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Darfur: Hundreds of ‘days of failure’

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Dec. 10 (IPS) — The Bush administration has done little to follow up its landmark declaration that called human rights abuses in Sudan’s Darfur region “genocide,” resulting in “100 days of failure,” said advocacy group Africa Action as the world marked Human Rights Day on Dec. 10.

Other organizations called on the United States and the United Nations Security Council to take much stronger action to stop the killing by government forces and government-backed militias of tens of thousands of members of several African ethnic groups in the area.

As many as 350,000 Africans are believed to have died or been killed over the past 18 months as a result of raids by Sudanese Arab militias, called “janjaweed,” and a government counter-insurgency campaign that have forced some 1.6 million people to flee their homes.

The United Nations, which months ago labeled the situation the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster,” estimates that between 10,000 and 30,000 more are dying each month.

The US Congress and the Bush administration have described the situation in even more dire terms. Last July, Congress found it amounted to “genocide,” a label formally endorsed in September by Secretary of State Colin Powell and later by President George W. Bush.

Despite the gravity of that assessment, Washington’s actions to rally an appropriate international response to the atrocities have been extremely disappointing, according to several groups, including Amnesty International and Africa Action, which called for stronger initiatives.

“The US must do everything necessary to secure a UN Security Council resolution invoking Chapter 7 [of the UN Charter], which would authorize a multinational force to stop the genocide in Darfur,” according to Salih Booker, the executive director of Africa Action, a grassroots group that played a leading role in the US anti-apartheid movement.

“Anything less will make the US complicit in the genocide, which only the US has rightfully acknowledged,” he added, noting that, as early as the end of this month, the total death toll in Darfur could rise to 400,000 “which is already half as many lives as were lost in the Rwandan genocide a decade ago.”

Also recalling the Rwanda disaster 10 years ago, Human Rights Watch (HRW) bemoaned the failure of the United States and the rest of the world to take stronger action.

“There has been much international hand-wringing, many expressions of outrage, but far too little meaningful response,” said HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth in a special Human Rights Day Statement.

“The international community has moved from ignorance to concern to feigned action — but not more. Coming a decade after the Rwandan genocide, this meager response mocks our vows of ‘never again,’” he added.

The basic problem at the United Nations, according to John Prendergast, an Africa specialist at the International Crisis Group (ICG), is that four key Security Council members — China, Russia, Algeria, and Pakistan — have opposed stronger measures for a variety of reasons.

Additionally, the Bush administration has been unwilling to push hard enough for a tough resolution, fearing that doing so will make it more difficult to gain the council’s cooperation on Iraq and related issues.

Thus, a series of tough resolutions threatening economic and diplomatic sanctions against Khartoum if it does not immediately halt the violence, disarm the janjaweed and hold their leaders accountable, which were brought by the United States and Britain over the past six months, have been watered down in order to obtain easy approval, added Prendergast.

As a result, the Security Council has so far only called on the government to take actions without establishing specific deadlines, after which sanctions would be applied. Instead, it has authorized the deployment by the African Union (AU) of a 3,500-member observation body to monitor a cease-fire between all forces in Darfur.

That body, less than one-third of which has been deployed over the last two months, was given no authority either to enforce the cease-fire, which continues to be violated by all sides, or even to protect unarmed civilians.

Rights groups consider these measures to be completely inadequate given the scope of the disaster, particularly noting the difficulty the AU has had in filling the slots of its monitoring force and the size of the territory that it must monitor.

“The AU forces authorized for Darfur — a pittance for an area the size of France with few roads or infrastructure — must be bolstered significantly,” HRW’s Roth said Dec. 10.

“Their mandate must be expanded to encompass civilian protection. Despite their preoccupations elsewhere, major governmental powers outside of Africa have a duty to protect and assist as well.”

In addition to Washington’s timidity in pushing for a stronger resolution, activists also criticize what they see as misplaced priorities in Sudan over the past several months.

Instead of trying to keep the spotlight on Darfur, they argue that the international community put more effort into trying to seal — so far unsuccessfully — a final peace agreement between the Khartoum government and a 21-year-old insurgency in southern Sudan. The conflict there has been frozen by a cease-fire that has endured for well over a year.

“In recent weeks, we have seen the US engaging with the Khartoum government as a legitimate partner in the north-south peace process,” said Booker, “even while this same government continues to wage genocide in western Sudan.”

Such a strategy, he added, feeds the notion that Washington places a higher priority on normalizing ties with Khartoum — to deepen its cooperation in the “war on terror” and perhaps to gain access to its oil resources — than on stopping genocide, permitting the regime to “play the United States.”

“We’re asking the US, which has talked the talk [on genocide], to walk the walk,” said Prendergast.

Washington could use the most recent Security Council provision as an important opening to press the Darfur issue effectively, he said. That provision created a UN Commission of Inquiry to assess the situation in the region to determine whether there is substantial evidence that war crimes, crimes against humanity, or even genocide have been committed. It is due to make a preliminary report in early January.

Assuming the commission will find such evidence, Washington should move to force a discussion of how to further probe and prosecute crimes, according to Prendergast, who stressed that “just debating options will send a critical message.”

Those talks should also set the groundwork for additional sanctions, including the imposition of an arms embargo against the regime, a travel ban against senior Khartoum officials and a freeze on the foreign assets of companies owned by the ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) and its officers.

“The point of these steps is to pin a scarlet letter on Sudan to isolate it,” Prendergast said, adding that China, whose substantial oil investments in Sudan make it reluctant to take punitive action, would “grumble” but would probably abstain on a sanctions vote.

“The UN Security Council remains the key, and it won’t move unless the US steps up,” according to Prendergast, who added that the “administration won’t move unless the Congress presses [it] harder, and Congress won’t move until it gets pressure from its constituents.”

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Experts rebel over US stance on N. Korea

By Jonathan Watts

Beijing, China, Dec. 11— A group of senior US policymakers has called on the Bush administration to change its stance towards North Korea, with its chairman accusing the White House of “distorting” intelligence about Pyongyang’s uranium weapons program just as it exaggerated claims about Iraq.

The Task Force on Korean Policy, which includes former US chiefs of staff and ambassadors to Seoul, said the administration’s obsession with the unproved uranium program had held up negotiations, scuppered the old nuclear inspection regime and allowed Pyongyang to press ahead with the development of plutonium weapons, which represent a far more immediate and substantiated threat.

The unusually public rebellion by Washington’s top advisory body on Korean affairs is likely to have been prompted by concerns that hawks in the White House will try to use the second Bush administration to resolve the issue by force now that Colin Powell — the main advocate for restraint — has said he will stand down from the post of Secretary of State.

Since last year, six-nation talks on the future of the peninsula have failed to make any progress, largely because the US has insisted that no deal can be reached until North Korea promises to scrap its uranium program. Pyongyang has consistently denied such a program exists.

“Greater recognition should be given to the urgency of the threat posed by North Korea’s possession of significant quantities of weapons-usable plutonium that could be transferred to third parties,” news agencies quoted the report as saying.

“The group urges the adoption of a more ambitious, sharply focused strategy designed to achieve the complete removal of all of this plutonium from North Korea in the first phase of denuclearization.”

The current nuclear stand-off started in October 2002 when US officials returned from a trip to Pyongyang claiming a senior North Korean diplomat, Kang Sok Ju, had admitted the existence of a covert uranium program.

North Korea denied this and the South Korean government expressed doubts about the US’s interpretation of events.

But the US claims were enough to disrupt a year of otherwise surprisingly good relations between Pyongyang and its neighbors. They also killed the “Agreed Framework” — the nuclear freeze put in place by the Clinton administration and condemned by neo-conservatives in the Bush administration.

Washington and its allies halted supplies of oil and North Korea responded by kicking out nuclear inspectors.

Selig Harrison, chairman of the Task Force on Korean Policy, said this was a deliberate ploy by the US to regain the initiative in northeast Asia. “Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did on Iraq),” he writes in next month’s Foreign Affairs journal.

The intelligence on North Korea’s supposed uranium program has not been made public, but the evidence has been shown to at least three countries — South Korea, Japan and China. It is not known whether British officials have seen the documents, but the UK Foreign Office has supported the accusations.

While the US has focused on uranium and the removal of Kim Jong Il, North Korea has made no secret of building up its plutonium deterrent. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN nuclear watchdog, said he was certain North Korea had converted enough fuel for four to six nuclear bombs.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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Controversial US groups operate behind the scenes on Iraq vote

By Lisa Ashkenaz Croke and Brian Dominick

Dec. 13 -- Even as the White House decries the ominous prospect of Iranian influence on the upcoming Iraqi national elections, US-funded organizations with long records of manipulating foreign democracies in the direction of Washington’s interests are quietly but deeply involved in essentially every aspect of the upcoming Iraqi elections.

“As should be clear, the electoral process will be an Iraqi process conducted by Iraqis for Iraqis,” declared United Nations special envoy Ashraf Jehangir Qazi in a Sept. 14 statement to the Security Council. “It cannot be anything else.”

But in actuality, influential, US-financed agencies describing themselves as “pro-democracy” but viewed by critics as decidedly anti-democratic, have their hands all over Iraq’s transitional process, from the formation of political parties to monitoring the Jan. 30 nationwide polls and possibly conducting exit polls that could be used to evaluate the fairness of the ballot-casting.

Two such groups — the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) — are part of a consortium of non-governmental organizations to which the United States has provided over $80 million for political and electoral activities in Iraq.

Both groups publicly assert they are nonpartisan, but each has extremely close ties to its namesake American political party, and both are deeply partial to the perceived national interests of their home country, despite substantial involvement in the politics of numerous sovereign nations worldwide.

The groups’ separate but overlapping mandates in Iraq include educating Iraqis on the democratic process, training Iraqi organizations to monitor the elections and deal with electoral conflicts, and providing impartial advice and training to political parties, according to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the official governmental organ funding the consortium’s operations in Iraq.

USAID contracts with and provides grants to private organizations that uphold its objectives, which include, according to the Agency’s own literature, “furthering America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets while improving the lives of citizens in the developing world.”

Far from the United Nations’ mission to oversee the election process itself, the American groups are actively engaged in cultivating political parties, and IRI appears to be working most heavily with parties and politicians favored by Washington.

Critics have expressed alarm, if not surprise, that policies carried out in other countries over the past two decades appear to be repeating in occupied Iraq. “USAID has learned that ‘legitimate’ leaders are not just found, they’re made,” wrote Herbert Docena, a research associate specializing in Iraq at the Bangkok-based activist think tank, Focus on the Global South. “Before the US withdraws from the scene, it first has to ensure that its Iraqis will know what to do.”

In October, Reuters obtained documents from the US State Department suggesting that the parties benefiting from US support of the Iraqi political process would be limited to those considered by the US to be “democratic or moderate,” and that the Department was spending $1 million on polling to determine “which candidates and parties are attracting the most support from the Iraqi people.”

Such US-backed groups, including the Islamic Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI), which now dominate the 100-member National Council selected amid controversy last August, participated in a series of six “training conferences” hosted by IRI this June.

According to IRI’s website, the prominent parties were joined at the training by dozens of small and medium-sized organizations. “Topics ranged from candidate leadership skills to platform development,” reads the group’s report, “thus offering emerging Iraqi civic and political organizations a chance to learn a full array of successful campaign techniques. Results were promising — participants expressed great enthusiasm during the proceedings and many actively pursued closer working relationships with the Institute.”

Representatives of IRI would not speak on the record, but the group’s website page on Iraq — which does not appear to have been updated since early summer — suggests IRI was involved in organizing last August’s National Conference, purportedly held to elect an interim assembly that would oversee Iraq’s current interim government. That event was widely viewed as a calamity, not least because no vote ever took place.

Other IRI programs have employed a “top-down approach,” the group’s website states, providing instruction specifically for Iraq’s interim governing bodies, from the original Governing Council to the present administration. Such a policy would appear to offer those already in power, mostly US-backed parties, a disproportionate share of IRI’s resources and a precedent of involvement not shared with Iraq’s fledgling opposition parties.

IRI’s relationship with parties dominating Iraq’s interim government raises the question of how much influence the American group has had in determining the makeup of current coalitions being formed to vie for the 275-seat National Assembly come January 30, which will in turn select a new government and write Iraq’s permanent constitution.

Unlike its counterpart, NDI spoke at length with The New Standard. Insisting that NDI’s advice does not favor any of Iraq’s numerous political parties over any others, Les Campbell, the organization’s regional director for the Middle East and Africa, said, “We work with all the parties, including the big and well-known ones, but we actually … spend special efforts to find, for example, Sunni parties — ones that might represent the Sunni population.”

Campbell estimated that NDI’s contributions are probably disproportionately helpful to the more obscure, less experienced Iraqi parties — the ones that need assistance at nearly every level. “We have spent special effort trying to find people and parties that might reflect the views of the urban, sort of secular intellectuals,” Campbell said, “because we think that they are disadvantaged.”

Nevertheless, Campbell was careful to point out that NDI officially has no interest in the outcome of the Iraqi elections. “I have no idea, and nor do we ever really worry about whether or not our assistance has any effect on the [elections’] outcome,” he said. “We’re not even slightly outcome-oriented.”

Both NDI and IRI say they are maintaining low profiles in Iraq primarily for the security of their staff and the Iraqis to whom they provide political assistance. But Campbell said there are other reasons, at least for NDI, that they do not stand out as a defining feature of the transition to democracy in Iraq. “We’re not an organization that generally seeks credit,” Campbell insisted.

Critics of the work carried out elsewhere by NDI and IRI are concerned that the groups’ low profiles in Iraq are not driven just by security or institutional modesty. Professor and author William I. Robinson of the Global and International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara calls groups like NDI and IRI “extensions” of the US State Department.

Robinson agrees with Campbell that groups like NDI are in danger in Iraq to the extent they are identified with the United States government. But according to Robinson, who has researched and written extensively on US foreign political and economic policies, the perception of an alignment between the US government and private organizations it funds is well deserved.

“I suspect that [NDI and IRI] are … trying to select individual leaders and organizations that are going to be very amenable to the US transnational project for Iraq,” Robinson said. He described those actors as willing to engage in “pacifying the country militarily and legitimating the occupation and the formal electoral system.” Robinson added that developing relationships with “economic, political and civic groups that are going to be favorable to Iraq’s integration into the global capitalist economy” would prove even more important for US-based organizations in the long run.

NDI and IRI are two out of four core organizations of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a self-described “nonprofit, non-governmental, bipartisan, grant-making organization” the stated purpose of which is “to help strengthen democratic institutions around the world.” Created during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president to enhance overseas political influence weakened by Jimmy Carter’s 1977 ban on CIA democracy front groups, NED’s reputation as a promoter of democracy never truly thrived outside the United States.

According to Campbell of NDI, both his group and its Republican counterpart originally became involved with political party formation and civil society efforts in Iraq shortly after the Spring 2003 invasion, using NED funds while getting their feet wet. By the next winter, administrators at the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority, along with others at the State Department and the National Security Council, began showing interest, Campbell explained. Then, in early 2004, the US government allocated $25 million to the NED to spread among its affiliate groups. Finally, in preparation for the 2005 vote, USAID gave more than $80 million to NDI, IRI and others involved in the consortium set up to provide technical and political assistance to the electoral process.

Regardless of how the Jan. 30, 2005 elections turn out, US-backed nongovernmental organizations are likely to be involved in Iraq well into the future. “We’re digging in for the long haul,” said Campbell. “I would fully anticipate NDI being in Iraq five years from now or ten years from now.”

Source: The New Standard

US money helped opposition in Ukraine

The Bush administration has spent more than $65 million in the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet US leaders and helping to underwrite exit polls indicating he won last month’s disputed runoff election.

US officials say the activities don’t amount to interference in Ukraine’s election, as Russian President Vladimir Putin alleges, but are part of the $1 billion the State Department spends each year trying to build democracy worldwide.

No US money was sent directly to Ukrainian political parties, the officials say. In most cases, it was funneled through organizations like the Carnegie Foundation or through groups aligned with Republicans and Democrats that organized election training, with human rights forums or with independent news outlets.

But officials acknowledge some of the money helped train groups and individuals opposed to the Russian-backed government candidate --people who now call themselves part of the Orange revolution.

For example, one group that got grants through US-funded foundations is the Center for Political and Legal Reforms, whose Web site has a link to Yushchenko’s home page under the heading “partners.” Another project funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) brought a Center for Political and Legal Reforms official to Washington last year for a three-week training session on political advocacy.

The four foundations involved included three funded by the US government: The National Endowment for Democracy, which gets its money directly from Congress; the Eurasia Foundation, which gets money from the State Department, and the Renaissance Foundation, part of a network of charities funded by billionaire George Soros that also gets money from the State Department.

The International Republican Institute used US money to help Yushchenko arrange meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and GOP leaders in Congress in February 2003.

USAID also funds the Center for Ukrainian Reform Education, which produces radio and television programs aiming to “educate” Ukrainian citizens about reforming their nation’s government and economy. The center also sponsors press clubs and education for journalists.

Source: Associated Press