California lawmakers call for Sudan divestment
By Angela Woodall, The Oakland Tribune
CALIFORNIA, July 4, 2005 — California lawmakers have joined a growing number of states in calling on retirement funds and universities to stop investing in companies that do business in Sudan – a country whose government has been blamed for its involvement in the violence in Darfur – a conflict that President Bush and Congress have called genocide.
The California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation’s largest public retirement fund, is one of the biggest investors in companies doing business in Sudan.
CalPERS investments in companies active in Sudan total $7.5 billion, according to a report by the Conflict Securities Advisory Group, a private firm that specializes in terrorism risk research for investors.
Close behind is the CaliforniaState Teachers Retirement System with $5.8 billion.
Californians shouldn’t have to worry that they’re financing genocide, said Nathan Britton, spokesman for Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, who has been active in calling for divestment.
An estimated 300,000 people in Darfur have been killed by the Sudanese air force and government-backed tribal militias, particularly the Janjaweed, according to figures from Congress and humanitarian organizations.
Another 2 million people have been displaced since 2003, and at least 200,000 have fled to refugee camps in neighboring Chad.
Lee wants public companies to stop channeling money to Sudan. She wants to create the kind of momentum that similar measures against South Africa’s apartheid regime had in the late 1980s.
Divesting from companies that do business in Sudan is not just a “feel good” move, Britton said. It also cuts off funds that provide immunity to government, he said.
The issue came up in Congress again last week, prompted by a June 23 visit to Washington by Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, who was scheduled to meet with State Department Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick – the department’s second highest ranking official after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The visit raised lawmakers’ eyebrows because it followed the arrival several months ago of Sudanese intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, who was invited by the CIA to share information about the war on terrorism, according to news reports.
Allowing Sudanese government officials to visit the United States sends a “wrong message,” said Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., at a hearing of the House committee that oversees international relations.
Barbara Lee, who also sits on the committee, said she feared the visits were an indication that the United States was planning to lift sanctions against Sudan, which the State Department has classified as a state that sponsors terrorism since 1993, preventing U.S. companies from doing business there.
“What is taking place here?” Lee asked Zoellick, who was on hand at the hearing.
Zoellick, however, said Washington has no plans to lift sanctions.
He also said the United States could not support the new government until the “ongoing tragedy in Darfur” was resolved.
The violence in Darfur continues even as the country ended a brutal 20-year war between the Arab Muslim government in the north and rebels in the resource-rich south, populated mainly by non-Arab Africans.
The two sides signed a peace agreement last year and a new government will be initiated on July 9.
The violence in Darfur, which U.S. officials officially called a genocide recently began in previous decades as dwindling water and land resources led to tensions between non-Arab African farmers and Arab herders.
The conflict exploded in 2003 when non-Arab rebels demanded more involvement in a power-sharing arrangement between northern and southern leaders after the civil war ended.
Rebels attacked a police station, and Sudan’s government unleashed a “brutal militia counterinsurgency” in Darfur using the same cattle-herding Arab militias it used against rebels in the south, according to Zoellick.
A member of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, the main rebel group in the south, said his group will make sure the policy in Darfur is changed now that it will have a voice in the governing of the country.
The SPLM will facilitate peaceful dialogue and a power-sharing agreement, said Ezekiel Gatkuoth, the party’s representative in Washington, D.C., who was at the hearing.
We won’t authorize the government’s policy of killing and financing militias, Gatkuoth said. We will “block those options,” he said.
The U.S. government has played a large role in mediating the North-South peace agreement and in providing aid to the region.
The United States provides 86 percent of food aid to Darfur and 90 percent of food delivered to non-Darfur Sudan, Zoellick said.
Total aid to Sudan is more than $1.5 billion for 2004-2005, more than half directed to Darfur, according to Zoellick. Another $540 million has been requested for 2006. The majority is humanitarian aid.
But ranking member, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, – the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the U.S. Congress by his own account – said although it is sometimes necessary to “deal with the devil” to bring peace, Washington should not let Khartoum cover a “multitude of sins just because it reluctantly and belatedly reached an accord with southern Sudan.”