| Letter to the Editor, Irish Independent, 10 April 2007
Ronan Tynan is right to highlight the EU’s grotesque act of betrayal of Darfur, and China’s role in bankrolling a genocidal regime, in his letter “EU’s shameful Darfur Stance”, April 2).
With 400,000 dead and 4 million reliant on aid for survival, it is clear that only the presence on the ground of an international peace enforcing army, will stem this massive loss of life in the cursed Darfur zone.
China is the best and only lever on the Khartoum regime. The veto-yielding Security Council member has continually staled and diluted UN resolutions which would have brought the carnage to an end.
While more than two-thirds of Sudan's crude exports go to China, that makes up only 10 percent of China's oil imports. In other words, Sudan needs China more than the other way around.
The Asian tiger has become a major, and perhaps the largest, supplier of weapons to Sudan - United Nations investigators have found most of the small arms fuelling the conflict and human rights abuses in Darfur are Chinese. This flow of arms into Darfur has been matched by a flow of aid agencies out of the region which has become too violent to operate in. In the latter half of 2006, 13 humanitarian workers were killed on the job, threatening the very sustainability of the world’s largest aid operation, and putting the lives of millions beyond reach.
China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide makes its Olympic slogan, 'One world, one dream,' a complete joke.
Having failed to put the issue on the agenda at lasts week’s celebrations, the 27 members countries of the EU – born of atrocity to unite against further atrocity – must ask themselves one simple question: Which is more important, the Olympic Games taking place for the greater glory of China, or the lives of 4 million people?
Yours etc,
John O'Shea
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