Page 2 of 3 SPEAKING
FREELY A dangerous continental
drift By M A Orona
between Africa and non-African
countries - China has taken this to heart.
Currently, 45 African nations have trade
agreements with China.
In 2000, Beijing
formed the China-Africa Cooperation Forum (CACF)
to enhance mutual economic development and
cooperation. In 2003, trade between China and
African nations neared $19 billion. During a trip
to the African continent, a delegation of
representatives from China's business community
took
part in the CACF summit in which Chinese
businesses signed agreements with African-owned
businesses worth nearly $500 million.
China is also known to give a significant
amount of aid to African countries and has also
gone a step further by canceling more than $1
billion in debt from 31 African countries.
In an effort to bolster its image, China
has sent a foreign minister to at least one
African country since 1991 and continues to fund
education programs, and sends medical teams for
two-year rotations to several African nations.
During a trip to Africa, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao
announced that China would continue to fill an
education void and promised to train more than
10,000 African civil servants in the next three
years.
China's prestigious Foreign Affairs
University, which is under the direction of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and trains China's own
diplomats, continues to provide training for young
African diplomats. The appeal of countries
training their future diplomats in China centers
on the fact that Beijing will not lecture them
about democracy and human rights and pledges never
to interfere in a country's internal affairs.
China's efforts in Africa are motivated by
strategic rather than humanitarian aims. China
views Africa as an apparatus that will improve
China's economic output while allowing it to reach
its foreign-policy goals. Nicely centered in its
message to developing countries is a history
lesson that most nations can understand. China
historically sees itself as a country that has
suffered at the hands of Western imperialists and
shares a sense of historical humiliation with
African nations. However, one issue never
mentioned is that China's interest in Africa is
also based on its own domestic concerns.
Central to Beijing's interest in Africa
are China's plans to secure its own economic
growth and development. China's energy sources
have failed to keep up with the development of its
industrial sector. In parts of China there are
reports of rolling blackouts as a common
occurrence. Several cities have banned the use of
flashing neon advertising signs. Others have gone
a step further and limited the use of stoplights
and instead use the services of traffic officers
to conserve energy.
China continues to use
coal as its main source of fuel, but within the
past decade it has increased its dependence on oil
and has become the third-largest importer of oil
worldwide. Reports estimate that by 2020 China
will consume more than 600 million tons of oil a
year. To keep up with demand, China has looked to
a number of countries to quench its need for oil.
One is Sudan.
No rights? No problem
The violence and horror being committed in
Sudan by the government and its military proxies
known as the Jinjaweed have led to a mass exodus
of more than 200,000 people, mostly women and
children, from Darfur across the border into
neighboring Chad.
Well over 400,000
civilians have lost their lives and more than a
million are internally displaced. As the United
Nations Security Council and members of the
international community struggle to end the
violence in Darfur, one of the council's members,
China, continues to be an obstacle to peace.
Beijing, along with its state-owned China National
Petroleum Corp and its subsidiary PetroChina, has
invested more than $2 billion on oil
infrastructure in Sudan and owns 40% of Sudan's
Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Co projects,
which produce an estimated 150,000 barrels of oil
a day.
Recent reports by international
rights organizations target China as Khartoum's
main military supplier. At a time when the
violence in Darfur is growing worse on a daily
basis and an arms embargo against Khartoum is
justified, the Sudanese government instead is
allowed to update its military. Amnesty
International recently reported, "The government
of Sudan has used increases in oil revenues to
fund a military capacity that has in turn been
used to conduct war in Darfur, including carrying
out violations of international human rights and
humanitarian law."
Unfortunately, China's
involvement of supporting countries with poor
human-rights records is not limited to Sudan. In
August 2005, Hu welcomed Zimbabwean President
Robert Mugabe to Beijing to discuss debt relief.
While Mugabe was hoping for China to help wipe out
most of its $300 million debt owed to the
International Monetary Fund, Beijing did manage to
promise a $6 million trade deal with Harare.
Zimbabwe was not part of Hu's latest trip to
Africa, where his destinations were Cameroon,
Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South
Africa, Sudan and Zambia.
It is no secret
that the government of Zimbabwe is one of the
worst human-rights violators and was labeled by US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as an "outpost
of tyranny". Mugabe's government continues to
murder, imprison and torture members of the
political opposition and restrict independent
media and civil
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