Suth Sudan: Another Regime Change Opportunity

The US and Regime Change in South Sudan

by Thomas C. Mountain - CounterPunch

It is no longer a secret that the USA is attempting to carry out regime change in South Sudan. Why? It’s because South Sudanese President Salva Kiir is determined to continue supporting Chinese oil production in his country, China’s only majority owned energy project in Africa.

The USA managed to get the Chinese oil fields shut down a couple years back by promising to provide upwards of $200 million a month in “aid” during the dispute between Sudan and South Sudan over pipeline transit fees if the oil fields were closed.

When the oil shipments were subsequently stopped and the aid money failed to materialize, President Kiir, to avoid complete bankruptcy, for his only independent income is from oil revenue, went hat in hand to Beijing and a $8 billion Chinese rescue package was the result. The Chinese oil fields reopened amidst the gnashing of teeth by Pax Americana and regime change became the USA’s solution to this vexation.

As in all to many crimes committed by Pax Americana in Africa a particularly bloodstained warlord was chosen to do the dirty deed and in close cooperation with its local gendarme, Ethiopia, a coup attempt was launched earlier this year by one Riek Machar, former Vice President of the country.

Riek Machar is no stranger to ethnic cleansing and mass murder going back to at least 1991. At that time he sent his Nuur ethnic militias on a killing spree that saw many thousand’s of the Dinka ethnic group slaughtered. His denials at the time for his responsibility for his crimes mimics his protestations of innocence for the latest round of bloodshed his followers have carried out.

The fact is Riek Machar is the tool of US empire in its war against Chinese penetration of Africa’s energy resources, something so obviously contrary to the USA’s “national interest” that only the most truth challenged in the western media still try to deny.

But deny they do. They continue to try to hide Riek Machar’s links to the Ethiopian regime, who are so completely dependent on aid provided and micro managed by the USA and its western vassals that even if the regime didn’t want to be involved it has no choice (as in its disastrous invasion of Somalia in 2007).

It is no secret that Riek Machar is getting the arms, fuel and funds to continue his rebellion for almost a year now from outside South Sudan. Even the western media has to admit this but from just who is he getting the wherewithal to continue his bloodletting?

The answer to this question is now pretty obvious and its not from Sudan (badly hurt by the Chinese oil field closure), Uganda or Kenya. Only Ethiopia is left, and the regional anger against the regime is now an “open secret”.

Ethiopia’s involvement has led South Sudan to demand the moving of the so called “peace talks” (which have yet to result in any such thing) from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya.

President Kiir’s inner circle are regularly sourced charging Ethiopia with supporting Riek Machar’s death squads. Matters have gotten so bad that recent reports speak of large cash injections being provided to Ethiopian rebel forces operating on the South Sudan/Ethiopian border by the South Sudanese government in an attempt to disrupt the camps being operated there by the Ethiopia regime that are arming and training Mr. Machar’s death squads.

Ethiopia has done a really good job of pissing off its neighbors, with Sudan (whose economy has been badly hurt by the latest oil field closures), Egypt (threatened by the new damn Ethiopia is building on the Nile River that will cut critical amounts of the water it depends on), Uganda (South Sudan’s largest trading partner whose economy was already in dire straits even before the civil war destroyed trade between the two) and even Kenya, which also lost a major trading partner following the USA backed coup growing increasingly estranged from the regime.

Uganda has a significant military force supporting Salva Kiir’s government and it is being reported that Egypt has set up a military base in South Sudan as well.

The UN response has been predictable with the USA’s lapdog Secretary General Ban Ki “slippery eel” Moon having appointed the former head of Ethiopian military intelligence to run the UN “peacekeeping” operation in South Sudan. This is the guy who used to run the genocidal counterinsurgency in the Ethiopian Ogaden and was past commander of the almost 10,000 Ethiopian “peacekeepers” stationed around the Sudanese oil fields (where UN staff held press conferences last year complaining about the Ethiopians providing weapons to local militias, now fighting under Riek Machar leadership).

Ethnic cleansing, mass murder, famine, you name it, the list of crimes being committed against the people of South Sudan in the “national interests” of the good old USA in an attempt to deny China access to African oil should come as no surprise for the history of Pax Americana and its indentured servant Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa is nothing new. Patience with the Ethiopian regime is running short amongst its neighbors and many are hoping that regime change in Ethiopia rather than in South Sudan may soon come to fruit.

Thomas C. Mountain has been living and writing from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain at g mail dot com.