Divestment drive targeting Sudan
By Scott S. Greenberger, The Boston Globe
Dec 10, 2004 — Activists are launching a drive to get Harvard University and the retirement funds for Massachusetts and Boston workers to sell off their holdings in companies that do business in Sudan, which has been accused by the United States of waging a genocidal campaign in its long-running civil war.
The campaign, part of a national effort that has targeted pension funds and universities around the United States, is following a divestment strategy used in the 1980s that helped topple South Africa’s apartheid government. Massachusetts, which was one of the first states to divest in companies doing business with South Africa, may become a key battleground in that fight.
Two Harvard University students are circulating a petition, signed so far by 79 faculty members and 257 of students, calling on the school to sell what activists say is a roughly $3.87 million stake in PetroChina, which is working with the Sudanese government on a $1 billion venture to boost oil production.
Tonight, a Boston-based group will hold a candlelight vigil on the State House steps in hopes of persuading state lawmakers to withdraw $1.4 billion in state pensions that activists say is invested in companies that do business in Sudan.
The “demonstration is extremely important — it’s simply a wave that is now happening. It’s a model that has been tested and proven successful,” said Joseph E. Madison, a Washington, D.C., radio host who is president of the Sudan Campaign, which has become an umbrella group for activists around the country.
“What we’ve told people is, all you have to do is dust off the South Africa divestment strategy and simply change the name from ‘South Africa’ to ‘Sudan.’ ”
Eric Reeves, a Smith College English professor at the center of the effort, said yesterday “this divestment campaign is set to explode off the blocks.”
“My prediction is that Harvard will divest, and that this will be the thin edge of the wedge for many other universities,” said Reeves, who has helped force a Canadian oil company to leave Sudan. “Public institutional shareholding and university endowments are the real pressure points. That’s what gets the ball rolling.”
In a bid to crush a rebellion in Darfur, a region in western Sudan roughly the size of Texas, the government in Khartoum has bombed villages and armed Arab militias that have terrorized the civilian population, activists say.
The militias, known as Janjaweed, or “evil horsemen,” have murdered at least 50,000 non-Arab villagers, engaged in the mass rape of women and girls, and displaced as many as 1.5 million people, according to the United Nations, aid workers, and human rights activists.
During the 1990s, the country became a haven for terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, who was there from 1991 to 1996. In 1997, President Clinton signed an executive order barring US companies from operating in Sudan, citing the Islamic government’s support of terrorism, persecution of minority religions, and tolerance of the slave trade.
Because US companies are banned from Sudan, the burgeoning divestment effort is targeting universities and retirement systems that invest in foreign companies that do business in Sudan and are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, such as Germany’s Siemens AG, Switzerland’s ABB Ltd., and France’s Alcatel.
“The world needs to send a very clear signal to this regime that it will be facing severe economic pressures if it does not cease the genocide in Darfur,” Reeves said.
According to the Sudan Campaign, US retirement systems have more than $91 billion invested in such companies.
The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, a private think tank, has helped generate the estimate, culled from public investment portfolios, but the figures have not been independently verified. Some critics have questioned the figures.
In 1982, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, and numerous US cities withdrew $250 million in investments from companies that did business with South Africa. Dozens of other states, cities and universities eventually followed suit.
But the Sudan divestment drive, begun in earnest on Labor Day, is still gathering steam. Last September Frederick Nesbitt, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, said, “We become concerned when people start drawing lines. . . . You could end up having no place to invest.”
Harvard University spokesman Joe Wrinn refused to comment on the issue yesterday.
Eileen O’Connor, a spokeswoman for state Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, who oversees the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, said the board’s mission is to get the highest returns it can for state workers and teachers who draw their pensions from the fund.
O’Connor added that “if the Legislature provides specific guidance regarding Sudan, as it has with South Africa and tobacco, the PRIM board will adjust its portfolios accordingly.”
The Massachusetts Legislature has taken no action on the Sudan divestment issue. Bills calling for state pension funds to divest in companies doing business in Sudan are moving forward in New Jersey, California, and Illinois.
Madison said teachers and other state workers will welcome divestment once they are educated about the issue.
“How does a teacher explain to her students that her pension, her retirement, is being partly financed by a country committing genocide?” he said