On 29th August they are having a presentation by a staff person from Talisman Oil Company who requested the meeting with the Bishops during this Plenary. The Talisman request came as result of the letter which the Catholic Bishops wrote to IGAD on 15th September 2000 during their Annual meeting in Pesaro (Italy). 
In that letter, the Catholic Bishops stated that “we foresee that the production of Oil will fuel the war…Since several countries have rushed to show interest in trading of oil with Khartoum, the GOS has lost interest in pursuing a peaceful solution to the war. Moreover some foreign countries are assisting the GOS to drive people from their ancestral land to facilitate the exploitation of the oil wells. We are convinced that the oil revenues will not be used for the welfare of the Sudanese.  The fact that numberless government employees have gone without pay for several months attests to this…”
The Bishops’ Letter to IGAD ended with a number of considerations, including the following:
“We are convinced that the benefits from the oil production are not shared for the development of the South and other marginalized areas.  In fact we fear that this wealth will cause escalation of the conflict.”
Further more, on 17th August 2001, the joint meeting in Nairobi of the Bishops of the Catholic and Episcopal Churches of the Sudan, after analyzing the war situation in the Sudan and the sufferings the conflict imposes on innocent people, issued to the Government of the Sudan and the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement/Army
the appeal “for an immediate end of the war. A negotiated settlement rather than military means is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace.”
In this appeal, they also outlined a Programme for Peace which includes: 
“Suspension of oil extraction until peace is achieved.  Its continuation fuels the war, uproots civilian populations, and reinforces the existing imbalance in wealth sharing.”
Regarding this presentation by Talisman at the Bishops’  annual meeting, they want to note that in their search for truth and mutual understanding, they have in the past been addressed by different parties in the present conflict without intending such occasions as their sign of approval of the parties’ activities or ideologies.  In like manner, by having representatives of Talisman address them at this annual meeting, the Catholic Bishops of Sudan do not intend the occasion to be a sign of their approval of Talisman’s  present activities in Sudan.
Sudan Catholic Bishops Regional Conference(SCBRC)
P.O. Box 66057, Nairobi, Kenya Tel:560-603; Fax:575-970
e-mail: scbrc@form-net.com 
 

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 28 (Reuters) - The United States has dropped its 
opposition to lifting largely symbolic U.N. sanctions against Sudan, allowing the 
U.N. Security Council to end the embargoes in a Friday vote, diplomats said. 

The council had delayed a Sept. 17 meeting to end sanctions on the movement of 
diplomatic personnel because of the attacks against the World Trade Center in New 
York and the Pentagon in Washington. 

But the envoys said the United States apparently has softened its view that Sudan was supporting terrorist activities and may abstain in the vote but not use its veto to block a resolution on the embargoes. The U.N. sanctions are separate from broader ones imposed unilaterally by the United States, which are still intact. 

Earlier this week, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher praised talks with Khartoum. "For about a year, we have had a counter-terrorism dialogue with Sudan and had been making concrete progress in that regard," Boucher said on Wednesday. 

"I would characterize our discussions so far with Sudan as good," he added." 

"Since the bombings, we have seen statements from Sudan that are positive and offered sympathy and support," he said, following reports Sudan was rounding up so-called extremists. 

U.N. sanctions against Sudan were imposed in 1996 to force the Khartoum government to hand over suspects in an assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. 

They require states to reduce the number of Sudanese diplomatic personnel and to restrict the entry or transit of Sudanese government officials. But the United States is one of the few countries to honor the sanctions. 

Even Egypt, on whose behalf the embargoes were imposed, and Ethiopia, where the attack against Mubarak took place, support ending the sanctions. 

The United States has insisted Sudan show it is no longer providing sanctuary to alleged terrorist groups, and U.S. counter-terrorism experts said last month the government was not supporting the gunmen involved in the attack on Mubarak. 

Separately, the United States has its own sanctions, imposed by former President Bill Clinton, who closed the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum in 1996 and put trade embargoes in place. 

Sudan also remains one of seven countries listed by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism. 

In August 1998, Clinton ordered air strikes on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory on grounds, much disputed, that it was preparing to produce ingredients for chemical weapons. 

Washington said then that Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, now suspected in the latest attacks against the United States, had a stake in the plant. 

The White House, particularly U.S. President George W. Bush, had hesitated to lift any sanctions, mainly because of Khartoum's use of slaves throughout the country's brutal 18-year-old civil war. 

On Sept. 6, however, Washington decided to launch a peace initiative to mediate between Sudan's Islamic government and Christian and animist militias fighting for autonomy. 
 

Nairobi, Kenya, August 17, 2001
We the Bishops of the Catholic and Episcopal Churches of the Sudan, gathered in Nairobi for a seminar, Pastoral Leadership and United Action in a Crisis Situation, from August 12 - 17 2001, moved by our Christian Faith and concerned by the immense suffering of all the Peoples of Sudan, because of the current civil war, appeal for an immediate end of the hostilities and the establishment of a just and durable peace in the Sudan.
We address our appeal to the Government of Sudan, the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), other warring parties, all Peoples of Sudan of every tribe and religion, the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD) and other peacemakers including the IGAD Partners Forum (IPF), the United Nations, the African Union and international partners.
We also address our appeal to his Holiness Pope John Paul II and the Most Reverend and The Right Honourable Dr. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, and to religious leaders around the world.
State of suffering
We are deeply concerned with the appalling human suffering in both the North and South of the country. Nearly three million people have died because of the war. Over six million have been internally displaced and millions more have fled the country. The economic situation has deteriorated to the extent that over 96 percent of the population is living below the poverty line.
In some areas, populations are being deliberately denied critically needed basic humanitarian assistance. The war has adversely affected particularly the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly.
In order to sustain the war efforts, the warring parties conscript by force children of school age into military service, thus exposing them to grave harm, depriving them of any chance of education and jeopardising their future. Women and children are harassed and abused and the elderly are robbed of normal traditional care. Ordinary and traditional family life has collapsed and cultural traditions have broken down.
Large sections of the population have become dependent for their survival on humanitarian assistance. This assistance, though desperately needed, is however not an effective long-term solution to the crisis.
Given these and other heinous experiences of human suffering, we appeal for an immediate end of the war. A negotiated settlement, rather than military means is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace.
Peace based on justice
Stopping the war is essential, but not sufficient for the establishment of a just and lasting peace. The root causes of the conflict must also be addressed, so that all Sudanese can enjoy their full rights in dignity.
This could be achieved by addressing the following:
-Affirmation of diversity in the national identity that ensures the equal treatment of all cultural, racial and religious groups in the public media and the educational and legal systems in order to promote peaceful coexistence.
-Power sharing by a participatory system of governance that ensures the full rights and participation of all people. Such a system should protect the states exclusive rights over their territories and provide for the sharing of agreed upon powers at the national level. This balance of powers must be configured to avoid the domination by any one group over another and ensure the full rights of all.
-Wealth sharing through an agreed upon formula between the states and national government to ensure balanced and equitable development.
Programme for peace:
Addressing the above three major concerns requires a concrete programme of action that includes the following:
-Affirmation of principles: We affirm the Declaration of Principles of the IGAD peace process, particularly in regards to the relationship between state and religion, the principle of self-determination, and the comprehensive cease-fire.
-Relationship between state and religion: The unity of the country and peace with justice cannot be achieved under Sharia Law in a country with a diversity of cultures and religions. Instead we call for religious freedom for all religious groups and the separation of religion and state.
-Comprehensive cease-fire:  Upon the achievement of a negotiated settlement, a comprehensive cease-fire should be declared and internationally monitored.
Advocacy for justice and peace. 
We call for:
a) Respect for human rights for all citizens
b) Peace building, reconciliation and forgiveness among the diverse cultural groups of the nation, including North - South, South – South and North -North initiatives
c) The co-operation of neighbouring countries, international organisations, and IGAD Partners Forum countries and all people of goodwill.
d) The constructive engagement of all national state stakeholders, including civil society groups and religious communities in particular.
e) Affirmation of the ongoing people-to-people reconciliation and peace process in the South and urge all parties to the conflict to engage and support seriously this process and any similar processes in the North.  These grassroots efforts should be linked to the higher national political level.
f) Commitment to fostering genuine Christian - Muslim dialogue particularly at the local community level.
g) Affirmation and support of the Sudan Ecumenical Forum and its ongoing initiatives for peace.
h) Suspension of oil extraction until peace is achieved.  Its continuation fuels the war, uproots civilian populations, and reinforces the existing imbalance in wealth sharing.
Conclusion
As believers in the one Creator, and sharing in a single humanity, we believe and hope that God will grant the Peoples of Sudan peace if we are willing to pray sincerely, to reconcile and bear one another's burdens.
Sudan Catholic Information Office (SCIO) - P.O Box 21102 - Nairobi, Kenya
e-mail: SCIO@maf.or.ke
tel: 254-2-577616/ 577949/ 577595 - fax 254-2-577327
 

The Sudan Catholic Bishops are currently holding their annual Plenary in Nairobi from 21st August to 1st September 2001. 
On 29th August they are having a presentation by a staff person from Talisman Oil Company who requested the meeting with the Bishops during this Plenary. The Talisman request came as result of the letter which the Catholic Bishops wrote to IGAD on 15th September 2000 during their Annual meeting in Pesaro (Italy). 
In that letter, the Catholic Bishops stated that “we foresee that the production of Oil will fuel the war…Since several countries have rushed to show interest in trading of oil with Khartoum, the GOS has lost interest in pursuing a peaceful solution to the war. Moreover some foreign countries are assisting the GOS to drive people from their ancestral land to facilitate the exploitation of the oil wells. We are convinced that the oil revenues will not be used for the welfare of the Sudanese.  The fact that numberless government employees have gone without pay for several months attests to this…”

The Bishops’ Letter to IGAD ended with a number of considerations, including the following:
“We are convinced that the benefits from the oil production are not shared for the development of the South and other marginalized areas.  In fact we fear that this wealth will cause escalation of the conflict.”
Further more, on 17th August 2001, the joint meeting in Nairobi of the Bishops of the Catholic and Episcopal Churches of the Sudan, after analyzing the war situation in the Sudan and the sufferings the conflict imposes on innocent people, issued to the Government of the Sudan and the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement/Army
the appeal “for an immediate end of the war.  A negotiated settlement rather than military means is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace.”
In this appeal, they also outlined a Programme for Peace which includes: 
“Suspension of oil extraction until peace is achieved.  Its continuation fuels the war, uproots civilian populations, and reinforces the existing imbalance in wealth sharing.”
Regarding this presentation by Talisman at the Bishops’  annual meeting, they want to note that in their search for truth and mutual understanding, they have in the past been addressed by different parties in the present conflict without intending such occasions as their sign of approval of the parties’ activities or ideologies.  In like manner, by having representatives of Talisman address them at this annual meeting, the Catholic Bishops of Sudan do not intend the occasion to be a sign of their approval of Talisman’s  present activities in Sudan.
Sudan Catholic Bishops Regional Conference(SCBRC)
P.O. Box 66057, Nairobi, Kenya Tel:560-603; Fax:575-970
e-mail: scbrc@form-net.com
 

- meeting in Nairobi for the last three months on their own without the benefit of external mediation and pressure;

- convinced that the Unity of our people is of utmost importance for the Liberation Process;

- concerned about the meaningless and regrettable loss of lives caused by internecine and inter-factional fighting as a result of our political differences which, only benefit the enemy;

- alarmed by the genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery and displacement of our people and their replacement by non-indigenous settlers from the North;

- determined to halt the vandalization and wanton looting of our oil and other natural resources by the illegitimate, fascist  and Islamic Fundamentalist regime in Khartoum;

- cognizant of the fact that the enemy  does not believe in the peaceful resolution of the Sudan conflict and therefore does not honour negotiated agreements, the most recent of which is the dishonoured and now defunct April 21st 1997 Khartoum Peace Agreement;
- fully aware that a United Stand is the only sure way to bring the war to a speedy and just  end;
- having reviewed the past experiences of the Liberation Struggle;

- appreciating  that we were one movement before;

and 

- considering that the committees have been fully mandated by the leaders of the two movements to discuss freely and frankly about reconciliation, peace and unity of our people and reach an agreement thereon;

A. Hereby agree on the following:

1)     Organic unity of  the two Movements under the SPLM/SPLA;

2)     The Objectives of the Liberation Struggle which are;

a)     Administration of the Sudan as a Confederal/Federal United Secular Democratic New Sudan during an Interim Period, as a form of an Interim Unity, and 

b)    The exercise of the Right of Self-Determination by the People of Southern Sudan including Abyei, Southern Kordofan and Southern Blue Nile in an internationally supervised referendum at the end of the Interim Period to choose between:- (i) Continuation and development of the Union in 2 (a), above, or (ii) Independence for Southern component part of that Interim Union.

c)     Federalism/Regionalism shall be the system of governance during the Liberation struggle in Southern Sudan including Abyei, Southern Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan and thereafter.

3)     The unified Movement remains committed to the IGAD Peace Process, and to resolutions and institutions of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Popular National Congress (PNC).

4)     Harmonization of the political, military and administrative structures of the unified Movement.

B.  Further agreed that the following steps be immediately  effected:

1)     Immediate cessation of hostilities: military and negative media campaigns;
2)     Smooth implementation of relief and other humanitarian interventions;

3)     Establishment of a military commission for the reorganization of the unified forces and harmonization of the ranking system; 

4)     Establishment of technical committees for harmonization of the political and administrative structures of the unified Movement;

5)     Formation of enlightenment committees to explain to our people and the international community the just concluded agreement on reconciliation, peace and unity;

6)     Extension of the unity process to include other political forces and military groupings in Southern Sudan, Southern Kordofan, Southern Blue Nile and any other areas;

C.   Finally,  the parties hereby; 

1)     Agree to uphold and work towards the speedy implementation of this Declaration, which will come into force this day. 

2)     Call upon friends and people of good will to support this initiative on peace, reconciliation and unity:

Signed

for  SPLM/SPLA : Dr. Justin Yaac Arop, and Prof. George Bureng Nyombe

for SPDF : Cdr. Taban Deng Gai and Cdr. James Kok 

date : 28/05/2001

May 31, 2001

A fresh burst of conflict violates a ceasefire—and poses new problems for U.S. policy in Africa

Even as it was announcing a May 25 ceasefire in its 18-year-old civil war, the government of Sudan was sending ground troops and helicopter gunships into the Nuba Mountains in a major operation against civilians, according to well-placed humanitarian-aid sources in the region.

TROOPS TORCHED THE HUTS, sent civilians fleeing for their lives and displaced thousands of Muslim and Christian civilians in a region it did not control, a source in one aid group said. The government’s actions came on the eve of renewed negotiations with the Sudanese opposition in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and just as Secretary of State Colin Powell was traveling into the immediate region with plans for a new, more activist U.S. policy for Sudan. The operation poses a major challenge to U.S. diplomatic efforts in Sudan and reveals a serious weakness in America’s intelligence-monitoring capability.

Powell and aides told NEWSWEEK they were unaware of the offensive and the destruction of the habitat of a large number of civilians. And even after checking all available sources, they still could not confirm details five days later, a senior official accompanying Powell said aboard his plane Wednesday night.

First word about the offensive came from John Garang, head of biggest faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, who told NEWSWEEK in Nairobi last Sunday that 14 villages in the area of Heiban had been torched and more than 5,000 households destroyed with residents having to flee into the mountains, Garang said. U.S. officials accompanying Powell said they had no immediate information and, even after consulting the U.S. missions in the region, were unable to provide any confirmation.

Humanitarian-aid experts, described by top Powell aides as highly reliable, used their own independent sources to confirm the assault Wednesday. They said between 2,000 and 5,000 families were burned out of their modest quarters. With households averaging five or six people, this means between 10,000 and 30,000 people were forced to flee. There were no major attacks on military targets, says an informed source, who calls it “very much a civilian-targeted” operation. The source says there was no way of knowing the number of casualties. “If people are wounded, they generally don’t survive” due to the paucity of medical facilities, the source adds. 

Unlike much of southern Sudan, where a mostly Christian and animist population is under frequent assault by the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Khartoum, Heiban county has both Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians who do not want to submit to the Khartoum regime and its insistence on applying Islamic religious law. It has become a major target by the government following the discovery of oil in the area.

According to Garang, the Sudanese government dropped bombs over Tonj last Saturday and launched an offensive in three places. He said five brigades of troops—more than 10,000 soldiers—attacked in the Nuba Mountains, and they also attacked the SPLA in the southern Blue Nile and in Bar el Ghazal. (The SPLA has since faxed a statement to Reuters’s Cairo office claiming its fighters killed 400 government troops and won three battles on the southern front lines Tuesday.) “This is a war against the civilian population. Not against the SPLA as such,” Garang told NEWSWEEK.

The more activist U.S. policy on Sudan is the result of strong pressure by a combination of evangelical Christian groups, the Congressional Black Caucus and the human-rights community. A policy review is nearly completed, but Powell has already announced that Andrew Natsios, the director of the Agency for International Development, will be special coordinator for food aid in Sudan. A special envoy— experienced diplomat Chester Crocker is reported to be under consideration by Powell—will be named to coordinate U.S. diplomacy and overall policy in Sudan. 

While in Nairobi, Powell announced that the United States will send 40,000 tons of grain to both the government-controlled north and southern Sudan in an effort to avert a looming famine. The United States also has released some $3 million in assistance to the National Democratic Alliance, an umbrella group in which Garang’s SPLA is a major component.

Despite the heightened U.S. interest, Powell declined to receive Garang while in Nairobi. Instead, he sent Natsios to talk with both Garang and the Sudanese ambassador. Powell’s next step is unclear. But it’s painfully obvious that one of Washington’s biggest challenges will be getting the kind of real-time data that its special envoy will need to proceed.
 

Contents

Executive summary
Introduction

Chapter 1: The war for oil : The 'scorched earth' policy in three oil concessions

Chapter 2: Life on a knife-edge :The war on relief and the banning of aid

Chapter 3: Paying for the war :Oil money for arms

Chapter 4: Foreign oil : How complicit are the foreign oil companies?

Chapter 5: The British connection

Recommendations

Christian Aid in Sudan
Sudan's civil war
Who's who in oil 
Glossary

References
Credits

“Christ was sold for 30 pieces of silver and our people are being sacrificed in exchange for barrels of oil” Sudan Catholic Bishops Conference, September 2000.

Executive summary

In the oilfields of Sudan, civilians are being killed and raped, their villages burnt to the ground. They are caught in a war for oil, part of the wider civil war between northern and southern Sudan that has been waged for decades. Since large-scale production began two years ago, oil has moved the war into a new league. Across the oil-rich regions of Sudan, the government is pursuing a 'scorched earth' policy to clear the land of civilians and to make way for the exploration and exploitation of oil by foreign oil companies.

This Christian Aid report, The scorched earth, shows how the presence of international oil companies is fuelling the war. Companies from Asia and the West, including the UK, have helped build Sudan's oil industry, offering finance, technological expertise and supplies, to create a strong and growing oil industry in the centre of the country. In the name of oil, government forces and government-supported militias are emptying the land of civilians, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of southern Sudanese. Oil industry infrastructure - the same roads and airstrips which serve the companies - is used by the army as part of the war. In retaliation, opposition forces have attacked government-controlled towns and villages, causing further death and displacement.

Exports of Sudan's estimated reserves of two billion barrels of oil are paying for the build-up of a Sudanese home grown arms industry as well as paying for more arms imports. Without oil, the civil war being fought between the government of Sudan and the main opposition force, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is at a stalemate; with oil, it can only escalate. The Sudanese government itself now admits that oil is funding the wider civil war. 'Sudan will be capable of producing all the weapons it needs thanks to the growing oil industry,' announced General Mohamed Yassin just eleven months after the oil began flowing out of the new pipeline into the supertankers at the Red Sea port. The government now earns roughly US$1 million a day from oil - equivalent to the US$1 million it spends daily fighting the war. The equation is simple, the consequences devastating.

Christian Aid visited southern Sudan last year to gather first-hand information about the impact of the companies' involvement. Eyewitness accounts show that government forces are ruthlessly clearing the way for oil over an ever-larger area. In one area of Eastern Upper Nile where a new consortium began prospecting in March 2001, 48 villages have been burned and 55,000 people displaced in the past 12 months. Along a new road in one European oil company's concession, said one eyewitness, 'there is not a single village left'.

In a war against the SPLA, virtually all southerners - the ordinary people who have always lived in the oil-rich areas of Western Upper Nile - are regarded as potential enemies. For them, the legacy of the oil beneath their feet has not been new schools and roads, but displacement, destruction and death. The SPLA opposition is targeting the oil installations and fighting government forces. It is civilians who are dying from the abuses perpetrated by both sides.

Western Upper Nile now has the highest proportion of people in need anywhere in Sudan. Its children are at the highest nutritional risk. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which includes the protection of civilians during war, is being violated each and every day. Organisations such as Christian Aid and its 24 local partner organisations cannot fulfil their humanitarian mandate. Aid flights are banned by the government, leaving people in even greater need.

Extracting oil in a country at war with itself is, without question, problematic. In Sudan, geography compounds the problem. Although the oil is being exploited by the government, most oil reserves lie in southern Sudan - in areas where the SPLA and other southern groups are fighting against the government in pursuance of demands for a more equitable share of economic and political power. The oil is transported north through a 1,600 km pipeline built with foreign hardware, including British pumping stations and engines. Khartoum has signalled its intentions by selling oil concessions across the entire south as far as the Ugandan border. These are the areas next in line for armed clearance.

Oil companies such as Canada's Talisman Energy, Sweden's Lundin Oil, Malaysia's Petronas and China's state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) are business partners of the government of Sudan. Under contract, oil revenues are shared between the companies and the Sudanese national oil company, Sudapet. Military protection is also part of the partnership. As in many conflict-ridden countries, the oil companies are themselves targets. The SPLA has declared oilfields and oil companies to be legitimate military targets; one of its local commander has attacked oil installations.

The companies require protection so that they may operate unhindered and so their staff are secure. But the relationship between oil and security has moved far beyond simple defence. A strategy of clearing potential enemies - Nuer and Dinka civilians - from the oilfields is seen by the government as a prerequisite to making way for oil.

As companies cast their eyes on the prize - huge reservoirs of untapped oil deep inside SPLA-held territory - the oil war promises to spread. TotalFinaElf's 120,000 km2 concession near the town of Bor cannot be exploited unless the area is controlled by the northern government. There is nothing to suggest that the government will not practice its scorched earth policy here, too.

With this report Christian Aid joins a long list of organisations which have exposed these human rights violations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN, the New Sudan Council of Churches, and official delegations such as the Harker commission from Canada. Shareholders in the major oil companies are mounting a campaign reminiscent of the South African movement for divestment. A new report by the influential Washington-based Center for Strategic and Investment Studies concludes that: 'Oil is fundamentally changing Sudan's war' and calls for the US to enlist the support of the UK government in an effort to end the war. 

Yet, despite the evidence, the oil companies remain largely silent. Those directly engaged in production claim that they have no knowledge of oil-related human rights violations on their land - that, however deplorable, human rights violations are not linked to their activities or to their need for government-supplied security. The companies argue that their presence, and the production of oil, will help bring peace and prosperity to Sudan. British companies, from Rolls Royce to Weir Pumps of Glasgow, have supplied pumps and engineers for the pipeline. The companies say that they will help bring peace and prosperity to Sudan. But there are signs neither of peace nor of prosperity - only of more war.

In Sudan, oil and war are inextricably linked. For this reason Christian Aid, which has been working for 30 years in Sudan, and its partners, recommend that:

- Oil companies directly involved in oil in Sudan, such as Talisman Energy and Lundin Oil, should immediately suspend operations until there is a just and lasting peace agreement.

- Companies such as TotalFinaElf, which own concessions in Sudan but are not yet operational, and those which have invested in the Sudanese oil industry, should refuse to take any further steps to begin operations or supply equipment until a peace agreement is reached. - BP, Shell and other foreign and institutional investors in Sinopec and PetroChina, two subsidiaries of CNPC, should divest their holdings.

- The Government of Sudan should cease its abuse of civilians and breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law. It should publish reports of the use of oil revenue to demonstrate that it is used to benefit people in all of Sudan, north and south.

- The SPLA should also cease its breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws.

- The UK government should take steps to put in place strong and enforceable regulation of transnational corporations to ensure that they cannot be directly or indirectly complicit in human rights violations.

Oil should be Sudan's peace dividend - the incentive which makes peace desirable. Without peace, oil cannot be safely extracted. Foreign oil companies can no longer claim that they do not know of the scorched earth policy which has swept the oilfields. Western industry, including UK companies, have a choice: they can either continue to turn a blind eye to the atrocities carried out in their name, or they and their governments can help make peace possible.

Introduction

One of the bloodiest and longest running of Africa's wars is being fuelled by oil. This report shows, through eyewitness accounts, how foreign oil companies have helped to build Sudan's oil industry and demonstrates the cost of oil to ordinary people. It also demonstrates that - far from being a force for peace, as the oil companies argue - oil is threatening to extend the scorched earth strategy from the oil-rich area of Western Upper Nile to vast new oil concessions further south.

Oil - developed, exploited and financed by foreign oil companies - is both the justification and the means for a larger, more brutal war. From the government's own mouth we hear that oil is paying for arms.

How complicit are foreign oil companies? Report after report in a long list of authoritative human rights documents has made it clear to governments and companies alike that oil is integrally linked to the war, and that companies bear a responsibility. A year after an official Canadian delegation led by John Harker condemned foreign corporate complicity and recommended concrete areas for change, Christian Aid has found that:

- In the oilfields and surrounding areas, government forces and government-sponsored militias are carrying out a 'scorched earth' policy bent on emptying the areas of civilians.

- Oil company infrastructure, including airstrips and oil roads, are being used by government forces fighting in southern Sudan.

- Government bans on UN and NGO humanitarian flights go unremarked by the companies, whose own personnal more freely. Increased fighting plus the aid flight bans is leading to acute food shortages and fears of famine.

- Companies have failed to take proper responsibility for displacement and other human rights violations. Codes of conduct have had no visible impact. The benefits of oil are not accruing to the people from whose land it is being taken.

- Sudan, which two years ago was an oil importer, is now an exporter of oil and, with oil money, able to fund an expansion of the war. A new industrial complex in the north has been developed and reported to be used for dual civilian-military use. Defence spending has doubled.

- Companies such as Lundin, Petronas and CNPC are contributing to the extension of the war by permitting government forces to clear new areas for them to exploit. The offensive which will be necessary to take control of TotalFinaElf's concessions will take the scorched earth close to the borders of Uganda and Kenya.

 It is no longer possible for companies to claim ignorance of the effects of their operations. Investigation after investigation, by the UN's Special Rapporteur, Amnesty International, Canada's Harker commission, Human Rights Watch, church agencies and this report by Christian Aid, tell the story of systematic, overwhelming human  rights violations of innocent people. If the companies turn a blind eye now, it is a deliberate one.

Talisman and Lundin have told Christian Aid of their concern for human rights in the area and their desire for peace. Both companies have brought in some humanitarian relief. But in the wider context, deliveries of tents for temporary shelter for displaced villagers, or support for water boreholes or a 60-bed hospital look very feeble indeed. A sticking plaster while disaster spreads.

Should the companies be given the benefit of the doubt? The Canadian government, failing to apply sanctions in the wake of the Harker report, thought so. The companies, notably Talisman, argue that their presence will lead to positive change - 'islands of peace', as Talisman expressed it. But a year on, as Christian Aid has found, there are ever more villages lying in ashes.

Sudan needs oil: its people, north and south, need oil wealth. But under current conditions this is not happening. Oil is bringing few benefits to the people under whose land it lies. The development of oil must take place under a new set of terms.

Foreign oil companies can help in this process. Corporate Britain and major multinationals are talking the language of human rights and corporate social responsibility. If the ethical criteria declared publicly by these companies - BP's signature to the UN Declaration on Human Rights, for instance, and Talisman's signature to the International Code of Ethics for Canadian Business - are to have any  meaning, they must be applied. Companies directly involved in Sudan must end their 'business as usual'. Investors, such as BP, must take a serious look at their portfolio.

Chapter 1 The war for oil 

The government of Sudan is clearing huge tracts of southern Sudan to  make way for oil production. Troops are terrorising civilians,  burning homes and attacking villages from the air in a war for oil.

Wide stretches of southern Sudan are being subjected to a ruthless 'scorched earth' policy to clear the way for oil exploration and to create a cordon sanitaire around the oilfields. As new areas of exploration open up, and oil companies facilitate troop movements by building roads across swampland and bridges across rivers, the war  expands and the scorched earth advances.

While all parties are guilty of flouting Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law, what marks the government out from the opposition forces is the extent of its attack on civilians living in and around the oil rich areas. This is having a devastating impact on the life of the South's two main tribes: the Nuer, the main  victims of the current oil war, and the Dinka.

Since construction of the pipeline to the Red Sea began in 1998, hundreds of thousands of villagers have been terrorised into leaving their homes in Upper Nile. Tens of thousands of homes across Western Upper Nile and Eastern Upper Nile have been burnt to the ground. In some areas, the charred remains of the humble mud huts that got in the way of oil are the only evidence there is that there was ever  life in the region.

 Government forces and militias have destroyed harvests, looted livestock and burned houses to ensure that no-one, once displaced, will return home. Since the pipeline opened, the increased use of helicopter gunships and indiscriminate high-altitude bombardment has added a terrifying new dimension to the war. 'The worst thing was the gunships,' Zeinab Nyacieng, a Nuer woman driven hundreds of miles from her home, told Christian Aid late last year. 'I never saw them before last year. But now they are like rain.'

The inter-tribal warfare that has plagued the south for the last decade has been
 fomented by strategic arms deliveries from government garrisons. By the middle of
 last year, hundreds of cases of ammunition had already been delivered to one of the southern factions fighting for control of Western Upper Nile and its vast oil reserves.(1) This is warlordism - as the government and the oil companies call it - but warlordism provoked and encouraged by the government with the express intent of depopulating oil-rich areas.

One of the most tragic episodes in the history of Sudan's war is unfolding with scarcely a word of protest, or even acknowledgement, from any of the foreign companies operating in the region.(2) 

Their silence is tantamount to complicity.The areas around the Heglig and Unity oilfields, the first to be opened up, are already virtual wastelands - government-controlled no-go areas where impunity is the rule. Independent observers are rarely permitted in and, when they are, are tightly controlled. Without international pressure on the government of Sudan and the oil companies working with it, other oil-rich areas will soon suffer the same, irreversible, fate.

Here we report on displacement from three oil areas, based on interviews with people displaced from those areas:

- 1. Block 5a, south-east of Bentiu, operated by Sweden's Lundin Oil,  Austria's OMV and Malaysia's Petronas. Testing operations here began  in January 20013 after a ruthless, year-long government assault to  secure the environs to the concession and the access road leading to  it. Oil was struck again in early March 2001.

- 2. Block 3, east of Bentiu, where production from the Adar Yei  oilfield will be boosted by a new consortium of Malaysian and Chinese  companies.

- 3. Blocks 1 and 2, north of Bentiu, where the Greater Nile Petroleum  Operating Company (GNPOC) is exploiting the Heglig and Unity oil  fields. Displacement here began in the 1970s but continued, after  the formation of the GNPOC, in mid-1999.

'The only signs of life are the lorries travelling to the oilfield'

- 1. Block 5a: Lundin Oil
 In April 1999, Lundin Oil of Sweden drilled an exploratory well at Thar Jath,10 miles from the Nile, and reported finding as many as 300 million barrels of 'excellent' reservoir quality oil. A month later, according to Human Rights Watch, the government moved troops to Thar Jath and adjacent areas, displacing tens of thousands of people.

This was the start of a still-unfolding tragedy in the area that has a single cause: the lack of a national consensus on the country's single most important resource, oil.

In March 2000, amid fighting for control of the Thar Jath site, Lundin said it was suspending drilling because of 'logistical difficulties and safety considerations'. It announced the resumption of drilling in January 2001 'within days of the inauguration of the 75 kilometre all-weather road' from its base camp at Rub Kona.4 Taban  Deng, a former Minister of State for Roads in the Khartoum government, told Christian Aid the road was built by Chinese workers and paid for by Lundin at a cost of up to $400,000 per kilometre.

What Lundin did not say in its press release was that in the intervening 10 months, as the oilfield tripled in size and its airstrip was extended, government troops and militias had burned and depopulated the entire length of this oil road. In visits to Western Upper Nile in August and November 2000, Christian Aid found thousands  of Nuer civilians displaced from villages along this road, hundreds of miles away in Dinka Bahr el-Ghazal. They all told the same tale. Antonovs bombed the villages to scatter the people. Then government troops arrived by truck and helicopter, burning the villages and killing anyone who was unable to flee - in most cases, the old and  the very young.

Chief Peter Ring Pathai said that government troops airlifted to Kuach were shooting at villagers from the air, hanging out of the doors of their helicopters.

'All the villages along the road have been burned,' said John Wicjial Bayak, a local official who had been driven from a village close to the oil road.5 'You cannot see a single hut. The government doesn't want people anywhere near the oil.'

Aid workers who have flown over the oil road confirm these claims. An independent aid worker familiar with the area said that all the villages 6 that once existed along the road to Pulteri have been razed to the ground. 'As one flies along the new oil road, the only sign of life are the lorries travelling at high speed back and forth to the oilfield,' said the aid worker. 'Small military garrisons are clearly visible every five kilometres. The bulk of the population that once lived in villages along the road and within walking  distance of OLS airstrips are now nearly beyond reach. Communities in need cannot be assisted.'

Officials of Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) who have visited the area also say military traffic on the road is heavy. OLS is the major national and international relief effort bringing aid to the people of the Sudan, a consortium of the UN and non-governmental organisations.

According to village chiefs, systematic attacks on the villlages along the oil road began in March 2000, the month Lundin suspended drilling. First, Antonovs would bomb the villages to scatter people, then government troops would come into the village by truck and helicopter to burn huts and kill any people who had stayed. One  village was bombed ten times before government troops finally burned out the residents.

The scorching of villages along the Lundin oil road 

- One of the first villages attacked was Chotyiel, in October 1999. On hearing gunships, 80-year-old Liu-Liu ran to the forest with six of his grandchildren. 'We dug a hole for the children and put a blanket on top,' he said. 'Then soldiers came to burn the houses. Helicopters flew overhead. If they saw you, they killed you. We stayed 20 days in the forest eating wild fruit. It was not easy to move as we had blind people there. The Arabs are forcing the road to the village. They're going to Rier [Thar Jath], to the oilfield.'7

- Then in March 2000 government troops supported by Antonovs and  helicopter gunships attacked the village of Dhorbor, on the first  stretch of the oil road. Local officials reported more than 30  villagers killed.

- On 11 May 2000 it was the turn of the village of Guit. Mary Cuoy  heard shots at 4am. 'I had a 3-year-old grandchild sleeping with me,'  she said. 'I took her by the hand and left everything. In the  morning, some people went back and saw soldiers taking the cows.  Every hut was burned.'8

- A few days later, the village of Kuach was attacked by troops who  arrived in lorries. 'When I heard bullets I took one child and ran  naked to the forest,' said Simon Dual, a father of two. 'But it was  far and three people were killed as they ran. When I went back the  next day to see what had happened, I found the house burned and the  body of my child, Stephen, in the fire.' The SPLA tried to fight  back, explained Simon, but the Arabs had very big guns in their  vehicles. 'My home was right beside the road works. Bulldozers  passed within feet of it. They want to take the oil from the south  for the north. They want to chase us off our land because they want  the oil.'(9)

Burned alive

An estimated 11,000 people displaced from Block 5a by the above attacks settled in the SPLA-controlled village of Nhialdiu. The village was already swollen by Nuer who had been driven south from the Heglig area in earlier years. Then on 15 July 2000, government militias attacked Nhialdiu - burning every hut bar one and displacing  every inhabitant. A local chief, John Lou, said that the militias rounded up the elderly, put them in one hut and burned them alive. He said some of the dead were also very young children - five of them his own children.

Thousands more displaced people fled west into the neighbouring province of Bahr el-Ghazal, where a peace agreement signed between Nuer and Dinka in the village of Wunlit offered a safe haven after years of inter-tribal fighting. John Wicjial Bayak was one of them: 'We crossed five rivers,' he related.10 'It took 12 days. We had no  supplies, so the children just ate wild fruit. Five children in our group drowned because they couldn't swim. I swam with one hand and supported my two children in the other. We encountered crocodiles and elephants. So many enemies.'

The children who reached Bahr el-Ghazal safely were in a pitiful state when Christian Aid visited the region in November 2000. Most were naked or semi-naked and covered in scabies, having crossed miles of mosquito-infested swampland. Many had lost a parent or a sibling. All were hungry. Most families that had any cows left had begun  slaughtering them - a sure sign that they had exhausted all other resources.

How much further will it go?

In early March 2001 Lundin announced that it had struck oil at Thar Jath, a source of an estimated 4,260 barrels a day. 'This is a significant and exciting event for Lundin Oil,' said company president Ian Lundin. 'We have confirmed that the trend of prolific  oilfields as seen in Blocks 1,2 and 4 [Heglig and Unity] extend to our Block.' He also announced further exploration, 12 miles south east of Thar Jath, at the Jarayan-1 well and an 'extensive seismic campaign over the block'.(11)

More death and destruction may take place unless the international community takes action to prevent it. The Lundin road is currently being extended beyond the Thar Jath site to the port of Adok on the Nile. Efforts are also reportedly underway to build two spurs radiating out from the road: one to SPLA-controlled Boaw, site of an  old capped well, and another to Leer, a government garrison. If Lundin's advance so far has been accompanied by the destruction of dozens of villages, what guarantee is there that its plans for development will not lead to more razing of homes?

'Graves of children litter the area'

2. Adar oil fields in Block 3

The devastation in Block 5a chronicled above is, at the time of publication, being repeated in a wide swathe of Eastern Upper Nile, from the Adar oilfield east to the Ethiopian border. Local chiefs and opposition commanders say that here too the government is attempting to drive civilians from the area in order to allow oil  exploration to proceed unimpeded. They say the attackers - primarily government militias, some of them newly organised and armed - are avoiding military targets and attacking only civilians.

OLS officials say privately that they believe the government has one aim in the area: 'to depopulate the oilfields so oil surveys can be done in peace.'(12)

Churchmen in the area say that in the year 2000 government militias burned 48 villages and displaced some 55,000 people around Adar. This area, Block 3, is where Malaysian and Chinese state oil companies have recently extended their investment under a new $30 million exploration programme.(13)

In January this year, four villages in the Guelguk area south-east of Adar were attacked and burned by government militias and mujahadeen. Some rode in on camel-back. First reports said dozens of villagers died. It was difficult identifying the bodies because they had been attacked by birds. Survivors said many of the displaced fled for 48 hours, shot at and pursued the entire time. OLS officials said the displaced were sleeping under trees, without blankets, medicine or water.

One of the few organisations operating in Northern Upper Nile is the Johannesburg-based International Relief and Development agency (IRD). IRD's director, Derek Hammond, visited the region several times last year and said he saw graves of children 'littering' the area.14 'People do not build shelters or huts or stay in one area because this immediately presents them as a target,' Hammond said. 'Families  live under trees in the bush, mile after mile, hiding under trees. They eat leaves to survive because their crops and livestock have been destroyed by government raiders. Just eight miles away, trucks travel continually up and down a bush road carrying oil from the rig to the Nile.'

The evidence of the atrocities committed along the Lundin oil road and in Eastern Upper Nile appear to condemn these areas to the fate already suffered by areas north of Bentiu, around the Heglig and Unity oilfields.

'This is not your place any more!'

3. Heglig and Unity oilfields in Blocks 1 and 2: GNPOC, including Talisman

The depopulation of the Heglig and Unity oilfields began when Chevron first discovered oil there in 1980, and has continued under the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC). This is a consortium made up of Talisman Energy (Canada), Petronas (Malaysia), and Sudapet (Sudan's state oil company).

Canadian company Talisman maintains that it found an 'empty landscape' when it joined GNPOC in 1998. It says the area was not depopulated by oil because it was never inhabited. Despite a body of evidence to the contrary, Talisman repeated this assertion in late 2000, insisting that 'oil development had proceeded... without  incident' in the five years before the company began working in Sudan.15 At best, Talisman is guilty of failing to do its homework; at worst, of deliberately turning a blind eye.

In 1999, the UN Special Rapporteur Leonardo Franco accused Khartoum of using its army to create a 60 km security zone around the oilfields. He reported that half the  population in Ruweng county, the county in which Heglig and Unity lie, was displaced in attacks between April and July 1999. He said thousands of villages, and 17 churches were destroyed.16 In the Gumriak area, one of the areas targeted, a visiting team from the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) was told that government officials  had warned local people to move before the attack: 'We don't want anybody here. This is not your place any more! We have business to do here.'

In May 1999, the village of el-Toor was attacked and burned by government forces using troops and aircraft. Taban Deng, governor of Unity State at the time, told Christian Aid the village was within walking distance of a Talisman site. He said an agricultural programme he had set up at el-Toor to encourage southerners to return  to the area was burned by the troops that attacked the area - the very troops assigned to 'protect' the oilfields. He said the troops looted four of his 10 tractors and arrested his state police.

'The government's policy is to drive people inside the towns,' said Deng. 'In the bush either you run away or you are shot, burned and killed. Inside the towns they make life difficult for you.' 

Survivors of the offensive interviewed south of Bentiu said they fled empty-handed. Stripped of their homes and livelihoods, and weakened by sickness and hunger, some walked as far as 200 miles south. Others fled into the swamps bordering the Nile or to other inaccessible areas like forests. Many died on the way. 

'We heard about one group of displaced who ran into a tributary of the Bahr el-Ghazal river straight into the jaws of crocodiles,' a WFP official said.17 'That gives you an idea of the extent of their desperation. These are the stories you get to hear. What about the stories you don't hear?' 

Did GNPOC and its members, including Talisman, know about this displacement? Taban Deng says Talisman officials asked him in February 1999 if their operations had caused displacement. He told Human Rights Watch: 'I told them about the market that existed before the locals were burned out. I told Talisman about the displacement from Heglig... Our people are not safe there.' 

Talisman says Deng made no mention of displacement until a meeting with Talisman executives in Khartoum in December 1999.18 Deng recalls that meeting. But he also recalls other, earlier meetings with Talisman officials in Bentiu at which he raised the issue of displacement and told company officials of his concerns.
 

Government suspicion of southerners

Government suspicion extends not only to local people but to all southerners who might be security threats. In March last year, William Gatjang, a student at a Catholic school in Khartoum, travelled to Heglig to look for work. Within minutes of asking for directions, he says, he was seized in Heglig market by five plain clothed men armed with pistols.

'They took me into an office and registered my name,' Gatjang said.i 'They asked me what tribe I came from and I said: "Nuer." They said: "You'll spy on us and then you'll inform on us! You are SPLA!" I said: "No, I'm a student from Khartoum." They laughed at me and gave me 50 lashes with a leather whip.'

Gatjang says he was imprisoned in a rat-infested room with six other young southerners who told him that four fellow prisoners had died in the prison from injuries sustained in the two weeks before he arrived. His daily ration was a piece of bread and a glass of water. For 12 consecutive days, he claimed, he was beaten and kicked in an attempt to extract a 'confession' from him. 'They tied my hands and ankles,' he said. 'Four people took hold of me and threw me up and down. When I was weak, they interrogated me. I understood that they didn't want a southerner, and especially a Nuer, to work in the oilfields. In Khartoum they abuse us; when we come to our area looking for work they imprison us.'

Chapter 2 Flight bans and the denial of relief

The Sudanese government is now using relief as a weapon of war. To  empty the oil areas it regularly bans aid flights to the oil areas,  denying food and medicine to a people already in desperate need

In a region which is no stranger to hunger, oil is tipping the scales from food shortage to crisis point. Always precarious, life across southern Sudan is lived on a knife-edge. Drought and fighting - which drives families away from their land and crops - are perennial problems. But in Upper Nile, aid flight bans - the latest twist in the government's strategy of emptying the oil-rich areas - are fanning fears of a tragedy of the dimensions of the 1998 famine in Bahr el-Ghazal in which tens of thousands died.

While oil workers are permitted full and free access to Upper Nile, relief workers are not. Oil companies trumpet their own small humanitarian initiatives - but say nothing about the government's bans on much larger, potentially life-saving, deliveries by Operation Lifeline Sudan.

No other part of the world is as dependent on aid as southern Sudan. Lacking basic infrastructure and a functioning economy, aid is vital for the beleaguered people of southern Sudan. From the Lokichokkio complex in northern Kenya, one of the world's biggest aid operations is run by the OLS consortium. To fly into southern Sudan, OLS must receive permission from Khartoum month by month. Banning these flights, as routinely happens, can be a death sentence. If fighting does not empty the area, hunger will.

 As early as July 1999, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned of 'a humanitarian catastrophe' unless the government's flight bans on Western Upper Nile were lifted.(1)

 A year and a half later, most of those bans are still in place and others have been introduced. Pockets of extreme hunger are said to be appearing. Sixty per cent of people will depend on aid this year if they are to have enough to eat. The denial of relief to parts of Western Upper Nile is exacerbating a looming food crisis caused by  the failure of rains and the destruction of crops because of fighting. No one knows the full extent of the tragedy in Western Upper Nile. Outside witnesses cannot reach many of the affected areas because of fighting and the extremely limited access. Many displaced people have fled to mosquito-infested swamps where they cannot be reached, dying in large numbers from malaria and water-borne diseases.(2) Others prefer the bush to populated areas that are likely to be attacked, and are reluctant to emerge even on the rare occasions that relief is delivered for fear of government strikes against relief planes.(3)

Government denies access to relief planes 

Since the war spread to Western Upper Nile in 1998, many factors have conspired to impede relief operations - inter-factional fighting that prompted the withdrawal of most NGOs in 1998/99 and the intensification of aerial bombardment among them. Khartoum's refusal to let OLS deliver relief has completed the tragedy.

For the past two years, the Sudan government has refused to allow agencies operating under OLS's umbrella to fly into wide swathes of Western Upper Nile - a region so far-flung that there is no alternative to air transport. By mid-1999, OLS had virtually no access to Western Upper Nile. In March 2000, Khartoum gave the  go-ahead for need assessments but then denied the access required to alleviate that need.

Khartoum's 'denials' are only occasionally motivated by genuine security considerations. Locations given the green light by OLS's own security office are frequently put out of bounds by the government - most critically, for virtually all of last year, relief centres like Nhialdiu and Mankien where the displaced fled precisely because they were free of fighting. Eight locations in Western Upper Nile have  been consistently denied relief: Duar, Ganyiel, Gumriak, Leer, Mankien, Nhialdhu, Toy and Wicok, plus, less frequently, Kuach.(4)

As a result of the government bans, villagers displaced from the Bentiu-Thar Jath oil road in Lundin's Block 5a shuttled backwards and forwards in a futile and increasingly desperate search for food, medicine and clothing.

LiuLiu, the octogenarian grandfather burned out of his home village of Chotyiel, walked first to Chang, the closest relief centre. But the government had banned aid deliveries to Chang and there was no relief. From Chang he walked to Nhialdiu, only to find it too was on the banned list. And so he returned to Chang, waiting only to borrow  a pair of shorts so he would not have to walk naked. 'In Chang we found only wild fruits,' he said shortly after arriving in Nhialdiu.5 'So we walked ten days to get here. We expected the UN to help us here because there is an airstrip, but we have found  nothing. We brought nothing with us when we fled. No food, no blankets, no mosquito nets. No lines or hooks for fishing. Nothing to enable us to survive.'

A local woman, Martha Nyaring, summed up the bewilderment of the local people. 'We do not understand why the UN has brought nothing,' she said. 'There has been no fighting here all year.'

A cat-and-mouse game

To limit the damage caused by the flight bans, OLS has developed a system of alternative airstrips, playing a cat-and-mouse game with Khartoum in an effort to enforce its mandate without open confrontation.6 But these airstrips are often far from the displaced, who tend to flee along clan lines to traditional relief centres. In its 2000/2001 needs assessment, WFP reported that some people walked for as many as ten hours to reach a relief location. In the rainy season, many people could not reach any relief site.(7)

 'The bulk of the population that once lived in villages along the road and within walking distance of OLS airstrips are now nearly beyond reach,' an OLS official said in January this year, citing both government bans and OLS bans motivated by insecurity and the presence of government forces. 'Communities in need cannot be assisted at this time. We do not have a clear understanding of where these populations are, due to the recent fighting, and what their intentions might be. We do know that all these locations suffered poor harvests due to drought and what little food they had was lost  in the rounds of fighting that began last July.'(8)

In September last year, a senior OLS official told colleagues that the OLS would take Khartoum's denial of access 'to the highest levels of the Security Council' if necessary. But rather than join battle on access, OLS agreed not only to submit a list of locations to which it wanted to fly a month in advance, but also to specify which aircraft would be flying to which location on which exact day - an almost impossible target.

The field director of a British NGO - one of the few NGOs to operate in the area - said the tightening of access had 'massively reduced' his flexibility. It had also endangered staff in the field, he said. (9)

Some OLS officials said Khartoum's conditions were no different from those imposed by any sovereign state. But they also said colleagues in Khartoum had recommended against increasing pressure on the government. 'These conditions are crippling. They mean we have no emergency response capacity,' said a senior Unicef staffer. 'The crisis has been building up in Western Upper Nile since 1998. We should be rolling over locations all the time. Instead OLS basically has no presence in Western Upper Nile.'(10)

Local Sudanese NGOs have been struggling to provide some assistance but the aid delivered has been a far cry from meeting the real needs of people, both within and outside government-controlled areas.

The medical emergency

Healthcare has always been poor in Western Upper Nile. But over the past two years, the government flight ban, continuing insecurity and the failure of OLS to respond have all combined to create a medical emergency. As a result, needless death from illness and disease, on a colossal scale, is a reality across the region.

'There is virtually nothing in the whole of Western Upper Nile,' says an OLS official.11 'At the most basic level, there's a vastly increased risk of disease among the displaced who are living rough and scratching around for food. Unicef is supposed to be supplying medicines, but it isn't - and there's not a location in Western Upper  Nile where we couldn't have dropped medicines.'

Even before the town of Nhialdiu was burned to the ground, the only medicines available were those on sale in the market. Looted from NGO stores in Bentiu by government militias, they were prohibitively expensive and the young men selling them did little business. Instead, in a heart-rending exercise in futility, women and children continued to queue at the old OLS-supplied dispensary - even though  it ran out of drugs in September 1999. 'We are even seeing diseases we didn't know before like hepatitis and brucellosis,' said medical coordinator Abraham Riak of the SRRA. 'But I am a coordinator with nothing to coordinate. Every day people come  to what is called the dispensary, but there is no food and no drugs. I tell the mothers: "Take your child home to die. Better to die at home than in a dispensary with nothing to dispense."'(12)

Displacement from the oil war has also created new waves of illness. The burning of Nhialdiu in July sent more than 10,000 inhabitants fleeing, some as far as Bahr el-Ghazal.

Health worker Joseph Chang, interviewed three months later at a health clinic in partially rebuilt Nhialdiu, reported: 'I have been to all the villages around Nhialdiu and found many children dying, mostly because of diarrhoea.

'When they escaped from Nhialdiu the children drank dirty water. They had no good food and whenever they got diarrhoea they had no resistance. The situation is very, very bad. You cannot imagine how hard it is. People come with so many diseases - and you have nothing to help them with.'13

One of the most common diseases in the region, kala azar, had been brought under control by 1998, but is now spiralling out of control. Kala azar is a bacterial disease of the liver and spleen, to which the malnourished are especially vulnerable. It is fatal in 95 per cent of cases. After renewed fighting and the looting of NGO compounds, key programmes, including a hospital in Leer, were closed. In the absence of medical services, the incidence of the disease today can only be very roughly estimated. But a spot check carried out at Nhialdiu airstrip by MSF-Holland in January 2000 found that 39 out of 50 people tested positive, a dramatic increase on the usual rate of one in three.

'In the name of God, you cannot find a single seed!'

Wherever war strikes in southern Sudan, hunger follows. In Western Upper Nile, the WFP, the main provider of food aid, targeted an average of 250,000 people last year, roughly half the estimated population. This gives the oil areas of Western Upper Nile the highest proportion of needy people anywhere in Sudan. A new WFP report claims that children are at greater nutritional risk here than anywhere else in the south.

All of the hungry will not receive aid. In a good month, using alternative airstrips, the WFP claims to have been able to access 60 per cent of the needy; in a bad month, only 40 per cent. Relief agencies say the real figure is probably even lower than 40 per cent.(14)

In Eastern Upper Nile, the site of the Adar oilfield, the situation is even worse. Here there is virtually no relief.

IRD director Derek Hammond described what he found in areas around Adar: 'Fields of destroyed crops with no evidence of any type of food, a handful of local people scratching around in a swamp for something to eat, children chewing on the roots of a plant, women reaching up into trees to pick leaves which are boiled on a fire and  eaten - not for any nutritional value, but merely to satisfy hunger pains.'

A 41 per cent reduction in WFP's staff in southern Sudan has combined with expectations of a substantial decline in food production in 2000/2001 to create real concern for the coming year. In a report published in October 2000, USAID's Famine Early Warning System said late rains, inadequate inputs following poor harvests in 1999, increased insecurity and displacement, late-season flooding and crop damage had combined to augur a 50 per cent decline on the production levels of 1999/2000.

In one area of Upper Nile - the Koch area close to the Thar Jath oilfield, repeatedly attacked by SPLA forces - an OLS assessment team found a 'severe emergency situation looming' in October last year. They warned that food interventions would be needed right up to October this year.15 But, because of oil, that may prove impossible: a number of airstrips close to the Bentiu-Thar Jath oil road have  already been put off-limits - 'red-lighted' - by OLS's own security office because of  the presence of government troops on the road. OLS fears that aid deliveries will draw civilians to distribution points and make them vulnerable to attack.

The situation in many areas was already critical at the time of the last planting in
 April/May 2000. By the end of the planting season, two of the most important
 traditional relief centres in Western Upper Nile, Nhialdiu and Chang, had received no
 OLS flights and had nothing to plant. SRRA relief coordinator Kut Yang said the
 11,000 displaced people in Nhialdiu had consumed all the host population's seeds. 'In the name of God, you cannot find a single seed,' he said.

There was nothing left to plant, and no food aid to fill the gap.

In the nearby rebuilt village of Roubnyagai, women were feeding their families on water lily roots gathered from the river. 'Five women have been taken by crocodiles,' said Martha Nyaring. 'But what choice do we have? We have no seeds at all. If we don't go to the river our children may die.'

Collecting wild food is becoming increasingly hazardous. All over Western Upper Nile in the wake of the fighting between Nuer rivals Peter Parr and Peter Gadet, civilians report that wild animals have encroached on burned and abandoned villages, making the search for wild foods increasingly unsafe.

Across the region, displacement is placing unbearable pressure on host communities, themselves already barely surviving. Even in the north, the impact is felt. A Christian Aid visitor in July 2000 witnessed the overcrowding and hardship of about 64,000 displaced and their cattle on the inhabitants of Bentiu town.

In the south, WFP officials warn that Nuer displaced people flooding into Bahr el-Ghazal are creating a 'timebomb'. Dinka officials in Akop payam, which is hosting Nuer displaced from all across Western Upper Nile, agree.

'The little cultivation of the first internally displaced persons was spoiled by drought and new displaced people are arriving with few cows,' said SRRA field supervisor Peter Akec.(16) 'They are very weak and most are sick because they were moving through water. They are begging from the Dinka. I don't think the Dinka can continue to share the little they have.'

Dhieu Paul, an SRRA relief official in Pagarau, 320 km miles south of Bentiu, said the displaced were arriving in terrible condition. All were hungry. Many were suffering from malaria and diarrhoea.(17)

'Before oil, our region was peaceful,' said Chief Malony Kolang, a Nuer chief just returned from escorting a group of displaced to safety in Pagerau. 'People were cultivating with their cattle. When the pumping began, the war began. Antonovs and helicopter gunships began attacking the villages - sometimes four times every day. All  the farms have been destroyed. Everything around the oil fields has been destroyed. Oil has brought death.'

Soft targets: the war on humanitarian agencies

In addition to denying access, the government of Sudan has taken its war directly to relief agencies. SPLA forces have killed relief workers and routinely loot relief in attacks on front-line oil villages. But government attacks are more concentrated,  more systematic and more sustained.

Last year, the US Committee for Refugees (USCR) reports, the government launched at least 152 aerial attacks on humanitarian agencies and civilians throughout the south - eight in the first three weeks of 2001 alone. USCR also reported the increased use of helicopter gunships in the oil areas.

'Once they get people out, they have to keep them out,' says an OLS observer.

 In recent months, attacks on relief agencies have spread from Western to Eastern Upper Nile, where Chinese and Arab oil firms have formed a joint consortium to develop existing oil fields in Adar Yei and explore other fields in a 75-square-kilometre area east of the White Nile.

In an attack last May on Mading, north-east of the town of Nasir, government-backed forces placed anti-personnel mines inside the compound of one NGO, outside the primary health centre and at a water point. Syringes and needles in the health centre were piled up and doused with fuel. All NGO compounds were looted. Seeds delivered by CARE the day before the attack were stolen. An OLS security officer who visited Mading after the attack said the government forces were  applying a policy of 'trash and run'.ii

Five months later, in October, a government militia moving south from the Adar area attacked two villages with an NGO presence. In one village, Uleng, they sprayed the compound of the NGO - the International Rescue Committee - with machine gun and rocket fire, shouting: 'We're going to take UN workers!' IRC employees were not in their tents. Had they been, OLS investigators said, they would have died.

'We think we're seeing the beginning of a policy to chase relief workers from the area,' said a Unicef field officer. 'The attack was vicious even by 1998 standards.'

That year marked the start of the government's war on relief in Western Upper Nile. In inter-factional fighting for Leer town in 1998, government-backed forces destroyed an MSF hospital and looted NGO compounds. The Catholic church's grinding machine and an NGO car were burned. A second MSF compound in nearby Duar was also looted and burned. Soon after, all relief agencies were forced to withdraw  from Leer. MSF had been providing therapeutic and supplementary feeding to 751 children.

'The government troops burnt everything on their way including our compound, the huts which made the clinics, the medical supplies we had brought in and the huts in the villages nearby,' one of the NGOs affected said recently. 'This was undoubtedly because of our proximity to the oilfields. Since then, we haven't been able to go  back to that place due to continued insecurity. There are no other agencies providing humanitarian assistance to one of the most vulnerable populations in south Sudan.'

Another NGO, which asked not to be named for fear of inviting government retaliation, has no presence on the ground but flies in every month to meet local health workers. In June, its staff stayed in the area overnight. Antonovs bombed 24 hours after they left and ground troops attacked the following day, burning all the villages on their path. They destroyed the medical supplies the NGO had brought  in and the food WFP had dropped some weeks earlier.

Chapter 3 Paying for the war: oil for arms

Dollar for dollar, oil pays for the war: $1million a day in oil income for $1 million spent on defence

Sudan't military budget has more than doubled since construction began on the Red Sea pipeline, rising from US$162 million in 1998 to a projected US$327 million in 2000.1 For a country as poor as Sudan this is a huge amount. Khartoum spends approximately half the state budget - US$1 million a day - on the war in southern Sudan. Profits from oil exports are estimated at approximately US$400 million a  year, which is enough to pay for the entire war.

After early protestations that their new-found oil wealth would be pumped into development, not arms, Sudanese leaders are now throwing caution to the wind and acknowledging the all-important role played by their re-launched oil industry. Speaking to student army conscripts in Khartoum last July, 11 months after pumping began, armed forces spokesman General Mohamed Osman Yassin announced that Sudan was manufacturing ammunition, mortars, tanks and armoured personnel carriers thanks to an 'unprecedented economic boom - particularly in the field of oil  exploration and exportation, and the remarkable progress in light and heavy industries.' 2 He said Khartoum would reach 'self-sufficiency in light, medium and heavy weapons from its local production by the end of the year 2000.'

A new report by the influential Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says: 'Oil is shifting the balance of military power in favor of Khartoum. It has prompted Khartoum to focus its military efforts, including forced mass displacement of civilians, on oilfields and the pipeline.' Oil - and the revenue which flows from the oilfields - is fundamentally reshaping the war and making the prospects of peace even more remote.

The weapons factories
 Before oil, Sudan manufactured ammunition on a relatively small scale at a factory in Shaggara, south of Khartoum. Sources inside the arms industry say Sudan today has two huge sites. The first of the new sites, known as the Military Manufacturing Complex (MMC), is split into two sections: military and non-military manufacturing.(3) The military section, which reportedly specialises in light weapons, machine guns and ammunition, is a huge complex on the Khartoum-Medani highway. Workers live in accommodation inside the complex and security is tight. The second site, a complex called GIAD, cost US$450 million. It was inaugurated by President Omar el-Bashir in October 1999, 13 months after oil began flowing through the pipeline. Today the government presents GIAD solely as a civilian manufacturing centre: GIAD promotions show gleaming new vehicles rolling off the assembly line and boast of its new vehicle manufacturing capabilities. But at the opening ceremony, Bashir was more explicit. Speaking at the site, some 40 km south of Khartoum, Bashir said the complex was already producing rocket-propelled grenades, machine-guns and mortars - and was still expanding. 'We will produce mortars and tanks,' he said.  'Then we will go on to warplanes and rockets.'(4)

Commander Gadet, the former government ally who defected to the south in October 1999, told Christian Aid he had collected weapons from several of the new plants before he left the government. He had seen military vehicles and tanks, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns being assembled under the supervision of Chinese engineers.5 Gadet showed Christian Aid RPG-9s that carried no  identification marks. He said these weapons - lightweight anti-tank weapons that can be pulled by hand - were among those being made in Khartoum under the supervision of Chinese engineers. 'Most of those assembled inside are unmarked,' he explained. 'The government doesn't want to show where its oil money is going.'(6)

OLS security officers also believe Sudan's new domestic production is playing a significant role in supplying the south with the low-tech weapons that cause most civilian casualties. In recent months, they have seen new AK-47 submachine guns with refurbished yellow stocks, and boxes of ammunition so pristine they believe they must originate in northern Sudan. 'All the other boxes of ammunition I have seen  are dirty old things. But these were brand new. It would therefore seem they are coming in from the north and no place else,' said one security officer.(7)

Supplies from Europe

In 1994 the EU created an embargo on arms to Sudan banning all exports of arms, ammunition and military equipment. The embargo covers not only 'weapons designed to kill and their ammunition, weapon platforms, non-weapon platforms and ancillary equipment' but also 'spare parts, repairs, maintenance and transfer of military  technology'.

Highly-placed sources in Khartoum say a German company played a key role in the supply of non military equipment used in setting up the MMC complex. The company, Thosco, is based in Hamburg. Its website, www.thosco.de, lists a range of products including spare parts and industrial chemicals. Until September it also listed refurbished machinery. Clearly sales of machine tools for military use would be  in breach of the embargo. Sales of industrial tools would not. However, experts say it is not difficult to 'tweak' dual-purpose machine tools to make them suitable for arms production. 'There is nothing illegal about this,' said an official with BWB, Germany's  arms sales and procurement agency. 'But it's unacceptable. It has to be stopped.'

BWB officials approached by Christian Aid said Thosco has in the past supplied machine tools, perfectly legally, to Iran's Defence Industries Organisations. They say they have no knowledge of sales to Sudan, which has close ties to Iran. One source in BWB said that because of German privacy laws, it is difficult to find out what is  happening: 'Thosco is not talking. It has battened down the hatches.'

 In November last year, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that President Bashir had ordered the GIAD project to be carried out in great secrecy, to prevent international opposition that might lead to calls for a ban on dual-purpose products.(8) 

Arms from China and Poland

Attempts to globalise the EU arms embargo have so far failed. Shipments of weapons regularly arrive in Sudan - mainly from China and Eastern Europe. 

Taban Deng, who as governor and state minister had access to strategic information, said he believed the new revenue was also enabling the government to increase its imports of arms, many of which come from private brokers who fabricate a complex paper trail of East European suppliers and legitimate destinations on Sudan's borders.9 He said 'a lot of tanks, more Antonovs and Russian gunships' had come in from Eastern Europe, while China was supplying artillery - especially 130mm - and vehicles.

China, the largest shareholder in the Greater Nile consortium, is the key player in Sudan's arms effort and has sold arms to successive Sudanese governments since the early 1980s, becoming a major supplier in the 1990s. According to Human Rights Watch, Beijing attaches no conditions to arms sales other than monetary ones and oil concessions - 'guns for oil' deals or, in industry jargon, 'offset packages'. Weapons deliveries by China since 1995 include ammunition, tanks, helicopters and fighter aircraft.(10)

In one of the most significant transactions since Sudan discovered oil, China is said to have sold Khartoum SCUD missiles at the end of 1996 in a deal underwritten by a $200 million Malaysian government loan against future oil extraction. A former embassy official in Kuala Lumpur, who claimed to have witnessed the deal, said it was arranged by Sudan's state minister for external relations, Dr Mustafa Osman Ismail.(11)

The defector in question, Abdel Aziz Ahmed Khattab, told Human Rights Watch that the Malaysian national oil company was used as a cover to ship arms to Sudan: 'Arms deals agreed upon have been shipped by sea, in the name of the Malaysian National Petroleum Company and the Chinese National Petroleum Company, under the guise of petroleum exploration equipment. This is according to an agreement concluded between the government in Khartoum and these companies in Kuala  Lumpur under which they provide weaponry and military equipment in exchange for being given concessions for oil explorations.'(12)

As if to illustrate what oil would mean for the war, 20 T-55 tanks arrived in Sudan on the very day that the first 600,000 barrels of oil were shipped from Port Sudan.(13) The tanks were traced to Poland's state-run Cenzin arms company. However, the company cancelled a second delivery under threat of economic reprisal from  the United States.(14) Cenzin's reconditioned tanks cost only $30,000 each - an indication of how far US$327 million can be stretched in a low-tech war like Sudan's.(15)
German helicopters converted into gunships?

 There is also evidence that Khartoum may have acquired German-made helicopters. Early last year, sources at Hover Dynamics, a Johannesburg-based firm for pilot training and helicopter maintenance, said they had won a contract to train Sudanese pilots on German-built B0 105 helicopters - the same model as South Africa  itself flies.16 The sources said the helicopters, initially conceived as medical evacuation helicopters, were being converted by Khartoum for use as gunships. They said eight had already been delivered and more were en route. 'It's not very difficult to cobble some anti-tank missiles on the side of a helicopter,' commented Paul  Jackson, editor of Jane's All the World's Aircraft.(17)

Commander Gadet told Christian Aid his forces had shot down three gunships - two Russian-made Hinds and one German.18 Gadet displayed the German 'Varta' battery taken from one of the gunships, which he said had German writing inside the cabin.

Taban Deng also said a small number of Puma helicopters have recently been seen transporting senior officers in the oil area, sometimes landing at company airstrips at Heglig and Rub Kona. The Puma is a French-made transport helicopter favoured in the oil industry - widely used, for example, in the North Sea.

Aerial bombardment by Antonovs and helicopter gunships are one of the biggest changes in the war since oil production began, according to people living in the oil areas. 'In the morning they attacked on the ground and then they bombed the whole village,' said Chief Malony Kolang, one of thousands of Nuer displaced by oil. 'They crushed people with tanks. People couldn't hide because gunships landed. So they fled.'

Money for militias

Oil revenues are paying for more than just weapons. Since oil revenue starting coming in, the government has hiked the pay and improved the benefits of the forces fighting for it - regular troops and militias alike.

'In the financial year 2000/2001, salaries of civil servants were raised by 15 per cent because of oil - but army salaries by 80 per cent,' Deng told Christian Aid. 'Because of oil, there are also better services. Officers now have cars. In the oilfields, you have a car from captain up. If you are operational, your family is well treated.'

He added: 'Two or three years ago, young men were reluctant to go the army. But now people are going back to the army because of good services and salaries.

'In 1999, before the army had all this oil money, the army enrolled less than a battalion. Hardly anyone wants to fight for a jihad - holy war - which cannot be measured in terms of household benefit. But everyone is in favour of a war that has cut the price of cooking gas by half.'i Last year, he said, thousands volunteered. Deng also said that before his defection the government had earmarked US$10  million for militias in this year's dry-season offensive. 'A single militia person in operations is being paid 50,000 Sudanese pounds pocket money. He is given food, a rifle and ammunition. The rifle is his; he doesn't have to return it. If his horse or camel is killed, the minimum compensation he will get is 700,000 Sudanese pounds.'

Asked what these sums meant for a militiaman, Deng replied: 'It's little to him. The biggest thing is the booty he's going to have. Any cattle is his. A child fallen captive is his.' 

 ... but no money for development

The increase of funding for the war is not matched by an increase in funding for southern development. In August 2000, Khartoum announced that it had allocated approximately US$3 million for development in the south. This is the equivalent of one per cent of military spending. When Deng resigned, he accused the government of investing its oil wealth in the army rather than in development projects for southern areas affected by oil: 'When I was governor I never received a single penny from the oil so I could build a school,' he said.

Chapter 4 Foreign oil: how complicit?

A year after a Canadian commission reported human rights violations in oil areas, oil companies still claim not to know the extent of the death and destruction on their land. Is this ignorance - or part of a PR offensive?

FOREIGN OIL COMPANIES have built Sudan's oil industry. Agip began exploration in 1959 in the Red Sea. US oil giant Chevron discovered oil in the south in 1979, but pulled out in 1984 after three expatriate workers were kidnapped and executed by the SPLA.

Today, a network of Western and Asian companies provide the critical expertise, finance and technology for Sudan's oil industry. Talisman Energy (Canada), Petronas (Malaysia), CNPC (China), Lundin (Sweden) and OMV (Austria) have built production and refining facilities and financed the building of the 1,600 km pipeline taking oil from the oil fields to the Red Sea. Royal Dutch Shell built a refinery at Port Sudan. Chinese companies built the pipeline using materials that were supplied by the European company, Europipe, owned by Mannesmann (Germany), British Steel (now Corus), and a French company. As Chapter 5 describes, British companies also contribute. Weir Pumps of Glasgow and Allen Power of Bedford were awarded the  contract to produce pumps and drivers in January 1998. Rolls Royce provides diesel engines and expatriate engineers to maintain them.

Claims that foreign investment in oil has not been the key to development must be dismissed as so much false modesty. When Talisman took over the job in October 1998, only 680 km of pipeline had been laid, as Human Rights Watch points out.1 Less than a year later, the 1,600 km pipeline to the Red Sea was completed, a port for oil supertankers was built at the Red Sea, more wells had been drilled, and production in Blocks 1 and 2 was up to 150,000 barrels per day, most of it for export. Fittingly, Talisman CEO James Buckee presided over the opening of the pipeline on 31 May 1999 alongside President Bashir.

These companies are doing business in Sudan in the face of massive human rights violations specifically linked to oil operations. Pleas of ignorance no longer stand up to scrutiny. The reports of the UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Sudanese organisations including the New Sudan Council of Churches, a Christian Aid partner, make the extent of the atrocities  clear. In February 2000, a Canadian delegation led by John Harker reported widespread human rights violations in both Talisman and Lundin concessions. A year on, as Chapter 1 shows, the situation is even worse.

When oil pumping resumed in 1999, SPLA leaders announced that the new pipeline, the oilfields, and oil company workers would all be regarded as legitimate military targets. But the need for protection in a war zone does not justify what is a well-documented, systematic policy of attacking civilians.

Christian Aid believes that foreign oil companies are complicit in  these human rights violations in the following ways:

 1. At company request, the Government of Sudan and its allied militias provide security for the oilfields.

 2. Facilities paid for by oil companies, including roads and airstrips, are used by government forces for military purposes.

 3. Revenues from oil production and exports increase the government's ability to wage war, as Chapter 3 shows.

 4. The uncritical presence of international oil companies fosters impunity and adds credibility to a government which systematically violates human rights.

'We are very relaxed We think this foreign investment can only be evidence of tranquillity and a prosperous atmosphere.' Adbelgai Kabir, deputy director, Sudan's Peace and Humanitarian Affaires Department

'Remaining in Sudan is the moral thing to do.' Jacqueline Sheppard and Reg Manhas, Talisman Energy Inc.

But it is not just the companies which are complicit. Oil exploration in Sudan continues because of the huge potential for revenue. It is also motivated by the policies of national governments, some of them owners of the oil companies operating in Sudan. Current investment by Chinese and Malaysian state oil firms reflect those countries' desire to secure reliable supplies of oil and to give political support to the Sudanese government. The European Union has a policy of 'critical dialogue' with the  Government of Sudan, which is now courting European companies (oil and non-oil) for investment opportunities.

Moreover, as the report by the US think tank CSIS recommends, governments of the companies engaged in Sudan also have responsibilities. These are the governments of Canada, China, Malaysia, Austria, France, Qatar and Sweden, whose companies (state owned and private) are directly involved in Sudan.

Only US companies are not investing in Sudan, as sanctions have been imposed due to the Sudanese government's alleged sponsorship of terrorism and poor human rights record. These sanctions prohibit trade between the US and Sudan, as well as investment by US businesses in Sudan. As the next chapter notes, CNPC had to  restructure its corporate flotation so that major investors such as BP and Shell could buy shares.

 1. The provision of security to the oil companies Talisman and CNPC companies have asked the Government of Sudan to provide security in the Heglig and Unity oilfields. This security has been provided by government troops, local defence forces and  organised armed militias. Lundin initially sought to employ a local Nuer force, but backed down under pressure from Khartoum and is now protected by government troops.

Two divisions of regular troops, the 10th and the 15th, guard the oilfields around Bentiu, supported by mujahedeen - holy warriors - commanded by army officers. It was these regular forces assigned to the protection of oil who burned villages close to Talisman's rig at el-Toor in 1999.2 The militia of Paulino Matip, an illiterate and  exceptionally bloody warlord whom Khartoum has rewarded with the rank of major general in the regular army, operates out of Bentiu, capital of Unity State.

These forces are all accused of committing human rights abuses against civilians. The perceived needs of the oil companies to operate without interruption have taken precedence over the rights of the Sudanese people living in the oil areas not to be killed, injured or displaced from their homelands.

This report has documented the burning of villages around Nhialdiu and the massive displacement, and burning of villages, in Lundin's Block 5a. Most of these attacks were carried out by government forces, using aerial bombardment from Antonovs and helicopter gunships, and troops on the ground. This offensive follows the Harker report's documentation of the displacement that occurred from Talisman's concession area during 1999 - a government campaign that led to a 50 per cent decline in the permanent population of Ruweng county and large numbers of others earlier being placed in 'peace camps' near to government-held towns of Bentiu and Pariang.(3)

Peter Gadet, a commander under Matip before he returned to the south, said that Matip's forces killed scores of civilians, raped and abducted women and burned and destroyed homes south of Bentiu in the months before the pipeline opened. Gadet's own men participated in many of those abuses. He said the main purpose of the atrocities was to gain control of the oilfields.(5)

There is no apparent accountability for the actions of government forces and government-sponsored militias demanded by the oilcompanies. Nor is there a transparent relationship between the companies and the Government of Sudan. Despite written requests from Christian Aid, no oil company has been willing to disclose the terms of its agreements with the forces assigned to it. Talisman cited 'confidentiality reasons' for its refusal. Talisman, Petronas and Lundin have written  to Christian Aid expressing general concerns over allegations of human rights violations.6 However, to Christian Aid's knowledge, no company has acknowledged a single instance of abuse within its area of operations.

The degree of the companies' contractual complicity with the government's war effort cannot be known while their contracts are 'confidential'. In this regard, the example set by international oil companies in other war-torn, oil-rich countries gives cause for  concern. In Colombia, oil companies have entered into arrangements which oblige them to furnish the Colombian military with goods and services including security and communications equipment, information, engineering and health services, helicopter time and land transport. They have also made direct cash payments.(7)

Taban Deng, former governor of Unity State, claims that GNPOC pays funds to the Sudanese military. He told Christian Aid that he believed that 'GNPOC gives the Ministry of Defence a lot of money. The companies know that for them to operate they have to support the army.'8

Oil companies operating in Sudan must state clearly what their obligations are to the Sudan army and whether they pay for the troops whose protection they have sought. They must make public the agreements they have with security forces. Reliance on government forces carries a moral responsibility for any abuses those forces may  carry out. Secrecy can only encourage these abuses to take place with impunity.

There is already concern about new displacement from heavily populated SPLA-controlled areas close to the town of Mankien in Block 4, where Talisman is drilling three new wells.(9) Shortly before Talisman announced the venture in November, helicopter gunships firing rockets filled with metal shards wounded more than 50 people in a two-minute attack on Mankien.(10) Days after the announcement,  government Antonovs subjected the villages in the area to high-altitude indiscriminate bombardment.(11)

 2. The military use of oil company resources: the 'all-weather war' Government forces use the infrastructure of the oil companies in pursuit of their war aims. Peter Gadet said: 'The companies are giving power to the govern-ment to drive us away. They are helping the government with everything. They are making the roads, bringing  the cars, making the airstrips where the bombers and helicopter gunships sleep. They are bringing the guns and the engineers that make the guns.'(12)

In the GNPOC concession, all-weather roads built by the oil companies were used by government armoured personnel carriers in their offensive in Ruweng county in May 1999. Amphibious vehicles owned by the oil companies have been used to build the roads across the rivers, assisting the movement of government troops.

Shared airstrips

More importantly, as air power becomes a greater factor in the war, government helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers have been armed and re-fuelled at the Heglig airstrip and then used against civilians. The Heglig airstrip was a small government dirt airstrip that the GNPOC lengthened and converted to all-weather use. A government garrison is stationed next to the airstrip. The airstrip is now the principal all-weather airstrip in the region. Reports from Heglig say it is currently being tarmacked. Using the airstrip offers enormous advantages to government forces, as Heglig is roughly 450 km further south than El Obeid, a northern base - bringing  troops much closer to their military targets.

A year ago, Harker judged that 'flights clearly linked to the oil war have been a regular feature of life at the Heglig airstrip.' He said: 'Canadian chartered helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft which use the strip have shared the facilities with helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers of the government of Sudan.'

A number of southerners who have worked at Heglig told Christian Aid that gunships used to be accommodated in a small hangar on the edge of the airstrip. The sources said the gunships 'gave cover to oil workers,' but also attacked civilian targets. One of Talisman's own security advisors, a former employee of the British security firm  Rapport, said privately that a gunship unloaded ammunition at Heglig only minutes before the Harker team arrived on its closely monitored inspection visit.(13) Joshua Latjor, a Nuer who worked in Heglig during 1998/99, said 'government planes shared the airstrip with the company. They could even land there at night.'(14)

Talisman has given various accounts of the use of the Heglig airstrip. It initially denied that the government used the airstrip at all. Then it said its contract with the government allowed it to be used for 'defensive' purposes. But in a response to the Harker report, Talisman CEO Dr James Buckee said Khartoum appeared to have  exceeded the terms of the contract: Talisman had complained to Khartoum about the use of the airstrip on the grounds that it appeared to go beyond the demands of defence and logistics.15 Dr Buckee indicated that government use of the airstrip had stopped. Then, at its AGM in May 2000, Talisman was asked whether it could  guarantee that its airstrip in the oilfields of Sudan would not be used to support or assist any military purpose. Dr Buckee said that the company was concerned about the use of the airstrip; that the airstrip had been used in the past for some supporting role for military purposes, but that the company had made it clear to the Government of Sudan that this was not acceptable. He said that Talisman hoped that the airstrip would not be used in the future for military purposes.

The airstrip is still apparently being used. A 24-year-old student,  Anwar Abdullah Abduallah, told Christian Aid how when he was taken for obligatory military services in May 2000, he and 250 other conscripts were flown from Khartoum to Heglig in a government plane. After two weeks at Heglig, they were told they were being sent to deliver food to a government garrison. Instead they were sent to  fight on the front line.

Talisman receives security advice from a British company, Rapport. Christian Aid has learned that some Rapport officials who have been seconded to Talisman have warned Talisman against letting the government use the Heglig airstrip for military purposes. They have reportedly told Talisman that it is difficult for Rapport to fulfil its security brief in these circumstances. They have also told Talisman it is not prudent to give government commanders room on aircraft leased by Talisman. Asked for comment, an official at Rapport's London headquarters said: 'I don't think I should comment. 

In fact, I don't want to say anything at all.'(16( He then hung up the telephone.

Taban Deng told Christian Aid that Talisman frequently gave space on its aircraft to government commanders, among them State Minister for Defence Brig. Ibrahim Shamseddine.

A second airstrip, longer than Heglig's, was built at Rub Kona in 1999, paid for by Lundin, according to Taban Deng. Rub Kona is headquarters of the army's 15th Division and Lundin's base camp. Deng told Christian Aid that government planes use both airstrips, sometimes for Antonov bombers that carry no military markings.

Outside GNPOC's drilling area, government bombers attacking in and around the oilfields fly on aviation gas refined at the El Obeid refinery on the GNPOC pipeline.(17)

Troops use all-weather oil roads

The army also makes use of a huge network of all-weather roads built and financed by the oil companies, both to clear existing oilfields of unwanted populations and to open up previously inaccessible oil-rich areas to development. Roads in the GNPOC concession are banked up as much as six feet to prevent flooding during the rainy  season. Some are lit up night and day, giving government forces a clear advantage in their war against the SPLA.(18)

'Every tree and bush has been destroyed,' said a foreign observer who asked not to be identified. 'The rebels have nowhere to hide. These all-weather roads and airstrips are making this an all-weather war for the government.'

The roads extend to frontline garrison towns: Mayom, Wangkei, Bentiu, Pariang, and Abiemnom. Taban Deng told Christian Aid he was never consulted about the road system, either as governor of Unity State or later as State Minister for Roads and Communications.19 He said company executives told him the roads were to enable the army to 'secure the oil from afar'.

The roads have become an integral part of the military drive. Last year, Anwar Abdullah and his fellow conscripts were driven to the front along oil roads. Deng said the government's plans for its 2001 offensive include the recapture of Gogrial, the frontline of SPLA-controlled Bahr el-Ghazal, by moving troops along GNPOC's  Heglig-Abiemnom road.

Deng said the government also plans to push into Western Upper Nile down the Rub Kona-Thar Jath road financed by Lundin, using spurs of the road yet to be built across areas already burned and depopulated. He said even the Ministry of Energy had expressed surprise at the size of the budget drawn up by the Ministry of Defence to secure the Thar Jath road and oilfield. Lundin also paid for half the cost of  the Rub Kona-Heglig road, Deng said, at a cost of up to US$400,000 per km. It put up some US$10 million to build a semi-permanent bridge across the river Jur south of Rub Kona. The bridge enables government troops garrisoned in Rub Kona to push into oil-rich areas south of Bentiu in Western Upper Nile.

Giving vehicles for the ground war There are also reports that the oil companies are giving the government vehicles that are being used in the ground war. Deng and  Gadet told Christian Aid that GNPOC handed 50 trucks to the government's deputy chief of staff for operations, Mohamed Ahmad Shagaf, in a ceremony in Bentiu at the end of 1998. They said the lorries were painted with camouflage colours and used to transport troops along the Rub Kona-Thar Jath road. Most of the cars used by  the army came from the consortium, they said.

The Companies' response

Faced with evidence of human rights abuses, the response of the oil companies has been muted. Talisman, as the largest western company involved in Sudan, has had to face sustained campaigning from churches, human rights groups and shareholder activists since 1998.

'In five years of operation, staff in the field have not seen any evidence of forced displacement or relocation in our area of operation…' Dr James Buckee, Chief Executive Officer, Talisman Energy

Talisman

Responding to criticism, Talisman says that it has developed human rights monitoring processes to investigate and document activities within GNPOC and has persuaded GNPOC to adopt a code of conduct that 'includes the concept of human rights protection'.20 It has also reported to Christian Aid that Dr Buckee and a senior member of Talisman staff met government officials in Khartoum to 'advocate'  respect for human rights.... the protection of civilians in conflict zones [and] the cessation of the bombing of civilian targets in south Sudan.' However, the human rights situation has not improved since these meetings; on the contrary, it has worsened.

Talisman has also outlined the benefits the company is said to bring to the local community. In a letter circulated to shareholders on 23 November 1999, Dr Buckee said that Talisman had provided a hospital, a vaccination programme, employment, water wells, and hundreds of miles of roads. 'Projects funded by the oil project,' he stated, 'have brought hope and stability to the region.' The value of these projects is evaluated in the box below.

Buckee's words stand in strong contrast to the expressed feelings of the citizens of Unity State. Their appeal to Senator Johnston asked: 'Until when will the world turn a blind eye to the Khartoum regime and allow it to do whatever it pleases with the lives of the southern people? Although you are hearing and seeing the suffering and the  atrocities committed against the southern people, yet you are unable to move to solve the problem which causes so much suffering and has claimed so many lives.... You who love humanity and freedom, we appeal to you to put an end to our misery now without delay.' .In August 2000,Talisman flew in widely publicised supplies of medicines, tents, mosquito nets and veterinary supplies for southerners displaced to Bentiu by fighting. It now has spent US$1 million on community projects, including 53 water wells. Taban Deng said Talisman's development programmes are referred to in Unity State as 'programmes of displacement' because they encourage northerners to  settle in place of displaced southerners.

Writing in the Oil & Gas Journal, two senior Talisman executives gave the official view: 'The company believes that remaining in Sudan is the moral thing to do because its involvement there is improving life for the Sudanese,' they wrote.(21)

Senior company officials have repeatedly stated that reports of human rights violations in Sudan are false, exaggerated or mere hearsay. In his 23 November letter to company sharehol