Blood money

Darfur, China, and IMF votes.

Stopping the genocide in Darfur needs a mandatory UN Security Council resolution. This is apparently blocked by Khartoum’s protector in the UN Security Council, China. Why? China is run by out-and-out Kissingerian realists. It doesn’t care one way or the other about the deaths of black African Muslims. It has oil concessions in Sudan, large for the hosts but chickenfeed in relation to China’s overall needs. It doesn’t want to offend other Arab oil exporters that in turn don’t want to offend Khartoum and don’t care about the killings either. Finally it is worried about setting a precedent for intervention in China’s internal affairs. (For a hopeless, quixotic and politically incorrect argument that the last fear is ill-founded, see here .)

These are substantial interests, but not strategically vital ones. Arab oil exporters sell to countries they disagree with, like the USA, which is powerful, and Australia, which isn’t. Sudan needs China more than the reverse. Precedents are in the eye of the beholder. So here’s the question: is there some other diplomatic Monopoly card, held by countries that care a bit about genocide, that China’s leaders might care about more? Yes: more voting power in the IMF. The USA is trying to secure them this, the Europeans oppose.

Why not make the linkage?

PS update: It’s not arbitrary. The IMF charter has no wide political content, but it’s an instrument of global governance; and it looks proper to me to hold China to its (very Confucian) obligations of stewardship of world peace in the framework where it has been given great authoriy, the UN Security Council.

Author: James Wimberley

James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web

4 thoughts on “Blood money”

  1. How do you get voting rights at the IMF? We have so many because we deposited so much gold and cash into it in 1948 when it was set up. Solution – China gets rid of a big chunk of its spare forex reserves by depositing them at the IMF, rather than backing yet more credit creation in its own banking system.
    Trebles all round!

  3. This Ishmael moron has been posting white supremisist garbage on a few blogs in the past weeks. Can we please ban his IP or something?
    [Done. Thanks. MK.]

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