The US first became heavily involved in Sudan in the 1970s, forging an alliance with the rightward-turning dictatorship of Jafaar Nimeiri, who Washington came to see as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, Libya and the region’s moves towards pan-Arabism.
George H. W. Bush, then the US ambassador to the UN, shared satellite imagery with the Nimeiri regime indicating possible oil reserves in the country’s south, and obtained approval for the US-based energy giant Chevron to do the exploratory work.
The Sudanese government’s desire for the oil money to flow into the central government’s coffers, instead of to the country’s south, reignited a north-south civil war, which would last 22 years and take some 2 million lives, mostly civilians in the south.
(...) With Khartoum having demonstrated its acquiescence towards Washington’s dictates by being the only Arab country to support the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978, Sudan by the early 1980s was receiving more economic and military aid from the US than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa.
(...) As a series of famines beset Sudan in the ’80s, Washington demonstrated the depth of its purported humanitarian concern by using its influence to ensure, with few exceptions, that Western aid organisations did not operate in rebel-controlled zones — keeping food provisions from starving people who lived in the “wrong place”.
(...) In fact, though the US alliance with Sudan cooled after Nimeiri’s overthrow in 1985, and broke down entirely subsequent to Khartoum’s verbal backing of Iraq in the 1990-91 Gulf War, Washington’s disregard for Sudanese lives has continued unimpeded to the present.
(...) Soaring rhetoric aside, the US cannot even be bothered to fully fund humanitarian operations in Darfur. In June, the World Food Program had to cut its aid flights to the region due to a lack of funding from wealthy donor nations.