With the EU’s Threats: What Should Be Done?

By Mohamed Othman Ibrahim

The European Union issued an arrogant and ugly statement that equates Sudan’s nation-state with foreign aggression. The EU set out several conditions and issued multiple directives it demands the government implement — threatening punitive measures if its demands are not met.

The government may be unable to respond to the EU’s statement with the outright rejection and contempt it deserves, because of the many complications that oblige it to keep channels open with the Union and other Western states, and because it cannot leave that diplomatic arena empty for the Abu Dhabi sheikhdom and its servants — the Janjaweed and the scoundrels in the Forces of Freedom and Change.

What should be done?

1. Sudan is not in a position to be cowed by threats. The aggression of the #AbuDhabi_Sheikhdom, in collusion with traitors at home and with the complicity of the European Union itself, has destroyed all state institutions, infrastructure, services, and the social peace and reconciliation of the nation. Tens of thousands have been killed and many times that number wounded; more than ten million people have been displaced from their homes; banks, movable property and reserves have been looted. With this record, what leverage does the EU have to threaten Sudan?

2. The EU demands the formation of a civilian government while the country is at war — a war financed by trillions of dollars looted by the ruling family of the Abu Dhabi sheikhdom from its own people. This demand is unacceptable. The true and honorable demand of the Sudanese people is the formation of a full wartime military government in which there is no place for anyone who does not bear arms in defense of the homeland, its free women, and its citizens.

3. The EU calls for negotiations with the Janjaweed while turning a blind eye — for cash — to their atrocities and war crimes in Sudan. If the EU were consistent, it would demand its member states negotiate with their own repressed citizens — those who have protested from time to time in France, Britain, Spain and allied countries such as the United States — who are not waging wars but only seeking their dignity under capitalist systems that drain their blood, steal their labor and sweat, and exploit them without fighting.

4. The EU aims to establish a client regime in Sudan and puppet rulers who can be manipulated to protect its borders from the migration of the world’s poor — people whose countries’ infrastructures and buildings in Europe were built from the looted wealth of their ancestors, from their sweat and blood, and even from the limbs cut from some who could not gather enough wealth for the hated occupier.

5. The EU demands that the Sudanese government apply human-rights standards devised by its own rulers, yet again turns a blind eye to demanding that the Abu Dhabi sheikhdom and the UAE government cease their crimes and be held accountable for every drop of blood and every tear shed by Sudan’s children, women, elders and all its people.

6. For the EU — operating from its seat in Brussels with all the weight of its shameful history in human-rights violations and its ugly present record of persecuting its own citizens and the peoples of countries it once occupied — to lecture others is more nauseating than anything else. Review Amnesty International’s reports on human-rights conditions in Belgium, and examine this state’s crimes in the Congo and Rwanda before using it as a platform to instruct countries that have consistently outperformed it in the humanity of their people and the ethics of their societies.

Honorable Sudanese must form popular organizations to reject the EU’s threats and its assistance to the Janjaweed and their masters in the Abu Dhabi sheikhdom, and must mobilize mass action to respond to the arrogance of this body — just as Sudanese mobilized in past years to reject the interventions of the British ambassador #IrfanSiddiq and the criminal UN envoy #VolkerPeretz. O Sudanese — rise up for your dignity, or prepare to live forever at the margins.