Sudan play bad timing for Talisman - Globe & Mail, Wednesday October 27
MADELAINE DROHAN
Ottawa -- Jim Buckee, the chief executive officer of Talisman Energy
Inc., must be scratching his head.
For years, his Calgary-based oil company has operated in human rights
hotspots such as Algeria and Indonesia.
The Algerian government has waged a bloody campaign against internal
dissidents. The world got a picture of what the Indonesian government
was capable of with the brutal crackdown in East Timor earlier this
year.
If the Canadian government cared about Talisman's operations in either
country, nothing was said publicly.
Yet yesterday Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy took the unusual step
of publicly expressing grave reservations about Talisman's involvement
in Sudan.
He did not stop there. Mr. Axworthy invited Mr. Buckee to come to
Ottawa to discuss his company's Sudanese activities and to give
assurances that those activities were not exacerbating the 43-year-old
civil war in Sudan.
Mr. Axworthy suggested that if he was not satisfied with the answers,
the Canadian government would consider economic and trade sanctions
that would make it difficult for a Canadian company to do business in
Sudan.
Mr. Buckee has to be asking himself: Why now?
It boils down to bad timing on his part.
The war between the north and south in Sudan had been going on for
some time when Talisman decided last year to buy the Canadian
company Arakis Energy, whose sole asset was a 25-per-cent share in
the consortium developing major oil fields in Sudan.
As mentioned earlier, Talisman was already operating in several
countries with questionable human rights records. Other international oil
companies had operated for years in places such as Nigeria and
Angola, where oil revenues have fuelled civil wars.
But Sudan has something these other countries do not: a reputation of
being one of the few places left in the world where slavery is tolerated.
Slavery is one of those hot-button issues that attracts media attention
and campaigns by humanitarian organizations in equal measure.
Mr. Buckee was wading into a public relations minefield from which
there was no safe way out.
The anti-slavery groups were already well organized before Talisman
came on the scene. They realized, however, that putting pressure on
other members of the consortium -- the state oil companies of China,
Malaysia and Sudan -- was a lost cause.
Talisman was a different story. It was a reputable oil company from a
country that prided itself on its human rights record. In other words, it
was fair game.
Playing into this was the role Mr. Axworthy had taken on the world
stage. He had been a high-profile member of the campaign to ban land
mines. Canada's membership on the UN security council had given him
a platform to champion a number of similar initiatives.
Even as he was staking out Canada's claim to the moral high ground, he
was getting an earful from the Americans about Talisman in Sudan. The
United States has declared Sudan a terrorist state and forbids U.S.
companies to do business there.
On her swing through Africa last week, U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright met with some of the southern Sudanese rebels who
are fighting the northern government in Khartoum. She announced she
planned to talk to the Canadians about Talisman's operations in Sudan.
Mr. Axworthy's statement yesterday had been in the works long before
Mrs. Albright's comments in Africa, although she may have helped
speed the process along.
Bad publicity surrounding slavery in Sudan, combined with an activist
foreign minister and heavy U.S. pressure produced the statement
yesterday that sounded very much like a naming and shaming of
Talisman Energy.
Mr. Buckee did not interpret it this way. He proclaimed himself
delighted with the initiatives announced by Mr. Axworthy and said it
was just the type of positive engagement in Sudan that Talisman had
hoped for.
There is a lot of misinformation about Sudan, Mr. Buckee said. He said
the company will do all it can to help the Canadian mission Mr.
Axworthy has asked to investigate allegations about human rights
abuses and the practice of slavery.
But here's the kicker. Mr. Axworthy's move may have come too late to
affect the course of the war.
Sudan needed Talisman for its pipeline expertise in order to design and
help build the 1,600-kilometre pipeline from the oil fields in the south to
the marine terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
That pipeline was completed last summer and oil exports have begun. In
an oil-hungry world, the Sudanese will find lots of buyers who are not
too particular about where their oil comes from. China, which owns the
majority share of the oil consortium, has just become a net oil importer
and will have an increasing appetite for fuel.
While the pipeline was still under construction, the Canadian
government might have had some leverage through Talisman. But as Mr.
Buckee has said a number of times, the project would go ahead with or
without Talisman now.
Madelaine Drohan can be reached by E-mail at
mdrohan@globeandmail.ca |
