A case for divesting in Sudan

As more humanitarian organizations leave Darfur, where violence also includes them, more of the victims of the genocide are children. In an Oct. 7 report on the reliable Sudan Tribune Web site, the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that each day in Darfur, 80 children under the age of five die. As the United Nations spins useless resolutions, more children will perish. But, in late September, the Senate, under pressure, removed an important section of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act.

As previously passed by the House with wide bipartisan support and now signed by the president, the bill blocked assets and froze visas of anyone connected with mass murders and rapes of black African Muslims.

But what Sen. Richard Lugar, Indiana Republican — chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — removed from the Senate version was a section in the House bill that protected the right of our individual states (six already, with more on the way) to divest public pension funds from international companies doing business in murderous Sudan.

Successfully lobbying against this provision was the National Foreign Trade Council, representing more than 300 multinational companies, some of whom eagerly do business with Sudanese President Lt. Gen. Omar Bashir, the architect of this genocide, which has not killed as many as Hitler’s Holocaust. But the willingness of international corporations to profit from the dealings with the Hitler of Africa reminds me of a magazine headline I saw in the late 1930s: “Would you do business with Hitler?”

Also opposing individual state divestments is the National Association of Manufacturers. In the Sept. 27 issue of The Hill, Bill Primosch, that organization’s director of international business policy, dismissed state divestment laws as not having “a practical impact; it becomes a symbolic gesture.” And another lobbyist crowed of the removal of this section of the House bill: “It is a big win.”

The biggest winner, the National Foreign Trade Council (which is suing the state of Illinois on its divestment law) claims, moreover, that individual states have no right to interfere with national foreign policy. (The Bush administration did not object to the stripping of the House bill on this issue.)

However, years ago, during the debate on state divestments against South Africa’s apartheid regime, Gerald Warburg, on the staff of California Sen. Alan Cranston, said: “The bottom line is that local authorities already have a clear legal right and moral obligation to exercise discretion in how they invest their own money.”

And California Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat — and a determined prime mover in the states’ and national divestment campaigns — emphasizes: “Concern about the constitutionality of state divestment campaigns is just a smokescreen to cover for efforts by the financial-services industry to quietly kill a divestment movement it sees as an inconvenience” (San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 26).

Miss Lee, who has traveled to Darfur twice, says: “So many people have died that it’s our duty to make sure pension funds don’t have blood in their banks. It is the blood of genocide.”

Even if this were only a “symbolic gesture,” would divestment at least tell the world of the horrified concern by many Americans in these divesting states that day after day, the corpses mount in Darfur?

But significantly, Sudan’s monstrous Gen. Bashir does not see these state laws as emptily symbolic — like the continually useless United Nations resolutions on Darfur. Adam Sterling, executive director of the nonprofit National Sudan Divestment Task Force, tells the Washington Post (Oct. 7):

“We are already seeing a response from the Sudanese government. Last April, a press release from the Sudanese Embassy here urged institutions to stop divesting. And in a recent discussion with our campaign leader in Indiana — (home of Sen. Richard Lugar, killer of the divestment section of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act) — divestment was the only topic the Sudanese ambassador was interested in addressing.”

Miss Lee is not giving up. She has introduced a bill, the Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act (whose fate I will follow in a future column) that, she says, “would bar international companies, whose business in Sudan directly or indirectly supports the genocide in Darfur, from receiving taxpayer-funded federal contracts.”

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