Fight for Sudan's oil is killing civilians - Globe and Mail, October 5
Canadian company part of consortium developing fields being cleared by force in civil war
DAMIEN LEWIS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, October 5, 1999
Gumriak, Sudan -- The Nuba mountains of southern Sudan, a region long
closed to outsiders, is Sudan's new killing fields, where bombs and
helicopter gunships have razed villages and deep, blackened craters pock
the landscape.
The area is a crucial oil field, and working amid the destruction are
Canada's Talisman Energy Inc., of Calgary, as well as state oil
companies from China and Malaysia, trying to increase the region's oil
output tenfold.
The Sudanese may not know the actual names of the oil companies
responsible for what happens here. But they all know that their lives are
being destroyed because of oil.
"The reasons for the attacks are clear," said Stephen Mabok, a local
commissioner. "They want to exploit the oil in this area without fear of
local resistance, so they are clearing the area and removing all the people."
Sudan has an estimated $45-billion (U.S.) in oil reserves. The international
consortium of companies developing the fields has plowed more than
$4-billion (U.S.) into what they hope will be Africa's newest oil boom.
The oil fields are situated on the very front line of Africa's longest-running
civil war, in which the ruling National Islamic Front is pitted against the
rebels of the South, chiefly the Sudan People's Liberation Army.
In 1983, when the northern government tried to impose Islamic law on the
south, war broke out. An estimated two million Christians and Muslims
have been displaced by the war.
The rebels say the NIF regime aims to Islamize and Arabize the animist
and Christian black Africans of South Sudan, or exterminate them. They
say they're fighting for their very survival.
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