unified Sudan and Egypt against Israel’s Northern Sinai Agricultural Development Project (NSADP) could scupper the Jewish state’s water plans. Access to the Nile waters is another factor driving Israel’s indefatigable determination to destroy Sudan.
The Red Sea
The Portuguese empire in the 16th century, Napoleonic France and the British empire have all sought to control the Red Sea, which has historically been the conduit used by Arab traders to transport Indian spices to Europe.
Djibouti, Eritrea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Sudan all border the Red Sea.
During the 1970s Israel established close ties with Ethiopia. Ethiopia would become Israel’s base for penetration of Sudan.
When millions of Ethiopians were starving to death in 1984, Israeli intelligence (The Mossad) with help from the CIA, secretly evacuated Ethiopian Jews from the famished country to Israel, bypassing through Sudan.
The Israelis had managed to persuade Sudanese president Gafar Nimeiry to co-operate with the covert operation. However, the decision to co-operate with an enemy state cost Nimeiry his career and he was ousted in a coup a year later.
Al Bashir and Darfur
Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir ousted Sadiq Al Madhi in a military coup in 1989. Al Bashir’s first action in power was to negotiate an end to the Second Sudanese Civil War. However, Darfur would be the next scene of Israeli-backed destabilisation.
Israel has been supplying weapons and training to the Darfur rebels since the outbreak of the conflict there. Although Israel has denied involvement in Darfur, the Sudanese government has presented proof of Israeli Tavor assault rifles captured from Darfur rebels.
During the Clinton years, US National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Secretary of Defence William Cohen played crucial roles in coordinating the US/Israeli destabilisation of Sudan.
After the Clinton administration imposed sanctions on Sudan in 1997 for its alleged support of terrorism, US secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave 2 million dollars to the Ugandan government to fight so-called “Ugandan” rebels coming across the border from Sudan.
Sudan soon found itself surrounded by US client regimes intent on ‘protecting’ minorities inside the country’s borders.
Although the conflict is often portrayed as having its roots in ethnic hatred between Black people and Arabs, the reality in Sudan is quite different.
While it is true that the Arabs dominated during the British colonial era and maintained a certain hegemony thereafter, the same power division on racial lines is not quite the case today.
Even the president of Sudan Omar Al Bashir is himself ethnically black African rather than Arab, which complicates the notion of black Sudanese being wholly dominated by their Arab compatriots.
Many ethnicities and cultures intermingle in Sudan and the conflict cannot be reduced to a simplistic racial divide of Arabs and Blacks.
In fact, climate rather than race or religion has been a key factor behind the violence in Darfur. Droughts during the 1990s forced migrations from North Darfur to the South as well as towards the East. Competition for land and scarce resources, as well as proxy guerrilla armies who served Western interests such as the Sudanese Liberation Army, and the Movement for Justice and Equality have all contributed to the conflict.
It is important to note that when we identify climate as a factor in the conflict, we are not referring to Roger Revelle’s now-discredited hypothesis of anthropogenic, C02-driven “global warming.”
Urgence Darfour: Zionist intellectuals and belligerent politicians
Abdul Wahid al Nour, the leader of the Sudanese Liberation Army, had close links with Israel and France in particular. He is a personal friend of the former French minister for foreign affairs Bernard Kouchner as well as the Jewish “philosophers” Bernard Henri Lévy and André Glucksman.
(photo Noam Levy)
Bernard Kouchner’s enmity for Al Bashir’s Sudan goes back a long time. As a minister in the Mitterand government in 1991, he travelled to South Sudan to talk with rebel leaders there — without permission from Paris.
Kouchner, who is himself Jewish and a fervent supporter of Israel, has been an indefatigable campaigner for military intervention in Sudan. Kouchner’s dubious humanitarianism came under the spot-lite in 2009 with the publication of the book ‘Le Monde selon K’– the world according to K, by the French journalist Pierre Péon. The book’s revelations about Kouchner’s corrupt business dealings in Africa provoked a national scandal, but it was not enough to force the former French foreign minister from office. It was simply another embarrassing example of “La France Afrique”: In French political culture, a certain degree of permissiveness is tacitly tolerated when it comes to dealings with former African colonies.
The French ‘Urgence Darfour’ campaign is a who’s who of French Jewish organisations and Zionist pundits. Although the French campaign against the Sudanese government has managed to ring in some African anti-racist groups, their claims to care about the plight of Black Africans in Southern Sudan and Darfur border on the absurd.
The anti-Sudanese Jewish associations have expressed no concern for the death toll of Africans in the neighbouring Congo since the US/Israeli-backedTutsi invasion in 1996, now estimated to be between 5 and 10 million, according to UN estimates.
The Save Darfur campaign: Jewish lobbies, Hollywood actors and war criminals.
The campaign against the Sudanese government in the United States known as the Save Darfur campaign follows a similar pattern to its sister organisation in France Urgence Darfour.
The American funding for the Save Darfur campaign comes from over 60 Jewish lobbies. Charles Jacob is one of the masterminds of the American Save Darfur campaign.
A self-styled political activist, Jacob is the co-founder of American Anti-Slavery Group(1994), co-chairman of The Sudan Campaign(2000), Deputy Director of the Boston chapter of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America and co-founder of the David Project Centre for Jewish Leadership
Jacob’s ‘anti-slavery’ campaign focuses exclusively on Sudan, where he claims that black people are being sold as slaves to Arabs. The American Anti-Slavery Group have provided no evidence whatsoever for these claims.
Jacob’s anti-slavery campaigning makes no reference to slavery in the Congo where children work in mines for less than 20 cents a day, nor does it denounce the trafficking of women for sex slavery in Israel, a fact that has been well documented by numerous human rights organisations.
Jacob’s spurious slavery allegations against Sudan are aimed at uninformed Americans and particularly, the black community in America.
US congresswomen Cynthia Mckinney was approached by Jacob participate in the slanderous campaign against Sudan.
She was told that her image would be displayed on the front page of magazines across America and that she would be re-elected for life if she co-operated with the Save Darfur campaign. Mckinney refused.
The pop-star Michael Jackson was also asked to participate in the Save Darfur campaign, but the singer was apparently not convinced of the good intentions of the campaign and also refused. The spurious Save Darfur campaign, however, found a willing participant in George Clooney who has acted as a frontman for the organisation, bringing it much needed kudos in the media. Clooney is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a key lobbyist for US imperialist interests around the world.
This well-funded politically motivated campaign against Sudan has, for the most part, gone unexposed in the mainstream media. The buzz words incessantly repeated by the Save Darfur campaign are “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, slavery and so on.
In 2005 a UN panel concluded that there was no evidence of genocide in Darfur. But the Save Darfur campaign continues to use the word genocide in its publications.
Sudanese Oil
Sudan’s vast oil reserves located in Darfur are another motivation behind the Save Darfur campaign. On January 25th 2002, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies held a symposium in Washington to formulate a US energy policy for Africa. The symposium resulted in the creation of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group, who published a reported entitled ‘ African Oil, a priority for US national security and African development’
The Report states:
‘AOPIG considers the Gulf of Guinea oil basin of West Africa, with greater western and southern Africa and its attendant market of 250 million people located astride key lanes of communication, as a “vital interest” in US national security calculations. The Gulf of Guinea, as part of the Atlantic oil-bearing basin, surpasses the Persian Gulf in oil supplies to the U.S. by 2.1, moreover, it maintains significant deposits of critically important strategic minerals including chromium, uranium, cobalt, titanium, diamonds, gold, bauxite, phosphate and copper. The region is also characterized by underdeveloped hydrological, agricultural and fisheries resources. Failure to address the issue of focusing and maximizing U.S diplomatic and military command organization will be perceived by many in Africa as a device of cultivated neglect by the world’s only superpower, and could therefore act as an inadvertent incentive for U.S rivals such as China, adversaries such as Libya, and terrorists organizations like Al Qaeda to secure political, diplomatic and economic presence in parts of Africa.’
The report was originally published online under the URL of “Israel Economy”, an interesting fact in itself, seeing as Israel is not mentioned in the document.
Former Sudanese minister for foreign affairs Eltigani Fidail said:
“ We know that the United States wants to control the exploitation and supply of oil throughout the world. U.S companies were the first to discover oil in our country, but thinking that they had not competitors, they demanded unacceptable conditions for its exploitation, which drove us to conclude an agreement with China. That doesn’t please the Americans.”
The report recommends “the establishment of a sub-united command with exclusive responsibility for the expanded Gulf of Guinea region, or all of sub-Saharan Africa, similar to US Forces Korea.”
Charles Jacob was instrumental in bringing a case of human rights violation against Canadian oil company Talisman Energy in 1998. Talisman Energy had a 25 % interest stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, a company co-owned by China, Malaysia and Sudan.
Jacob and the Save Darfur campaign claimed that Talisman was guilty of complicity in genocide through its involvement with the Sudanese government. But the case was subsequently dismissed by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
However, pressure from Jacob and his many business associates forced Talisman Energy to pull out of Sudan. It was Talisman’s co-operation with China and Malaysia that was the target of Jacob’s campaign on behalf of US/Israeli or Zionist interests.
According to Onana, China has had trade accords with Sudan since 1958 and relations between the two countries have always been cordial and mutually beneficial.
Competition between Western powers and China for Sudanese oil is likely to be the source of conflict in the region in the years ahead.
In part two of this series, I will address some of the key issues that need to be considered in assessing the global significance of the current Sudanese crisis.