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The road to Darfur runs through Beijing

Mike KrauseAspen, CO Colorado

The Communist government in China just can’t help but show its true colors.The same authoritarian regime that is desperately trying to put on a friendly face for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing recently detained and then deported Colorado resident Kirsten Westby and four other Americans for peacefully displaying a banner saying “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008” on the Tibetan side of Mount Everest.The slogan, in protest of the more than 50-year occupation of Tibet by China was a clever play on Beijing’s own cynical slogan for the Olympics, “One World, One Dream.” China richly deserves much more of this kind of bad publicity.Indeed, the 2008 Olympics in Beijing provide an excellent opportunity for other Coloradans, including elected officials, to help shine some light not just on China’s oppressive occupation of Tibet, but also Beijing’s economic and political complicity in the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.For instance, Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff’s House Bill 1184 would direct Colorado’s public pension funds to divest from certain companies that do business in Sudan. The bill is an important, though largely symbolic, gesture against the genocide being perpetrated by the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum against non-Arab tribes-people in Darfur.But the thugs in Khartoum don’t really need the investment of American states.Professor Eric Reeves of Smith College, a Sudan expert, calls China “an economic powerhouse that allows the Khartoum regime to largely ignore economic pressure from the rest of the world.”According to a March 2007 report from the Washington D.C.-based Heritage Foundation, “Beijing has at least $3 billion invested in the Sudanese energy sector, for a total of $10 billion since the 1990s.” China’s huge investment in Sudan oil, in turn, helps fund the genocide in Darfur. As the Heritage report continues, “Khartoum has doubled its defense budget in recent years, spending 60 percent to 80 percent of its estimated $500 million in annual oil revenue – half from China – on weapons. Some of these weapons find their way to the conflict in Darfur. Moreover, with Chinese assistance, the Sudanese government recently built three weapons factories, complicating international arms embargoes against Khartoum.” China also provides Khartoum political cover at the United Nations. In 2006, China not only abstained from U.N. Security Council Resolution 1706, which authorized deployment of troops and civilian police into Darfur to provide security against the genocide, but also used its veto power to force language into the resolution that requires the consent of the same Khartoum regime whose mass murder in Darfur created the need for an international security force in the first place. As Professor Reeves plainly states on his website (http://www.sudanreeves.org), “It is time for China to recognize that it cannot be a legitimate host of the 2008 Olympic Games while remaining complicit in Darfur’s genocidal destruction.” China’s absurd response to a Colorado woman engaging in peaceful protest on a mountain in Tibet shows just how easily the regime in Beijing can be goaded into making its own worst authoritarian impulses into an international spectacle.And while there is only so much an American state can do to impact international affairs, any Colorado lawmakers who want to build on Speaker Romanoff’s divestment bill should keep in mind that the road to Darfur runs through the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.Mike Krause is a Senior Fellow at the Independence Institute in Golden, Colo.