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Sudan’s new oil wealth still a source of conflict

Jan 10, 2006 (LANKIEN, South Sudan) — Nothing has changed in the way oil wealth is distributed in Sudan, oil and aid workers say, a year after a peace agreement to end a petroleum-fueled civil war in the south of Africa’s largest country.

Sudan is among Africa’s poorest countries despite its newfound riches, though high-rise buildings were springing up amid a petroleum boom in the Arab and Muslim-dominated north.

Life for mainly black Christians and animists in the south, where oil is extracted, is closer to Biblical than modern.

Women gather reeds from the banks of tributaries that feed the White Nile to weave baskets in which they carry babies on their heads. People get around by walking for hours, in the rainy season through chest-high swamp waters. Foreign doctors who brought the first car to Lankien area recently hacked through bush to make a "road" between two clinics.

Southerners continue to die by the thousands of easily preventable diseases, some compounded by conflicts in which the government is accused of a scorched earth policy to force people away from oil sites.

The peace agreement signed Jan. 9, 2005 promised an equal share of oil wealth to an autonomous southern government, but southern leaders say the north has given only a fraction. Northern officials blame delays on bureaucracy.

There are fears the southern conflict, in which 2 million people died in 21 years, could rekindle if nothing is done to share growing oil income. President Omar al-Bashir announced in November that he expects production to double to 1 million barrels a day by year’s end.

A relative peace is holding in the south, where centuries of traditional rivalries over water and pasture exploded into full-scale civil war after oil was discovered.

Now, oil exploration in the west has increased stakes in a two-year conflict in Darfur province, where the United States and United Nations accuse the government of genocide. In a Muslim-on-Muslim conflict, ethnic African farmers rebelled, accusing the central government of neglect and then of arming ethnic Arab nomads with whom they long have clashed over water and land. The central government denies that it arms the militias.

International mediation is tempered by oil rivalries between Western countries, and between them and China, whose single largest source of foreign crude is Sudan.

Medical assistant Francis Gatluak, 48, says oil companies favored northerners with better salaries when he was laying pipelines in the 1980s.

During the ensuing war, guerrillas won control of much of the south but the central government established garrison towns around oil fields. American companies are excluded by sanctions imposed by the U.S. administration, which was a leading mediator in the peace agreement signed last January.

Joseph Geng, a 23-year-old paid US$300 a month as a line checker for London-based seismic survey company WesternGeco, charged northerners still get better money and conditions, living in mobile homes with electricity while southerners are relegated to tents.

"They treat northerners as first-class citizens and southerners as third-class," he said.

A Christian, Geng was offended that his salary was taxed for "dawa islawaiya" _ to propagate Islam.

WesternGeco did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nor did Sudanese officials in Khartoum, the capital.

Khartoum is fighting a lawsuit in the United States, along with Canadian Talisman Energy, over allegations of a scorched earth policy employed in 2002 and 2003 to expand oil operations by building an all-weather road southeast of Bentiu.

Survivors describe low-flying helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers and ground attacks by troops who torched villages, killed men and raped women and girls.

Thousands fled as the road progressed south, swelling the ranks of 500,000 refugees in camps in six neighboring countries and another 4 million displaced within Sudan.

Talisman acknowledges the government used its airstrips to launch air raids but CEO James Buckee has argued that "Talisman’s presence in Sudan has been a force for good" providing medical assistance, shelter, clean water and vocational training.

Pressure from human rights activists led Talisman to sell its shares in Sudan. A hospital that Talisman built and that offered free care to southerners now stands empty.

"It’s much more difficult now to find out what’s going on," said Keith Myers of the British foreign affairs think tank Chatham House. "Lobbyists got rid of Talisman but in moved national oil companies from China, Malaysia and India who are much less transparent and much less susceptible to lobbying."

Controversy surrounds oil concessions, some issued by both northern and southern officials. Britain’s White Nile company, for example, last year bought a concession from southerners that French Total has had on-hold since the 1980s.

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