Focus Turns to China's Role in Sudan

By Michael Abramowitz

BANGKOK--In the days leading up to the opening of the Olympics Games Friday, President Bush has been peppered with questions about human rights in China. Now another cause may come to the fore: Chinese complicity in the atrocities in Sudan.

The issue has been a focus of of many American activists, including the actress Mia Farrow, who helped pressure director Steven Spielberg to withdraw as an artistic adviser to the Games because of concern that China was not doing enough to curb the killing that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives in the Darfur region of Sudan in recent years.

The activists have already been planning their own publicity event to counter the Opening Ceremonies Friday, a seven-minute online concert featuring REM and other rock groups, while Farrow will be staging the "Darfur Olympics," a daily webcast from a Darfurian refugee camp. Her group, Dream for Darfur, wants the Chinese government to bring greater pressure on Sudan to speed up deployment of a 26,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force for Darfur.

Now the issue may gain new traction with the Chinese decision to block Olympic speedskating champion Joey Cheek from attending the 2008 guests as an observer. Cheek was one of the founders of Team Darfur, a group of athletes that has been trying to draw attention to human rights abuses in Darfur and the Chinese role.

Talking with reporters on Air Force One as it flew here from Seoul, White House press secretary Dana Perino said the White House was "disturbed" about the Chinese move and had sent embassy officials in Beijing to complain. "We would hope that they woiuld change their minds," she said.

Many Africa experts and humanitarian groups regard China as a major enabler of Khartoum, helping prop up the regime in Sudan in order to gain lucrative oil rights. Human Rights First and other advocacy groups say China is heavily involved in providing small arms to the Sudanese military, in contravention of a United Nations arms embargo.

China has moved in recent years to try to defuse international criticism generated by Farrow and others, going along with U.N. efforts to send peacekeepers to Darfur and contributing engineers to the enterprise. But opinion is divided in the U.S. government on whether these moves are significant: Some officials in Bush's own administration say privately that China is not helping to solve the problem at all.

During an interview with the Washington Post earlier in the week, President Bush himself weighed in on the issue, offering a mixed assessment of China's help on Darfur and suggesting the Chinese leaders are conflicted between helping in Sudan and their desire for oil and other natural resources.

"I believe that Hu Jintao thought he was being helpful in Sudan when he came down with some engineers and some gestures," Bush said in the interview Monday. "He is constantly faced with the dilemma of making a decision to help -- like in the case of Darfur--[and] more raw materials to keep his economy growing."

Bush said that while the Chinese should do more on Darfur, they have also "been more helpful in Sudan than Burma," another country whose regime has been protected by China, in the view of many experts. Burma will be a focus of the Bushes' day in Thailand Thursday, with the president planning a visit with Burmese dissidents and the First Lady Laura Bush scheduled to visit a refugee camp on the Thai-Burmese border.

"The Burma issue is more complicated than just China, by the way, and so is the Sudanese issue; more complicated than just China," Bush said. "I will tell you that my biggest frustration on Sudan has been the slow nature of the United Nations to respond to the issue. "

Bush's assessment of China's cooperation on Darfur is not likely to go over well with many activists who follow the issue closely. In an e-mail exchange this week, Jerry Fowler of the Save Darfur Coalition criticized the president's logic.

"The notion that China must choose between ending the Darfur genocide and
acquiring "raw materials" from Sudan is both wrong and dangerous," Fowler wrote. "China has the leverage in that relationship - not the other way around. As the president notes, China could do much more than it has."

By washingtonpost.com Editor |  August 6, 2008; 8:31 PM ET
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Posted by: dennis | August 8, 2008 12:12 PM

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