Cross posted from SSRC’s Making Sense of Darfur blog
Mr. Badawi in his recent post “Indebted to the Save Darfur Coalition?” plays loose with the numbers and the definition of Sudan’s “odious” debt. In addition, he mischaracterizes the objectives of the Save Darfur Coalition’s position related to how the international community should deal with Sudan’s debt crisis and ignores the coalition’s support thus far of the Obama Administration’s engagement strategy with Khartoum. We have repeatedly called for the U.S. to offer Sudan’s leaders with a choice between earned incentives for durable peace and escalating costs to those who obstruct efforts to resolve Sudan’s interlocking crises. It is necessary, as Mr. Badawi argues, for the international community to rid the Sudanese people of this burdensome and “odious” debt accumulated by multiple regimes in Khartoum – but the burden of proof first lies with Sudan’s leaders to demonstrate that they have finally committed to extinguishing the flames of decades of conflict in Sudan.
To begin with the facts, Mr. Badawi is just plain wrong when he states that the “explosion [in debt] has been almost solely [due] to a build-up of repayment arrears to bilateral and multilateral creditors.” From 1989 until today, the Sudanese government has received an estimated $4 billion in new public medium and long-term loans and an estimated $5 billion in new private medium and long-term loans (information via Economist Intelligence Unit, a past employer of Mr. Badawi). Much of this new debt is even more recent. Sudan accumulated over $2 billion in new loans from international lenders (almost half of it from non-Paris Club bilateral loans) between 2001 and 2006 when it was still waging war in south Sudan and orchestrating its campaign of death and destruction in Darfur. In 2007 and 2008 alone, Sudan contracted another $1.444 billion in more loans mostly from Arab multilateral and non-Paris club creditors, as well as from China and India.
This data reveals that many in the international community continued to give to the Sudanese regime while it was waging war and genocide against its own people. Sudan’s arrears certainly did balloon during this period by $12 billion to bring its total arrears to $18 billion (half of its estimated debt load of $36 billion), but NIF/NCP leaders also contracted new irresponsible loans to finance their destructive policies. From their own reporting, Sudan imported weapons worth $76.3 million between 2004 and 2006, not including fighter jets and combat aircraft. The cost of Sudan’s purchase of 20 MiG-29s and 26 attack helicopters from 2004 to 2008 is unknown but most experts conservatively estimate the price-tag at hundreds of millions of dollars. Recent reports, furthermore, allege that this advanced military buildup continues.
Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) today joined 
