How China’s lust for Africa’s assets is putting Irish lives on the line

IRISH soldiers are risking their lives in Africa as a consequence of China’s thirst for political muscle and oil.

That was the depressing reality outlined on Monday evening by the BBC’s Panorama programme, China’s Secret War. It was narrated by Hilary Andersson, who first brought the Darfur crisis to the world’s attention, and it demonstrated convincingly that China is still selling arms to the Sudanese government in defiance of UN resolutions. The Irish-led EU force defending the refugees in Chad, on Darfur’s western border, picks up the pieces.

Already 300,000 people are estimated to have died in Darfur; hundreds of thousands more have been raped and mutilated. And still the onslaught goes on.

The US administration calls it a genocide against black Africans but shelters behind the African-led UN force in Darfur, large in numbers but woefully short of equipment. There is a dire lack of helicopters and in a region as big as France with no proper roads, the static force has been easy prey. There is still no peace agreement in place to be monitored as envisaged when the UN were deployed. Quite the opposite.

The Panorama programme showed dramatic images of Darfuri villages razed to the ground by Sudanese airforce jets. The BBC team discovered Chinese-made Dong Feng attack vehicles which were built after the UN arms embargo came into force and have subsequently been captured by the rebels fighting the Sudanese government. China insists it has told the Khartoum regime that arms it supplies must not be used in Darfur, but the Sudanese government has no intention of ceasing. The Chinese, equally, have no intention of halting their supply: they are just going through the motions.

Most worryingly of all, it appears that Chinese technicians continue to service the Fantan fighter jets based in Darfur, but provided before the embargo. Chinese instructors still train the pilots. Other countries, notably Russia, have armed the Sudanese regime, but China’s presence is the most high profile: they are busily writing off Sudan’s debts and building a new presidential palace for Omar al-Bashir who was this week accused in the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity.

So what is Beijing’s motivation? True, the Chinese don’t have a western sense of democracy or human rights norms but, equally, their motivations are not colonialist in the conventional sense. Chinese involvement in Africa predates European colonisation, but there has never been a comparable desire to rule over Africans.

It is still impossible to overstate China’s hunger for commodities. The country accounts for (only!) about a fifth of the world’s population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world’s pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending dozens of times more on imports of oil and copper than it did a decade ago as it transforms itself from a light to heavy manufacturer.

And China is getting ever hungrier for commodities.

As the west strives to find more efficient ways of transporting people and goods, the oil price is rocketing because demand from China and other developing economies like India, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico is still on the rise. China’s imports of oil are expected to triple again by 2030, so don’t expect the price at the pumps to fall significantly any time soon.

An even heavier price is being paid by the Chinese themselves in terms of chronic pollution. Steelmaking alone in China — largely coal-fired — absorbs nearly twice as much power as all the country’s households combined.

The acid rain and smog produced are not mere inconveniences. They cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and make the paddy fields unproductive. The Chinese government itself admits the costs inflicted by pollution each year amount to one-tenth of the country’s productivity. Despite frantic efforts to clean up Beijing in time for the Olympics next month, be prepared for plenty of images of athletes choking for breath.

True, Chinese trade with Africa is probably lifting more people from poverty than any number of aid schemes. Furthermore, China is not alone in coddling some pretty nasty regimes: look at France’s involvement in Chad where it plays poacher and gamekeeper at the same time. But there is a very direct cost, borne not least by the people of Darfur. In its drive to secure reliable supplies of raw materials, China undermines any serious efforts to spread democracy and prosperity.

Some Africans say this is humbug. Why should they be free to deal only with western countries, often former colonisers, but not with the Chinese who have never done so and which the west itself courts assiduously as a destination for investment? Whatever happened to all that talk of boycotts of the Olympics? And energy is not the root of all the evils. Yes, the Chinese can be less deferential to Africans’ cultural sensitivities and it is a ready customer for two-thirds of Sudan’s oil exports, asking no questions. But China is more than just a good country to do business with — none of those irritating shareholders that western oil prospectors have to answer to. Rather, China is seen as a role model for African development as well. China is a startling example of how a region can rise from poverty within a generation and become a dominant player on the global scene.

From the perspective of undemocratic African governments, how much easier must it seem to replicate the Red Dragon than the recently-stuffed Celtic Tiger?

SOME worry that China is viewed through a western prism and not through its own history. And it’s true that to talk of Chinese imperialism is a bit simplistic: China and Africa have too much in common for that, starting with gross wealth disparities and hundreds of millions of people on less than a dollar a day. Indeed, we cannot accurately predict how China’s new power will wield its influence into the future. Trade imposes its own obligations and the whole concept of importing resources is new to China, unlike Europe.

What we do know, thanks to Panorama, is that the situation today is desperate. Attempts to improve the situation in central Africa are being actively frustrated by Beijing. Defence Minister, Willie O’Dea, has already announced that the Irish peacekeeping contingent in Chad might be there well past the winter. The situation will be reviewed next month.

The situation there is complicated. The displaced people in eastern Chad they are protecting are not just Darfuris who have fled the murderous Sudanese regime, but native black Chadians persecuted by their own Arab-inclined government as well. Small in number, they do a job many other European armies are not prepared to tackle, in extremely unpleasant conditions which present enormous logistical difficulties.

It all goes to show what an interconnected world we now live in. We greedily consume cheap Chinese goods. Our entrepreneurs look on China almost as a mythical opportunity to make quick bucks. But the other side of the coin is that Ireland’s tiny little army is engaged in possibly its most risky mission to date, and China is partly to blame. Meanwhile, Africans die. To say we live in interesting times is an understatement.