Wow, could China really be worse than the West?

Photo by Pan-African News Wire...
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir being greeted by
Chinese official at the 2006 Sino-African Summit

To find if China might be a more irresponsible, um, power, than Western countries, we will begin by looking at what the Christian Science Monitor's uncovers in its four-part probe into the question "Is China Good for Africa?"

Today's focus will be on Sudan. As the Monitor apprises us: 64 percent of Sudan's oil is now sold to China, the world's second-largest consumer of oil, after the United States.

But check this out, China is also the majority owner of Sudan's two largest oil consortiums, Petrodar and the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company.

So how is China, Sudan's new, um, economic partner, comporting itself in the Sudan? As the Monitor reports:

CNPC has invested billions in oil-related infrastructure here in Paloich, including the 900-mile pipeline from the Paloich oil fields to the tanker terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a tarmac road leading to Khartoum, and a new airport with connecting flights to Beijing.

But they have not invested in much else here.

Locals live in meager huts, eating peanuts with perch fished out of the contaminated Nile. There is no electricity. A Swiss charity provides healthcare. An American aid group flies in food and mosquito nets. Most children do not go to school. There is no work to be found. Petrodar, for one, has its own workers – almost all of whom are foreigners (mostly Chinese, Malaysians, and Qataris) or Sudanese northerners. The consortium hires Paloich residents only rarely, for menial jobs.

And what do the locals think? According to the Monitor:

Locals blame their lot on oppression by Sudan's Islamist government and the long war with the north. But they also blame the Chinese.

"[The Chinese] moved us away so we would not see what was going on. They were stealing our oil and they knew it," says Abraham Thonchol, a rebel-turned-pastor who grew up near Paloich. "Oil is valuable and we are not idiots. We were expecting something."

US-based Chevron was the first oil company to arrive here, setting up operations in the 1980s. "They employed us," says Mr. Thonchol. "We helped with the drilling, drove them around, and worked as cooks. "

The second group of oilmen to show up was not as benevolent, say many locals. [As one told the Monitor,] "They looked like whites to us. We could not detect any difference, except, maybe, that they were shorter," he says. "But then we found they behaved differently."

Chased out by civil war in the mid 1980s and '90s, and later kept away by pressure from human rights groups, Chevron and other Western companies left the oil fields for others. . .

Chinese firms were more than happy to fill the void.

But as the Monitor goes on:

Chinese operations were marked "from the beginning," by a "deep complicity in gross human rights violations, scorched-earth clearances of the indigenous population," says Sudan activist Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

In Darfur, for example, the China supplied the Sudanese government with most of the arms it in turn is alleged to have given the janjawid, the militia it used to kill hundreds of thousands of tribal Africans since a rebellion began there in 2003.

As a Darfur rebel, a leader of the Justice and Equality Movement in Darfur, Abdul-Aziz Mour, told Sebastian Junger who writes about the Chinese in the Sudan and Chad in this month's Vanity Fair:

"Darfur was a sovereign state until 1916. Now 95 percent of the population lives on half a dollar a day. We don't have a single paved road. We are fighting for very basic human rights, like education. We are fighting for drinking water. Our country is not poor; we are living on a big cistern of petroleum. And the central government is killing us like snakes."

John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group seems to corroborate Mour's view, as he reportedly told Junger, "[The Sudanese government] is basically destroying the non-Arab population in Darfur to destroy the rebellion."

Junger calculates that Khartoum has spent some 80 percent of its oil revenues on arms since 2003 quelling this insurgency, with most of these arms being purchased from - you guessed it - China. As he concludes, this means that most of the $2 billion dollars a year the Chinese were spending on Sudanese oil was immediately made back in weapons deals.

Not surprisingly, then, it the fact that it is China who effectively blocks any U.N. resolutions proposing sanctions or military force against Sudan to put pressure on Khartoum to stop what President Bush has termed the genocide going on there. Without U.N. - or Chinese - support, U.S. sanctions alone have little bite.

But, before we in the West can take comfort in China's emergence, an emergence that would it seems, portend to make us feel that we're no longer the guiltiest parties on the planet, consider Junger's conclusion:

The tragedy in Darfur - and perhaps a future tragedy in Chad - is fueled by China's reliance on brutal regimes for access to oil. That reliance, however, stems directly from Western domination of more easily accessible supplies. For example: in 2005, a state-owned Chinese oil company tried to buy the American oil giant UNOCAL for a price that was $1 billion higher than that of the closest Western bidder. Reaction in the U.S. Congress was so blistering that UNOCAL accepted the lower bid rather than open the door to China.

Alas, we're still the root cause of all the world's problems, even when it is China who is carrying out today's abuses...