War of the Future By David Morse TomDispatch Friday 19
August 2005
Oil drives the genocide in Darfur. A war of the future is being
waged right now in the sprawling desert region of northeastern Africa known
as Sudan. The weapons themselves are not futuristic. None of the
ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic storm troopers that are the stuff of
science fiction; nor, for that matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones
or other high-tech weapon systems at the cutting edge of today's
arsenal. No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and
knives. In the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics
are burning and pillaging, castration and rape - carried out by Arab
militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated technologies
deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese
government to support the militias when they attack black African
villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs
used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits hundreds of feet below
the surface. This is what makes it a war of the future: not the
slick PowerPoint presentations you can imagine in boardrooms in Dallas
and Beijing showing proven reserves in one color, estimated reserves in
another, vast subterranean puddles that stretch west into Chad, and
south to Nigeria and Uganda; not the technology; just the simple fact of
the oil. This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving
great powers whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a
finite pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael
Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the
consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible
war. Invisible? Invisible because it is happening in Africa.
Invisible because our mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum
industry. Think of all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers
and magazines. Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile
culture,
our suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and famous, the
giddy assumption that all this can continue indefinitely when we know it
can't - and you see why Darfur slips into darkness. And Darfur is only
the tip of the sprawling, scarred state known as Sudan. Nicholas
Kristof pointed out in a New York Times column that ABC News had a total of
18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts all last year,
and that was to the credit of Peter Jennings; NBC had only 5 minutes, CBS
only 3 minutes. This is, of course, a micro-fraction of the time
devoted to Michael Jackson. Why is it, I wonder, that when a genocide
takes place in Africa, our attention is always riveted on some black
American miscreant superstar? During the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago,
when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days, it was the trial of
O.J. Simpson that had our attention. Yes, racism enters into our
refusal to even try to understand Africa, let alone value African lives.
And
yes, surely we're witnessing the kind of denial that Samantha Power
documents in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; the
sheer difficulty we have acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it,
she observes, we pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly
by. And yes, turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia,
with its graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the
streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by
something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that prevents the
media from making the connections that would threaten our
petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to acknowledge the fact that the
industrial world's addiction to oil is laying waste to Africa. When
Darfur does occasionally make the news - photographs of burned villages,
charred corpses, malnourished children - it is presented without
context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-driven crisis in northern
Africa. An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians are dying every day. Yet
the message from our media is that we Americans are "helpless" to prevent
this humanitarian tragedy, even as we gas up our SUVs with these
people's lives. Even Kristof - whose efforts as a mainstream journalist
to keep Darfur in the spotlight are worthy of a Pulitzer - fails to make
the connection to oil; and yet oil was the driving force behind Sudan's
civil war. Oil is driving the genocide in Darfur. Oil drives the Bush
administration's policy toward Sudan and the rest of Africa. And oil is
likely to topple Sudan and its neighbors into chaos. The Context
for Genocide I will support these assertions with fact. But first,
let's give Sudanese government officials in Khartoum their due. They
prefer to explain the slaughter in Darfur as an ancient rivalry between
nomadic herding tribes in the north and black African farmers in the
south. They deny responsibility for the militias and claim they can't
control
them, even as they continue to train the militias, arm them, and pay
them. They play down their Islamist ideology, which supported Osama bin
Laden and seeks to impose Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan and
elsewhere. Instead, they portray themselves as pragmatists struggling to hold
together an impoverished and backwards country; all they need is more
economic aid from the West, and an end to the trade sanctions imposed by
the U.S. in 1997, when President Clinton added Sudan to the list of
states sponsoring terrorism. Darfur, from their perspective, is an
inconvenient anomaly that will go away, in time. It is true that ethnic
rivalries and racism play a part in today's conflict in Darfur. Seen in
the larger context of Sudan's civil war, however, Darfur is not an
anomaly; it is an extension of that conflict. The real driving force behind
the North-South conflict became clear after Chevron discovered oil in
southern Sudan in 1978. The traditional competition for water at the
fringes
of the Sahara was transformed into quite a different struggle. The
Arab-dominated government in Khartoum redrew Sudan's jurisdictional
boundaries to exclude the oil reserves from southern jurisdiction. Thus began
Sudan's 21-year-old North-South civil war. The conflict then moved
south, deep into Sudan, into wetter lands that form the headwaters of the
Nile and lie far from the historical competition for water. Oil
pipelines, pumping stations, well-heads, and other key infrastructure
became targets for the rebels from the South, who wanted a share in the
country's new mineral wealth, much of which was on lands they had long
occupied. John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army
(SPLA), declared these installations to be legitimate targets of war.
For a time, the oil companies fled from the conflict, but in the 1990s
they began to return. Chinese and Indian companies were particularly
aggressive, doing much of their drilling behind perimeters of bermed earth
guarded by troops to protect against rebel attacks. It was a Chinese
pipeline to the Red Sea that first brought Sudanese oil to the
international market. Prior to the discovery of oil, this dusty terrain had
little to offer in the way of exports. Most of the arable land was
given over to subsistence farming: sorghum and food staples; cattle and
camels. Some cotton was grown for export. Sudan, sometimes still called
The Sudan, is the largest country in Africa and one of the poorest.
Nearly a million square miles in area, roughly the size of the United States
east of the Mississippi, it is more region than nation. Embracing some
570 distinct peoples and dozens of languages and historically
ungovernable, its boundaries had been drawn for the convenience of colonial
powers. Its nominal leaders in the north, living in urban Khartoum, were
eager to join the global economy - and oil was to become their country's
first high-value export. South Sudan is overwhelmingly rural and
black. Less accessible from the north, marginalized under the reign of
the Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century, again under the British
overlords during much of the twentieth, and now by Khartoum in the north,
South Sudan today is almost devoid of schools, hospitals, and modern
infrastructure. Racism figures heavily in all this. Arabs refer to
darker Africans as "abeed," a word that means something close to "slave."
During the civil war, African boys were kidnapped from the south and
enslaved; many were pressed into military service by the Arab-dominated
government in Khartoum. Racism continues to find _expression in the
brutal rapes now taking place in Darfur. Khartoum recruits the militias,
called Janjaweed - itself a derogatory term - from the poorest and least
educated members of nomadic Arab society. In short, the Islamist
regime has manipulated ethnic, racial, and economic tensions, as part of
a strategic drive to commandeer the country's oil wealth. The war has
claimed about two million lives, mostly in the south - many by
starvation, when government forces prevented humanitarian agencies from
gaining access to camps. Another four million Sudanese remain homeless. The
regime originally sought to impose shariah, or Islamic, law on the
predominantly Christian and animist South. Khartoum dropped this demand,
however, under terms of the Comprehensive Peace Treaty signed last
January. The South was to be allowed to operate under its own civil law, which
included rights for women; and in six years, southerners could choose
by plebiscite whether to separate or remain part of a unified Sudan. The
all-important oil revenues would be divided between Khartoum and the
SPLA-held territory. Under a power-sharing agreement, SPLA commander John
Garang would be installed as vice president of Sudan, alongside
President Omar al-Bashir. Darfur, to the west, was left out of this
treaty. In a sense, the treaty - brokered with the help of the U.S. - was
signed at the expense of Darfur, a parched area the size of France,
sparsely populated but oil rich. It has an ancient history of separate
existence as a kingdom lapping into Chad, separate from the area known
today as Sudan. Darfur's population is proportionately more Muslim and
less Christian than southern Sudan's, but is mostly black African, and
identifies itself by tribe, such as the Fur. (Darfur, in fact, means
"land of the Fur.") The Darfurian practice of Islam was too lax to suit the
Islamists who control Khartoum. And so Darfurian villages have been
burned to clear the way for drilling and pipelines, and to remove any
possible sanctuaries for rebels. Some of the land seized from black farmers
is reportedly being given to Arabs brought in from neighboring Chad.
Oil and Turmoil With the signing of the treaty last January, and
the prospect of stability for most of war-torn Sudan, new seismographic
studies were undertaken by foreign oil companies in April. These studies
had the effect of doubling Sudan's estimated oil reserves, bringing
them to at least 563 million barrels. They could yield substantially
more. Khartoum claims the amount could total as much as 5 billion barrels.
That's still a pittance compared to the 674 billion barrels of proven
oil reserves possessed by the six Persian Gulf countries - Saudi Arabia,
Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar. The very
modesty of Sudan's reserves speaks volumes to the desperation with which
industrial nations are grasping for alternative sources of oil. The
rush for oil is wreaking havoc on Sudan. Oil revenues to Khartoum have
been about $1 million a day, exactly the amount which the government
funnels into arms - helicopters and bombers from Russia, tanks from Poland
and China, missiles from Iran. Thus, oil is fueling the genocide in
Darfur at every level. This is the context in which Darfur must be
understood - and, with it, the whole of Africa. The same Africa whose vast
tapestry of indigenous cultures, wealth of forests and savannas was
torn apart by three centuries of theft by European colonial powers -
seeking slaves, ivory, gold, and diamonds - is being devastated anew by the
21st century quest for oil. Sudan is now the seventh biggest oil
producer in Africa after Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and
Equatorial Guinea. Oil has brought corruption and turmoil in its wake
virtually wherever it has been discovered in the developing world.
Second only perhaps to the arms industry, its lack of transparency and
concentration of wealth invites kickbacks and bribery, as well as
distortions to regional economies. "There is no other commodity that produces
such great profit," said Terry Karl in an interview with Miren
Gutierrez, for the International Press Service, "and this is generally in the
context of highly concentrated power, very weak bureaucracies, and weak
rule of law." Karl is co-author of a Catholic Relief Services report on
the impact of oil in Africa, entitled Bottom of the Barrel. He cites
the examples of Gabon, Angola and Nigeria, which began exploiting oil
several decades ago and suffer from intense corruption. In Nigeria, as in
Angola, an overvalued exchange rate has destroyed the non-oil economy.
Local revolts over control of oil revenues also have triggered sweeping
military repression in the Niger delta. Oil companies and
exploration companies like Halliburton wield political and sometimes military
power. In Sudan, roads and bridges built by oil firms have been used to
attack otherwise remote villages. Canada's largest oil company,
Talisman, is now in court for allegedly aiding Sudan government forces in
blowing up a church and killing church leaders, in order to clear the land
for pipelines and drilling. Under public pressure in Canada, Talisman
has sold its holdings in Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish company,
withdrew under similar pressure from human rights groups. Michael Klare
suggests that oil production is intrinsically destabilizing: When
countries with few other resources of national wealth exploit their
petroleum reserves, the ruling elites typically monopolize the distribution of
oil revenues, enriching themselves and their cronies while leaving the
rest of the population mired in poverty - and the well-equipped and
often privileged security forces of these 'petro-states' can be counted on
to support them. Compound these antidemocratic tendencies with the
ravenous thirst of the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies,
and you have a recipe for destabilization in Africa. China's oil imports
climbed by 33% in 2004, India's by 11%. The International Energy Agency
expects them to use 11.3 million barrels a day by 2010, which will be
more than one-fifth of global demand. Keith Bradsher, in a New York
Times article, 2 Big Appetites Take Seats at the Oil Table, observes:
As Chinese and Indian companies venture into countries like Sudan, where
risk-aversive multinationals have hesitated to enter, questions are
being raised in the industry about whether state-owned companies are
accurately judging the risks to their own investments, or whether they are
just more willing to gamble with taxpayers' money than multinationals
are willing to gamble with shareholders' investments. The
geopolitical implications of this tolerance for instability are borne out in
Sudan, where Chinese state-owned companies exploited oil in the thick of
fighting. As China and India seek strategic access to oil - much as
Britain, Japan, and the United States jockeyed for access to oil fields in
the years leading up to World War II - the likelihood of destabilizing
countries like Sudan rises exponentially. Last June, following the
new seismographic exploration in Sudan and with the new power-sharing
peace treaty about to be implemented, Khartoum and the SPLA signed a
flurry of oil deals with Chinese, Indian, British, Malaysian, and other oil
companies. Desolate Sudan, Desolate World This feeding frenzy
may help explain the Bush administration's schizophrenic stance toward
Sudan. On the one hand, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in
September 2004 that his government had determined that what was happening
in Darfur was "genocide" - which appears to have been a pre-election
sop to conservative Christians, many with missions in Africa. On the
other hand, not only did the President fall silent on Darfur after the
election, but his administration has lobbied quietly against the Darfur
Peace and Accountability Act in Congress. That bill, how in committee,
calls for beefing up the African Union peacekeeping force and imposing
new sanctions on Khartoum, including referring individual officials to
the International Criminal Court (much hated by the administration).
The White House, undercutting Congressional efforts to stop the genocide,
is seeking closer relations with Khartoum on grounds that the regime
was
"cooperating in the war on terror." Nothing could end the
slaughter faster than the President of the United States standing up for Darfur
and making a strong case before the United Nations. Ours is the only
country with such clout. This is unimaginable, of course, for various
reasons. It seems clear that Bush, and the oil companies that contributed
so heavily to his 2000 presidential campaign, would like to see the
existing trade sanctions on Sudan removed, so U.S. companies can get a
piece of the action. Instead of standing up, the President has kept mum -
leaving it to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to put the best face
she can on his policy of appeasing Khartoum. On July 8, SPLA leader
John Garang was sworn in as vice president of Sudan, before a throng of
6 million cheering Sudanese. President Oman Bashir spoke in Arabic.
Garang spoke in English, the preferred language among educated
southerners, because of the country's language diversity. Sudan's future had never
looked brighter. Garang was a charismatic and forceful leader who
wanted a united Sudan. Three weeks later, Garang was killed in a helicopter
crash. When word of his death emerged, angry riots broke out in
Khartoum, and in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Men with guns and clubs
roamed the streets, setting fire to cars and office buildings. One hundred
and thirty people were killed, thousands wounded. No evidence of
foul play in his death has been uncovered, as of this writing. The
helicopter went down in rain and fog over mountainous terrain. Nevertheless,
suspicions are rampant. SPLA and government officials are calling for
calm, until the crash can be investigated by an international team of
experts. All too ominously, the disaster recalls the 1994 airplane crash
that killed Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, who was trying to
implement a power-sharing agreement between Hutus and Tutsis. That crash
touched off the explosive Rwandan genocide. What Garang's death
will
mean for Sudan is unclear. The new peace was already precarious. His
chosen successor, Salva Kiir Mayardit, appears less committed to a
united Sudan Nowhere is the potential impact of renewed war more
threatening than in the camps of refugees - the 4 million Internally Displaced
Persons (IDPs), driven from their homes during the North-South civil
war, several hundred thousand encamped at the fringes of Khartoum as
squatters or crowded into sprawling ghetto neighborhoods. Further west, in
Darfur and Chad, another 2.5 million IDPs live in the precarious limbo
of makeshift camps, in shelters cobbled together from plastic and
sticks - prevented by the Janjaweed from returning to their villages, wholly
dependent on outside aid. In short, Sudan embodies a collision
between a failed state and a failed energy policy. Increasingly, ours is a
planet whose human population is devoted to extracting what it can,
regardless of the human and environmental cost. The Bush energy policy,
crafted by oil companies, is predicated on a far different future from
the one any sane person would want his or her children to inherit - a
desolate world that few Americans, cocooned by the media's silence, are
willing to imagine.

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David Morse is an independent journalist and political analyst
whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends
Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, the Progressive Populist,
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.