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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Jul 18 2011 - 09:50:13 EDT
Sunday Update – 2011/07/17
to watch video podcast click here
http://www.corbettreport.com/sunday-update-20110717/
In/Dependence Day: Foreign Intervention Behind Creation of South Sudan
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome. This is James Corbett of The Corbett Report with your Sunday Update
from The Centre for Research on Globalization at globalresearch.ca for this
17th day of July, 2011. And now for the real news.
The world welcomed a new nation to the international community last week as
South Sudan officially became its own country. Obtaining independence from
Sudan on July 9th, the Republic of South Sudan became the 193rd member state
of the United Nations in a general assembly vote earlier this week and
Africa’s first new country since Eritrea became an independent state in
1993.
So far, coverage of the story in the western establishment media has
unproblematically portrayed the creation of South Sudan as the hard-won
fruit of a valiant and spontaneous liberation movement among the southern,
mainly Christian and animist population,who have been engaged in a
decades-long struggle against the mostly Arab north, where embattled
President Omar al-Bashir has been broadly criticized for his rule. He was
indicted last year by the International Criminal Court for genocide in the
Darfur region.
However, critics and independent journalists note that Sudan has long been
the victim of outside interference by western powers with financial
interests in the vast resource wealth of the region. They allege that
mainstream western press about South Sudan has gone out of its way to find
human interest angles in the story that are conspicuously free of historical
context or geopolitical analysis.
Britain’s Telegraph newspaper ran a story on Tuesday noting that “South
Sudan will be able to take part in the London 2012 Olympics but face a race
against time to do so under their own flag.”
The Daily Star out of Lebanon ran an entire article devoted to how a
wildlife preserve hopes to attract more tourists now that the south is its
own country.
The Washington Post posted a feature story about Chicago Bulls forward Luol
Deng traveling to South Sudan to host the country’s first post-independence
basketball clinic.
The New York Times ran a lengthy report about South Sudan’s independence
celebrations, providing great detail about the festivities, the personal
experiences of random Sudanese, and a lengthy list of the foreign
dignitaries in attendance. But, as independent journalist Russ Baker notes
in an essay criticizing such reporting, the Times does not even mention the
question of South Sudan’s primary resource until the 24th paragraph of their
article, when they note:
“Negotiators have yet to agree on a formula to split the revenue from the
south’s oilfields, which have kept the economies of both southern and
northern Sudan afloat.”
The effect of these reports are to downplay one of the central questions
behind the decades-long strife in the region, and obscure what many are
alleging is a history of western interventionism in the name of the region’s
strategic, mineral and economic interests.
Only ever mentioned as a backdrop to the hostilities that have been the
hallmark of the Sudan in recent years, oil accounts for between 70% and 90%
of the region’s exports. Sudan is the third largest oil producer in
sub-Saharan Africa, and according to a 2008 BP Statistical Energy Survey, it
had proven oil reserves of over 6.6 billion barrels at the end of 2007. Now,
as much as 85% of those reserves are believed to lie in the newly-created
Republic of South Sudan, reserves whose fate are now in question as the
region’s treaties and agreements are rewritten by a new government.
Throughout the 1990s, China has invested massively in the region’s oil
deposits, including the construction of a 1000 kilometer long pipeline to
pump Sudanese oil to Chinese ships anchored in the Red Sea. By the time of
separation, China had become Sudan’s largest trading partner, buying 40% of
Sudan’s oil.
But with the creation of the new government in the South, that looks set to
change. The South Sudanese central bank has been formally cleared from the
US sanctions that prevent American businesses from dealing with the Sudanese
central bank. Just this week, the new South Sudanese government announced
that they have launched a joint venture with Glencore, the world’s laragest
commodities training company, to develop the country’s vast oil wealth.
As long-time observers of the region are now noting, these latest moves
belie the fact that all of the western attention on this region over the
past decades, including economic, financial, military and even humanitarian
interest in Darfur, have been tied to the vast potential wealth of the
country, and the creation of a new, Western friendly government was the
geopolitical endgame all along.
To learn more about the story behind the story of the creation of South
Sudan, The Corbett Report talked last week to Keith Harmon Snow, a writer,
photographer, humanitarian campaigner and award-winning journalist who has
been writing about western interventionism in Sudan for several years.
[VIDEO]
Allegations that foreign interest in the Sudan was geared toward the
establishment of a western-friendly government in the region appear to be
vindicated by developments since the creation of the new state.
During independence celebrations, South Sudanese revellers were seen to be
carrying Israeli flags, a reflection of Israel’s active support for the
South in opposition to the Arab government in Khartoum throughout the period
of civil strife. Now, Israel has officially recognized the government of
South Sudan in its capital, Juba, and Juba has reciprocated by saying it
wants to help Israel in forging a middle east peace deal.
The South Sudan government also launched its own currency this week, the
South Sudanese pound, which was printed in Germany and flown into the
country yesterday. As a testament to the willignness of the South Sudanese
to subject themselves to the economic subjugation of the western-led
international financial order, the government in Juba applied for IMF
membership back in April, before it had even officially gained independence
from Sudan, a country with which the IMF has historically had a rocky
relationship.
Now, as tensions flare up once again between Sudan and South Sudan over
control of disputed, oil-rich areas of the region which are still in a
territorial grey zone, and as UN peacekeeping forces flood into the region
to ostensibly make sure those tensions do not fly out of control, look for
the establishment media to continue to provide contextless, fact-free
reporting on issues of no significance whatsoever and to unwaveringly side
with the western-friendly South over the Chinese-friendly North in every
dispute over resources.
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