JACK STRAW and his entourage arrive in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, today. He will speak firmly to a doubtless awestruck President Omar al-Bashir. He will tell him that we expect his Government to “live up to its promises” and end the violence in that country. He will let him know that “the world is not going to forget what is going on in Darfur”. He will remind him that the deadline imposed by the United Nations Security Council expires in seven days. He may then, as the French Defence Minister has already done, swoop into the war-ravaged region to see matters for himself — although one would have thought the people there had suffered enough without being subjected to the compassion of the British Foreign Secretary.
And, of course, very little with happen. There is not much appetite for serious sanctions against Sudan within the UN, let alone outright military intervention. The present deadline might be extended, minor measures initiated and mild further threats solemnly issued. What is called the international community, having wrapped itself in the rhetoric of “something must be done”, will settle for “let’s hang on until the television cameras have moved elsewhere” .
Not everyone will be satisfied with this outcome. One can already sense the Liberal Democrats, many of the aid agencies and other critics of Tony Blair preparing to engage in moral outrage. Implausibly casting off their kaftans for combat fatigues, this coalition of the tut-tutting will accuse the Prime Minister of hypocrisy. The man who once described Africa as “a moral scar on the conscience of the world”, they will intone, is prescribing a sticking plaster for Sudan’s deep wounds. He was happy to bomb the hell out of Iraq in pursuit of invisible weapons of mass destruction, they will gibe, but is not expending a tiny proportion of the costs of that enterprise to send troops to protect food convoys and save the starving.
There are, in my view, no compelling reasons to send British soldiers anywhere near Darfur. The worst possible case for doing so would be that the war in Iraq places a counterbalancing moral obligation on Britain to act in Sudan. Nor do I agree with Stephen Pollard, who asserted on these pages that because the likes of Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesman for foreign affairs, brim with enthusiasm for action in Sudan to promote humanitarian ends, they were shamefully inconsistent in not also endorsing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
What the argument about Iraq and Sudan exposes is a much more fundamental disagreement about the purpose of foreign policy. Should Britain aspire to be, or to assist, the world’s policeman, or the world’s social worker?
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The case for becoming more deeply involved in Darfur, while not having got involved in Iraq, appears to be twofold. The first strand is that such an intervention would be entirely selfless, devoid of any taint of national interest, or even historic ties. No one could accuse Washington or London of a wider agenda, such as extending their authority in a region of huge global importance or enhancing their influence on the oil market. It would thus be a morally pure exercise. The second strand is that as the UN is less divided over Khartoum than it was over Baghdad, this too would make strong measures ethically unimpeachable.
I do not think that Britain should spend £25 billion a year on defence in order to serve as the military wing of Oxfam. It is not only valid to place the national interest at the heart of foreign policy, it is the only rational thing to do. No foreign secretary should apologise for the fact that Iraq’s location and the character of its regime, especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, provided an incentive to strike there that does not exist anywhere in Africa.
The scale of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan should properly drive the Department for International Development to redirect its resources towards Darfur. It does not compel the Ministry of Defence to place men in wildly unpredictable conditions directing food convoys.
As for the United Nations, Sudan illustrates the dangers and inconsistencies of subcontracting moral and military issues to that organisation. It would, apparently, be right to interfere in the internal affairs of that country if the necessary majority in the Security Council deemed it to be run by vile people.
Yet if Sudan had been represented on the Security Council 18 months ago, it could have held the swing vote (as Angola, Cameroon, and Guinea at one stage did) in determining whether Iraq was under the control of a man so odious as to represent a menace to world order meriting armed conflict. The Liberal Democrats could thus have found themselves in the bizarre position of being obliged to support a conflict that they instinctively opposed because President al-Bashir had been offered enough incentives to back it.
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Sudan is worth diplomatic attention and an enormous amount of money directed at the needy. It is not, though, central to our national interests, nor do we have any sense of historical obligation to it. The comparison with Iraq is ludicrously inappropriate. The informal rule that one should rarely send troops to a country that you would struggle to find on a map must, in this instance, be respected.
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