The Forgotten Oil War In Sudan
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
07 March,
2008
Countercurrents.org
"The
issue of oil in Darfur isn't very different from the issue of oil
anywhere else," says Mike Aaronson, director general of British
NGO Save the Children. "It's potentially a tremendous blessing,
and potentially a tremendous handicap. It's not without reason that
people talk about the oil curse. The reality is that many countries
that have the greatest mineral wealth are also the ones with the conflicts."
Oil Discovery Adds New Twist to Darfur Tragedy By Ruth Gidley
- June 15, 2005
The forgotten oil war in Sudan is again in news. Fresh clashes between Sudan People's Liberation Movement units and fighters from the Misseriya community in the oil-rich Abyei region have left scores dead and the two sides trading blame over who was responsible for the latest skirmishes.
The deadly clashes in the volatile Abyei region provoke fears of renewed conflict as tension between the north and south as vicious tug-of-war continues over rights to the Abyei region.
Fighting in the north-south border region of Abyei stopped following the signing of the January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended 21 years of war that reportedly claimed the lives of an estimated two million people and displaced some four million.
The relative quiet has facilitated the exploitation of oil reserves in the region. U.S. oil companies have known about Sudan's oil wealth since the 1970s when Chevron discovered big oil reserves in the south. The corporation estimated that "Sudan had more oil than Iran and Saudi Arabia together."
Tellingly, just as the long war in southern Sudan drew to an uneasy close, rebels in the western region of Darfur, organized in the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/SLA) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), rose up against Khartoum, in 2003. The rebel groups have ties with pro-west former rebels in southern Sudan who fought a decades-long civil war against the central government. The war in Darfur did not come out of the blue, of course. It is known to have major yet untapped substantial oil reserves. Sudan announced in April 2005 that its ABCO corporation – which is 37 percent owned by Swiss company Clivenden – had begun drilling for oil in Darfur.
The mass media in the Britain and France and US writes a great deal about the suffering in the Darfur region. But it writes very little about the economic interests these three countries have in the oil recently discovered in this part of Africa.
The corporate oil companies and the Pentagon cannot justify an intervention against Sudan based on wanting to dominate the country's natural resources. They must resort to humanitarian slogans. "Stop Genocide" or "Protect the Rights of Ethnic Minorities" has a better ring.
People in the United States and the West have been bombarded regularly with the alleged crimes committed by the Sudanese government. By most media accounts, at least 200,000 people have died in Sudan's Darfur region since the conflict began in 2003.
Whatever the real numbers are, no doubt there is a humanitarian crisis. Lack of food, water and arable land in the region has contributed to the situation. But even the United Nations acknowledges that the conflict is not "genocide." A five-man panel UN mission led by Italian Judge Antonio Cassese reported in 2004 that genocide had not been committed in Darfur, rather grave human rights abuses were committed. It is a war stemming from the economic realities of Sudan.
The Bush administration, insisting that genocide has been going on in Darfur since 2003, has sought deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in Darfur to replace an ineffective African Union force. Sudan resisted the U.N. troops until President Bush announced on May 29, 2007, that he was imposing new unilateral economic sanctions against Sudan for failing to allow the deployment and end its support for the janjaweed militia. Three weeks later, Sudan announced it had reached a deal with the United Nations to allow an international force of 20,000 troops to shore up a struggling 7,000-member African Union force.
The United States has maintained a trade embargo against Sudan since 1997, so there is no legal U.S. investment in the country. Cliveden, the biggest stakeholder in ABCO corporation (exploring oil in Darfur), is a Swiss company, but an investigation for British television Channel 4 revealed that Cliveden's chief executive, Friedholm Eronat, swapped his U.S. passport for a British one shortly before signing an oil deal with the Khartoum government in October 2003.
Chinese connection
China's oil-related diplomacy is another major factor in the US-Sudan relations. China is Sudan's largest investor and buys 80 percent of its oil output. Washington accuses Beijing of trying to "secure oil at the sources," something Washington foreign policy has itself been preoccupied with for at least a Century.
The US sees China as their growing competitor for Sudan's oil. China has helped Sudan build up its oil exporting industry independently of the US. Not surprisingly, allowing a rival world power such as China to influence an African country with major oil supplies flies in the face of the U.S. goal of outright control of the world's major oil resources.
Beijing's China National Petroleum Company, CNPC, is Sudan's largest foreign investor, with some $5 billion in oil field development. Since 1999 China has invested at least $15 billion in Sudan. It owns 50% of an oil refinery near Khartoum with the Sudan government.
China plays a different role in Sudan and other African countries. China has actually helped Sudan's economic development while serving its own needs for oil. With its more than $1.3 trillion in mainly US dollar reserves, China has been generous in dispensing its soft loans, with no interest or outright grants to some of the poorest debtor states of Africa. The loans have gone to infrastructure including highways, hospitals, and schools, a stark contrast to the brutal austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank. In 2006 China committed more than $8 billion to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique, versus $2.3 billion to all sub-Saharan Africa from the World Bank. Unlike the World Bank, a de facto arm of US foreign economic policy, China attaches no strings to its loans.
Tellingly, African countries have now begun to argue that the World Bank and the IMF have become irrelevant to them because they can get aid packages and investment from China without the strings that are attached to money from the US-backed international financial organizations.
US Covert Operations
The war in Sudan involves both US covert operations and US trained "rebel" factions coming in from South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia and Uganda. F. William Engdahl, author of the book, 'A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,' provides an insight into the covert US operations in southern Sudan and Darfur:
"The United States, acting through surrogate allies in Chad and neighboring states has trained and armed the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army, headed until his death in July 2005, by John Garang, trained at US Special Forces school at Fort Benning, Georgia.
"By pouring arms into first southern Sudan in the eastern part and since discovery of oil in Darfur, to that region as well, Washington fuelled the conflict that led to tens of thousands dying and several million driven to flee their homes. Eritrea hosts and supports the SPLA, the umbrella NDA opposition group, and the Eastern Front and Darfur rebels.
"The Pentagon has been busy training African military officers in the US, much as it has for Latin American officers for decades. Its International Military Education and Training (IMET) program has provided training to military officers from Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, in effect every country on Sudan's border. Much of the arms that have fuelled the killing in Darfur and the south have been brought in via murky, protected private "merchants of death" such as the notorious former KGB operative, now with offices in the US, Victor Bout. Bout has been cited repeatedly in recent years for selling weapons across Africa. US Government officials strangely leave his operations in Texas and Florida untouched despite the fact he is on the Interpol wanted list for money laundering.
"US development aid for all Sub-Sahara Africa including Chad, has been cut sharply in recent years while its military aid has risen. Oil and the scramble for strategic raw materials is the clear reason. The region of southern Sudan from the Upper Nile to the borders of Chad is rich in oil. Washington knew that long before the Sudanese government."
It is known
that Ethiopia is one of the most active countries in the 21-year long
north-south war.
Eritrea is suspected of having supported the Beja separatist movements
in the northeastern part of Sudan. Uganda, which claims that Khartoum
supports the God's Resistance Army that fights against the Ugandan
administration, is reportedly among the countries that help the opposition
groups in Sudan.
There are more than 80 ethnic/religious groups among the 7 million
inhabitants of Darfur. Some groups have kin relationships with neighboring
country, Chad. Chad President Idris Deby is a member of the Zaghawa
tribe in Darfur. It is stated that three presidents, who held power
in Chad, directed their fights from Darfur.
According to Engdahl, the present concern of the current Washington Administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we were to look closely, genuine concern over genocide against the peoples in that poorest of poor part of a forsaken section of Africa. No. "It's the oil, stupid."
Sudan is Africa's largest geographical state, nearly a third the size of the United States, with a small population of only 30 million.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com E-Mail: [email protected]
