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Case Study: Peace what Price?
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| A Sudanese paramilitary group prepares for deployment to guard an oil field. |
Sudan hides a brutal 18 year civil war that has displaced 4.5 million people and killed more than two million, mostly Southern Sudanese civilians. The causes of the conflict are complex. There are deep divisions between Northern Sudanese, who identify racially and culturally with the Arab world, and Southern Sudanese, who identify with the peoples of Africa. Southerners have been the targets of racism, slavery and cultural and religious persecution from the North. Relations with Britain and Egypt, Sudan's colonizers, played out unequally between the two regions. Most foreign development dollars were invested in the North. At independence in 1956, the vast majority of administrative authorities in the South were Northerners appointed by the British. Since independence, Northern Arab-dominated central governments in Khartoum have imposed policies which Southerners believe violate their fundamental human rights: Islamic law, Arabic as the language of instruction and the ingraining of Islam and Arab culture in non-Islamic and non-Arab Sudanese.
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| A Nuer mother recounts how her children and husband were killed by Sudanese government forces during a raid on their home in the oilfields of Western Upper Nile province. (Photo by Hugh McCullum) |
More recently, competition for resources has come to play a central role in the conflict. Much of the North is barren desert, while the South boasts vast areas of fertile land, expansive forests, valuable metals. including gold, and vast oil deposits. With the aid of foreign oil companies, including Canada's Talisman Energy, the military government exports 200,000 barrels of oil a day. It has pledged to use oil profits to eliminate poverty, but these promises have not been honoured. The World Bank has reported that between 1998 and 2000, little was actually invested to reduce poverty. Instead, most oil profits were used to strengthen the Sudanese regime's war-making capacity.
Note only have southerners have received no benefit from the sale of oil, a resource which lies under 'their' land, international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, concur that the Sudanese government is using oil profits to subjugate the people of the South and push them off this territory.
Oil regions under development in the South have literally become killing fields. To eliminate any threat of attack on oil operations by Southern opposition forces, the government has adopted a policy of "depopulating" the oil concessions. Tens of thousands of Southern Sudanese men, women and children have been forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands. Tactics to uproot civilians are brutal. They include high-altitude bombing and terrifying scorched-earth raids in which people are shot, burned alive in their homes, abducted into slavery, or forced to flee for their lives. International humanitarian aid to war-affected populations is routinely blocked.
In April 2001 a delegation of Canadian church leaders visited Sudan's oil region where they met with many newly-displaced Southerners. Visibly traumatized, the Sudanese told how marauding government soldiers had shot their children and burned them alive before their eyes, and how they had been forced to flee for their lives. They also reported that helicopter gun ships had participated in the attacks. Human rights experts say these aircraft could only have come from air bases on concessions owned by foreign oil companies and there is undeniable evidence that Talisman's airstrips have been used by the Sudanese regime for offensive military purposes.
Despite repeated confirmation of Talisman's complicity in these
abuses, the Canadian government has refused to take action against
the company, which is Canada's largest independent oil and gas producer.
Even charges by a Department of Foreign Affairs-sponsored assessment
team , that Talisman "was adding to human suffering" in
Sudan, were ignored.
More than anything else right now, Sudan needs peace. Sadly, as
returning Canadian church leaders concluded, that may not be possible
as long as oil development continues.
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