Francis Mading Deng

Dr Francis Mading Deng is Research Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he is also the Director of their Center for Displacement Studies. He has served as Ambassador of Sudan to Canada, to the Scandinavian countries and to the United States of America, and as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. Deng served in the Sudanese government, resigning from the foreign service when the war started in 1983 "to protest Sudan’s growing orientation toward Islamic fundamentalism". Since 1992 he has also served as the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons and is co-founder of the Brookings Institution Project on Internal Displacement. Deng is also a member of MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS).

Deng is the author, along with J. Stephen Morrison, who has been influential in formulating US policy, of a 2001 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 'Report of the CSIS Task Force on U.S.-Sudan Policy,' funded through a grant from the U.S. Institute of Peace. By page two "Sudan’s rising oil production" is mentioned. The US is not impartial in Sudan and isolated from the rest of the international community — it funds the contra army in the south — and Deng's report concedes that the US is:

the principal backer, in humanitarian and diplomatic terms, of the southern Sudanese opposition, recognizes the south’s moral cause, and will not countenance the military subjugation of the south.

U.S. aggression is glossed over throughout the report:

U.S. policy did not match means to ends and fed the erroneous belief in Khartoum that the United States was committed covertly to the overthrow of the Sudanese government. These shortfalls in U.S. policy inadvertently benefited Khartoum, particularly after the United States bombed the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in August 1998. If the Bush administration is to be effective in advancing U.S. interests in Sudan, it will need a significantly modified approach.

Sixteen Tomahawk cruise missiles demolished the plant which produced 50% of Sudan's medicine and the attack was substantiated on charges that it posed the “imminent threat” of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and that El Shifa was owned by Osama Bin Laden, all which evapourated after the deed was done. Members of a delegation to El Shifa led by Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark noted that:

Ever since Sudan opposed the 1991 U.S.-led war against Iraq, U.S. policy has aimed at destabilizing the Sudan government. Washington has helped finance a secessionist civil war against the Khartoum government and imposed economic sanctions on Sudan. The missile attack came soon after Sudan took steps to access a 300-million-barrel reservoir of crude oil in the country's South. There is a clear relationship between U.S. oil policy and U.S. government hostility toward Sudan.

Strange things happen to intelligence on the Sudan. As recently as January 1998, the CIA had formally withdrawn more than 100 of its intelligence reports on Sudan, after concluding that its source was a fabricator. Deng's report has no mention that the U.S. has maintained a campaign to destabilize Sudan. On November 10, 1996, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. "would send $20 million in military equipment to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda, even though these three countries were embroiled in the bloody war in southern Sudan. The paper said its congressional sources doubted the aid would be kept from rebel forces fighting the Sudanese government. Shortly thereafter, Africa Confidential reported, "It is clear the aid is for Sudan's armed opposition" and added that U.S. special forces were on "open-ended deployment" with the rebels."

Deng's report argues that there should be intensive planning on the critical requirements for a 'self-governing' south: "Sudanese experts should undertake this effort, with technical and financial support provided by the World Bank, United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the EU, USAID, and other bilateral donor agencies." The Report cites Elliott Abrams and Paul Bremer (at the time with Kissinger Associates), as its "presenters".

In an article for CommonDreams, Tom Barry writes of Abrams:

During the Reagan administration, Abrams was the government’s nexus between the militarists in the National Security Council and the public-diplomacy operatives in the State Department, White House, and National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Abrams worked closely with Otto Reich, who directed the White House’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which was in charge of disseminating “white propaganda” to the U.S. public, media, and policymakers to build support for the Reagan administration’s interventionist policies in Latin America and elsewhere.

Deng was a key speaker at the 2000 U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which was chaired by Elliott Abrams.

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