The failed experiment in Chad needs to be rescued somehow

ARTICLE: “Exxon Oil-Fund Model Unravels in Chad: Government Breaches Deal Requiring It to Spend Royalties on Development,” by Chip Cummins, Wall Street Journal, 28 Febuary 2006, p. A4.

ARTICLE: “Refugee Crisis Grows as Darfur War Crosses a Border: 20,000 in Chad Are Uprooted by Attacks,” by Lydia Polgreen, New York Times, 28 Feburary 2006, p. A1.

I wrote about the historic Exxon deal with Chad in PNM: it stipulated that a trust fund for national development would be set up and overseen by the World Bank, so that the royalties wouldn’t simply disappear in the pockets of government officials, as so often happens in Africa.

But Chad’s government hasn’t stuck to the deal, so the World Bank froze the account. Now Exxon is in a tough spot: break the deal with the WB or break the deal with Chad and lose all that investment.

This is where our lack of understanding with a country like China on our shared energy and strategic interests in shrinking the Gap in Africa can haunt us. With enough key energy consumers coming together to pressure Chad’s government, Exxon gets out of its dilemma, but left to its own devices, it’s hard to expect them to shrink the Gap on their own--so to speak.

And yeah, the military-market nexus applies here just as it does throughout virtually all of Africa. Just watch Darfur start increasingly spilling into Chad, which has a long history of cross-border incursions into Sudan.

This could get a whole lot uglier. The Chinese already supply arms to the Sudanese and turn a blind eye to the genocide by the janjaweed because the oil flows. China, desperate in its search for energy, is paying way too much for that oil, but it will continue to do so there and elsewhere until we reach some larger, strategic, modus vivendi with them on how we both--together--need to settle Africa down with our military and their SysAdmin-filling pool of bodies.

Too much to dream for? Not for me, and I don’t think it will be too much imagination to ask from the upcoming Fifth Generation of leaders in China.

Anyway, what’s your great alternative? Waiting on the Europeans with all their colonial-era guilt? Or the all-powerful UN? Or the African Union to somehow become real in any appreciable SysAdmin way?

Then again, maybe these are just dark people dying in a galaxy far, far away. Yes, yes, the realist in me wants to think in such “strategic terms.”

Problem is, the Christian in me simply wants to vomit at that prospect of mass death via criminal neglect.

Do unto others, baby.

Comments

[Eddie]

A deal with China to help stem the violence in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan is not impossible, after all, experts agree that rebellious groups in Eastern Sudan (where much of the crude oil flows from the oil rich south-central regions to international markets through Port Sudan) could hinder oil delivery to Sudan's biggest customers, like China and India.

Can we not reason with the Chinese that it is time for them to press their supplier in Khartoum to start doling out more oil profits to the outlying regions and help stem this constant instability which takes so many lives and causes so much devastation?

[Dan]

Yes, the UN is a joke, and the thought of the African Union contributing anything other than political cover is also a joke. But why China, I can see us reaching out successfully to India and Japan, long before we have any success with China.

India is possessed of a long and storied history of involvement in British arms, they served in the trenches in the Great War. Thus there is something of a nostalgia, a sentiment, a rememberance that can be appealed to, over and above India's leadership of the non-alligned movement. Luring Japan into helping with your "sysadmin," and in a real way with sufficient numbers of troops, would help us into turning our relationship with Japan into something similar to the one we've been fortunate enough to enjoy with Great Britain. And it would have the added dividend of finally breaking Japan out from their Constitutional limitations on military forces, and expenditures.

China, as you noted, is standing idle in Sudan, while the Christian south is either annihlated, enslaved, or gang raped. That doesn't simply betoken a rough and ready realpolitick, it reveals a certain brutishness, a callousness towards the human condition. Then again, when we cast our glance towards what the regime in Peking is doing to the Catholic leadership in China, their fondness for throwing Bishops and Cardinals in the logai, it becomes of a piece, not an aberration, but the norm. Toss in the Falun Gong, the clamp down on Google, we're seeing a nauseating trend.

No such trend do we perceive in Japan and India.

So why bother pinning our hopes on China.

The deeper we can involve Japan and India into our actual military operations, the sooner we see them in the trenches along the frontier of civilization, along side us, along side the Australians, along side our British cousins, the better for us, for them, for the world.