Global Policy Forum

By Karl Vick

Sudan Oil built the airport at Heglig, the lavishly outfitted hospital next door and the new school at Debap. Oil built the electricity towers stippling the horizon and the tightly packed, all-weather road that runs across the broad savanna to Bentiu, where a thatched roof keeps the sun off Veronica Nyabiele. She is 12 months old, but malnutrition has held her weight to four kilograms.

Oil has a role in that, too.

In a civil war that seems to be fueled by so much - religion, for example, because one side is Muslim and the other side is not, and race, because one side is Arab and the other African - nothing has supercharged the fighting in southern Sudan quite like Nile Blend crude.

Much oil was discovered in south-central Sudan in the 1970s. Before it was drawn to the surface and piped north two years ago, the slightly waxy, light-grade petroleum was merely one more token of the schism between Sudan's ruling north and neglected south, something for the north to claim and the south to contest.

Today, four oil companies are producing more than 200,000 barrels a day - and more firms are exploring other reserves. Export revenue has doubled the government's military budget over two years. And a multitude of eyewitness reports say the new guns are being used to drive tens of thousands of southerners - like Veronica and her family - off their land to secure the oil underneath. "The fighting follows the oil," said John Ryle, an independent investigator who recently released a report that documented a broad government effort to clear the petroleum concessions, sometimes using helicopter gunships stationed at oil-field airports.

"I wouldn't use the term 'scorched earth,' which implies a kind of systematic campaign," Mr. Ryle said. "But they are burning and attacking villages."

Such tactics are nothing new in Sudan's civil war, which has raged for 18 years. Government troops and allied militias have been fighting rebel groups seeking autonomy for the country's southern provinces. Human rights groups and aid workers say the government has razed villages, bombed hospitals and churches and supported the militias' abduction of southerners as slaves. The rebels have been accused of similar atrocities on a lesser scale. But the presence of oil has brought the fighting to new areas, where it drives local people out of the countryside and into government-held garrisons such as Bentiu. Once it was a town of 15,000; now its population can triple or quadruple depending on the intensity of fighting nearby. A handful of UN and private agencies stand by with food and medical care. The worst cases end up, like Veronica, as stick figures in the therapeutic feeding center run by Action Against Hunger, an international charity.

"They all say the same thing," an aid worker said. "People came and destroyed their homes and they had to flee."

The situation has further stoked Western outrage over the Sudanese government's human rights record. While no American companies are involved - U.S. law prohibits them from doing business in Sudan - the involvement of Canadian and European firms in extracting Sudanese oil has prompted "disinvestment" campaigns like those directed against firms that did business with apartheid-era South Africa.

"These are war crimes," said Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor who works against companies doing business in Sudan.

The criticism has fallen hardest on Talisman Energy Inc., a Calgary-based firm that was little known outside Canada until it bought a 25 percent stake in Sudan's most promising oil field. The Muglad basin is classic geography for oil, a sedimentary plain exposed by two plates being pulled apart. Unfortunately, the same area roughly defines the boundary between Sudan's north and south.

Except on maps, the country's two halves have never become one. The Muslim Arabs of the arid north historically preyed on the Africans who live in the wetter south and practice Christianity or traditional beliefs. British colonialists actually separated the two. National independence in 1956 was quickly followed by a sporadic war for southern secession. And although the fighting was in abeyance when Chevron Corp., the U.S. oil company, sank wells north of Bentiu in 1978, the discovery of oil helped renew the conflict in 1983.

"It is a problem of uneven distribution of resources and power," said Alfred Taban, a southerner who publishes the independent Khartoum Monitor. "The northerners have taken up all the ground."

Chevron pulled out in 1984, after rebels killed three of its employees. The oil fields stood largely idle until 1997, when the Sudanese government made peace with some of the rebel factions and formed a consortium to renew exploration. The partners included the China National Petroleum Corp., the Malaysian national oil company Petronas and the Sudanese company Sudapet Ltd. But Talisman was the show horse.

Not only did the company bring technical expertise to build a 1,450-kilometer (900-mile) pipeline from the Heglig oil field to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, it also carried the stature of a Western oil firm, credentials craved by the government, which spent much of the 1990s under UN and U.S. sanctions because of its support of terrorism.

"My ultimate goal is to be the biggest oil exporter in the world," said Awad Jaz, Sudan's energy minister. Mr. Jaz has said any U.S. oil company could expect favorable terms if the sanctions were lifted.

But Western diplomats say U.S. firms are not lobbying hard to join Talisman and share its image problem. Mr. Reeves boasts that the divestment campaign has cost the company every one of its public institutional investors, from the City of New York to the Texas teachers' pension fund. Campaigners are now pressing Fidelity Investments to divest, as well as pushing to ban oil concerns doing business in Sudan from being listed on U.S. stock exchanges.

Talisman has hired a Sudanese seminary student to buff its image and formed an office of corporate responsibility that points out that the oil areas have an infrastructure unique in this strikingly poor country of 30 million people: new water wells, schools, clinics and the Heglig hospital, extraordinarily well-equipped for rural Africa, complete with operating room and neonatal unit.

"There's poverty, on the downside," said Helmut Gutsche, Talisman's field production manager at Heglig, where foreign employees fly in for 28-day shifts, living in a tidy camp of steel trailers. "On the upside, we're trying to improve things."

Talisman also bought satellite photos to try to prove that its oil fields have always been largely vacant, but students of the Sudan war have long watched the fighting overlap with the oil concessions. And, though Talisman's lightly populated operation areas were first cleared perhaps two decades ago, Mr. Ryle and a Canadian researcher documented recent helicopter attacks near its fields. They also found deserting soldiers who said their mission was to drive people away from the oil fields.

"It's kind of a raggedy system of harassment, but it does seem to be classic counterinsurgency," Mr. Ryle said. "You're trying to get people to come into the towns so you can keep an eye on them, or drive them farther into the swamps." Today, however, most of the fighting is farther south, nearer a concession leased to Lundin Oil, a Swedish company. Local residents were driven out over the past two years, largely through surrogates: The Sudanese government arms one southern militia, which raids the area, looting along the way.

Still farther south, a much larger bloc has long been held by the French giant TotalFinaElf. In fact, the Sudanese government has chopped much of the south into oil concessions reaching nearly to the Ugandan border. Critics see each bloc as another potential battlefield in a war that has already killed 2 million people.