Sudan’s SPLM says reassigns oil blocks in south
By Nima Elbagir
KHARTOUM, March 8 (Reuters) – The former rebel movement in south Sudan has reassigned all the oil concession blocks in the areas it controls, including one the Khartoum government awarded to Total of France, an SPLM official said on Tuesday.
The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) has not however tried to change the status of producing fields in parts of the south under governmment control, said Kostelloe Garang, the SPLM’s secretary for international cooperation.
“There are seven blocks all in all, and all the fields in the areas under SPLM control have been given away… For instance we divided the block of Total into three blocks,” he told Reuters from Nairobi in a telephone interview.
The SPLM has signed a concession agreement for one of the three blocks, known as block Ba, with the British oil firm White Nile. But Total SA said last week it was confident of the validity of its contract for the whole of block B that was signed in 1980, before a civil war in the south began.
Kostelloe Garang declined to say which other companies had made concession agreements with the SPLM.
But he argued that any oil companies that wanted to work in the south over the past two decades should have applied to the SPLM rather than to the Khartoum government.
“Nobody should come and say to us we made an agreement with Khartoum. If we recognised Khartoum we would not have been fighting all these years… Total knew where we were, why did they not come to us?” he said.
Under a comprehensive peace agreement signed by the SPLM and the government in January after more than 20 years of war, the former rebel movement will administer southern Sudan.
The wealth-sharing part of the agreement says that oil contracts signed before Jan. 9, the date of the agreement, “shall not be subject to renegotiation”.
The SPLM says this clause applies to the agreements which it signed with oil companies, just as much as it does to the agreements signed by the Khartoum government, and more so in the case of territory under SPLM control.
RIGHTS OVER OILFIELDS
“We are not giving rights to oilfields in the north. We are only giving rights to oilfields under our control,” Garang said.
But Mohammed Siddig, a spokesman for the Sudanese government’s Ministry for Energy and Mining, told Reuters the SPLM did not have the right to award oil contracts.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters on Monday evening the SPLM was seeking to argue an issue that had already been resolved.
“There’s no need for this debate. The agreement clearly states that all issues relating to petroleum are the concern of the Ministry of Energy and Mining and the National Petroleum Commission which will be set up within it,” Ismail said. “All that is being provoked is press controversy,” he added.
The dispute could be a foretaste of other controversies over how to implement the peace agreement.
“This isn’t just about resources. Being seen to control the oil means being seen to wield influence – this is about having the upper hand,” said Mohammed Issam, a political analyst.
“This is only the beginning and it is obvious the SPLM is keen to show it will not be the ‘younger brother’,” Issam added.
White Nile has been given the right to build a pipeline through Southern Sudan into Kenya – a plan criticised by northern officials as a preparation for southern secession.
“Whenever we make such decisions, Khartoum says that we are trying to tie the South to East Africa and preparing for secession. The pipeline is merely logistical. We do not ask them in the North who they have signed agreements with,” Kostelloe Garang said.