The coming collision in Sudan
Sunday, 21 October 2007
David Morse
EVEN before the Cessna touched down in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, I knew that we were on the front lines of what may someday be a huge war; that we were witnessing the opening skirmish in a series of resource wars in which countries like Sudan and Nigeria now figure prominently, but which may spread to most of Africa. Not only is this continent rich in mineral wealth; but the inhabitants of a number of its countries can still be driven from their land -- raped and killed -- with impunity. Today's resource-driven conflicts are but an extension of the slave trade as well as the ivory, gold, rubber, and diamond trades that have fed on Africa, undermining and corrupting its people's attempts at governance.
Oil was the precipitating cause of the 21-year-long civil war in Sudan. The South had the oil; the North was the center of power. When the North first moved to seize the southern oilfields in the mid-1980s, a rebellion began -- and, immediately after that, came the attacks on southern villages that caused our "Lost Boys" to flee for their lives. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in January of 2005, was supposed to heal the rupture between North and South and divide the oil equitably.
In neighbouring Darfur, the more immediate issue is water: water for grazing versus water for farming, the competition between herders and farmers exacerbated terribly by drought, global warming, and encroaching desert. Some of the poorest, most disenfranchised Arabs had no place to graze their herds, so they were easily recruited into the militias known as the Janjaweed, along with common criminals, and given license to steal, rape, and kill.
Oil and water don't usually mix. In this case they do. Neither Darfur, nor South Sudan can be understood in isolation. They are part of the same marginalized hinterland that is struggling with the central government in the North for access to resources.
Actions in the past few days have dramatised their connectedness. One of the Darfur rebel factions threatened to withdraw from peace negotiations. Why? Because of Khartoum's failure to honour the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in South Sudan. And while water triggered the conflict in Darfur, oil continues to fuel it. Oil pays for Khartoum's increasingly sophisticated arms purchases from Russia. Oil buys China's support at the UN Security Council, so that a culture of impunity can go largely unchecked. Oil buys the quiescence of the good citizens of Khartoum, who pretend not to know what is going on 500 miles away. Rumours abound that Darfur itself may contain oil reserves beyond those located in its southeast corner -- as well as valuable deposits of uranium and gold.
I had riches of my own. Traveling with Gabriel Bol Deng and two other "Lost Boys" through South Sudan offered filmmaker Jen Marlowe and me a privileged glimpse into the heart of Dinka society -- its elaborate handshakes, its female healers and dancers, its songs and genealogies. Marlowe captured much of it for the documentary film she is now editing and trying to fund. Even the painful moments -- the stark poverty, the belly hunger -- were part of our journalistic witness; an opportunity to assess the strength of a tenuous peace in a region that has been almost constantly at war for the better part of a century. It was also, we knew, a window that could slam shut at almost any moment.
The fractures in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA, seemed to be widening just in the weeks that we were traveling in the area.
"We are not getting all our oil," cabinet minister Dr. Barnaba Marial Benjamin told me in his office in Juba, speaking of his government's $300 million budgetary shortfall. The problem -- as I had been hearing for two years now -- was that Khartoum was stalling on demarcating the border between North and South that runs through the northern reaches of the country's richest oilfields.
Benjamin also singled out Khartoum's failure to implement the protocols designed to resolve the dispute over Abyei, which holds some of the richest oilfields. "The oil we are getting is from the few wells which are deep inside the South." So instead of sharing revenues evenly, as dictated by the peace agreement, he suspects Khartoum of taking 100% of the oil from all but those few wells. Lack of transparency and the presence of Khartoum's troops in the oilfields leave the South with no way of tracking the oil or auditing the revenues it should receive according to the CPA.
Benjamin's title is Minister of Regional Cooperation for the Government of South Sudan: He combines the roles of foreign minister and secretary of commerce. Sporting a subtly burnished golden silk necktie, and fluent in English, Benjamin is an energetic speaker who uses the full range of his voice -- which, when he complains about those northern troops in the southern oilfields, is both shrilly indignant and somehow endearing. One gathers that, in addition to his other roles, he is a lobbyist, importuning non-governmental organisations and friendly governments to help his impoverished but mineral-rich quasi-nation.
We are seated inside one of perhaps a dozen modular trailer-style offices parked near the site of a new complex of two- and three-story government buildings under construction. They may appear modest to a Western visitor, but for southern Sudan this constitutes a building boom, confirming the impression many southerners have that the government is focused on Juba, to the neglect of the countryside. Later, we will learn that Juba's road-building program is being curtailed for lack of funds, as is road-building throughout the South; and, in September, Darfur scholar and activist Alex DeWaal will email me on return from a trip to Juba, saying that he found the city on "a war footing." He added, "It would be tragic and stupid if the internationals by focusing attention on Darfur blindfolded themselves to the prospects of an even greater tragedy that could be imminent in the South…"
The situation is deteriorating as I write. But when we were in South Sudan, government officials were still trying to put the best face on things.
Only a year and a half had passed since I was last in Juba and yet the city was barely recognisable, its population having exploded from 100,000 to a million. On the previous trip, I happened to see the foundations being poured for Juba's first modern gas station -- probably the first in South Sudan. (In Kuajok, for instance, petrol is sold in glass bottles and jerry cans from stands.) Now, the capital's streets are full of cars. The airport has expanded rapidly. Our pilot, Captain Saleh, confirmed that the runways had been lengthened by at least a third to accommodate large passenger jets.
Sometimes, not far away, we could catch the throaty diesel roar of tanks engaged in manoeuvres -- a reminder that, in this embattled land, fully 40% of the national budget goes to defense. A reminder that the war might come tomorrow
Back to Dr. Benjamin, who was explaining that, in 2006, Khartoum had paid the government of South Sudan a little over one billion dollars as its annual share of oil revenues, based on a production level of 300,000 barrels per day. With production expected to increase to half a million barrels per day in 2007, his government had assumed its share would rise to somewhere between $105 million and $115 million per month "But no!" says the minister indignantly, "We are getting less! One month it dropped to $44 million!" The government is forced, he says, to go begging, looking for grants from "our friends" to make ends meet.
Benjamin's explanation is passionate, if a bit simplistic. To begin with, Khartoum's own projections may have been overly optimistic, inflated by its bullish oil minister Awad Ahmed al-Jaz. A hard-headed report from the Economist this June calls al-Jaz's prediction of an increase of up to one million barrels per day next year "too rosy." The country's original oilfields, which produce valuable low-sulfur oil known as Nile Blend, are already "maturing," as indicated by a drop in production from the 300,000 barrels per day Benjamin cited to 254,000 barrels in the first quarter of this year. Higher in sulfur, the new Dar Blend now coming on-line is reportedly selling for only a third of the average international price of crude oil.
The knowledge that some of Sudan's best oilfields are already starting to decline should be sobering to all parties. It puts Khartoum's stalling into perspective. Oil does not last forever.
In the meantime, Khartoum's refusal to remove its troops from the oilfields only reinforces the South's worst suspicions. Benjamin hedges his words. He does not quite say that Khartoum is stealing the South's oil, or accuse Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir of "acting in bad faith" -- a charge leveled by the South's President, Salva Kiir Mayardit, last January during a public celebration of the second anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Instead, Benjamin speaks of "certain elements within the National Congress Party" -- the ruling party in Khartoum -- who seem intent on scuttling the peace agreement.
He and his colleagues in the government wondered, he explained, if Khartoum had a "Plan B" in mind that prompted them to sabotage the CPA. "Well," he said, as if addressing Khartoum directly, "Have you got another plan, by refusing to implement the CPA?... Why are you buying modern aircraft, MiG-29s and the rest? Whom are you going to fight?… So have you a 'Plan B'? And that's why we say to the international community 'Help us, we don't know what the hell is going on.'"
The CPA, the minister emphasised, is an international agreement. Its implementation should be monitored by all its signatories. It was signed onto not only by the two warring parties -- the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political arm of the southern rebels led by John Garang, and the National Congress Party (formerly the National Islamic Front), representing the Government of Sudan -- but also by the UN, the European Union, the African Union, the Arab League, and individual nations including the United States, which helped broker the treaty. "I should not have to shout this from the rooftops! You don't give birth and then forget… You need to nurse it, see that it grows properly."
The peace, he said, cannot "grow properly" if the flow of international aid to the South slows to a trickle, as has happened. The attention concentrated exclusively on Darfur, the catastrophe du jour in the West, has been a disaster for the South. Most of the money pledged by wealthy nations at the Multi-Donor Trust meeting at Oslo in 2005 and specifically earmarked for development in the South has been diverted to humanitarian aid in Darfur.
In a second interview, I was joined by Gabriel Bol Deng, who asked Dr. Benjamin what his government was doing to "support our brothers and sisters in Darfur." The minister assured him that the SPLM supports the delivery of humanitarian aid and the deployment of UN troops in adequate numbers in the region; but, he stressed, the marginalized people in Darfur "need a political settlement." The CPA offers "the nucleus of peace that can spread throughout the Sudan." By the same token, "If the peace process in the South collapses, then the whole country goes back to war."
During a brief audience with President Salva Kiir Mayardit, I asked about the charge of "bad faith" he had leveled at Khartoum. He denied only that he had hurled the accusation in anger at Bashir personally. "I did not abuse him," he said.
This seemed to catch the essence of his government's official stance toward its former enemies, and now partners, in the new Unity Government -- an edgy bluntness combined with an attempt at surface equanimity: It is not Bashir personally, not even the Bashir regime, but rather "certain elements" that are sabotaging the CPA.
Under this studied calm lurks a grim principle of asymmetrical warfare: When a guerilla operation goes conventional, it loses its chief strength, its ability to hit the enemy and disappear. In any future conflict, the South and the other hinterlands of Sudan will be vastly outgunned. Just as Khartoum's oil pipelines and other infrastructure were once vulnerable to a ragtag rebel guerrilla army, now Juba is vulnerable to the well-armed North's superior airpower -- which makes Benjamin's reference to 'Plan B' ominous indeed.
To be continued.
(David Morse is an independent journalist and human rights activist whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, 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.)
--TomDispatch
EVEN before the Cessna touched down in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, I knew that we were on the front lines of what may someday be a huge war; that we were witnessing the opening skirmish in a series of resource wars in which countries like Sudan and Nigeria now figure prominently, but which may spread to most of Africa. Not only is this continent rich in mineral wealth; but the inhabitants of a number of its countries can still be driven from their land -- raped and killed -- with impunity. Today's resource-driven conflicts are but an extension of the slave trade as well as the ivory, gold, rubber, and diamond trades that have fed on Africa, undermining and corrupting its people's attempts at governance.
Oil was the precipitating cause of the 21-year-long civil war in Sudan. The South had the oil; the North was the center of power. When the North first moved to seize the southern oilfields in the mid-1980s, a rebellion began -- and, immediately after that, came the attacks on southern villages that caused our "Lost Boys" to flee for their lives. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in January of 2005, was supposed to heal the rupture between North and South and divide the oil equitably.
In neighbouring Darfur, the more immediate issue is water: water for grazing versus water for farming, the competition between herders and farmers exacerbated terribly by drought, global warming, and encroaching desert. Some of the poorest, most disenfranchised Arabs had no place to graze their herds, so they were easily recruited into the militias known as the Janjaweed, along with common criminals, and given license to steal, rape, and kill.
Oil and water don't usually mix. In this case they do. Neither Darfur, nor South Sudan can be understood in isolation. They are part of the same marginalized hinterland that is struggling with the central government in the North for access to resources.
Actions in the past few days have dramatised their connectedness. One of the Darfur rebel factions threatened to withdraw from peace negotiations. Why? Because of Khartoum's failure to honour the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in South Sudan. And while water triggered the conflict in Darfur, oil continues to fuel it. Oil pays for Khartoum's increasingly sophisticated arms purchases from Russia. Oil buys China's support at the UN Security Council, so that a culture of impunity can go largely unchecked. Oil buys the quiescence of the good citizens of Khartoum, who pretend not to know what is going on 500 miles away. Rumours abound that Darfur itself may contain oil reserves beyond those located in its southeast corner -- as well as valuable deposits of uranium and gold.
I had riches of my own. Traveling with Gabriel Bol Deng and two other "Lost Boys" through South Sudan offered filmmaker Jen Marlowe and me a privileged glimpse into the heart of Dinka society -- its elaborate handshakes, its female healers and dancers, its songs and genealogies. Marlowe captured much of it for the documentary film she is now editing and trying to fund. Even the painful moments -- the stark poverty, the belly hunger -- were part of our journalistic witness; an opportunity to assess the strength of a tenuous peace in a region that has been almost constantly at war for the better part of a century. It was also, we knew, a window that could slam shut at almost any moment.
The fractures in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA, seemed to be widening just in the weeks that we were traveling in the area.
"We are not getting all our oil," cabinet minister Dr. Barnaba Marial Benjamin told me in his office in Juba, speaking of his government's $300 million budgetary shortfall. The problem -- as I had been hearing for two years now -- was that Khartoum was stalling on demarcating the border between North and South that runs through the northern reaches of the country's richest oilfields.
Benjamin also singled out Khartoum's failure to implement the protocols designed to resolve the dispute over Abyei, which holds some of the richest oilfields. "The oil we are getting is from the few wells which are deep inside the South." So instead of sharing revenues evenly, as dictated by the peace agreement, he suspects Khartoum of taking 100% of the oil from all but those few wells. Lack of transparency and the presence of Khartoum's troops in the oilfields leave the South with no way of tracking the oil or auditing the revenues it should receive according to the CPA.
Benjamin's title is Minister of Regional Cooperation for the Government of South Sudan: He combines the roles of foreign minister and secretary of commerce. Sporting a subtly burnished golden silk necktie, and fluent in English, Benjamin is an energetic speaker who uses the full range of his voice -- which, when he complains about those northern troops in the southern oilfields, is both shrilly indignant and somehow endearing. One gathers that, in addition to his other roles, he is a lobbyist, importuning non-governmental organisations and friendly governments to help his impoverished but mineral-rich quasi-nation.
We are seated inside one of perhaps a dozen modular trailer-style offices parked near the site of a new complex of two- and three-story government buildings under construction. They may appear modest to a Western visitor, but for southern Sudan this constitutes a building boom, confirming the impression many southerners have that the government is focused on Juba, to the neglect of the countryside. Later, we will learn that Juba's road-building program is being curtailed for lack of funds, as is road-building throughout the South; and, in September, Darfur scholar and activist Alex DeWaal will email me on return from a trip to Juba, saying that he found the city on "a war footing." He added, "It would be tragic and stupid if the internationals by focusing attention on Darfur blindfolded themselves to the prospects of an even greater tragedy that could be imminent in the South…"
The situation is deteriorating as I write. But when we were in South Sudan, government officials were still trying to put the best face on things.
Only a year and a half had passed since I was last in Juba and yet the city was barely recognisable, its population having exploded from 100,000 to a million. On the previous trip, I happened to see the foundations being poured for Juba's first modern gas station -- probably the first in South Sudan. (In Kuajok, for instance, petrol is sold in glass bottles and jerry cans from stands.) Now, the capital's streets are full of cars. The airport has expanded rapidly. Our pilot, Captain Saleh, confirmed that the runways had been lengthened by at least a third to accommodate large passenger jets.
Sometimes, not far away, we could catch the throaty diesel roar of tanks engaged in manoeuvres -- a reminder that, in this embattled land, fully 40% of the national budget goes to defense. A reminder that the war might come tomorrow
Back to Dr. Benjamin, who was explaining that, in 2006, Khartoum had paid the government of South Sudan a little over one billion dollars as its annual share of oil revenues, based on a production level of 300,000 barrels per day. With production expected to increase to half a million barrels per day in 2007, his government had assumed its share would rise to somewhere between $105 million and $115 million per month "But no!" says the minister indignantly, "We are getting less! One month it dropped to $44 million!" The government is forced, he says, to go begging, looking for grants from "our friends" to make ends meet.
Benjamin's explanation is passionate, if a bit simplistic. To begin with, Khartoum's own projections may have been overly optimistic, inflated by its bullish oil minister Awad Ahmed al-Jaz. A hard-headed report from the Economist this June calls al-Jaz's prediction of an increase of up to one million barrels per day next year "too rosy." The country's original oilfields, which produce valuable low-sulfur oil known as Nile Blend, are already "maturing," as indicated by a drop in production from the 300,000 barrels per day Benjamin cited to 254,000 barrels in the first quarter of this year. Higher in sulfur, the new Dar Blend now coming on-line is reportedly selling for only a third of the average international price of crude oil.
The knowledge that some of Sudan's best oilfields are already starting to decline should be sobering to all parties. It puts Khartoum's stalling into perspective. Oil does not last forever.
In the meantime, Khartoum's refusal to remove its troops from the oilfields only reinforces the South's worst suspicions. Benjamin hedges his words. He does not quite say that Khartoum is stealing the South's oil, or accuse Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir of "acting in bad faith" -- a charge leveled by the South's President, Salva Kiir Mayardit, last January during a public celebration of the second anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Instead, Benjamin speaks of "certain elements within the National Congress Party" -- the ruling party in Khartoum -- who seem intent on scuttling the peace agreement.
He and his colleagues in the government wondered, he explained, if Khartoum had a "Plan B" in mind that prompted them to sabotage the CPA. "Well," he said, as if addressing Khartoum directly, "Have you got another plan, by refusing to implement the CPA?... Why are you buying modern aircraft, MiG-29s and the rest? Whom are you going to fight?… So have you a 'Plan B'? And that's why we say to the international community 'Help us, we don't know what the hell is going on.'"
The CPA, the minister emphasised, is an international agreement. Its implementation should be monitored by all its signatories. It was signed onto not only by the two warring parties -- the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political arm of the southern rebels led by John Garang, and the National Congress Party (formerly the National Islamic Front), representing the Government of Sudan -- but also by the UN, the European Union, the African Union, the Arab League, and individual nations including the United States, which helped broker the treaty. "I should not have to shout this from the rooftops! You don't give birth and then forget… You need to nurse it, see that it grows properly."
The peace, he said, cannot "grow properly" if the flow of international aid to the South slows to a trickle, as has happened. The attention concentrated exclusively on Darfur, the catastrophe du jour in the West, has been a disaster for the South. Most of the money pledged by wealthy nations at the Multi-Donor Trust meeting at Oslo in 2005 and specifically earmarked for development in the South has been diverted to humanitarian aid in Darfur.
In a second interview, I was joined by Gabriel Bol Deng, who asked Dr. Benjamin what his government was doing to "support our brothers and sisters in Darfur." The minister assured him that the SPLM supports the delivery of humanitarian aid and the deployment of UN troops in adequate numbers in the region; but, he stressed, the marginalized people in Darfur "need a political settlement." The CPA offers "the nucleus of peace that can spread throughout the Sudan." By the same token, "If the peace process in the South collapses, then the whole country goes back to war."
During a brief audience with President Salva Kiir Mayardit, I asked about the charge of "bad faith" he had leveled at Khartoum. He denied only that he had hurled the accusation in anger at Bashir personally. "I did not abuse him," he said.
This seemed to catch the essence of his government's official stance toward its former enemies, and now partners, in the new Unity Government -- an edgy bluntness combined with an attempt at surface equanimity: It is not Bashir personally, not even the Bashir regime, but rather "certain elements" that are sabotaging the CPA.
Under this studied calm lurks a grim principle of asymmetrical warfare: When a guerilla operation goes conventional, it loses its chief strength, its ability to hit the enemy and disappear. In any future conflict, the South and the other hinterlands of Sudan will be vastly outgunned. Just as Khartoum's oil pipelines and other infrastructure were once vulnerable to a ragtag rebel guerrilla army, now Juba is vulnerable to the well-armed North's superior airpower -- which makes Benjamin's reference to 'Plan B' ominous indeed.
To be continued.
(David Morse is an independent journalist and human rights activist whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, 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.)
--TomDispatch