3 - Funding the war
 One million dollars a day

The regime spends half its budget - around $1million a day - continuing the civil war.

It is fighting a coalition of southern and northern forces, the National Democratic Alliance. The NDA represents the majority of the Sudanese people, including the mainstream political parties of the last elected parliament and many former government army officers. Most of the war has been in the south, against the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), now part of the NDA. The regime often uses a process of divide and rule, arming southern splinter groups against each other.

The toll on southern Sudan has been terrible, spreading famine and prompting an enormous international aid effort - which in mid-1998 was also costing about $1 million a day.

Now the government of Sudan can look forward to earning the same sort of figure from the oil project.

NIF leader Hassan al-Turabi boasted to a political rally in April 1999 that the regime's share of the oil revenue, estimated at $200-$400 million a year, would help buy and build tanks and missiles. Ministers quickly denied this, but in August 1999 it emerged that 20 Polish-built T-55 tanks had arrived from Gdynia via Yemen.

Meanwhile, by October 1999, 3,000 - 4,000 people from Western Upper Nile - the site of the main oilfields - were fleeing south from the area.

The Khartoum government has used "bombers, helicopter gunships and artillery against unarmed civilians," according to a report in November 1999 by Dr Leonardo Franco, a special investigator for the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Dr Franco writes that the "long-term efforts by the various governments of the Sudan to protect oil production have included a policy of forcible population displacement in order to clear oil producing areas and transportation routes" of people thought to support the rebels.

However, Jim Buckee, chief executive of Talisman, launched a pre-emptive strike to protect his company's interests, denouncing the report as "hearsay."

 Invisible people
Interviewed by Damien Lewis, in whose film from Gumriak southern Sudanese claimed that thousands have been displaced by government forces in the area, Talisman's Jim Buckee responded, "There are no people there."

4 - Human casualties