War of the Future
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.
By David Morse
TomDispatch
Posted by Bulatlat
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.
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