It's always easy to point fingers at China for their dealings with the worst governments on the planet; however, its also rather facile to take a long hard look at our own government, and our obsequious dealings with the worst of the worst, in the name of securing mineral rights and sustaining our addiction to oil. Or when we find ourselves in an idealogical war with an arch nemesis. Here's a fitting example; the tiny oil rich country of Equatorial Guinea, and our good buddy Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Do human rights matter less in Equatorial Guinea than in Darfur or Myanmyar? Are we any less complicit than the Chinese in perpetrating crimes against humanity by propping up these malevolent dictators to secure that sweet sweet crude beneath their Gucci-loafered feet? Isn't hypocrisy great!
Fast Company had an extensive special report last month on China's resource quest in Africa..here's a little bit on E. Guinea, my favorite resource-rich African backwater.
With the Beijing Olympics bearing down fast, everyone from George W. Bush to Mia Farrow seems to be seizing the opportunity to bash China for doing big business in Sudan, where since 2003, government-backed militias have killed more than 400,000 people and displaced an estimated 2.5 million. And it's true that China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil exports, while selling Khartoum weapons and defending it in the UN Security Council. But you don't hear any complaints in Washington or Hollywood about China's growing role in Equatorial Guinea. Nor will you.
E.G. is less a country than a corrupt, extended-family business that cooked up its own national anthem. And the American oil industry has been singing along for years, cuddling up as much as necessary (and with barely any competition) to Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the 66-year-old despot who has ruled this backwater since 1979. Smaller than El Paso, Texas, E.G. has nevertheless managed to get itself at or near the top of just about every shameful list in the world -- from the most-censored countries (according to the Committee to Protect Journalists) to the most corrupt (Transparency International) to the worst places to do business (the World Bank). Geoffrey Wood, a business professor at the U.K.'s University of Sheffield and coauthor of The Ethical Business, concluded in his own 2004 study of E.G. that the country is a "criminal state" that matches or exceeds the "rapacity and brutality" of the Duvaliers' Haiti, Somoza's Nicaragua, and Batista's Cuba. Despite an economy with the highest average annual growth rate in the world (21%) since 2001, more than half of the population lacks access to potable water and electricity. The UN says E.G. shows the greatest disparity on earth between per capita income ($50,000, surpassed only by Luxembourg) and human welfare (most of E.G.'s citizens live on less than $1 a day).
