Oil Money Is Fueling Sudan's War

["Yunan" <yunan@tiscalinet.it>]

Oil Money Is Fueling Sudan's War
New Arms Used to Drive Southerners From Land

By Karl Vick
Washington Post
Monday, June 11, 2001

BENTIU, Sudan -- Oil built the airport at Heglig, the lavishly outfitted
hospital next door and the new school at Debap. Oil built the electricity
towers stippling the horizon and the tightly packed, all-weather road that
runs across the broad savanna to Bentiu, where a thatched roof keeps the sun
off Veronica Nyabiele. She is 12 months old, but malnutrition has held her
weight to nine pounds.

Oil has a role in that, too.

In a civil war that seems to be fueled by so much -- religion, for example,
because one side is Muslim and the other side is not, and race, because one
side is Arab and the other African -- nothing has supercharged the fighting
in southern Sudan quite like Nile Blend crude.

Large quantities of oil were discovered under south-central Sudan in the
1970s. Before it was drawn to the surface and piped north two years ago, the
slightly waxy, light-grade petroleum was merely one more token of the schism
between Sudan's ruling north and neglected south, something for the north to
claim and the south to contest.

Today, four oil companies are producing more than 200,000 barrels a day --
and more firms are exploring other reserves. Export revenue has doubled the
government's defense budget over two years. And a multitude of eyewitness
reports say the new guns are being used to drive tens of thousands of
southerners -- like Veronica and her family -- off their land to secure the
oil underneath.

"The fighting follows the oil," said John Ryle, an independent investigator
who recently released a report that documented a broad government effort to
clear the petroleum concessions, sometimes using helicopter gunships
stationed at oil-field airports.

"I wouldn't use the term 'scorched earth,' which implies a kind of
systematic campaign," Ryle said. "But they are burning and attacking
villages."

Such tactics are nothing new in Sudan's civil war, which has raged for 18
years. Government troops and allied militias have been fighting rebel groups
seeking autonomy for the country's southern provinces. Human rights groups
and aid workers say the government has razed villages, bombed hospitals and
churches and supported the militias' abduction of southerners as slaves. The
rebels have been accused of similar atrocities on a lesser scale.

But the presence of oil has brought the fighting to new areas, where it
drives local people out of the countryside and into government-held
garrisons such as Bentiu. Once it was a town of 15,000; now its population
can triple or quadruple depending on the intensity of fighting nearby. A
handful of U.N. and private agencies stand by with food and medical care.
The worst cases end up, like Veronica, as stick figures in the therapeutic
feeding center run by Action Against Hunger, an international charity.

"They all say the same thing," an aid worker said. "People came and
destroyed their homes and they had to flee."

The situation has further stoked Western outrage over the Sudanese
government's human rights record. While no American companies are
involved -- U.S. law prohibits them from doing business in Sudan -- the
involvement of Canadian and European firms in extracting Sudanese oil has
prompted "disinvestment" campaigns like those directed against firms that
did business with apartheid-era South Africa.

"These are war crimes," said Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor who
works against companies doing business in Sudan.

The criticism has fallen hardest on Talisman Energy Inc., a Calgary-based
firm that was little known outside Canada until it bought a 25 percent stake
in Sudan's most promising oil field. The Muglad basin is classic geography
for oil, a sedimentary plain exposed by two plates being pulled apart.
Unfortunately, the same area roughly defines the boundary between Sudan's
north and south.

Except on maps, the country's two halves have never become one. The Muslim
Arabs of the arid north historically preyed on the Africans who live in the
wetter south and practice Christianity or traditional beliefs. British
colonialists actually separated the two. National independence in 1956 was
quickly followed by a sporadic war for southern secession. And although the
fighting was in abeyance when Chevron Corp., the U.S. oil company, sank
wells north of Bentiu in 1978, the discovery of oil helped renew the
conflict in 1983.

"It is a problem of uneven distribution of resources and power," said Alfred
Taban, a southerner who publishes the independent Khartoum Monitor. "The
northerners have taken up all the ground."

Chevron pulled out in 1984, after rebels killed three of its employees. The
oil fields stood largely idle until 1997, when the Sudanese government made
peace with some of the rebel factions and formed a consortium to renew
exploration. The partners included the China National Petroleum Corp., the
Malaysian national oil company Petronas and Sudan's own Sudapet Ltd. But
Talisman was the show horse.

Not only did the company bring technical expertise to build a 900-mile
pipeline from the Heglig oil field to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, it also
carried the stature of a Western oil firm, credentials craved by the
government, which spent much of the 1990s under U.N. and U.S. sanctions
because of its support of terrorism.

"My ultimate goal is to be the biggest oil exporter in the world," said Awad
Jaz, Sudan's energy minister. Jaz has said any U.S. oil company could expect
favorable terms if the sanctions were lifted.

But Western diplomats say U.S. firms are not lobbying hard to join Talisman
and share its image problem. Reeves boasts that the divestment campaign has
cost the company every one of its public institutional investors, from the
City of New York to the Texas teachers' pension fund.

Campaigners are now pressing Fidelity Investments to divest, as well as
pushing to ban oil concerns doing business in Sudan from being listed on
U.S. stock exchanges.

Talisman has hired a Sudanese seminary student to buff its image and formed
an office of corporate responsibility that points out that the oil areas
have an infrastructure unique in this strikingly poor country of 30 million
people: new water wells, schools, clinics and the Heglig hospital,
extraordinarily well-equipped for rural Africa, complete with operating room
and neonatal unit.

"It's kinda neat," said Helmut Gutsche, Talisman's field production manager
at Heglig, where foreign employees fly in for 28-day shifts, eating and
sleeping in a tidy camp of steel trailers. "There's poverty, on the
downside. On the upside, we're trying to improve things."

Talisman also bought satellite photos to try to prove that its oil fields
have always been largely vacant, but students of the Sudan war have long
watched the fighting overlap with the oil concessions. And, though
Talisman's lightly populated operation areas were first cleared perhaps two
decades ago, Ryle and a Canadian researcher documented recent helicopter
attacks near its fields. They also found deserting soldiers who said their
mission was to drive people away from the oil fields.

"It's kind of a raggedy system of harassment, but it does seem to be classic
counterinsurgency," Ryle said. "You're trying to get people to come into the
towns so you can keep an eye on them, or drive them farther into the
swamps."

Today, however, most of the fighting is farther south, nearer a concession
leased to Lundin Oil, a Swedish company. Local residents were driven out
over the past two years, largely through surrogates: The Sudanese government
arms one southern militia, which raids the area, looting along the way.

Still farther south, a much larger bloc has long been held by the French
giant TotalFinaElf. In fact, the Sudanese government has chopped much of the
south into oil concessions reaching nearly to the Ugandan border. Critics
see each bloc as another potential battlefield in a war that has already
killed 2 million people.

Sudan's annual take from oil -- perhaps $500 million, a figure that will
climb steeply after investors recover their risk -- has clearly tipped a
stalemated war in the government's favor. The oil fields are new government
garrisons, with soldiers camped every three miles on the main road, and
tanks and helicopters in plain sight around airfields.

And the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, the principal southern rebel
force that declared oil installations a target, has managed only scattered
raids. In January, rebels hit a drilling derrick operated by China's Great
Wall Drilling Co., killing three soldiers in a raid that killed 15 rebels.

"You don't want to be flying around here at night if you don't have to,"
said a Canadian pilot who flies the Bell 212 helicopter that ferries oil
workers around the concession.

Whatever it does to the military equation, however, oil shows no signs of
easing the political question at the heart of the war.

"I will say one example," said Thomas Kume, a former governor of the
province adjoining the oil fields and a nominal government ally. "The fact
that the refinery is moved to Khartoum and there's not even a small refinery
in the south -- southerners are bitter about it."