Olympics focusing Beijing's mind on a Darfur fix
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
Beijing has gone a charm offensive. It’s an expression of concern by the Chinese Communist leadership that their extraordinary effort to display pomp and circumstance during the XXIX Olympiad, anointing their arrival as a world power, could go sour.
The Chinese moved in the face a growing campaign by human rights activists the world over to couple China’s support of the Sudan government with foreign participation in its Games. The campaign for pressuring the Chinese — some even advocating a boycott like the one that which overtook Moscow’s Olympics in 1980 led by the Carter Administration after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan — has been slowly percolating.
But with the rapid approach of the Olympics in August and an incredibly complicated mess in the Sudan, Africa’s largest country, now drawing in its neighbors, the Chinese have shifted gears. The generally recalcitrant Chinese foreign ministry trotted out a senior official to claim that the Chinese are doing everything they can to calm the situation in Darfur, Sudan’s huge western province.
Liu Guijin, the Chinese government's special representative on Darfur, argued that progress has been made in putting together a peacekeeping mission, a hybrid United Nations and African Union force. He claimed most of the obstacles to the peacekeepers’ deployment had been cleared. Liu said that the advance troops of a 315-strong engineering unit from China and a police unit from Bangladesh have already been deployed in Darfur, and African nations such as Egypt and Ethiopia are preparing to send forces.
It would certainly take all China could do to get the Darfur events under control. Murderous gangs aided and abetted by the government in Khartoum have been pursuing what President George W. Bush identified almost three years ago as genocide. As many as 2.5 million people have been uprooted, with from 200 to 400,000 dead. And as recently as last month, thousands of neighboring Chadians fled rebel attacks on their capital of N’djamena and poured across Chad’s southern border into Cameroon.
The whole inferno could get worse if there is a breakdown in what had been hoped to be a standing negotiated settlement between Khartoum and Southern Sudan dissidents – now expected by many on the scene. They fought the longest civil war in post-World War II history ending with a shaky settlement only in 1995.
China gets in the act not only because of its massive participation in Sudanese oil development, after western companies were forced out by human rights campaigns against their participation, but as an arms dealer. In 1998, the government-owned China National Petroleum Company [CNPC] laid an 185-mile long pipeline to the Red Sea with a refinery near Khartoum and began massive oilfield development. A CNPC official bragged that “…a Western company couldn’t have done what we did . . . Sudan wanted it done in 18 months and we did it, even though we knew we wouldn’t make any money.”
Beijing had coupled its strategic oil deal with earlier sales of armaments which had, in effect, fed the conflict in Southern Sudan. By the time iGNPOC invested, weapons deliveries from China to Sudan since 1995 had included ammunition, tanks, helicopters, fighter aircraft – and deadly for civilian, antipersonnel and antitank mines after 1980.
Human rights activists including some Hollywood celebrities [Mia Sparrow had labeled the Beijing Olympics as “the genocide games” and compared them with Adolph Hitler’s 1936 Games] had already been agitating for some time for a boycott. But the campaign took a fillip when filmmaker Steven Spielberg announced in February that he was withdrawing as an artistic advisor over the Darfur issue. Beijing reacted with righteous indignation, arguing the Olympics should not be politicized,. Then the state-run media unleashed a torrent of insults, calling Spielberg naive, vain and childish. They got indirect support from President George W. Bush, who has accepted an invitation to attend, and other Western leaders who agreed politics should be kept out of the Games.
But that hasn’t stopped the human rights campaign.
Now Beijing is using honey instead of salt.
"We are using our relationship with the Sudanese government to exert leverage," Liu, one of Biejing’s most seasoned diplomats, argued at the Beijing briefing, after his return from Africa and a tour of Western capitals. "China has done many positive things which have been recognized by the international community."
Liu didn’t mention the Olympics issue, of course. But it hung over unusual media exposure.
"These Olympics are a geopolitical debutante ball for China. They are to highlight China's ascension onto the stage of world power, and that makes it quite reasonable for human rights advocates to highlight what they are doing around the world," Allyn Brooks-LaSure, spokesman for the Washington-based organization Save Darfur, told the Los Angeles Times.
There is no doubt that the Chinese have invested an enormous amount in the Games, some estimates run to $40 billion – counting projects that include moving rivers in order to satisfy the requirements for water to the 17 million people in the capital always short. The spectacular buildings for the Games have been designed in part by foreign architects with tens of thousands of part-time workers struggling to meet deadlines for their completion.
But a bigger investment is in the prestige and recognition China hopes to harvest from the games. The Chinese have also promised the International Olympics Committee they would give free rein to foreign athletes and their accompanying media hoard. That could be difficult in an environment where the government spends millions of dollars and employs the most advanced cybernetic techniques requiring as many as 30,000 employees to keep a lid on criticismas well as the traditional police activities of authoritarian states.. How to control the millions of visitors — including possible terrorists — has taken top priority and occupied time, effort and money for months in Beijing.
The Chinese finally began to move on the Darfur issue when Liu was appointed China’s special envoy in May and has made four trips to Sudan, and met with various principals in the conflict. He argued that Chinese engineers have been digging wells and built infrastructure for the refugees. But while he accused Washington of selling more weapons to governments in Third World countries, he did not dispute the fact that it is Beijing arms the Sudanese government and fuels the war in the region.
A European Union mission to Chad and the Central African Republic {EUFOR] is set to begin operations by March 15, with between 400 and 600 troops on the ground. Deployment of the 3,700-strong force could be completed by June, having begun late in January but then delayed by a rebel attack on the Chadian capital N’Djamena.
But it is China that has now, in effect, taken the leading role in trying to find a settlement — after shielding the Sudanese from world criticism and action in the UN Security Council for years. With its favored access to the Sudanese government, it is logical that Beijing should try to pacify the situation. But, even conceding sincerity based on what is now their national interest, Chinese diplomacy is going to be tested in a way Washington has had to face in dozens of difficult situations around the world. And as Xinhua, the government news agency said, “The hybrid peacekeeping operation, widely known as UNAMID, will be the largest peacekeeping operation for the international organization in the world. UNAMID is mandated to protect civilians, facilitate humanitarian assistance and help provide a secure environment in Darfur.” That’s a big order.
On the question of the emotional word “genocide”, Liu said: "I don't like to debate with people what words should be used to describe what has happened, which has caused the displacement of millions of people and cost tens of thousands of lives."
Meanwhile, the worldwide network of human rights activists is churning. At risk for the Chinese — and the world — is the holding a free competitive sports contest in one of the world’s most stifling environments — an atmosphere rife with both industrial and political pollution.