t r u t h o u t. David Morse: Oil War of the Future

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FOCUS | David Morse: Oil War of the Future

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FOCUS | David Morse: Oil War of the Future

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/082005Y.shtml

 

War of the Future

By David Morse

TomDispatch

 

Friday 19 August 2005

 

Oil drives the genocide in Darfur.

 

A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling

desert region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan. The weapons

themselves are not futuristic. None of the ray-guns, force-fields, or

robotic storm troopers that are the stuff of science fiction; nor, for

that matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones or other high-tech

weapon systems at the cutting edge of today's arsenal.

 

No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives.

In the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics

are burning and pillaging, castration and rape - carried out by Arab

militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated

technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by

the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black

African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the

seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits

hundreds of feet below the surface.

 

This is what makes it a war of the future: not the slick

PowerPoint presentations you can imagine in boardrooms in Dallas and

Beijing showing proven reserves in one color, estimated reserves in

another, vast subterranean puddles that stretch west into Chad, and

south to Nigeria and Uganda; not the technology; just the simple fact

of the oil.

 

This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great

powers whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a

finite pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of

Michael Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example

of the consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an

invisible war.

 

Invisible?

 

Invisible because it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our

mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think of

all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers and magazines.

Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile culture, our

suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and famous, the giddy

assumption that all this can continue indefinitely when we know it

can't - and you see why Darfur slips into darkness. And Darfur is only

the tip of the sprawling, scarred state known as Sudan. Nicholas

Kristof pointed out in a New York Times column that ABC News had a

total of 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts all

last year, and that was to the credit of Peter Jennings; NBC had only

5 minutes, CBS only 3 minutes. This is, of course, a micro-fraction of

the time devoted to Michael Jackson.

 

Why is it, I wonder, that when a genocide takes place in Africa,

our attention is always riveted on some black American miscreant

superstar? During the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago, when 800,000

Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days, it was the trial of O.J. Simpson

that had our attention.

 

Yes, racism enters into our refusal to even try to understand

Africa, let alone value African lives. And yes, surely we're

witnessing the kind of denial that Samantha Power documents in A

Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; the sheer

difficulty we have acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it, she

observes, we pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly

by. And yes, turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia,

with its graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the

streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by

something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that

prevents the media from making the connections that would threaten our

petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to acknowledge the

fact that the industrial world's addiction to oil is laying waste to

Africa.

 

When Darfur does occasionally make the news - photographs of

burned villages, charred corpses, malnourished children - it is

presented without context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader

oil-driven crisis in northern Africa. An estimated 300 to 400

Darfurians are dying every day. Yet the message from our media is that

we Americans are " helpless " to prevent this humanitarian tragedy, even

as we gas up our SUVs with these people's lives.

 

Even Kristof - whose efforts as a mainstream journalist to keep

Darfur in the spotlight are worthy of a Pulitzer - fails to make the

connection to oil; and yet oil was the driving force behind Sudan's

civil war. Oil is driving the genocide in Darfur. Oil drives the Bush

administration's policy toward Sudan and the rest of Africa. And oil

is likely to topple Sudan and its neighbors into chaos.

 

The Context for Genocide

 

I will support these assertions with fact. But first, let's give

Sudanese government officials in Khartoum their due. They prefer to

explain the slaughter in Darfur as an ancient rivalry between nomadic

herding tribes in the north and black African farmers in the south.

They deny responsibility for the militias and claim they can't control

them, even as they continue to train the militias, arm them, and pay

them. They play down their Islamist ideology, which supported Osama

bin Laden and seeks to impose Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan and

elsewhere. Instead, they portray themselves as pragmatists struggling

to hold together an impoverished and backwards country; all they need

is more economic aid from the West, and an end to the trade sanctions

imposed by the U.S. in 1997, when President Clinton added Sudan to the

list of states sponsoring terrorism. Darfur, from their perspective,

is an inconvenient anomaly that will go away, in time.

 

It is true that ethnic rivalries and racism play a part in today's

conflict in Darfur. Seen in the larger context of Sudan's civil war,

however, Darfur is not an anomaly; it is an extension of that

conflict. The real driving force behind the North-South conflict

became clear after Chevron discovered oil in southern Sudan in 1978.

The traditional competition for water at the fringes of the Sahara was

transformed into quite a different struggle. The Arab-dominated

government in Khartoum redrew Sudan's jurisdictional boundaries to

exclude the oil reserves from southern jurisdiction. Thus began

Sudan's 21-year-old North-South civil war. The conflict then moved

south, deep into Sudan, into wetter lands that form the headwaters of

the Nile and lie far from the historical competition for water.

 

Oil pipelines, pumping stations, well-heads, and other key

infrastructure became targets for the rebels from the South, who

wanted a share in the country's new mineral wealth, much of which was

on lands they had long occupied. John Garang, leader of the rebel

Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), declared these installations to

be legitimate targets of war. For a time, the oil companies fled from

the conflict, but in the 1990s they began to return. Chinese and

Indian companies were particularly aggressive, doing much of their

drilling behind perimeters of bermed earth guarded by troops to

protect against rebel attacks. It was a Chinese pipeline to the Red

Sea that first brought Sudanese oil to the international market.

 

Prior to the discovery of oil, this dusty terrain had little to

offer in the way of exports. Most of the arable land was given over to

subsistence farming: sorghum and food staples; cattle and camels. Some

cotton was grown for export. Sudan, sometimes still called The Sudan,

is the largest country in Africa and one of the poorest. Nearly a

million square miles in area, roughly the size of the United States

east of the Mississippi, it is more region than nation. Embracing some

570 distinct peoples and dozens of languages and historically

ungovernable, its boundaries had been drawn for the convenience of

colonial powers. Its nominal leaders in the north, living in urban

Khartoum, were eager to join the global economy - and oil was to

become their country's first high-value export.

 

South Sudan is overwhelmingly rural and black. Less accessible

from the north, marginalized under the reign of the Ottoman Turks in

the nineteenth century, again under the British overlords during much

of the twentieth, and now by Khartoum in the north, South Sudan today

is almost devoid of schools, hospitals, and modern infrastructure.

 

Racism figures heavily in all this. Arabs refer to darker Africans

as " abeed, " a word that means something close to " slave. " During the

civil war, African boys were kidnapped from the south and enslaved;

many were pressed into military service by the Arab-dominated

government in Khartoum. Racism continues to find expression in the

brutal rapes now taking place in Darfur. Khartoum recruits the

militias, called Janjaweed - itself a derogatory term - from the

poorest and least educated members of nomadic Arab society.

 

In short, the Islamist regime has manipulated ethnic, racial, and

economic tensions, as part of a strategic drive to commandeer the

country's oil wealth. The war has claimed about two million lives,

mostly in the south - many by starvation, when government forces

prevented humanitarian agencies from gaining access to camps. Another

four million Sudanese remain homeless. The regime originally sought to

impose shariah, or Islamic, law on the predominantly Christian and

animist South. Khartoum dropped this demand, however, under terms of

the Comprehensive Peace Treaty signed last January. The South was to

be allowed to operate under its own civil law, which included rights

for women; and in six years, southerners could choose by plebiscite

whether to separate or remain part of a unified Sudan. The

all-important oil revenues would be divided between Khartoum and the

SPLA-held territory. Under a power-sharing agreement, SPLA commander

John Garang would be installed as vice president of Sudan, alongside

President Omar al-Bashir.

 

Darfur, to the west, was left out of this treaty. In a sense, the

treaty - brokered with the help of the U.S. - was signed at the

expense of Darfur, a parched area the size of France, sparsely

populated but oil rich. It has an ancient history of separate

existence as a kingdom lapping into Chad, separate from the area known

today as Sudan. Darfur's population is proportionately more Muslim and

less Christian than southern Sudan's, but is mostly black African, and

identifies itself by tribe, such as the Fur. (Darfur, in fact, means

" land of the Fur. " ) The Darfurian practice of Islam was too lax to

suit the Islamists who control Khartoum. And so Darfurian villages

have been burned to clear the way for drilling and pipelines, and to

remove any possible sanctuaries for rebels. Some of the land seized

from black farmers is reportedly being given to Arabs brought in from

neighboring Chad.

 

Oil and Turmoil

 

With the signing of the treaty last January, and the prospect of

stability for most of war-torn Sudan, new seismographic studies were

undertaken by foreign oil companies in April. These studies had the

effect of doubling Sudan's estimated oil reserves, bringing them to at

least 563 million barrels. They could yield substantially more.

Khartoum claims the amount could total as much as 5 billion barrels.

That's still a pittance compared to the 674 billion barrels of proven

oil reserves possessed by the six Persian Gulf countries - Saudi

Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar. The

very modesty of Sudan's reserves speaks volumes to the desperation

with which industrial nations are grasping for alternative sources of oil.

 

The rush for oil is wreaking havoc on Sudan. Oil revenues to

Khartoum have been about $1 million a day, exactly the amount which

the government funnels into arms - helicopters and bombers from

Russia, tanks from Poland and China, missiles from Iran. Thus, oil is

fueling the genocide in Darfur at every level. This is the context in

which Darfur must be understood - and, with it, the whole of Africa.

The same Africa whose vast tapestry of indigenous cultures, wealth of

forests and savannas was torn apart by three centuries of theft by

European colonial powers - seeking slaves, ivory, gold, and diamonds -

is being devastated anew by the 21st century quest for oil.

 

Sudan is now the seventh biggest oil producer in Africa after

Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and Equatorial Guinea.

 

Oil has brought corruption and turmoil in its wake virtually

wherever it has been discovered in the developing world. Second only

perhaps to the arms industry, its lack of transparency and

concentration of wealth invites kickbacks and bribery, as well as

distortions to regional economies.

 

" There is no other commodity that produces such great profit, "

said Terry Karl in an interview with Miren Gutierrez, for the

International Press Service, " and this is generally in the context of

highly concentrated power, very weak bureaucracies, and weak rule of

law. " Karl is co-author of a Catholic Relief Services report on the

impact of oil in Africa, entitled Bottom of the Barrel. He cites the

examples of Gabon, Angola and Nigeria, which began exploiting oil

several decades ago and suffer from intense corruption. In Nigeria, as

in Angola, an overvalued exchange rate has destroyed the non-oil

economy. Local revolts over control of oil revenues also have

triggered sweeping military repression in the Niger delta.

 

Oil companies and exploration companies like Halliburton wield

political and sometimes military power. In Sudan, roads and bridges

built by oil firms have been used to attack otherwise remote villages.

Canada's largest oil company, Talisman, is now in court for allegedly

aiding Sudan government forces in blowing up a church and killing

church leaders, in order to clear the land for pipelines and drilling.

Under public pressure in Canada, Talisman has sold its holdings in

Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish company, withdrew under similar

pressure from human rights groups.

 

Michael Klare suggests that oil production is intrinsically

destabilizing:

 

When countries with few other resources of national wealth exploit

their petroleum reserves, the ruling elites typically monopolize the

distribution of oil revenues, enriching themselves and their cronies

while leaving the rest of the population mired in poverty - and the

well-equipped and often privileged security forces of these

'petro-states' can be counted on to support them.

 

Compound these antidemocratic tendencies with the ravenous thirst

of the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies, and you have a

recipe for destabilization in Africa. China's oil imports climbed by

33% in 2004, India's by 11%. The International Energy Agency expects

them to use 11.3 million barrels a day by 2010, which will be more

than one-fifth of global demand.

 

Keith Bradsher, in a New York Times article, 2 Big Appetites Take

Seats at the Oil Table, observes:

 

As Chinese and Indian companies venture into countries like Sudan,

where risk-aversive multinationals have hesitated to enter, questions

are being raised in the industry about whether state-owned companies

are accurately judging the risks to their own investments, or whether

they are just more willing to gamble with taxpayers' money than

multinationals are willing to gamble with shareholders' investments.

 

The geopolitical implications of this tolerance for instability

are borne out in Sudan, where Chinese state-owned companies exploited

oil in the thick of fighting. As China and India seek strategic access

to oil - much as Britain, Japan, and the United States jockeyed for

access to oil fields in the years leading up to World War II - the

likelihood of destabilizing countries like Sudan rises exponentially.

 

Last June, following the new seismographic exploration in Sudan

and with the new power-sharing peace treaty about to be implemented,

Khartoum and the SPLA signed a flurry of oil deals with Chinese,

Indian, British, Malaysian, and other oil companies.

 

Desolate Sudan, Desolate World

 

This feeding frenzy may help explain the Bush administration's

schizophrenic stance toward Sudan. On the one hand, Secretary of State

Colin Powell declared in September 2004 that his government had

determined that what was happening in Darfur was " genocide " - which

appears to have been a pre-election sop to conservative Christians,

many with missions in Africa. On the other hand, not only did the

President fall silent on Darfur after the election, but his

administration has lobbied quietly against the Darfur Peace and

Accountability Act in Congress.

 

That bill, how in committee, calls for beefing up the African

Union peacekeeping force and imposing new sanctions on Khartoum,

including referring individual officials to the International Criminal

Court (much hated by the administration). The White House,

undercutting Congressional efforts to stop the genocide, is seeking

closer relations with Khartoum on grounds that the regime was

" cooperating in the war on terror. "

 

Nothing could end the slaughter faster than the President of the

United States standing up for Darfur and making a strong case before

the United Nations. Ours is the only country with such clout. This is

unimaginable, of course, for various reasons. It seems clear that

Bush, and the oil companies that contributed so heavily to his 2000

presidential campaign, would like to see the existing trade sanctions

on Sudan removed, so U.S. companies can get a piece of the action.

Instead of standing up, the President has kept mum - leaving it to

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to put the best face she can on

his policy of appeasing Khartoum.

 

On July 8, SPLA leader John Garang was sworn in as vice president

of Sudan, before a throng of 6 million cheering Sudanese. President

Oman Bashir spoke in Arabic. Garang spoke in English, the preferred

language among educated southerners, because of the country's language

diversity. Sudan's future had never looked brighter. Garang was a

charismatic and forceful leader who wanted a united Sudan. Three weeks

later, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash. When word of his death

emerged, angry riots broke out in Khartoum, and in Juba, the capital

of South Sudan. Men with guns and clubs roamed the streets, setting

fire to cars and office buildings. One hundred and thirty people were

killed, thousands wounded.

 

No evidence of foul play in his death has been uncovered, as of

this writing. The helicopter went down in rain and fog over

mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, suspicions are rampant. SPLA and

government officials are calling for calm, until the crash can be

investigated by an international team of experts. All too ominously,

the disaster recalls the 1994 airplane crash that killed Rwandan

president, Juvenal Habyarimana, who was trying to implement a

power-sharing agreement between Hutus and Tutsis. That crash touched

off the explosive Rwandan genocide.

 

What Garang's death will mean for Sudan is unclear. The new peace

was already precarious. His chosen successor, Salva Kiir Mayardit,

appears less committed to a united Sudan

 

Nowhere is the potential impact of renewed war more threatening

than in the camps of refugees - the 4 million Internally Displaced

Persons (IDPs), driven from their homes during the North-South civil

war, several hundred thousand encamped at the fringes of Khartoum as

squatters or crowded into sprawling ghetto neighborhoods. Further

west, in Darfur and Chad, another 2.5 million IDPs live in the

precarious limbo of makeshift camps, in shelters cobbled together from

plastic and sticks - prevented by the Janjaweed from returning to

their villages, wholly dependent on outside aid.

 

In short, Sudan embodies a collision between a failed state and a

failed energy policy. Increasingly, ours is a planet whose human

population is devoted to extracting what it can, regardless of the

human and environmental cost. The Bush energy policy, crafted by oil

companies, is predicated on a far different future from the one any

sane person would want his or her children to inherit - a desolate

world that few Americans, cocooned by the media's silence, are willing

to imagine.

 

David Morse is an independent journalist and political analyst

whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends

Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, the Progressive

Populist, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel, The Iron Bridge (Harcourt

Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum wars in the first two

decades of the 21st century.

 

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