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| Liu Guijin: After years of vagueness, China's envoy is blunt. xinhua/ap |
China speaks out on Darfur crisis
Keen not to taint Olympics, and under pressure from West, Beijing sends envoy to Khartoum with strong words.
By Scott Baldauf and Peter Ford | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitorand Laura J. Winter | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the February 25, 2008 edition
Page 1 of 2
JOHANNESBURG, south africa; BEIJING; AND LONDON - For much of the five-year conflict in Sudan's Darfur region, Khartoum has counted on the silent support of its most important trading partner, China. While Western diplomats and human rights groups pressured China to exert its influence to halt the fighting, which has killed more than 200,000, Beijing seemed unmoved.
This week, however, China has gone on the diplomatic offensive, opening up about past efforts and future plans. Just days after Hollywood director Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic director of the 2008 Beijing Olympics – accusing Beijing of not doing enough to stop the Darfur crisis – China sent its special envoy on Darfur, Liu Guijin, to Khartoum Sunday, both to deliver a stern warning to the Sudanese government, and to remind its Western critics that they, too, could be doing more to stop the fighting.
At a stopover in London, which one analyst described as a "public relations roadshow," Mr. Liu told a crowd of diplomats and China experts at Chatham House, a prominent foreign-affairs institute, that China has been "forced" to take open action on Darfur. "According to our original culture, we do a lot of things quietly," he said. "We do not like to speak everywhere. But the situation has forced me to speak out on what we have done and what we are going to do."
China's change of tactics, from quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy to more public speechmaking, could be motivated by many factors, from a desire to maintain its paramount influence in Sudan to a need to protect its upcoming Summer Olympics. Whatever the motivations, China's diplomatic initiative carries risks and raises questions of how much influence China really has with its African allies.
"Definitely, China has found the need to play the role of global actor," says Mariam Jooma, a Sudan expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria (or Tshwane, as the South African capital city now calls itself). Mr. Spielberg's action may have sped up Beijing's diplomacy, but China looks at Sudan in much broader terms than mere public relations.
"To the west of Sudan, the Chadian rebels have been pushed back, in part with French military assistance," says Ms. Jooma. "To the south, the SPLM [Sudanese People's Liberation Movement] is hedging its bets by signing up the US as a major ally. So for strategic reasons, China is beginning to feel the need to send a message that it is quite a big player in Sudan."
As if to underscore how important the Darfur issue has become, America's envoy arrived in Khartoum on the same day that Liu arrived. Both will conduct separate talks with the Sudanese government this week.
"China has been pushing the Sudan government behind the scenes for at least two years now," says Alex De Waal, a Sudan expert at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "They were a driving force behind the hybrid force of UN and AU [African Union} peacekeepers," which began to deploy in Sudan last month, "and it has been doing this before there even was an activist campaign over Darfur."
The combined attentions of human rights campaigners and Hollywood stars such as Mia Farrow, Don Cheadle, George Clooney, and now Spielberg may make bigger news in the United States than in Beijing, but activists have had a surprisingly stinging effect nonetheless. Beijing's response has come out sounding hurt rather than angry. But the very fact that it has responded at all is a big change.
"It is understandable if [critics] are not familiar with China's policy," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said last week. He said China had played "a positive and constructive role in the proper solution of the issue" and that "China's important role in the process is widely applauded by the international community."
Since envoy Liu was appointed last May, apparently signaling a shift from Beijing's previous diplomatic support for Khartoum's stonewalling, US, British, and UN officials have welcomed what they say are behind-the-scenes efforts by the Chinese to pressure the Sudanese authorities.
This month, Liu reportedly told Sudan's Foreign Minister, Deng Alor, that "the world is running out of patience with what is going on in Darfur." He urged Sudan not to take actions that would "cause the international community to impose sanctions on them."
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