Oil Drives The
Genocide In Darfur
By David Morse
20 August, 2005
TomDispatch.com
A war of the future
is being waged right now in the sprawling desert region of northeastern
Africa known as Sudan. The weapons themselves are not futuristic. None
of the ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic storm troopers that are the
stuff of science fiction; nor, for that matter, the satellite-guided
Predator drones or other high-tech weapon systems at the cutting edge
of today's arsenal.
No, this war is
being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the western region
of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are burning and pillaging,
castration and rape -- carried out by Arab militias riding on camels
and horses. The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the
one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support
the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other
hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil
companies to map oil deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.
This is what makes
it a war of the future: not the slick PowerPoint presentations you can
imagine in boardrooms in Dallas and Beijing showing proven reserves
in one color, estimated reserves in another, vast subterranean puddles
that stretch west into Chad, and south to Nigeria and Uganda; not the
technology; just the simple fact of the oil.
This is a resource
war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers whose economies are
predicated on growth, contending for a finite pool of resources. It
is a war straight out of the pages of Michael Klare's book, Blood and
Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the consequences of our addiction
to oil, if it were not also an invisible war.
Invisible?
Invisible because
it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our mainstream media are
subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think of all the car ads you see
on television, in newspapers and magazines. Think of the narcissism
implicit in our automobile culture, our suburban sprawl, our obsessive
focus on the rich and famous, the giddy assumption that all this can
continue indefinitely when we know it can't -- and you see why Darfur
slips into darkness. And Darfur is only the tip of the sprawling, scarred
state known as Sudan. Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a New York Times
column that ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in
its nightly newscasts all last year, and that was to the credit of Peter
Jennings; NBC had only 5 minutes, CBS only 3 minutes. This is, of course,
a micro-fraction of the time devoted to Michael Jackson.
Why is it, I wonder,
that when a genocide takes place in Africa, our attention is always
riveted on some black American miscreant superstar? During the genocide
in Rwanda ten years ago, when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 100
days, it was the trial of O.J. Simpson that had our attention.
Yes, racism enters
into our refusal to even try to understand Africa, let alone value African
lives. And yes, surely we're witnessing the kind of denial that Samantha
Power documents in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide;
the sheer difficulty we have acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge
it, she observes, we pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand
idly by. And yes, turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia,
with its graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the
streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by something
just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that prevents the media
from making the connections that would threaten our petroleum-dependent
lifestyle, that would lead us to acknowledge the fact that the industrial
world's addiction to oil is laying waste to Africa.
When Darfur does
occasionally make the news -- photographs of burned villages, charred
corpses, malnourished children -- it is presented without context. In
truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-driven crisis in northern Africa.
An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians are dying every day. Yet the message
from our media is that we Americans are "helpless" to prevent
this humanitarian tragedy, even as we gas up our SUVs with these people's
lives.
Even Kristof --
whose efforts as a mainstream journalist to keep Darfur in the spotlight
are worthy of a Pulitzer -- fails to make the connection to oil; and
yet oil was the driving force behind Sudan's civil war. Oil is driving
the genocide in Darfur. Oil drives the Bush administration's policy
toward Sudan and the rest of Africa. And oil is likely to topple Sudan
and its neighbors into chaos.
The Context for
Genocide
I will support these
assertions with fact. But first, let's give Sudanese government officials
in Khartoum their due. They prefer to explain the slaughter in Darfur
as an ancient rivalry between nomadic herding tribes in the north and
black African farmers in the south. They deny responsibility for the
militias and claim they can't control them, even as they continue to
train the militias, arm them, and pay them. They play down their Islamist
ideology, which supported Osama bin Laden and seeks to impose Islamic
fundamentalism in Sudan and elsewhere. Instead, they portray themselves
as pragmatists struggling to hold together an impoverished and backwards
country; all they need is more economic aid from the West, and an end
to the trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. in 1997, when President Clinton
added Sudan to the list of states sponsoring terrorism. Darfur, from
their perspective, is an inconvenient anomaly that will go away, in
time.
It is true that
ethnic rivalries and racism play a part in today's conflict in Darfur.
Seen in the larger context of Sudan's civil war, however, Darfur is
not an anomaly; it is an extension of that conflict. The real driving
force behind the North-South conflict became clear after Chevron discovered
oil in southern Sudan in 1978. The traditional competition for water
at the fringes of the Sahara was transformed into quite a different
struggle. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum redrew Sudan's jurisdictional
boundaries to exclude the oil reserves from southern jurisdiction. Thus
began Sudan's 21-year-old North-South civil war. The conflict then moved
south, deep into Sudan, into wetter lands that form the headwaters of
the Nile and lie far from the historical competition for water.
Oil pipelines, pumping
stations, well-heads, and other key infrastructure became targets for
the rebels from the South, who wanted a share in the country's new mineral
wealth, much of which was on lands they had long occupied. John Garang,
leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), declared
these installations to be legitimate targets of war. For a time, the
oil companies fled from the conflict, but in the 1990s they began to
return. Chinese and Indian companies were particularly aggressive, doing
much of their drilling behind perimeters of bermed earth guarded by
troops to protect against rebel attacks. It was a Chinese pipeline to
the Red Sea that first brought Sudanese oil to the international market.
Prior to the discovery
of oil, this dusty terrain had little to offer in the way of exports.
Most of the arable land was given over to subsistence farming: sorghum
and food staples; cattle and camels. Some cotton was grown for export.
Sudan, sometimes still called The Sudan, is the largest country in Africa
and one of the poorest. Nearly a million square miles in area, roughly
the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, it is more region
than nation. Embracing some 570 distinct peoples and dozens of languages
and historically ungovernable, its boundaries had been drawn for the
convenience of colonial powers. Its nominal leaders in the north, living
in urban Khartoum, were eager to join the global economy -- and oil
was to become their country's first high-value export.
South Sudan is overwhelmingly
rural and black. Less accessible from the north, marginalized under
the reign of the Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century, again under
the British overlords during much of the twentieth, and now by Khartoum
in the north, South Sudan today is almost devoid of schools, hospitals,
and modern infrastructure.
Racism figures heavily
in all this. Arabs refer to darker Africans as "abeed," a
word that means something close to "slave." During the civil
war, African boys were kidnapped from the south and enslaved; many were
pressed into military service by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.
Racism continues to find expression in the brutal rapes now taking place
in Darfur. Khartoum recruits the militias, called Janjaweed -- itself
a derogatory term -- from the poorest and least educated members of
nomadic Arab society.
In short, the Islamist
regime has manipulated ethnic, racial, and economic tensions, as part
of a strategic drive to commandeer the country's oil wealth. The war
has claimed about two million lives, mostly in the south -- many by
starvation, when government forces prevented humanitarian agencies from
gaining access to camps. Another four million Sudanese remain homeless.
The regime originally sought to impose shariah, or Islamic, law on the
predominantly Christian and animist South. Khartoum dropped this demand,
however, under terms of the Comprehensive Peace Treaty signed last January.
The South was to be allowed to operate under its own civil law, which
included rights for women; and in six years, southerners could choose
by plebiscite whether to separate or remain part of a unified Sudan.
The all-important oil revenues would be divided between Khartoum and
the SPLA-held territory. Under a power-sharing agreement, SPLA commander
John Garang would be installed as vice president of Sudan, alongside
President Omar al-Bashir.
Darfur, to the west,
was left out of this treaty. In a sense, the treaty -- brokered with
the help of the U.S. -- was signed at the expense of Darfur, a parched
area the size of France, sparsely populated but oil rich. It has an
ancient history of separate existence as a kingdom lapping into Chad,
separate from the area known today as Sudan. Darfur's population is
proportionately more Muslim and less Christian than southern Sudan's,
but is mostly black African, and identifies itself by tribe, such as
the Fur. (Darfur, in fact, means "land of the Fur.") The Darfurian
practice of Islam was too lax to suit the Islamists who control Khartoum.
And so Darfurian villages have been burned to clear the way for drilling
and pipelines, and to remove any possible sanctuaries for rebels. Some
of the land seized from black farmers is reportedly being given to Arabs
brought in from neighboring Chad.
Oil and Turmoil
With the signing
of the treaty last January, and the prospect of stability for most of
war-torn Sudan, new seismographic studies were undertaken by foreign
oil companies in April. These studies had the effect of doubling Sudan's
estimated oil reserves, bringing them to at least 563 million barrels.
They could yield substantially more. Khartoum claims the amount could
total as much as 5 billion barrels. That's still a pittance compared
to the 674 billion barrels of proven oil reserves possessed by the six
Persian Gulf countries -- Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates,
Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar. The very modesty of Sudan's reserves speaks
volumes to the desperation with which industrial nations are grasping
for alternative sources of oil.
The rush for oil
is wreaking havoc on Sudan. Oil revenues to Khartoum have been about
$1 million a day, exactly the amount which the government funnels into
arms -- helicopters and bombers from Russia, tanks from Poland and China,
missiles from Iran. Thus, oil is fueling the genocide in Darfur at every
level. This is the context in which Darfur must be understood -- and,
with it, the whole of Africa. The same Africa whose vast tapestry of
indigenous cultures, wealth of forests and savannas was torn apart by
three centuries of theft by European colonial powers -- seeking slaves,
ivory, gold, and diamonds -- is being devastated anew by the 21st century
quest for oil.
Sudan is now the
seventh biggest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria, Libya, Algeria,
Angola, Egypt, and Equatorial Guinea.
Oil has brought
corruption and turmoil in its wake virtually wherever it has been discovered
in the developing world. Second only perhaps to the arms industry, its
lack of transparency and concentration of wealth invites kickbacks and
bribery, as well as distortions to regional economies.
"There is no
other commodity that produces such great profit," said Terry Karl
in an interview with Miren Gutierrez, for the International Press Service,
"and this is generally in the context of highly concentrated power,
very weak bureaucracies, and weak rule of law." Karl is co-author
of a Catholic Relief Services report on the impact of oil in Africa,
entitled Bottom of the Barrel. He cites the examples of Gabon, Angola
and Nigeria, which began exploiting oil several decades ago and suffer
from intense corruption. In Nigeria, as in Angola, an overvalued exchange
rate has destroyed the non-oil economy. Local revolts over control of
oil revenues also have triggered sweeping military repression in the
Niger delta.
Oil companies and
exploration companies like Halliburton wield political and sometimes
military power. In Sudan, roads and bridges built by oil firms have
been used to attack otherwise remote villages. Canada's largest oil
company, Talisman, is now in court for allegedly aiding Sudan government
forces in blowing up a church and killing church leaders, in order to
clear the land for pipelines and drilling. Under public pressure in
Canada, Talisman has sold its holdings in Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish
company, withdrew under similar pressure from human rights groups.
Michael Klare suggests
that oil production is intrinsically destabilizing:
"When countries with few other resources of national wealth exploit
their petroleum reserves, the ruling elites typically monopolize the
distribution of oil revenues, enriching themselves and their cronies
while leaving the rest of the population mired in poverty -- and the
well-equipped and often privileged security forces of these 'petro-states'
can be counted on to support them."
Compound these antidemocratic tendencies with the ravenous thirst of
the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies, and you have a recipe
for destabilization in Africa. China's oil imports climbed by 33% in
2004, India's by 11%. The International Energy Agency expects them to
use 11.3 million barrels a day by 2010, which will be more than one-fifth
of global demand.
Keith Bradsher,
in a New York Times article, 2 Big Appetites Take Seats at the Oil Table,
observes:
"As Chinese and Indian companies venture into countries like Sudan,
where risk-aversive multinationals have hesitated to enter, questions
are being raised in the industry about whether state-owned companies
are accurately judging the risks to their own investments, or whether
they are just more willing to gamble with taxpayers' money than multinationals
are willing to gamble with shareholders' investments."
The geopolitical implications of this tolerance for instability are
borne out in Sudan, where Chinese state-owned companies exploited oil
in the thick of fighting. As China and India seek strategic access to
oil -- much as Britain, Japan, and the United States jockeyed for access
to oil fields in the years leading up to World War II -- the likelihood
of destabilizing countries like Sudan rises exponentially.
Last June, following
the new seismographic exploration in Sudan and with the new power-sharing
peace treaty about to be implemented, Khartoum and the SPLA signed a
flurry of oil deals with Chinese, Indian, British, Malaysian, and other
oil companies.
Desolate Sudan,
Desolate World
This feeding frenzy
may help explain the Bush administration's schizophrenic stance toward
Sudan. On the one hand, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in
September 2004 that his government had determined that what was happening
in Darfur was "genocide" -- which appears to have been a pre-election
sop to conservative Christians, many with missions in Africa. On the
other hand, not only did the President fall silent on Darfur after the
election, but his administration has lobbied quietly against the Darfur
Peace and Accountability Act in Congress.
That bill, how in
committee, calls for beefing up the African Union peacekeeping force
and imposing new sanctions on Khartoum, including referring individual
officials to the International Criminal Court (much hated by the administration).
The White House, undercutting Congressional efforts to stop the genocide,
is seeking closer relations with Khartoum on grounds that the regime
was "cooperating in the war on terror."
Nothing could end
the slaughter faster than the President of the United States standing
up for Darfur and making a strong case before the United Nations. Ours
is the only country with such clout. This is unimaginable, of course,
for various reasons. It seems clear that Bush, and the oil companies
that contributed so heavily to his 2000 presidential campaign, would
like to see the existing trade sanctions on Sudan removed, so U.S. companies
can get a piece of the action. Instead of standing up, the President
has kept mum -- leaving it to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to
put the best face she can on his policy of appeasing Khartoum.
On July 8, SPLA
leader John Garang was sworn in as vice president of Sudan, before a
throng of 6 million cheering Sudanese. President Oman Bashir spoke in
Arabic. Garang spoke in English, the preferred language among educated
southerners, because of the country's language diversity. Sudan's future
had never looked brighter. Garang was a charismatic and forceful leader
who wanted a united Sudan. Three weeks later, Garang was killed in a
helicopter crash. When word of his death emerged, angry riots broke
out in Khartoum, and in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Men with guns
and clubs roamed the streets, setting fire to cars and office buildings.
One hundred and thirty people were killed, thousands wounded.
No evidence of foul
play in his death has been uncovered, as of this writing. The helicopter
went down in rain and fog over mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, suspicions
are rampant. SPLA and government officials are calling for calm, until
the crash can be investigated by an international team of experts. All
too ominously, the disaster recalls the 1994 airplane crash that killed
Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, who was trying to implement
a power-sharing agreement between Hutus and Tutsis. That crash touched
off the explosive Rwandan genocide.
What Garang's death
will mean for Sudan is unclear. The new peace was already precarious.
His chosen successor, Salva Kiir Mayardit, appears less committed to
a united Sudan
Nowhere is the potential
impact of renewed war more threatening than in the camps of refugees
-- the 4 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), driven from their
homes during the North-South civil war, several hundred thousand encamped
at the fringes of Khartoum as squatters or crowded into sprawling ghetto
neighborhoods. Further west, in Darfur and Chad, another 2.5 million
IDPs live in the precarious limbo of makeshift camps, in shelters cobbled
together from plastic and sticks -- prevented by the Janjaweed from
returning to their villages, wholly dependent on outside aid.
In short, Sudan
embodies a collision between a failed state and a failed energy policy.
Increasingly, ours is a planet whose human population is devoted to
extracting what it can, regardless of the human and environmental cost.
The Bush energy policy, crafted by oil companies, is predicated on a
far different future from the one any sane person would want his or
her children to inherit -- a desolate world that few Americans, cocooned
by the media's silence, are willing to imagine.
David Morse is an
independent journalist and political analyst whose articles and essays
have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the Nation, the
New York Times Magazine, the Progressive Populist, Salon, and elsewhere.
His novel, The
Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum
wars in the first two decades of the 21st century.
© 2005 David
Morse