Africom’s covert war in Sudan

by Keith Harmon Snow
The winter of Bashir’s discontent

I recently received a phone call from an Australian man who identified himself as an investigator for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, Netherlands. The investigator and his colleague had read my story, “Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,” and they wanted my cooperation to provide more detailed evidence about the warlords behind the massacres at Bogoro, Congo, described briefly in my story.
After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an email at the definitive moment, when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier” about the specific case - which they said “had generated a lot of interest” at the ICC - and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only indicting Black Africans.
I indicated my concern for the witness “Sandrine,” a young girl discussed in my story who named names of commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or mysteriously disappeared and noted my awareness of the injustice of the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the disconcerting trajectory of the ICC.
I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed, until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the recent ICC indictments against another Black man, and an Arab at that. It was a very stupid career move, someone else remarked.
On March 4, 2009, the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last issuing the long threatened but first ever indictments against a sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab president of Sudan. Meanwhile, Somali “pirates” off East Africa recently freed a Ukrainian ship with a Panamanian registration, a Ukrainian crew and flag of Belize: The freighter carried tanks, rockets and munitions destined for Darfur, and it is owned by an Israeli “businessman” and reputed Mossad operative named Vadim Alperin.
It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur - especially when people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against Blacks that is being committed by the Bashir “regime” - but such is the establishment propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it revolves around some relatively unknown but shady characters. What follows is a short and imperfect summary of some of the deeper geopolitical realities behind the struggle for Sudan.

Arabic Forum