On 12 October 2001, Andrew S. Natsios, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), gave a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Museum entitled 'A Reinvigorated Commitment to the People of Sudan'. He had comparatively recently returned from a ground- breaking visit to Sudan, where he had pledged that the American government and USAID would be neutral with regard to the Sudanese conflict. (1) It could have been the occasion for a long-overdue reassessment of American-Sudanese relations, distancing the Bush Administration from the Clinton Administration's farcical Sudan policies. (2) Instead, it would have been difficult to point to a more inept speech by an American official on the issue of Sudan in the past twelve months. It was certainly on a par with his claims in connection with HIV and AIDS treatment some months previously that there was no point in providing Africans with anti-AIDS medication, as they "don't know what Western time is".

Many Africans, African-Americans and Africanist scholars and activists were appalled at Mr Natsios' judgement in this matter. Many will have been appalled at the equally ignorant claims with regard to Sudan made in this subsequent speech.

Natsios, Holocausts and Genocide

Firstly, the venue for the speech was remarkably ill-chosen. The fact that the U.S. Holocaust Museum maintains an exhibition on Sudan is deeply questionable, itself the result of a remarkably ill-informed, polemical campaign against Sudan. For Mr Natsios to have spoken at this venue, with all the clear inferences that there is genocide in Sudan, was a particularly ill-informed decision. The use of such a venue for crass propaganda reasons also detracts from the unique horror that the Holocaust museum was established to commemorate.

Accusing the Sudanese government of genocide is as vulgar a propaganda claim as those made in the 1960s that the Americans were committing genocide within the Vietnam war. That there has been a brutal civil war in Sudan is sadly all too evident. That war has largely been fought in southern Sudan itself between government forces that are themselves made up of a very large number of southerners, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) led by John Garang and various southern Sudanese groups. The responsibility for deaths in the war lies with all parties.

The observations of the Washington Office on Africa, no friend of the Khartoum government, are instructive: "In fact, factional fighting in the South is responsible for a greater number of deaths than direct clashes between Sudanese government forces and southern rebels". (3) Given that Mr Natsios raised the issue of genocide and by implication ethnically-related violence, it should be noted that tens of thousands of southerners have died as a result of the SPLA's ethnically-motivated violence which certainly would qualify as genocide-like behaviour.

Amnesty International has stated that the SPLA has attacked civilians "for ethnic reasons". (4) The Clinton Administration's Sudan specialist, John Prendergast, has documented the existence of ethnic tensions between the largely Dinka SPLA and the Nuer tribe as well as communities in Equatoria in southern Sudan ever since the SPLA came into being in 1983, with the SPLA showing an "absolute disregard for their human rights" (5). SPLA ethnic cleansing continues to this day. The UN special rapporteur for human rights in Sudan has also reported on SPLA violence towards non-Dinka ethnic groups, groups which, in the words of the BBC, also "accused the SPLA of becoming an army of occupation". (6) On these and other issues Mr Natsios was conspicuously silent.

Natsios on Human Rights and Peace in Sudan

Mr Natsios states that the United States is "trying to prevent terrible human rights abuses from taking place". He also claimed that "we who understand the benefits of peace have a duty to do all that we can to encourage it." He ignored the fact that former American President Jimmy Carter has on several occasions roundly criticised the American government for having supported the SPLA and thereby prolonging the war: "The biggest obstacle [to peace in Sudan] is US government policy. The US is committed to overthrowing the government in Khartoum. Any sort of peace effort is aborted, basically by policies of the United States...Instead of working for peace in Sudan, the US government has basically promoted a continuation of the war." (7) By militarily and politically assisting one side to the conflict, the United States itself directly contributes to the systemic abuse of human rights in Sudan.

Human rights tend to be violated in all civil wars. In his speech Mr Natsios seemingly sought to attribute all human rights abuses to the government of Sudan, this despite the fact that the United States has for several years supported the SPLA, a group described by The New York Times as "brutal and predatory", stating that they "have behaved like an occupying army, killing, raping and pillaging" in southern Sudan, a group led by John Garang, someone described by the paper as one of Sudan's "pre-eminent war criminals". (8) Eight US-based humanitarian organisations working in Sudan, including CARE, World Vision, Church World Service, Save the Children and the American Refugee Committee, an aid community with which Natsios is closely associated, has also publicly stated that the SPLA has: "engaged for years in the most serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, beatings, arbitrary detention, slavery, etc." (9) Human Rights Watch has also gone out of its way to state that "[t]he SPLA has a history of gross abuses of human rights and has not made any effort to establish accountability.

Its abuses today remain serious." (10)

Kenya's East African newspaper has pointed out the hypocrisy of Natsios' position: "Reports that the US is continuing to supply arms to Africa's fighting groups and states ... are disturbing. The US also supplies weapons to the Sudan People's Liberation Army of Col. John Garang ...

Although it is the US that supplies these arms, it is its own human rights groups that move with great alacrity to censure human rights violations in the countries where the arms end up...As long as the US continues to provide arms to the region, it has no moral authority to criticise a country's human rights record because it is the source of that record."(11) (emphasis added)

American Military Assistance to the SPLA

The previous Administration's military, diplomatic and political support for the SPLA was an open secret. In 2001, the United States Congress voted to provide the rebels with millions of dollars in assistance. (12) In previous support for the SPLA, tens of millions of dollars worth of covert American military assistance was supplied to the rebels. This included weapons, landmines, logistical assistance, and military training. On 17 November 1996, the London Sunday Times reported that: "The Clinton administration has launched a covert campaign to destabilise the government of Sudan." Referring to more than $20m of military equipment being shipped to Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda, Sunday Times further stated that: "much of it will be passed on to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which is preparing an offensive against the government in Khartoum." This was confirmed by the newsletter Africa Confidential: "The United States pretends the aid is to help the [Ugandan, Eritrean and Ethiopian governments]...to protect themselves from Sudan...It is clear the aid is for Sudan's armed opposition." (13) Africa Confidential has confirmed that the SPLA "has already received US help via Uganda" and that United States special forces are on "open- ended deployment" with the rebels. (14)

Natsios on Famine in Sudan

Mr Natsios took the incredible decision to compare the famines in Sudan with those in Russia and the Ukraine during the 1930s, in China in the 1950s, in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s and in North Korea more recently. He inferred that the two famines in Sudan, one in the 1980s and the other in the 1990s, were "deliberately and methodically imposed" by a "ruthless, ideology-driven totalitarian" regime. He specifically claims that the "Government has provoked at least two separate famines over the past dozen years". While perhaps making for superb school-boy propaganda rhetoric, statements are staggeringly questionable.

There are several things which must be said on this issue. Mr Natsios' assertion that the government created the famine in the south is not supported by the evidence. As with so much in Sudan there were several factors at play. Many independent observers have stated, for example, that the devastating 1998 famine was precipitated by an American- sponsored SPLA offensive in the Bahr al-Ghazal area. In late January 1998, Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, a SPLA commander who had previously supported the Sudanese government's internal peace process, led a rebel attack on the city of Wau in Bahr al-Ghazal. This attack, and the fighting that followed it, led to a drastic deterioration in the security and food distribution situation in that region. Rebel responsibility in large part for the famine situation was reported on by CNN in early April 1998 under headlines such as "aid agencies blame Sudanese rebel who switched sides": "Observers say much of the recent chaos has resulted from the actions of one man, Kerubino Kwanying Bol, a founding member of the rebel movement...He aided rebel forces in sieges of three government-held towns, which sent people fleeing into the countryside." (15) Newsweek magazine also reported that: "Aid workers blame much of the south's recent anguish on one man: the mercurial Dinka warlord Kerubino Kuanyin Bol". (16) This was also confirmed by Human Rights Watch which, while confirming that there were several factors which caused the 1998 Bahr al-Ghazal famine, stated that "[t]his famine has Kerubino's footprints all over it ... he is the SPLA's responsibility". (17) Amongst other causes Human Rights also stated "SPLA looting of civilians and relief agencies, manipulation and diversion of relief food, and continued siege policy of using land mines and ambushes to prevent all overland traffic in southern Sudan". (18) Mr Natsios characteristically also neglected to mention that the SPLA has murdered dozens of humanitarian aid workers, murders which have also severely dislocated food aid in times of crisis.

Natsios pointedly speaks of the Sudanese people being "denied access to relief by the Government of Sudan". He is deafeningly silent on the fact that the SPLA has been guilty of massive and systemic food aid diversion. The Roman Catholic Bishop of the starvation-affected diocese of Rumbek, Monsignor Caesar Mazzolari, for example, has stated that the SPLA were diverting 65 percent of the food aid going into rebel-held areas of southern Sudan. This was a view shared by humanitarian aid workers. Agence France Presse also reported that: "Much of the relief food going to more than a million famine victims in rebel-held areas of southern Sudan is ending up in the hands of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), relief workers said." (19)

While Mr Natsios may have a different definition, most dictionaries describe famine as "a severe shortage of food". (20) To most objective observers, the theft of virtually two-thirds of food aid literally out of the mouths of Sudanese men, women and children at the height of a particularly severe famine can only but create a severe shortage of food in parts of southern Sudan. That this continues to this day is a matter of record. More objective commentators may find Mr Natsios' claim that the government deliberately caused famine in the south, while pandering to a domestic American anti-Sudanese constituency, is a transparently facile one.

Mr Natsios also sees fit to allege that the Sudanese government was not interested in alleviating the serious drought in Kordofan, Darfur and the Red Sea Hills provinces in northern Sudan because, he further asserts, the inhabitants are not government supporters. Such deeply questionable, overtly propagandistic claims are undermined by reality.

While Mr Natsios does mention Operation Lifeline Sudan in his speech, for example, he neglected to mention some of the more relevant details.

Operation Lifeline Sudan was unprecedented in post-war history when it came into being in 1989, in as much as it was the first time within a civil war situation that a government put aside issues of sovereignty and agreed to the delivery of assistance by outside agencies to rebel- dominated parts of the same country. It is matter of record that the present government agreed an increase in the number of food delivery sites in the south from 20 in 1993 to over 180 during the height of the Sudanese famine in 1998. Well over one hundred sites are served today.

The vast majority of these sites are within rebel-held areas in southern Sudan - and both the government and international community are fully aware that perhaps more than half of such food aid never reaches the civilians for whom it is intended, being diverted by the SPLA for its own use. Far from a disinterest in alleviating suffering within areas that might be deemed to be anti-government, the evidence shows quite the opposite.

Mr Natsios also chose not to mention the fact that in January, 2000, the SPLA issued an ultimatum humanitarian aid agencies active within SPLA- controlled areas of southern Sudan, demanding that they sign an agreement which strictly controlled their activities and dictated their relationship with the SPLA

The SPLA stated that those NGOs that failed to sign the document by 1 March would cease to be the security responsibility of the SPLA and would be "dealt with accordingly". (21) The European Commission publicly condemned this "explicit threat made by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to the safety of humanitarian agencies". (22) Eleven international humanitarian aid agencies, including some 149 personnel working under the umbrella of Operation Lifeline Sudan, felt themselves unable to remain active in southern Sudan under such conditions. These groups included organisations such as CARE, Oxfam, Medecins sans Frontieres, Medecins du Monde, Save the Children, World Vision International and the Carter Center, and handled about 75 percent of the humanitarian aid entering southern Sudan. (23) The withdrawal of these NGOS directly affected US$ 40 million worth of aid programs. (24) The expelled aid agencies stated that one million southern Sudanese were at risk as a result of the SPLA's decision to expel the NGOs. (25) USAID and Mr Natsios would appear to have a particularly short institutional memory.

Natsios and the Nuba Mountains

Mr Natsios went out of his way to focus upon the Nuba mountains, and the government's alleged involvement in hardships in that region. There is not a word said about SPLA abuses in the same area. He did not mention that in these very same Nuba mountains, for example, Amnesty International had reported that the SPLA imposed a "civilian exclusion zone" around areas it dominated in order to deter civilians leaving.

(26) Those leaving were murdered by the SPLA. Reporting on his visit to the Nuba Mountains, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on human rights in Sudan spoke of a "very dark picture" of gross violations of human rights by the SPLA. Local Nuba chiefs spoke of murders, torture, rape, kidnappings, abductions and the forced conscription of Nuba children, and the destruction of homes and looting of property by the SPLA. The Special Rapporteur was given lists of hundreds of victims of SPLA terrorism. (27)

Mr Natsios is also apparently unaware of, or chooses to ignore, the fact that thousands of under-age Nuba child soldiers and children died from war, hunger or disease while under SPLA control. As much has been confirmed by SPLA national executive member Dr Peter Nyaba. (28) If one is ostensibly concerned about genocide, then the SPLA's destruction of a good part of a whole generation of Nuba children certainly qualifies as grounds for deep concern. Human Rights Watch has also pointed out the dangers of SPLA policy in this respect. While, Mr Natsios promises that the "plight" of the Nuba "will not be forgotten", he has clearly chosen, for policy reasons, to forget these horrific systemic abuses by the SPLA. Natsios complains of Sudanese government hesitancy about some of the "relief" going into the Nuba mountains and elsewhere. Perhaps Mr Natsios could comment on claims that Norwegian People's Aid, one of the big recipients of USAID funding for activities in southern Sudan, was revealed on Norwegian television to have been involved in flying in hundreds of tonnes of weapons, including landmines, into the Nuba mountains under the guise of relief aid. (29)

Natsios on Sudan's "support for terrorism"

In his speech Mr Natsios referred to the "[Sudan] Government's support for terrorism". This is perhaps one of the more obviously deceitful statements he made. Sudan has been involved in anti-terrorist cooperation with the United States since early 2000. (30) In August 2001 Bush Administration officials confirmed that this Sudanese-American cooperation had been positive. (31) The London Observer newspaper has reported that in May this year Washington gave Sudan "a clean bill of health". (32) State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher has stated: "[The Sudanese government] have worked with us to eliminate the presence of terrorist groups that could threaten American interests." (33) Moreover, it has recently been revealed that in 1996 the Khartoum authorities offered to turn Osama bin-Laden over to the United States government. Washington refused the offer. (34) It has also now clear that the Clinton Administration refused several additional Sudanese offers, dating back to 1997, to open up its intelligence archives on bin-Laden and the al-Qaeda network. (35) Natsios would presumably have known about all of these circumstances given that they were in the public domain. In any instance, former United States President Jimmy Carter, long interested in Sudanese affairs, went out of his way to see what evidence there was of Washington's claims of Sudanese involvement in terrorism, apparently echoed by Natsios. Carter was told there was no evidence: "In fact, when I later asked an assistant secretary of state he said they did not have any proof, but there were strong allegations." (36) It is also well documented that in September 1998, in the wake of the disastrously inept American attack on the al-Shifa medicine factory in Khartoum, both the New York Times and the London Times reported that the Central Intelligence Agency had previously had to withdraw over one hundred of its reports alleging Sudanese involvement in terrorism. The CIA had realised that the reports in question had been fabricated. (37)

Natsios: Bombing and War

Mr Natsios makes a point of criticising Sudanese air force bombings in the course of the war in southern Sudan, stating that alleged bombings of areas in which the United Nations was arranging food distribution "could hardly have been an accident". The bombing of any civilians or civilian areas is unacceptable. The fact is that mistakes are made in the course of wars. On 16 October, four days after Mr Natsios delivered his lecture on the ethics of bombing criticising Sudan, the American air force bombed very clearly marked Red Cross warehouses in Kabul, Afghanistan. The American air force returned on 26 October and bombed the same clearly-marked Red Cross compound, buildings containing food and blankets for 55,000 disabled and vulnerable people. The International Committee of the Red Cross condemned the American bombings as a "violation of international humanitarian law". (38) Using Mr Natsios' own logic, these incidents could hardly have been an accident, or where they? Agence France Presse also documented numerous other instances where American warplanes killed hundreds of civilians in the course of air-strikes in Afghanistan. Amongst the civilian buildings hit by American bombs were hospitals, mosques, villages, United Nations de- mining offices and refugee convoys. (39) U.S. warplanes also managed to bomb an old people's home, killing pensioners. (40) It might be pointed out that the Sudanese air force are using antiquated aircraft and comparatively inaccurate bomb delivery systems - certainly when compared to the state-of-the-art laser-guided, "smart" bombs used by the most sophisticated air force in the world. It should perhaps also be borne in mind that during the Kosovo air war only 2 percent of the unguided, "dumb" bombs used by the British air force could be confirmed as having hit their targets. There was only a 72 percent hit rate with its "smart" bombs. (41) It would appear that only the American air force can bomb civilians by accident.

Conclusion

In July this year, in the course of a ground-breaking visit to Sudan Mr Natsios had gone through the motions of declaring that USAID was to be neutral within the Sudanese conflict. The speech he gave in October clearly exposed the hypocrisy of Natsios' protestations of neutrality.

The fact that in a speech on the causes of famine, human rights abuses and peace in Sudan, Natsios' was deafeningly silent with regard to the Sudan People's Liberation Army jarred with his professions of neutrality.

This speech served to confirm the concerns of many in the Sudanese government, the European Union and international community that United States policy remains distorted and skewed in favour of one side.

Mr Natsios' speech was a piece of meaningless and self-defeating rhetoric strongly reminiscent of the Clinton Administration's failed and farcical Sudan policy. Mr Natsios' attempts to rewrite Sudanese history, together with his choice of venue for this remarkably inept speech, can only but be of concern to those interested in a peaceful resolution of the Sudanese civil war. They are also of concern to those who had hoped for a more realistic and less propagandistic approach by the Bush Administration to Sudan.

When Mr Natsios made his now notorious comments about Africans, Aids and time-keeping, eminent Africa scholars such as Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, termed them "ignorant and bigoted views" that do not "belong in a policy-making position". (42) Exactly the same can be said about Natsios' equally ignorant and bigoted comments on Sudan.