In Sudan, Oil Fuels Development Even as It Stokes the Fires of War

If the grass huts gleaming in the sunlight weren’t so new and there were no power lines above them, Bentiu would be just another flyblown town in war-ravaged southern Sudan.

But Bentiu lies in the heart of oil country, at the center of a debate over whether revenue from the 220,000 barrels pumped daily is bringing development or just more bloodshed to Africa’s largest nation, which has been plagued by conflict for 34 of its 45 independent years.

The questions come at a time when U.S. Christian groups are trying to push Sudan higher on President Bush’s agenda. These groups underscore allegations that the country’s Muslim government condones slavery and is waging a murderous war against Christians in the south, who make up 5% of the population.

The government in Khartoum contends it wants peace and says it is making strides toward ending human rights abuses and moving away from fundamentalist Islamic policy.

Although often portrayed as a religious conflict, the war in southern Sudan is about many things--competition for resources, politics and historical disagreements, as well as religion.

Since July 1997, a consortium of Chinese, Canadian, Malaysian and Sudanese companies has spent more than $1 billion to bring Sudan’s oil online. Critics and humanitarian groups say the money is fueling an 18-year-old civil war in the south in which an estimated 2 million people have already died, mainly from war-induced famine.

Most of Sudan’s oil reserves lie along a line 465 miles south of Khartoum that divides the predominantly Arab, Muslim north from the south, which is inhabited primarily by black Christians and animists.

In the past two years, Bentiu’s population has swollen from 7,000 to more than 50,000, most of them from the region’s Nuer and Dinka tribes.

Many came of their own accord for the jobs as well as for such basics as running water and electricity. Many others are refugees from the fighting.

The British charity Christian Aid accuses the government of forcing people from their homes in and around prospective oil fields.

“For them, the legacy of oil beneath their feet has not been new schools and roads, but displacement, destruction and death,” the charity said in a report in March.

John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, recently said more than 100,000 people had been displaced around the oil fields. Oil is a “killer . . . it’s evicting our civil population,” he said.

The government and the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Co. consortium deny the allegations and blame disputes among local tribes for violence around the fields.

China National Petroleum Corp. holds 40% of the shares in the consortium, Malaysian Petronas 30%, Talisman of Canada 25% and Sudan’s state-owned Sudapet 5%.

To counter pressure to pull out of Sudan, Talisman produced satellite pictures that it says show there has not been any forced displacement of people from oil areas. It also has appointed a human rights coordinator from southern Sudan to investigate the charges.

Critics of the government say it is using oil revenues, estimated at $500 million last year, to beef up the military and step up the war.

The people in Bentiu, which is separated from rebel territory by the Bahr El Ghazal River, have mixed feelings about the oil.

Some like it because it has brought water, electricity, roads and hospitals--paid for by the government and the consortium. Others complain that oil has brought the fighting closer, attracting government soldiers, SPLA forces and militias from both sides.

“It’s gotten worse,” said Kier Gathon, a Nuer trader. “Those who dig the oil make the problem for us. . . . Many cattle have died, many children have died.”

For generations the Nuer tended cattle and carried on subsistence farming with little contact with the outside world.

Many had never seen a proper medical center before the consortium arrived, said Dr. Abdulla Mirghanir, medical director at Al-Fath Al-Mobein Hospital. The consortium built the $2-million, 39-bed facility as part of its development program, and officials hold it up as evidence the oil is doing more good than harm.

A few miles from the hospital in the Heglig oil field, huge, shiny steel installations process oil in the midst of a vast scrubland.

Since oil started flowing in August 1999 there have been attacks on oil equipment and sometimes on work crews, but the frequency has fallen as the government beefed up defenses, said Yahia Adam Abdalla, an official in the consortium’s security department.

He said there had been only one attack this year, in which two government soldiers and “several” rebels died. During 1999 rebels attacked the installations “many times,” and in 2000 there were a number of incidents, he said, declining to give specifics on damages or casualties.

“Oil has its own evil, its own ills and its own good. Sudan is now getting the good of the oil,” said Thomas Kume, a former governor of Unity state and a Nuer elder.

Since Gen. Omar el-Bashir seized power in 1989, his Islamic government has been treated as an international pariah, accused of sponsoring terrorism, committing human rights violations and condoning slavery.

Sudanese officials and foreign diplomats say the government is slowly making improvements.

“It is being pragmatic. They realize it’s impossible to continue challenging and suppressing the civilization of our country,” said Ghazi Suleiman, chairman of the independent Sudan Human Rights Group who has been jailed 12 times in a decade and beaten by police for criticizing the government.

El-Bashir’s government contends its human rights record has improved and says it wants to be more open and to improve relations with the international community.

“We have a plan of developing this country, developing infrastructure. We need peace, unity and technology. You cannot get peace and national unity without openness,” Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said in an interview.

Ismail said the government is distancing itself from fundamentalist Islamic policies propounded by government ideologue Hassan Turabi. El-Bashir cut ties with Turabi when he dissolved parliament in December 1999, and Turabi was jailed in February after signing an agreement with Garang’s rebels.

The government says it wants a cease-fire and dialogue with Garang. But numerous peace initiatives have failed, and the war shows no sign of abating.

On June 7, while fresh fighting raged in the southwestern province of Bahr el Gazal, el-Bashir urged thousands of supporters to wage holy war on the rebels. Garang says oil production has to stop before his men will lay down their arms.