Khartoum - There are a number of secretive speakeasy-style
restaurants offering Chinese food and karaoke to oil industry
insiders around Khartoum, as the Chinese National Petroleum Company
uses billboards to promote 'evergreen' Sino-Sudanese relations.
Despite the economic activity and its scramble for oil, China
appears keen to keep a low profile politically in Sudan, making its
diplomatic intentions much less obvious than its economic ones.
On Friday, Chinese President Hu Jintao is set to arrive in the
country for a controversial trip that will most likely tighten the
booming economy's grip on Sudanese oil and could see China use its
non-confrontational approach to diplomacy to speak to Sudanese
leaders about embattled Darfur.
But China's laissez-faire attitude towards human rights violations
has created sceptics.
'You don't find Chinese influence on Sudanese politics,' Sudan's
former finance minister Ibrahim Moneim Mansour told Deutsche Presse-
Agentur dpa.
'I was astonished when the Americans went to China and said 'we
want you to press the Sudanese on Darfur.' Anyone who has met the
Chinese knows they won't do it,' he added.
China has long insisted its interest in Sudan, and Africa for that
matter, is purely economic but it has been prodded by the US and UN
to use its influence to ensure some concrete deal on Darfur, where at
least 200,000 people have been killed in nearly four years of
violence.
China, which spent 1.5 billion dollars buying half of Sudan's oil
in 2006, exerts considerable influence due largely to its thirst for
Sudanese crude which has spurred billions of dollars' worth of
Chinese investments in pipelines and refineries throughout Sudan.
But it has sent mixed signals about what is likely to come out of
Hu's two-day stay in Sudan, part of an 8-nation tour to the resource-
rich African continent.
'The West has asked China to use its influence but we will not
intervene in other countries' affairs. We will not change this
attitude,' said Shao Weijian, commercial secretary at the Chinese
economic and commercial counsellor's office in Nairobi.
Chinese Foreign Minister Zhai Jun told a news conference in
Beijing in late January that Darfur would be on the agenda during
Hu's visit, sparking some optimism that China will play a role in
pushing for diplomacy to end the region's military conflict.
The international community has been perplexed by how to deal with
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's wavering refusal of a
10,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. It has pondered
economic sanctions and trade restrictions while China has vowed to
use its UN Security Council veto to block any punitive measures.
Throughout the diplomatic wrangling, violence in Darfur has
spiked, severely curtailing aid operations to some 2.5 million
displaced civilians.
The human rights community has urged Hu to use his influence to
bring some solution to Darfur.
'I hope - maybe it is better not to hope - I think that the
Chinese government will put pressure on the Sudanese government to
accept the whole UN package,' said human rights activist Faisal el-
Bagir of the Khartoum Center for Human Rights and Environmental
Development.
'This is the best and last chance to avoid confrontation with the
international community,' he said.
China's own human rights record has been the subject of
considerable derision and rights groups charge that the sale of
Chinese weaponry to Sudan has helped fuel the Darfur conflict.
Sudan is charged with arming Arab nomads to conduct a proxy war
targeting civilians belonging to the same tribes as predominantly
African rebels. The rebellion that started in 2003 was in reaction to
what the rebels claim was the Khartoum government's neglect of
Darfur, which has led to underdevelopment of the remote region.
But despite the ongoing violence, analysts stress that Hu's trip
to Sudan is centred on trade rather than the conflict.
'This visit is about an economic partnership between the two
countries, not about Darfur,' says former finance minister Mansour.
Still, the Chinese policy of quiet diplomacy may be the best bet
in negotiating with Sudan, a nation which typically treats diplomatic
screw-tightening as a threat.
'That is the character of the Sudanese,' says Mansour, 'You get
what you want with a smile, but never with sanctions.'
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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