That the World Politics, be it Dictatorships or Democracies it is the wheeler Dealers who shape the Policy whether at Home or Abroad.
In some cases the meddling is direct and visible but in most cases it is invisible and more powerful.
The latter carries more clout and totally unaccountable..
They imagine that they are the arbiters of the World and shape the World Policies.
Society has been witnessing these Societies ,some of them as I said are overt , some covert.
Illuminati is one.
I have blogged in detail on Illuminati.
Despite mounting evidence on the existence of Illuminati, people still refuse to accept the fact as in the case of the UFOS.
Now fresh documented information is available with Reuters, which has investigated the manipulations of a group of people who shaped US policies on Sudan which eventually to Sudan’s Independence.
(Special Report: The wonks who sold Washington on South Sudan‘)
One is reminded of Robert Ludlums Thriller ,The Materese Circle,Matlock Papers and the like.
In many a case it is the CIA which handles these messy cases and usually lands with egg on its face.
However the Group, on the other hand does get things done quietly and successfully.
Now Read on.
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In the mid-1980s, a small band of policy wonks began convening for lunch in the back corner of a dimly lit Italian bistro in the U.S. capital.
After ordering beers, they would get down to business: how to win independence for southern Sudan, a war-torn place most American politicians had never heard of.
They called themselves the Council and gave each other clannish nicknames: the Emperor, the Deputy Emperor, the Spear Carrier. The unlikely fellowship included an Ethiopian refugee to America, an English-lit professor and a former Carter administration official who once sported a ponytail.
The Council is little known in Washington or in Africa itself. But its quiet cajoling over nearly three decades helped South Sudan win its independence one year ago this week.
Across successive U.S. administrations, they smoothed the path of southern Sudanese rebels in Washington, influenced legislation in Congress, and used their positions to shape foreign policy in favor of Sudan’s southern rebels, often with scant regard for U.S. government protocol.
“We never controlled anything, but we always did try to influence things in the way we thought most benefited the people of South Sudan,” said Roger Winter, now an honorary adviser to the South Sudan government and one of the group’s original members, who dubbed himself the Spear Carrier.
The story of the Council has not been told before. For a Reuters series chronicling the first year in the life of South Sudan, the group’s main members spoke for the first time about how they came together and what they tried to achieve. They pinpointed key moments when peace could have slipped away. Some expressed disappointment at the compromises America made to broker the creation of South Sudan. One idea shines through: Independence was far from inevitable.
“I actually think it was a miracle we got something,” said Winter.
Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people. It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives.
President George W. Bush, who set out to end Africa’s longest-running civil war, also played a big role, as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress.
But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world’s newest state was the tightly knit group, never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington’s DuPont Circle.
A CHARISMATIC REBEL
In 1978, Brian D’Silva, a young student in agricultural economics, began pursuing a doctorate at Iowa State University. There, he studied alongside an intensely charismatic southern Sudanese man named John Garang, who had begun dreaming of a democratic Sudan.
After graduation, D’Silva went with Garang to Sudan to teach at the University of Khartoum. An uneasy peace held between Sudan’s predominantly Arab Islamic north and largely Christian south. The divide stemmed from colonial times, when Britain encouraged Christian missionaries to evangelize the south. The British considered splitting the country in two, but ultimately handed a unified Sudan to a small Arab elite in Khartoum, who tried to impose Islamic law throughout the country.
A 1972 agreement had given southerners semi-autonomy. That fragile deal began unraveling in 1979 after Chevron discovered oil in the south; the north did not want to lose control over the newly found riches.
D’Silva returned to the United States in 1980 to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Three years later, his old schoolmate Garang, a conscript in the Sudanese army, led a mutiny of southern Sudanese soldiers. His group would become the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM), which led the fight for southern autonomy.
Roger Winter visited Sudan in 1981 for a non-governmental outfit called the U.S. Committee for Refugees. Upon his return, the former Carter administration official sought out Sudanese who were based in Washington. Key among them was respected legal scholar Francis Deng, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
“A man with a ponytail came to see me,” recalled Deng, who is now the U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide.
Deng hails from Abyei, a fertile area straddling north and south Sudan. He thought Winter must be some “wealthy hippie-type” who wanted to give money to the rebels. When Winter explained that the best he could do was disseminate information, Deng suggested that the American public needed first-hand accounts of people affected by the war. He called a cousin in the rebel movement to ensure that on future visits, Winter would have access to all the so-called liberated areas – the parts of Sudan held by the rebels – where he could gather direct testimony on the impact of the war.
By the mid-1980s, these three future Council members – D’Silva, Deng and Winter – were working in the United States as proxies for John Garang. Over six feet tall and more than 200 pounds, the rebel leader had a laugh – and a personality – that filled a room.
“You meet Dr. John, you get converted,” said Winter, who first met Garang in 1986.
The three men quickly discovered the size of the task ahead of them. In 1987, D’Silva tried to bring a delegation from the SPLM to meet officials in Washington. But standard procedure at Foggy Bottom was to maintain relations with the recognized Sudanese government in Khartoum and ignore the rebel movement. D’Silva received a phone call from an official instructing him that no meetings should be arranged on any government-owned or -leased property.
ENTER “THE EMPEROR”
According to Deng, many in Washington associated the rebels with the Soviet-backed government in neighboring Ethiopia, leaving the SPLM on the wrong side of the Cold War. “It took a lot of hard work to remove the prejudice against John Garang,” Deng said.
As D’Silva, Winter and Deng tried to get the southern rebels through doors in Washington, a wayward college graduate in search of a cause was traveling in the Horn of Africa. By the early 1990s, John Prendergast had decided his calling was to help win better U.S. policies for Africa.
At the time, the circle of people in Washington who cared about the Horn of Africa was small. Prendergast soon ran into Winter, and the pair began briefing journalists, urging them to cover the conflict and putting them in contact with the rebels.
Human rights campaigning was very different from today. The idea of Western groups advocating in a coordinated way on behalf of foreign causes – as they had during the British-led anti-slavery campaigns in Belgian Congo more than a century before – had only recently been rekindled by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
For the few Americans who had heard of Sudan at all, “the south was a black hole,” said Winter, the refugee-rights organizer.
It was about this time that the Council’s future Emperor made his entrance. Ted Dagne was a 14-year-old Ethiopian in 1974 when a Soviet-backed military junta seized power. Dagne’s older sister, a student leader, was among the first to be executed by the new government.
“After that, there was a (target) on our family,” said Dagne, drawing a cross in the air.
By the time Dagne was 16, both he and his older brother had been imprisoned and tortured. Dagne was subsequently released, but his brother was executed and Dagne’s own prospects for survival looked slim. One morning he donned his sister’s T-shirt and his brother’s jeans and shoes, keepsakes for an unknown future, and told his parents he was going out for groceries. It was the last time he saw them.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/11/us-south-sudan-midwives-idINBRE86A0GC20120711
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