Oil Flowing in Sudan, Raising the Stakes in Its Civil War
The New York Times
Sunday, October 17
By IAN FISHER
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- The pipeline here was built with the breathtaking speed
born of a poor, violent nation seeking economic redemption through the
discovery of oil. In just a year, 936 miles of steel were welded together
and sunk a yard beneath the sandy soil of Sudan.
The attack came almost as swiftly: on Sept. 19, exactly 20 days after the
first shipment of Sudanese oil was exported to Asia, rebels bombed the new
pipeline. The oil stopped for four days. No one doubts it will soon happen
again.
"What do they expect us to do?" asked Yousif Kowa Makki, who commands
rebels in the Nuba mountains, near the pipeline, though they apparently
were not involved in this attack. "Do we wait until they have enough money
to come and kill us? What we really have to do is stop that oil."
The stakes in the conflict in Sudan -- Africa's largest country, cursed by
the continent's longest-running civil war -- have suddenly gotten much
higher. Oil was discovered here as early as the 1920's, but the nation's
Islamic Government has only now brought it to market -- creating an
irresistible target for the various rebel groups and, for the Government,
a valuable asset it might very well lose.
The big question is whether the oil will be a force for peace or for yet
more war and the sad extension of poverty in a land of potential wealth.
The answer is of particular interest to the outside world, which this year
will spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars in relief in Sudan's
war zones.
In the most recent 16 years of fighting and famine, estimates of the
number of dead run as high as two million people. The war is in many ways
a religious conflict, pitting the Muslim north against the Christian
south. It has made men on both sides of the conflict rich and spawned
ghastly abuses of human rights, including the increased abduction of
slaves from the south to the north.
The National Islamic Front, which took power a decade ago and has been
accused of most, but not all, of those abuses, says it now realizes the
war cannot be won.
In what many skeptical diplomats and aid workers are calling a "charm
offensive," some Sudanese officials say the huge oil profits must be
shared around the nation to build roads, schools and irrigation projects.
Sudan stands to earn $200 million a year to start, or 20 percent of the
economy, rising to three or four times that in a few years.
In short, the Government sells the view that the oil will finally develop
Sudan, and that is an incentive for all sides to agree to peace.
"Short of a permanent and just settlement, very little can be done, even
with oil," said Hasan Abdin, Under Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign
Relations. "The Government is genuine about peacemaking."
Abdin, though, is considered a moderate in a Government undecided over
whether to continue along its inward, oppressive and authoritarian course
or become more open and friendly to outsiders and the various factions
among its own people. No one knows which way it will go.
Several diplomats, aid workers and many Sudanese themselves suspect the
Government will use the windfall to buy more weapons.
That would keep the war going and possibly help shore up the National
Islamic Front, whose popularity is flagging under a worsening economy,
weariness with the war and almost too many rebel groups to count.
"Don't you think it's obvious?" said Jemera Rone, an expert on Sudan with
Human Rights Watch in Washington. "They will be having income they didn't
have before. They will be an oil exporter, which puts them in an exclusive
club of countries.
"I think they believe that they will gain alliances through the business
community in many countries.
I'm afraid it might dampen their enthusiasm for any compromise."
That view is shared by a growing group of protesters against Talisman
Energy Inc., the largest independent oil company in Canada, which owns 25
percent of the pipeline project (The $1.2 billion project is also financed
by the state oil companies of China, Malaysia and Sudan).
Along with Canadian church groups and some Talisman investors, the New
York City Comptroller, Alan Hevesi, has said he is considering divesting
the city's $4 million in Talisman stock. The company, he said, "is
cavalier about its moral and social responsibility."
Talisman officials strongly deny the oil will fuel the war. Ralph R.
Capeling, general manager for Talisman in Sudan, said Government officials
regularly assure Talisman of their intention to seek peace and share the
oil money.
"I just can't believe that many people could lie in unison," Capeling
said. "I do believe they are sincere."
But if the Government is not sincere, history hints that Talisman may be
one of the first to pay the price.
In the 1970's Chevron spent tens of millions of dollars to develop two oil
fields along the dividing line between north and south. In 1983, the civil
war reignited. In February 1984, rebels attacked a Chevron base near the
town of Bentiu, killing three oil workers. Not long afterward, Chevron
pulled out of Sudan -- and in the years since, Sudan has fought itself to
economic and political exhaustion.
It is these same oil fields that Talisman and the other companies have
developed and that are now pumping some 120,000 barrels a day from fields
near the town of Heglig 1,000 miles north to Port Sudan.
Soon, Talisman officials say, production will rise to about 160,000
barrels a day. Once all the pumping stations are in place, the pipeline
will be able to handle 450,000 barrels a day
Capeling said the two oil fields they are developing -- known as Heglig
and Unity, near Bentiu -- have reserves of 1.2 billion barrels of oil.
Both the north and south claim that these fields fall in their historical
zones.
Regardless, there is suspected to be much more oil in Sudan -- enough, the
Government hopes, to raise production to one million barrels a day by 2005
although many of the reserves lie indisputably in the south.
And so, experts say, the warring factions in Sudan are forced either to
find peace or fight a much more intense war.
If there is to be peace, the questions have gotten no simpler over the
last years of fighting: some of the southern rebels want the south to
secede completely, while others want regional autonomy, freedom from
Islamic law and a hefty share of the oil profits. The Government has been
reluctant to compromise, though recently it has made some gestures, like
legalizing opposition parties.
Both the Government and the southern rebels, who include the main fighting
group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, are gearing up for yet another
round of talks.
If it is to be more war, the oil will be the biggest target, as the attack
on Sept. 19 proved. What is even more disturbing for the Government, that
attack appears to have been carried out not by southern rebels but by the
military wing of the Umma Party, northerners and fellow Muslims fighting
the extremism of the current powers-that-be.
If the war intensifies, the Government risks losing its hopes for
development and outside investment and respect. It also may lose a key
ally, the former southern rebel commander Riek Machar, who joined the
Government in 1997 after a peace agreement promised the south a share of
the oil money.
In an interview here, Machar, already rumored to be impatient and
undermined in the Government, said flatly he would rejoin the fight in the
south if the oil money went to buy more weapons.
"I would not be a party to it," he said. "The war cannot be won."
Meantime, Talisman says it is urging the Government to make peace but is
prepared for war. In Colombia, a pipeline owned largely by Occidental has
been bombed 65 times this year alone, with what oil analysts say is only
minimal disruption of the oil flow. Talisman has built regular repairs
into the cost of doing business in a place like Sudan.
"We hope we don't get a lot of practice repairing explosions," Capeling
said. "But if we do, we hope we'll get to where we can do it really fast." |
