PREVIEW: China's quiet diplomacy may be best bet to deal with Darfur

By Noel King Feb 1, 2007, 13:00 GMT

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.'