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.