19 - Summary20 years and over $3 billion since its discovery in the south and south-west of Sudan, oil has not yet had a demonstrably positive impact on Sudan's economy or people's lives. It helped re-ignite civil war in 1983 after a decade of relative peace, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that it will continue to do more harm than good.
Sudan joined the ranks of oil exporters in August 1999, when the first oil was shipped along its newly constructed 1,610km pipeline from the southern oil fields to the Red Sea, to a new port built for oil tankers.
Meanwhile in parts of south-central Sudan the civil war has intensified and is creating massive human suffering. The foreign companies exploiting oil there
have inevitably become involved in the war on the side of the government forces.
Yet Sudan has been transformed in the eyes of business interests from a basket-case on the verge of expulsion from the IMF to one whose future is bright with the promise of oil wealth.
The National Islamic Front government has been making allies in countries whose corporations are lining up for oil contracts. These allies will lobby their governments against any condemnation of Sudan for its extreme violations of human rights. They will attempt to block any measures that will interfere with their short-term profits.
The oil may only last 15 years. It is a finite resource, and needs to be used with maximum efficiency. Why squander it in haste? In the stampede to ship it out and discover more, its legacy is more likely to be devastation rather than any solution to Sudan's economic and social problems.
It is unrealistic for external partners in the scheme to maintain that the oil project is in any way distinct from the NIF's war effort. The drive for oil has become a central factor in the civil war.
Talisman, as lead partner in the oil consortium, has repeatedly failed to display any awareness or sense of responsibility for the political and military role it is inevitably playing.
The region's chronic instability has added significantly to the costs - financial and human - of extraction, while the act of extraction and maintaining "security" has fuelled that instability, in a vicious cycle.
VULNERABLE OIL INSTALLATIONS
The SPLA has repeatedly declared that all oil installations in South Sudan are a legitimate target for their military operations. The Sudan Alliance Force (SAF) and National Democratic Alliance (NDA) have issued similar warnings with regard to the north of the country. If the armed opposition concentrates on attacking the pumping stations at staged intervals, it will maximise its chances of actually halting the operation.
Weir Pumps appear to have built their intended quota of seven. It is not clear who will build or the five extra stations needed to complete the proposed upgrading to 250,000 b/d - although France has a similar manufacturer - or supply replacements in the event of damage .
- The oil pipeline project not only risks longer-term disasters for Sudan's people and environment, but threatens to sustain the current regime in its prolongation of war and its rejection of democratic values and human rights.
- Parts of Sudan already need massive aid provision in the year 2000.
- Oil conflict will only add to that need.
With the oil revenue coming onstream, the government of Sudan's economic constraints are being eased to the extent that it will be more likely to regard continued war as affordable and will feel less pressure towards serious peace negotiations.
POWER AND THE N.I.F.
The National Islamic Front has a totalitarian outlook which is implicitly opposed to sharing power. It resists any dilution of its absolutist ideology, but is sufficiently politically astute to present itself as flexible when necessary. It has portrayed peace as within reach for as long as it has been promoting the oil project, but has always shrunk from offering the secular society and self-determination that would actually provide it.
The militarisation of the oil exploration zones and the conflict engendered by the pursuit of oil at this time are likely to worsen the social fragmentation of Sudan.
Claims by the Sudan government or its business partners that this conflict is "local internecine fighting" are disingenuous. The regime's policy is to arm southern splinter groups and their leaders as a buffer against the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), particularly in the oil zone, while playing them off against each other. It has been supplying these armed groups for years and has given their commanders military rank in the regular Armed Forces.
ENVIRONMENT
The environmental dangers of the pipeline are inadequately studied and impossible to discuss under the totalitarian regime. Talisman has declined to disclose its Environmental Impact Assessment and Emergency response plans.
There is a reasonable possibility, given the project's history, that technical safeguards have been minimised and that the risk of fires, explosions and pollution from oil spills both deliberate and accidental - even into the River Nile and Red Sea - has not been addressed realistically. Extraction areas will face the same fate as the Niger delta: chronic poverty amid chronic pollution, contamination of soil and water.
The people of Western Upper Nile and South Kordofan are already suffering more direct military oppression than the Ijaw or Ogoni people of Nigeria. They may have ecological disaster added to famine and war.
Emergency responses to spillage are likely to take days rather than hours. Clean-up operations in remote areas are expected to be token or non-existent for the most part. Sabotage attempts may further endanger populations near the pipeline.
REFINERIES
Local refineries such as El Obeid are believed to be producing aviation fuel for bombing raids on southern villages and low-grade petrol primarily for armed forces and security personnel vehicles.
The oil will be used inefficiently by poor quality refineries. A secondhand refinery which has been imported (from the US) and rebuilt in Khartoum no longer conforms to environmental regulations in its country of origin. Pollution and wasteful processing can also be expected from the refinery in El Obeid.
AID SUBSIDISING OIL
Operation Lifeline Sudan is already the biggest relief operation in the history of the UN. Fighting over oil will increase the need for aid input from the international community. Unless the oil issue is resolved, a perverse situation will prevail where humanitarian aid is needed simply to deal with the fallout of fighting around the oilfields. Aid would, in effect, be acting as a subsidy to the oil companies.
The destabilising effects of the civil war and the aggressive may spill over into the neighbouring countries in the already fragile Horn of Africa.
TRADE AND MILITARISATION
There is a lack of coherence in UK government policy towards Sudan. While some British government departments and ministries were pushing for peace and providing humanitarian assistance in 1998, its trade ministry was enthusing about the supply of equipment essential to the oil pipeline which - it could be argued - is contributing to the war. The equipment is certainly considered a strategic military target.
PIPELINE MILITIA
The Sudan government has attempted to recruit sufficient young men into militia to protect the pipeline along its entire length (an impossible task). The recruitment is often no more than press-ganging, and under-age children have often been swept up into the militia.
Since European oil companies can provide money in the form of "investment" which the NIF government then spends on weapons, the current EU arms embargo on Sudan is effectively being broken.
ECONOMY
The government is now paying off its debt arrears to the International Monetary Fund. Because the decision by the IMF to upgrade Sudan's borrower status from ‘non-compliance’ to ‘compliance’ has been made on strictly fiscal criteria, it has overlooked the broader consequences of the way the Sudan government is conducting its economy, including the human impact of the investment in oil in the middle of a civil war.
PEACE
Closer examination must be given to the possible outcomes of two areas of possible fence-mending. The NDA's Sadiq al-Mahdi and NIF leader Hassan al-Turabi have been holding meetings in 1999 which have not always pleased others in Sadiq's Umma party, let alone the rest of the NDA. This rapprochement, echoed in Egyptian and Libyan peace initiatives aimed at the northern Sudanese opposition, is highly unlikely to bring the rest of the NDA into reconciliation with the NIF. Nor will it end the war.
Members of Southern groups - notably UDSF / SSDF - which have been fighting on the government side since 1996 - have been mending fences with the SPLA. This has been affected by the grass-roots Nuer-Dinka and Nuer-Nuer peace initiatives of the church. Nonetheless, the situation remains in flux.
HUMAN RIGHTS
The SPLA has been guilty of human rights abuses which have turned several communities against it. These are not, however, comparable with the National Islamic Front's deliberate use of torture in government as a means of control, nor with the scale of official abuses committed against minorities by the NIF in the pursuit of its social engineering policies.
Nonetheless, the SPLA has continued holding fellow rebels prisoner in prolonged arbitrary detention, confiscating food (including emergency relief food) from civilians, looting crops, summary executions and disappearances. It, too, has recruited thousands of under-age boys.