It’s blood for oil in Southern Sudan

By Julie Flint, The daily Star

June 10, 2005 — When UN Secretary General Kofi Annan went to Darfur recently, he went to
the front line – to Labado, where more than a hundred people died in one
of those aerial bombardments the Sudan government says isn’t happening.
When he went to Southern Sudan, he went to the back line – to Rumbek,
administrative center of the new Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS),
where the children of a relief generation greeted him with banners
saying: “Kofi, no food, hunger imminent.” Had Annan gone to the front
line – to a village like Payuer, on the east bank of the White Nile – he
would have received a very different message. “The war’s not over.”

Five months after Africa’s longest-running civil war ended – officially,
at least – Rumbek and Payuer are worlds apart. Everyone visits Rumbek;
almost no one visits Payuer. Peace will not break down in Rumbek, but it
could in Payuer.

Rumbek is a seethe of UN officials, relief workers and rebel commanders
turned ministers-in-waiting. It has a secondary school (built by the
British in 1948), roads, solid brick buildings, satellite dishes and
restaurants with napkins. It has children who hold up banners that
appear to have been dictated by adults. The biggest security problem the
town has experienced since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was
signed on January 9 was a fatal hit-and-run accident involving a UN
driver. The driver fled into the local police station. Relatives of the
victim attacked the police station, took the driver away and lynched
him.

There are no cars in Payuer, no police and no paper to write slogans on.
No one like Annan has ever visited Payuer, and until recently the place
received no relief from the UN. Two years ago, Southerners displaced
from government attacks on villages around the Adar oilfields were
living in stone-age conditions there – eating leaves and re-boiled fish
heads; sleeping without blankets or mosquito nets; dying of malaria,
kala-azar, diarrhea, respiratory infections and wounds sustained during
indiscriminate aerial bombardments. Things are a little better now:
there’s a small market offering shoes, clothes and oil brought from
government towns for the few, the very few, who can afford them. There
are a couple of aid workers investigating malnutrition (and finding less
than they expected). There are cattle too, although most of them belong
to Fellata – Sudanese Muslims of West African origin who have crossed to
their prewar dry-season grazing grounds in rebel-controlled territory
for the first time since 1983. There is universal relief that aerial
bombardment has stopped, but also widespread skepticism about the
durability of peace.

People here aren’t asking for food: not one person, among scores
interviewed in the course of a week, even mentioned it. Their message to
the international community is this: “You forced this peace through. Now
take the government militias away – or see peace fail.”

Throughout the war, the Khartoum government used ethnic militias to
divide and rule, denying any hand in the resulting mayhem. “Tribal
trouble,” it said, as it says now in Darfur. The CPA was negotiated, and
signed, only by the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s
Liberation Army (SPLA). The militias had no involvement in it. And in
Northern Upper Nile, around Payuer, they are not fading away. Far from
it: they are recruiting – at government urging, defectors say – training
and attacking. Not quite as before, it’s true. But attacking
nonetheless.

Since the CPA was signed, government-supported Southern militias have
attacked two SPLA positions around the oilfields near Payuer and
displaced Southern civilians from a number of villages. The government
has responded by promoting the militia leaders, confirming local people
in the belief that the attacks were government-inspired. Militiamen who
have chosen to join their kin in SPLA-controlled territory have paid a
heavy price: their villages have been attacked and looted, and their
families displaced.

The people of Payuer see a short-term and a long-term goal in the
continued activation of the militias. Both involve oil, an industry
currently worth more than a billion dollars a year to the Khartoum
government. In the short term, they say, the government means to keep
oil flowing, in ever greater quantities, by forcibly removing any people
who still live in its way; in the long term, Khartoum will use the
militias to fight against the separation of the South (and its oil) if
Southerners vote for separation in a referendum in six years’ time.

The war in Southern Sudan was fought for 21 years and took more than a
million lives without ever reaching the UN Security Council. Darfur was
raised at the Security Council in May 2004, barely a year after the
rebellion there began. The oil war that has raged in Southern Sudan from
1998 onward never captured international imagination, and indignation,
in the way that Darfur has. But it was every bit as terrible. Villages
were burned, civilians slaughtered, women and children raped and
mutilated. Most of the oil discovered in Sudan is located in the South,
and to exploit it the government first had to capture the land under
which it lay. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners were displaced and
remain displaced.

Negotiations over oil were among the most difficult in the discussions
that led to the CPA. Under the agreement, existing contracts remain
valid, but can be reviewed in the event of environmental or ecological
problems. New contracts will be negotiated and approved by the National
Petroleum Commission, a joint government-Sudan People’s Liberation
Movement (which controls the SPLA) body which will be the industry’s
regulatory body. The GoSS will get 50 percent of net revenue from oil
produced in the South. But here’s the rub: the CPA does not give a
categorical definition of the South. It defines the border as the border
which was in place at independence in 1956. But even this border was
controversial, and there is already disagreement over where the giant
Heglig oilfield belongs, with some SPLA officials accusing the
government of altering its administrative boundaries to shift it from
South to North.

If the government sets Southerner against Southerner to try to hold onto
oilfields like Adar, or if it seeks to play the boundary card, the SPLA
will have only itself to blame. In the weeks before peace, the SPLA
signed a number of seemingly illegal deals unilaterally granting oil
concessions in the South. Khartoum has challenged the agreements as
violations of the CPA – and leading industry analysts agree. As a
particularly trenchant critic of SPLA “greed” says: “We have a
government which doesn’t yet exist – the “Civil Authority of New Sudan”
– handing out oil licenses, the rights to which it doesn’t own, to
so-called oil firms which no one has ever heard of and which appear to
have none of the technical, financial, management or operational
requirements to take on the Sudd,” the Nile swamplands which are at the
center of the disputed leases. “If this is the way the South is going to
approach the postwar environment, rather than accepting 50 percent of
oil revenues and a role in the negotiation of any new oil licenses, then
the whole peace agreement will fail. We’ll be back to another decade or
two of war and the petroleum will stay in the ground for another
century.”

Veteran journalist Julie Flint has written extensively on Sudan and
researched and co-authored a Human Rights Watch report on Darfur titled “Darfur
Destroyed.”