[I]f there are indeed al-Qaeda elements in Khartoum ("people in Khartoum who were not in Khartoum before"), it is because the National Islamic Front has permitted them to be there, and almost certainly encouraged them to be there. The NIF hosted Osama bin Laden from 1991-1996---the formative years for al-Qaeda. And even when bin Laden departed for Afghanistan in 1996, extremely close ties were preserved through, and after, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Khartoum's ruthlessly efficient Mukhabarat certainly knows the whereabouts in Sudan of terrorist elements; and any decision to allow them to remain is a deliberate, carefully calibrated threat directed against the possibility of a UN peacekeeping force, and more generally the international community. Khartoum is willing, in short, to use the threat of terrorism---which it can certainly control---as a means of forestalling international actions that might halt genocide.
If the international community yields to this threat, it will become a precedent well noted in other quarters in Africa and elsewhere around the world.
This argument is an almost exact parallel of the "don't let China check" argument. That argument basically said that if a country becomes a Chinese client state, and we let Chinese opposition stop an intervention in the event of a massive human rights catastrophe (like genocide), then other oppressive regimes will get the idea that they should enter the Chinese umbrella to slaughter their citizens with impunity. Sudan is ground-zero for this theory, since it is a major ally of China and China has been working to scuttle international intervention efforts. Apparently, Khartoum is experimenting with terror in the same way. And similarly, if other countries see that becoming a quiet al-Qaeda host acts as a deterrent to foreign intervention, we give a massive incentive for hostile nation's to encourage the growth of terror infrastructure in their borders. That would turn the "war on terror" into a farce.
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The events in Sudan (over the past thirty or so years) have highlighted for me the one great failing in the UN and its Charter.
Essentially, the UN is hogtied, unable to do anything, for as long as those events can be categorised as "an internal matter". Hence every time the UN tries to put the machinery in motion the Sudanese government informs the UN that "they are taking action on the matter to bring it under control". That immediately takes away any power that the UN might think it has.
The desire of the international community generally (not picking on the US here, I mean generally) to divorce itself from involvement and to absolve itself from any blame was never better illustrated than in Rwanda.
So, in fact, the writers of the original essay are wrong in one facet - that Sudan (not Darfur) will be a precedent for all of Africa. That precedent was set some while back when the international community sat with their thumbs very firmly wedged in the darkest part of their anatomy while blood ran in the rivers.
There are other instances within Africa with the potential to reach similar lows in time - Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda...
To drag the involvement of the likes of AlQaeda into the equation now seems to me to be little more than vain posturing to keep low the likelihood of international intervention of any kind.
At least China can be seen to be doing something, no matter how much we might dislike the actions or the threat. The truth is that over thirty years have passed Sudan by and still there has been no action, no involvement, no resolution.
Have they found oil there yet?
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