Blood for oil

Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

May 2, 2005 — Geopolitics: Critics who claimed the war in Iraq was motivated by American lust for Mideast crude are strangely silent as China protects a murderous Sudanese regime to meet its own growing energy needs.

Darfur is actually Sudanese President Omar Hassan al Bashir’s second genocidal campaign against the people he rules. The first was waged against the Christian and animist peoples of south and central Sudan.

From the early 1990s to 2002, more than 2 million people were estimated to have perished and 5 million were displaced in an area centered on what is known as Block 5 before peace protocols were finally signed in 2004. Block 5 is an area designated for oil exploration.

The world did not pay as much attention then as it does now when the victims are the black, Sufi Muslims of Darfur in western Sudan. But lost in the carnage is perhaps the main reason for the atrocities and the main reason the United Nations has been ineffective in moving to stop the killing — China’s veto and its interest in Sudanese oil.

“It’s very clear what’s happening,” said Georgette Gagnon, deputy director of the Africa desk at Human Rights. “China is the largest foreign investor in Sudan, so it has an economic interest in ensuring that the Sudanese government is not penalized too harshly. It has been opposed to sanctions from Day One..

When the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1564, threatening Sudan with oil sanctions unless it curbed the violence in Darfur, China threatened to veto any effort to impose an embargo on Sudan, which supplies 7% of China’s oil imports.

China’s oil needs are expected to grow 10% a year for the foreseeable future, and it has invested $15 billion in developing Sudanese oil fields through its China National Petroleum Corp.

CNPC recently employed 10,000 workers to build a 900-mile long pipeline from an oil field in Kordofan province to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Just outside Khartoum is a new $700 million oil refinery built with Chinese assistance.

CNPC owns 40% — the largest single share — of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Co., a consortium that dominates Sudan’s oil fields in partnership with the national energy company and firms from Malaysia and India. It also owns the concessions for Block 6, an oil field partly located in southern Darfur.

Chinese oil workers work under the protection of Sudanese troops largely armed with Chinese-made weapons. Billboards in Khartoum carry pictures of smiling Chinese workers and the slogan: “CNPC — Your close friend and faithful partner..

China is Sudan’s largest supplier of arms, according to a former Sudan government minister. Khartoum uses Chinese-made tanks, aircraft, helicopters and other weapons to clear civilians and rebels from oil-fields rich in petroleum.

A report by the U.S.-funded Civilian Protection Monitoring Team, which investigates attacks in southern Sudan, said Sudanese government troops have “sought to clear the way for oil exploration and create a cordon sanitaire around the oil fields..

Rusthal Yackok, a survivor of an attack that wiped the town of Nhialdiu off the map on Feb. 26, 2002, an attack that killed his wife and six children and left him blind, is quoted as saying: “The Chinese want to drill for oil; that is why we were pushed out..

Thanks to China’s economic investment and military aid, Sudan’s military regime reaps roughly $2 billion a year in oil revenues. Without that, it probably couldn’t stay in power, let alone wage war against its own people.