J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.

Last week, some 200 baton-wielding policemen prevented Mia Farrow and members "Dream for Darfur" group from holding a rally near the site of Cambodia's "killing fields"to urge the People's Republic of China (PRC) to use its influence on the Sudanese regime to end the conflict in the African country's Darfur region that no less a figure than former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan characterized as"the world's worst humanitarian crisis." An aide to Cambodian Premier Hun Sen explained that the Hollywood actress was engaged in a"stunt to smear China" since her group, which as part of its international campaign has held similar events in Chad, Rwanda, Armenia, Germany and Bosnia, tried to light an Olympic-style torch (Beijing is hosting this year’s Summer Olympics). Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu agreed, telling the audience at a routine January 24th press conference that the actress's action was "of apparent political intention and purpose to link the Darfur with the Olympics,"a tactic which she said"violates the Olympic spirit and principle, and will never succeed."

While I share the healthy skepticism of the efficacy of celebrity forays into foreign policy evinced in a recent National Interest essay by Professor Daniel Drezner of Tuft's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in this case I think Ms. Farrow has a point, while Ms. Jiang doth protest too much. While Beijing's ties to Sudan are predicated upon a complex series of political and economic considerations, it is nonetheless true that without mainland China, it is rather unlikely that President Umar Hassan al-Bashir would be in any position to pose much of a threat to Darfuris, South Sudanese, or any other of the peoples long-oppressed by his Arab-dominated Islamist regime.

Although with Sino-Sudanese relations go back nearly five decades - in 1959, Sudan became the third African country, after Egypt and Morocco, to recognize China's communist rulers - the close ties between the two countries are of a more recent vintage. 1989 found both Beijing and Khartoum diplomatically isolated, the former for its brutal suppression of student protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4th of that year, the latter for the bloody coup with which the National Islamic Front (NIF; now the National Congress Party, NCP) seized power on June 30th. Chinese arms transfers and low-interest loans to Sudan's beleaguered new rulers paved the way for them to issue an invitation to develop the African country's vast oil reserves which, although discovered by Chevron in 1978, went largely unexploited due the pressures on Western companies to boycott the regime - thus opening the way for what has now amounted to a Chinese investment of over $10 billion.

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Posted by dcjaya at January 31, 2008 3:19 AM