Activists in Sudan Fear Loss of Western Oil Firms' Influence
Washington Post, Sunday June 24
By Karl Vick
washingtonpost.com
NAIROBI -- The overwhelming vote in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month to punish oil companies doing business in Sudan did not exactly overwhelm human rights activists in that country.
The activists acknowledge that oil fuels Sudan's civil war: Export revenue supplies the fundamentalist Muslim government with weapons to use against rebellious, marginalized southern Sudan.
But the activists emphasize that as long as the companies involved are Western, their concerns about corporate citizenship provide valuable leverage to the war's many critics. Talisman Energy, the Canadian firm targeted by the House bill, has quietly pressed human rights concerns on a Sudanese government over which the West has little other influence, the opposition figures say.
"We sometimes have to be pragmatic," said Ghazi Suleiman, a prominent human rights lawyer in Sudan who recently spent two months in jail. "If Talisman were to pull out of Sudan, this doesn't mean the oil business will come to an end. Talisman will be replaced by some company" less interested in the Sudanese people, he said.
U.S. companies have been barred from doing business in Sudan since 1997, under a presidential order designed to isolate the fundamentalist regime that once gave refuge to suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. Sudan's government has also been widely condemned for bombing civilians and encouraging enslavement during the 18-year civil war, in which 2 million people have been killed.
The House bill, which passed 422 to 2 on June 13, barred foreign oil firms from selling stock or other securities in the United States unless they fully disclose their dealings with the turbulent African country. Talisman, which is based in Calgary but whose stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, promptly announced it would unload its 25 percent stake in Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Co., which pumps 220,000 barrels a day. Rumored buyers include its consortium partners, the Malaysian state oil company Petronas and China National Petroleum Corp., which recently announced plans to triple overseas production by concentrating on Sudan.
"Human rights and the issue of the suffering of the southern Sudanese will be of very little concern to them," Alfred Taban, who publishes the capital's only independent newspaper, the Khartoum Monitor, said of Talisman's potential buyers. Talisman has established an office of "corporate social responsibility" and gradually acknowledged the link between oil and the war, which in recent years has concentrated on areas designated for future drilling. "The way forward is not to take away companies that admit some of this is going on and have been working to try to end some of that abuse," said Taban, who is from southern Sudan.
Suleiman, the lawyer, even credited Talisman's presence with the marginal freedoms Sudan's government has accorded opposition parties, which were banned for most of the 1990s.
Rifaat Makkawi, another human rights lawyer in Khartoum, also endorsed constructive engagement with the governing National Islamic Front. "This isolation by the international community for nine years did not work," Makkawi said. |
