—Headline, UN News Source
There is nothing overstated about this headline from a report by the
UN’s Integrated Regional Information Network (April 19, 2002). On
the contrary, war is raging, indeed accelerating terrifyingly in
southern Sudan’s oil regions. And evidently numbed by years of ongoing
catastrophe in Sudan, the world seems unable to register that something
of historical significance is occurring at this very moment. Even as
the international response to Sudan’s crisis seems to be on hold pending
the release of the report by US special envoy John Danforth—which is
to assess the prospects for peace in Sudan—Khartoum has seized this
moment to mount its most comprehensive campaign to date of civilian
slaughter. The unambiguously clear purpose is to lay complete waste to
as much as possible of the civilian population in southern Sudan’s oil
regions. The regime’s deliberate, concerted efforts to destroy
civilians and civil society make a ghastly mockery of its commitment to
Danforth to halt such attacks.
Eric Reeves [April 24, 2002]
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu
Sudan’s agony is, almost inconceivably, intensifying with present
efforts by the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum to effect a
final solution to the problem of civilian presence in the oil regions of
the south. With savage barbarism, the regime is now waging a war of
unprecedented intensity against civilians in the oil regions. Report
after report from humanitarian organizations and human rights workers on
the ground in the south, as well as from the southern opposition
(SPLA/M), has established this as incontrovertible fact—occurring now,
this very day, with no end in sight unless there is robust international
condemnation and action.
This is not “more of the same”: it is the very pinnacle of Khartoum’s
genocidal ambitions in southern Sudan.
Atrocities like the now infamous attack on Bieh are continuing, though
with much less likelihood of witnesses from international relief
organizations. For Khartoum has almost doubled the number of locations
denied relief access during March and April of this year. This is
clearly designed to bring further destruction to highly distressed
civilian populations and to provide free reign for the military forces
that are attacking these populations, often with the help of helicopter
gunships purchased with oil revenues. The attack on Bieh—in which
Khartoum’s helicopter gunships poured heavy-machine gun fire and rockets into thousands of women and children waiting emergency UN food aid—is being replicated on an ongoing basis.
But Bieh, like so many other sites in the oil regions, has been denied
further humanitarian access by Khartoum. There will be no future
witnesses from the UN’s World Food Program if Khartoum has its way. And beyond insuring that there will be no witnesses to future atrocities,
Khartoum’s decision to double the number of flight bans to stricken
populations will insure that thousands more will die.
As the UN’s World Food Program reported in a press release (April 5,
2002), 1.7 million human beings are now denied humanitarian assistance.
This is a staggeringly large number, one that should crack through the
indifference of the most jaded news reporting organizations. What
morally credible reason can be given to explain how it is that the UN
statement does not constitute headline news? Where else in the world is
there a situation in which a government-imposed ban on humanitarian aid
affects a population of remotely this size and enduring such suffering?
“The UN World Food Programme today strongly condemned the decision by the Government of Sudan to deny access of WFP flights to 43 locations in southern Sudan, which will prevent about 1.7 million people from
receiving humanitarian assistance” (UN World Food Program press release, April 5, 2002).
Beyond the denial of humanitarian food and medical aid, there have been
very recent and highly credible accounts from the ground of massive
foodstocks being destroyed. The Associated Press (April 23,
2002)—reporting on the displacement of “hundreds of thousands of
people from their homes”—cites one humanitarian organization active in
the oil regions of Upper Nile province:
“Another aid agency operating health clinics in the [oil region] area,
Servant’s Heart, reported that 60,000 civilians had fled the fighting
and needed immediate emergency food. The group accused government forces of intentionally destroying civilian food and seed supplies in villages they had captured or attacked.
“‘If the food and seed is not immediately replaced, the government of
Sudan will kill thousands of defenseless civilians in a slow and
horrific manner,’ said David Bennett, executive director of Servant’s
Heart. ‘These attacks are insidious, because they will keep killing
thousands of civilians into next year because they have destroyed the
seed supplies as well as food stores.'”
Another very recent assessment comes from Gary Kenny, a Canadian human rights researcher for the Canadian church organization KAIROS. He notes in his report on a mission to the oil concession areas of Talisman
Energy that there has been very significant displacement in the Mankien
area, just 15 miles south of Kaikang, center of Talisman’s new
operations in Block 4 (previous human clearances and destruction to
provide Talisman’s “security” have been chiefly for their Unity [1] and
Heglig [2] concession blocks).
Kenny reports on the continuing forced displacement of the Nuer people
from their ancestral homes in Western Upper Nile. Interviews conducted
in the region in February 2002 make clear that Talisman and its partners
working in the newer and more westerly Kaikang oil concession block are
building oil roads and continually widening the radius of operations.
The consequences are yet more attacks on civilian settlements and new
waves of displacement. The nature of the war against civilians is
graphically captured in the epigraph to Kenny’s report (“Report of an
Investigation into Forced Displacement in the Town of Mankien, Western
Upper Nile, Sudan,” April 2002):
“They cut people through the neck with knives [machetes] and they shot
people who couldn’t run. My husband and brother, my two sisters were
killed. My elderly parents were burned alive in their tukul.”
(Teresa Nyejal, Bul Nuer, from Mankien, interviewed in Maper, February
14, 2002.
Yet another very recent report (April 11, 2002) was issued by Christian
Aid (UK) and DanChurchAid. Entitled “Hiding Between the Streams,” the
report is based on a four-day assessment mission to the oil regions.
Their findings are entirely consistent with the many other such reports
that have come from human rights and humanitarian organizations:
“The Government of Sudan is deliberately targeting civilian
populations, resulting in the displacement of the majority of Rubkona
County—maybe as many as 75,000 people []. The Government is using
the same scorched earth tactics already witnessed in [oil concession]
Blocks 1 and 2, Ruweng County, in the area of the Unity and Heglig
oilfields.”
“All this is done because of the oil. Rubkona County sits on large
reserves of oil that Lundin Oil Company of Sweden has the concession
to exploit. Lundin have been unable to operate in the past months
because the area has been ‘insecure.'”
“The majority of displaced gave horrific accounts of bombardments and
gunship attacks. Many interviewed were chased and shot at by the
horsemen. All too many of those interviewed spoke quietly of
relatives, even their own little children, being killed in front of them. There
has been a systematic and wholesale abuse of human rights against its
own civilians by the Government of Sudan despite the many overtures
made by government officials to the U.S. Special Envoy, former Senator
Danforth.”
The Winston-Salem Journal (April 16, 2002) reports on
the—again—very recent findings of human rights worker Diane
DeGuzman, formerly of UNICEF in southern Sudan and one of the most
experienced people working on the ground in the south:
“DeGuzman said that many civilians in southern oil-producing regions
told similar stories of villages being attacked over the past few months
by bombers, helicopter gunships, and ground troops from the government
based in Khartoum.”
“DeGuzman estimated that 80,000 people have been displaced by recent
government offenses that people in the region say seem to have one
goal—to clear the way for oil exploration. ‘Within about a month’s
time, Talisman oil was on the ground with a drilling rig,’ she said of
one area that had been cleared of civilians. Talisman Energy Inc., a
Canadian multinational company, has extensive leases in Sudan.”
In her public briefing at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC,
DeGuzman reported that in Ruweng County, which includes much of Talisman Energy’s concession areas, recent military action by Khartoum’s forces differed from previous attacks in that they were much more persistent in pursuing people (burning huts, following fleeing people to swamps and rivers), and that they had laid land mines around water sources. Following this offensive, the Heglig area (Heglig is the nerve center for Talisman operations) had been 75% depopulated. Oil drilling by Talisman and its partners began immediately in the Pakier area.
This is the scandal of Khartoum’s present scorched-earth campaign
throughout the oil regions. Companies like Talisman Energy take
conspicuous and unspeakably callous advantage of civilian destruction to
expand their concession operations. For some, 80,000 people displaced
is a terrible tragedy; for Talisman it seems another perfect opportunity
to squeeze more oil revenues from the suffering in southern Sudan.
Collectively these various reports are simply indisputable in their
largest conclusion: an unprecedentedly large and brutal campaign of
scorched-earth warfare against civilians in the oil regions of southern
Sudan is occurring right now. And it is a campaign that serves one
overwhelmingly significant purpose: to “secure” the oil concessions for
oil companies like Talisman Energy.
To be sure, in extracting its own revenues from amidst this human
suffering and destruction, Talisman and its partners also send revenues
to Khartoum, amounting to roughly $500 million per year. So it is no
accident that Khartoum’s minister of defense is presently on a widely
reported arms shopping spree in Russia, where he will sign a military
cooperation accord. A special interest has been shown by Khartoum in
purchasing 12 MiG-29 aircraft, a highly advanced weapon that would
immensely augment Khartoum’s ability to destroy. Agence France-Presse
reports (April 22, 2002) Khartoum’s defense minister as declaring, “We
have decided politically to develop the Sudanese armed forces by
modernising our equipment and buying new military hardware.” This
military hardware has included, and will continue to include, deadly
helicopter gunships—the weapon of choice for civilian destruction.
There is very little time left for the world to respond meaningfully to
this present massive episode in what can only be described as genocidal
destruction. The Nuer, Dinka, and other southern peoples of the oil
regions are beings targeted with brutal force and unspeakable barbarism.
The desire is to destroy them as peoples, as such, in their ancestral
homes.
Silence—though the world’s most likely response—is neither
inevitable, nor forgivable.