By Norimitsu Onishi
New York TimesOctober 13, 2001
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Ms. Luok, a peasant woman in her 30's, said government soldiers and an allied militia invaded her village last year. Five relatives, three men and two women, were killed and her 15-year-old daughter was kidnapped, never to be seen again.
"It was terrible," she said, cradling an infant in her arms. "Even if you gave birth a few days earlier, they raped you." Asked if that had happened to her, she looked down and said, "Yes."
Her account of suffering has become all too familiar in southern Sudan, where the oil fields have become the big prize in the 18- year battle between the Islamic Arab north and the non-Muslim black Africans of the south.
Both sides have been guilty of inflicting immeasurable devastation on civilian populations. But international monitors, including officials from the Canadian government, the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, say government forces and their allies have led a brutal campaign against civilian populations near the oil fields.
Their goal, according to various reports, has been to clear black Africans from areas where oil is being produced or may be found. Once the government has control of the region, it can assure a steady flow of revenue.
Since 1999, a consortium made up of Talisman of Canada, Petronas of Malaysia, the China National Petroleum Corporation and Sudapet of Sudan has been pumping oil. Production is about 220,000 barrels a day, a tenth of Nigeria's production. But it has been enough to increase the government's annual official military budget to $327 million this year, from $162 million in 1998, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The most intense fighting — in the Western Upper Nile region of southern Sudan — occurred last year when government forces and their militias attacked village after village under rebel control. The attacks sent thousands fleeing, most of them to the government-controlled town of Bentiu, about 20 miles north of here.
In recent months, though, many of those displaced began leaving Bentiu, where they had eked out a living by collecting and selling firewood, and returning here to Nhialdiu (pronounced nee-AL-doo), a small rural village.
In the capital, Khartoum, Sudan's minister of information, Mahdi Ibrahim, repeated longstanding denials that the government is using its forces against civilians. Instead, he blamed the southern rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army.
"When we attack," he said, "we attack a military force. We attack armored cars. We attack tanks. We attack ammunition depots. We attack military formations."
"Sometimes, sometimes, it falls, unfortunately, maybe, in the wrong place," he added. "But it is never part of a design. We never mean to attack our own people."
But people fleeing renewed fighting in August told similar stories of being forced from their villages last year by government soldiers and allied militias. They said the troops had killed men, kidnapped girls and young women, burned houses and slaughtered livestock. Helicopter gunships also terrorized them, they said, and Russian- made Antonov bombers attacked indiscriminately.
"Men are being accused of having given information to the rebels who attacked the oil fields," said Jur Jiath, a man in his 50's, who said that during attacks last year his blind mother had been shot to death and his 10-year-old daughter had been kidnapped.
Mr. Jiath was in a group of five families who had just walked two days from Bentiu to Chotchara, a village near here. There they squatted in mud-and-straw huts, some of them smoking from pipes fashioned out of spent rifle shells.
Mr. Jiath and the others had returned to villages with the remains of burned huts and fields empty of crops. August was the height of the rainy season, and the rains had turned this area in the Sudd, the swamp that covers much of the south, even more inhospitable.
Cobras and other venomous snakes hid in the tall grass, and the crocodile-filled rivers swelled. During the day, flies swarmed everywhere, dozens covering a person's body at any moment; at night, the flies disappeared but were immediately replaced by clouds of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
There was nothing here that suggested the 21st century, except for the omnipresent Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Not a single car could be found here, not one road.
About two dozen small children milled around, some naked, others wearing T- shirts donated from overseas. One boy wore a Bart Simpson T-shirt, another a Federal Express one.
A woman in her 50's, Nyeguar Dobuol, said the government forces and their allies had burned her hut, killing her son-in-law, who was inside. She said they had kidnapped four of her daughters, two of whom were married and two single.
Another woman, in her 30's, Martha Kuet, was sitting outside a hut, surrounded by about 20 children. She gave a shriveled breast to one baby whose head she was checking for lice.
During the attack last year, she said, the government forces invaded her village, shooting indiscriminately and killing three relatives, two men and a woman. One of her daughters was kidnapped. A black African militiaman allied with the government took her, but she escaped.
"Before there was not fighting like this," she said. "But after we heard about the oil, there was a lot of fighting. It must be the reason we are being mistreated."
Sudan, independent from Britain since 1955, has lived through only a decade of peace, from 1972 to 1983. During that period Chevron came and discovered oil in an area of the country that straddles the historic divide between the north and south, and which the peacetime government had named, with great hope, Unity State.
Abel Alier, a southerner who was a vice president in the federal government and president of the southern states in the 1970's, said the northern leaders had been against oil exploration at first.
"They were afraid that the discovery of oil would encourage secession in the south," Mr. Alier, 68, said in an interview in Khartoum. "But we hoped that it would help develop the south, and we persuaded them to let Chevron in."
"In hindsight," Mr. Alier added, "if I had known that the central government was not going to act in good faith and that oil would have the devastating effects it has had on our populations, I would have never encouraged the oil companies to come in."
Since the departure of the British, who had ruled Sudan as two separate states, the northern Arab-led Islamist government has tried to conquer and Islamize southern black Africans who have sought self-determination in a single Sudan or outright secession. Chevron's discovery of oil helped renew the war in 1983. Understanding that oil would only help the government, the main rebellion group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, kidnapped and killed three Chevron employees. The company pulled out in 1984.
In 1997, after the government made peace with some of the rebels, it saw another opportunity to re-enter the dormant oil fields.
With American companies barred from Sudan because of sanctions imposed on Khartoum for its support of terrorism, the oil was left to the Chinese, Malaysians and Canadians. Thousands of Chinese laborers arrived in Sudan and quickly built a 1,000- mile pipeline stretching from the Unity and Heglig oil fields just north of Bentiu to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
Since 1984, the war is believed to have resulted in two million deaths. Millions of Sudanese have been displaced inside and outside the country. Thousands have been enslaved in the age-old practice of Arabs' raiding black Africa for slaves, or of rival black Africans taking the vanquished force's women and children as war booty.
Because of geography and absence of infrastructure, southern Sudan remains almost inaccessible, heightening the southerners' feelings that the world has forgotten them and their suffering.
Having heard that a reporter and photographer were walking through this region in August, Gatkur Dador, one of the most powerful men in the area, walked a full day to seek them out.
Mr. Dador, who said he was 90 years old though he looked 50, is known as the region's greatest magician. He wanted the journalists to know that the government forces had dropped bombs and attacked his village with helicopter gunships.
At sunset one evening, Mr. Dador sat under a tree, waiting for a canoe to take him across a river. He wore a cowboy hat and was dressed entirely in green. His Kalashnikov lay at his feet.
"I have no power," he said, defeat suddenly filling his voice. "This land is being taken from us by force because of the oil."
"I have no power," he repeated, as a small boat appeared on the horizon. "I will have to leave, as well as the others. We will have to find a new home."
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