News Article by PI posted on August 04, 2001 at 09:16:45: EST (-5 GMT)
Oil feeds the fire now in Sudan's long civil war
By Warren P. Strobel
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Bureau
August 4, 2001
BUOTH, Sudan - Mut Chasiay doesn't speak English. But he knows one word, and he repeats it over and over: gunship.
Government helicopter gunships attacked his village of Wattjak and surrounding areas last month, sending thousands fleeing into the bush, he said. Soldiers followed on the ground, burning and looting, killing or capturing young men and women. The rest were driven away from land they had lived on for generations - and away from the oil that lies underneath.
Some survivors walked for two days, they said, to reach Buoth, a remote village about 20 miles south of the government-held oil capital of Bentiu. A militia commander allied with the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army, or SPLA, is encamped here.
The accounts of Chasiay and six other villagers, thin as wraiths and shivering in Sudan's rainy season, provide new evidence that the Islamic government in Khartoum, which controls the northern two-thirds of the country, is pursuing a "scorched earth" policy against impoverished southern Sudan.
With Russian-built helicopters and other weapons bought with oil money, the regime is depopulating swaths of territory around the fields, which are being developed by foreign oil companies, including a subsidiary of the Canadian firm Talisman Energy Inc.
Straddling the historic line between Sudan's Islamic north and the mostly Christian south, the oil fields yield 200,000 barrels of crude per day, pumped 1,000 miles through a pipeline to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. While they provide a tiny fraction of the 75 million barrels produced each day worldwide, the Sudanese fields are vast and largely untapped.
"We know that somebody comes from another country and takes our oil," said Chasiay, 54.
Oil is now the fulcrum of Sudan's 18-year-old civil war, which has left two million dead and four million such as Chasiay displaced. The conflict, which at various times has been over race, religion and tribe, is now mostly about resources.
Sudan, Africa's largest country, has suddenly been thrust high on Washington's foreign-policy agenda. A coalition of lawmakers, evangelical Christians, and black activists have urged President Bush to play a more active role, citing reports of slave-taking by government-backed militias and the military's deliberate bombing of civilians in the south.
But the oil could dash hopes of a U.S.-mediated end to the war. The Khartoum government, flush with petroleum money and courting foreign investors, appears to have little incentive to make concessions. Rebel leaders in the south, which gets none of the new wealth, vow to attack the oil installations and the foreign companies that operate them. "We consider them mercenaries working for the Islamist regime," SPLA leader John Garang said in June.
The Sudanese government denies it is forcibly displacing civilians to secure control of the oil.
"This is one of the biggest fallacies, that the government is pushing away people," said Sudan's first vice president, Ali Osman Mohamed Taha. Only civilians in areas where drilling is taking place have been relocated, Taha told President Bush's special humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, Andrew Natsios, during his visit to Khartoum last month.
The accounts of Chasiay and the others, including an 8-year-old girl with a mangled nose that villagers said was injured in the attacks, could not be independently confirmed.
But they jibe with reports from human-rights groups and international aid workers of a campaign that benefits both the regime and foreign oil companies.
In one area of eastern Upper Nile province, 48 villages have been burned and 55,000 people displaced, according to a March report by Christian Aid, a British church-based relief group.
"Oil industry infrastructure - the same roads and airstrips which serve the companies - is used by the army as part of the war," the report said.
Rebel leaders concur. Peter Gadet, the militia commander in the area, said the Sudanese military provided protection for the foreign oil operations.
Several of Gadet's fighters carried the long gun of a Russian-built MI-24 Hind helicopter gunship on a wooden trestle. Gadet said his men shot it down a week before a reporter visited July 20.
His men showed their visitors trophies from a June 25 attack on a road construction convoy that was escorted by military vehicles: an antitank weapon with Chinese instructions, an RPG-7 grenade launcher, and a worker's blue jumpsuit with a Canadian flag stitched on. Three Chinese oil workers were killed in the ambush, they said.
As international indignation rises over the oil industry's role in Sudan, the criticism has fallen most heavily on Talisman and the Swedish company Lundin Oil, whose board members include former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted 422-2 in June to bar foreign companies that develop oil or gas in Sudan from trading their securities in U.S. capital markets. U.S. firms are prohibited from working in Sudan under 1997 sanctions.
The measure was aimed primarily at Talisman, whose Dutch subsidiary has a 25 percent share of a consortium developing large tracts of government oil concessions. The other partners are the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), Petronas of Malaysia, and Sudan's national petroleum company, Sudapet.
Officials of the Calgary-based Talisman said the company's presence was helping the Sudanese people. The company has built a 60-bed hospital, schools and medical clinics, and has paid to vaccinate 15,000 people from a half-dozen communicable diseases, said David Mann, a company spokesman.
As for forced displacement of residents, Mann said Talisman spent $150,000 to acquire and analyze satellite photos that showed the population around its oil concessions had actually increased. "The concept of a massive forced displacement to clear development for the oil fields isn't supported by anything we've seen," Mann said.
Critics of the House sanctions, including some Sudanese opposition figures, said that forcing Talisman out would backfire. If the company leaves, its drilling rights will be bought up by the companies from China and Malaysia, countries less susceptible to pressure from human-rights groups, they say.
Bush administration officials said they opposed the House measure for that reason. |
