Mick Hartley

Back to Tablet for this piece by Armin Rosen.

The Cuban refugees business wasn't the only last minute move from the outgoing Obama administration. There was also Sudan. Remember Darfur, and the charge of genocide against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir? Well hardly anyone else does.

In one of the Obama administration’s last major foreign policy decisions, the outgoing president issued an executive order on January 13 lifting most of its sanctions against the government of Sudan, whose nominally Islamist regime had been accused of aiding terrorist groups and committing grave human rights abuses against its citizens. The move could bring an end to the National Congress Party regime’s decades of isolation and reverse the country’s economic plunge….

So what changed? According to the January 13 executive order, the lifting of the sanctions was the result of Sudan’s new cooperation on counter-terrorism, helpful moves towards ending the civil war in neighboring South Sudan, and supposed progress towards reaching a political settlement with various armed and unarmed domestic opponents. Counter-terror cooperation has improved, and Khartoum has largely stopped meddling in the affairs of its southern neighbor. But the regime of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who is still under an International Criminal Court indictment for crimes against humanity, has made almost no progress towards internal political reconciliation—the issue that brought Save Darfur activists to the Mall over a decade ago. “Domestically, nothing has really changed,” says Ahmed Koduda, a commentator on East African affairs. “The Americans really wanted to get this done one way or another and needed to make it palatable to the advocacy community and American activists—they had to say, Sudan has cooperated on x, y, and z issues. But in reality, the regime has not done anything domestically to warrant this change.”…

Sudan is still a US-listed state sponsor of terror, and a more Islamist iteration of the current regime sheltered Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s. And until late 2015, the Sudanese regime was essentially Iran’s only Sunni Arab ally. Tehran helped Sudan set up one of Africa’s largest domestic arms industries, and used Sudanese territory and military infrastructure as a transit point for weapons intended for Hamas and Hezbollah. But in October of 2015, Khartoum abruptly switched sides in the Saudi-Iranian cold war and sent ground troops to join Riyadh’s coalition against the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels who had overthrown the government of Yemen.

The lifting of US sanctions is partially the result of Saudi lobbying. If the Israelis actually did back the lifting of sanctions, the move would further reflect Jerusalem’s convergence of interests with the Gulf States in countering Iran and reflect a certain willingness among Israel and the Gulf countries to chase identical diplomatic objectives at the same moment.

[See this Michael Totten piece for more on the Israeli-Saudi convergence.]

There was another major change leading up to the executive order: Americans stopped caring about Darfur, and Bashir’s regime viciously crushed much of the region’s remaining armed opposition. Even if the Obama administration’s 11th-hour move preserves sanctions related to the Darfur conflict, it will greatly enrich the regime responsible for committing atrocities in the country’s west—atrocities that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled as “genocide” in September of 2004. “It’s a miracle for the regime,” says Kodouda of the sanctions’ removal. “The sanctions have been the No. 1 political priority for Khartoum and with this partial removal the regime has scored a major political victory and morale boost.”

In the mid-2000s, Sudan became an unlikely focus for activists—many of them Jewish—who envisioned a foreign policy animated by human rights and a unique American responsibility to end atrocities, instead of by narrow national security or economic interests.The Save Darfur movement was an idealistic attempt to break American complacency about the lone superpower’s supposed moral responsibilities. “Those of us who occupy this building during the week are aware of what is going on in Darfur,” one member of the Senate said at the April 30, 2006 rally. “We get busy,” he lamented. “We get distracted. And the searing images of children being slaughtered, and women being assaulted start fading from view and we start worrying about gas prices and we start worrying about elections and the priorities start drifting down, down, until we no longer recognize the moral urgency that’s required.” The rally, he said, could be part of an effort change that sad reality: “In every corner of the globe, tyrants, and terrorists, powers and principalities will know that a new day is dawning and righteous spirit is on the move,” he said at the close of his speech.

That senator was Barack Obama, and a little over a decade later, he would help to prove just how far those images of Darfur had faded from view, and how radical that fleeting, long-ago, Jewish-led attempt to shape American foreign policy around human rights had really been.