This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 29, August 28-September 3, 2005
War of the Future
By David Morse Oil drives the genocide
in Darfur. 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 b e 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.
August 19,
2005 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. © 2004 Bulatlat
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