“‘There’s no doubt he’s on his way out, but you need someone to huff and puff and blow the house down,’ was how one international observer summed it up. ‘And people are so busy trying to survive day by day.'”
The government of Chad has drawn threats of financial reprisals from World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. The inability to pay the salaries and benefits of civil servants and the ensuing strikes, a rebellion in the east and coup attempts of various origins, and the burden of some 200,000 Sudanese refugees, had led the parliament controlled by the party of President Idriss Déby to begin months ago to rethink Chad’s arrangement with the World Bank. It recently passed legislation that would “water down” a legal condition agreed to in 1999 for a World Bank insured loan to develop the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline Project with “a consortium led by Exxon Mobil” that includes “ChevronTexaco Corp of the U.S. and Malaysia’s Petronas.”
World Bank entities financed or guaranteed $192.9 million of the $4.1 billion pipeline project.
It is the largest privately financed project in sub-Saharan Africa, with private companies paying $3.5 billion or 85 percent of the total. According to the World Bank, among the private backers are Exxon Mobil Corp, which operates the pipeline and has 40 percent of the private-sector interest; Petronas of Malaysia, 35 percent; and ChevronTexaco, 25 percent.
Wolfowitz has sent the message that ratification of this legislation, which diverts money from a fund established to serve the poor and “future generations,” leaves the World Bank with no alternative but to consult with its financial partners and shareholders and decide which steps to take. They could decide to “suspend new credits or grants, halt disbursement of funds, and demand accelerated repayment of loans.” He blames the govt.’s current financial crisis on unresolved corruption.
Just another corrupt African govt. neglecting its people and creating a moral dilemma for the anti-poverty crusading World Bank, as Wolfowitz states? The World Bank wasn’t concerned when residents from the project region “reported killings by government forces shortly after the World Bank approved the project,” complaints that have been ongoing. And it didn’t take similar punitive steps in November 2000 when the Chad govt. spent “$4.5 million of a $25 million oil contract bonus to purchase weapons from Taiwan.” “Several international NGOs requested the World Bank to grant a two-year moratorium to its approval of the project,” due to Chad’s poor human rights record and civil unrest, but “the Bank declined.” However, it did manage to exonerate “the oil consortium from any future liability or accountability with respect to its operations.” And according to Akong Charles Ndika, an energy policy analyst with Global Village Cameroon, “Worst of all, the allocations contained in the law can be changed by the government unilaterally after five years.” But not the ones in dispute?
Déby “symbolically turned the tap that opened the flow of 225 000 barrels of oil,” on 10 February 2003. He now wants “ to renegotiate the agreement with the major companies extracting his country’s oil, complaining that ‘Chad gets only crumbs out of it’.” The honeymoon appears to be over. I’m wondering if Wolfowitz and the Bank, who shamelessly relieve themselves of culpability in the human and environmental abuses this grand experiment continues to inflict upon Chad’s people, have a suitable enforcer replacement in mind? And how long will the next one last?
Darfur Bleeds:
Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad
February 2006 Human Rights Watch (pdf)
Between October and December 2005, members of the Chadian armed forces (including the presidential guard), and even members of Déby’s own family, left his side to join armed Chadian opposition groups in eastern Chad and Darfur.9 Many observers in Chadian capital N’Djamena believe these defections may have mercenary motives, their aim being to win concessions from Déby in ongoing disputes over the allocation of Chad’s newfound oil wealth.10 While defecting to the rebels might seem a drastic irreversible step, there are examples in Chadian history of military defectors being welcomed back in government once their concerns are addressed.
On December 18, 2005, the Rassemblement pour la Démocratie et la Liberté (Rally for Democracy and Freedom, RDL), a Chadian rebel group based in Darfur, attacked the border town of Adré, Chad. Adré is the strategic key to Chad’s defense against attacks launched from Sudan (both Déby and Hisséin Habré before him ascended to power in Chad after attacking from Darfur and capturing Adré). Déby, apparently prompted by the wave of defections from the Chadian army between October and December, had begun reinforcing Adré, as well as Abéché, the capital of Ouaddaï province, even before the December 18, 2005 attack.11
He set about reorganizing his military forces along the border to the south of Adré, starting with the battalion in Modoyna, which was deployed to Adré on October 10, 2005,12 followed by battalions stationed in Koloy and Koumou on December 10, 2005. As of early February 2006, the Chadian army garrisons in Modoyna, Koumou, Koloy, Adré, Aourado, Borota and Goungour stood empty.13 Withdrawal from these border positions allowed Janjaweed militias to operate unchecked in eastern Chad, with disastrous consequences for civilians.
On December 28, 2005, the RDL and seven other Chadian anti-government politicomilitary groups created the Front Unique pour le Changement Démocratique au Tchad (FUC) and united their forces under a single military commander, Mahamat Nour, former head of the RDL.14 In a recent interview, Nour said he would seize power by force of arms unless Déby convened a “national forum” to decide the nation’s future before his presidential term ends in June.15
The Sudan conflict has been pouring over Chad’s borders since Déby “symbolically turned the tap” in 2003 and the conflict now “threatens to engulf” the country. Déby has faced several coup attempts from within his appointed govt. and clan for refusing to provide direct support to Sudanese Zaghawa rebels against the govt. of Sudan in Darfur and from former military personnel angling to be the new oil rich tyrant. And he’s faced-off with Sudan’s govt., accusing it several times of harbouring and supporting Chadian rebels that threaten to usurp Déby in a military coup, as Déby himself came to power in 1990. The “sharpest break” occurred on 23 December 2005, when Chad declared a “state of belligerence” with Sudan and the countries began amassing troops on the border. High-level talks held in Libya ended with an announcement on 8 February 2006 of mended fences and a pledge to not support respective opposition groups. That is also when the Chadian garrisons that were previously manned stood emptied enabling the “Janjaweed militias to operate unchecked in eastern Chad, with disastrous consequences for civilians.” A failure or success of the talks?
Desperation in Darfur
Can the United Nations now succeed where African peacekeepers have failed?
By Dan Morrison
12 February 2006 US News & World Report
Last week, the U.N. Security Council released a report accusing both Sudan’s government and the rebels of violating a U.N. arms embargo. “I came here thinking that I could help this place live in peace,” said a South African Army major nearing the end of his tour. “I did my level best, but we were tangled up from the start, from within and without.”
Now, the United Nations has begun the months-long process of taking over the African Union mission. At the U.N. Security Council, the Bush administration is using its February presidency to push for a stronger peacekeeping operation under a U.N. mandate, which some say could take as many as 20,000 peacekeepers (as well as Sudan’s agreement to cooperate). U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said he will ask President Bush this week for American troops and equipment to help “stop the carnage.” A better funded and equipped U.N. force, Annan said, needs to include robust elements like tactical air support to be able to respond quickly and stop attacks rather than arrive “after the harm has been done.”
But the carnage where? In the Western Upper Nile, where since 2000 “attacks carried out by Government of Sudan (GoS) forces and local pro-government militias and by rebel forces of, or aligned with, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Sudan Peoples’ Democratic Front/Defence Force (SPDF),” have created a living hell for Sudanese civilians? This is “the operational area of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC), the oil consortium that comprises the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Petronas Carigali (the national petroleum company of Malaysia, or its subsidiary Petronas Carigali Overseas Sudan Berhad), Sudapet (the Sudan state petroleum company) and *Canada’s Talisman Energy (Talisman),” where this report noted, “an increase in the number of recorded helicopter gunship attacks on settlements in or near this area. Some of these gunships have operated from facilities built, maintained and used by the oil consortium. The attacks are part of what appears to be a renewed Government of Sudan strategy to displace indigenous non-Arab inhabitants from specific rural areas of the oil region in order to clear and secure territory for oil development.”
*Talisman relented to public pressure and sold its interests in the Greater Nile Project Company to India’s ONGC Videsh in 2002.
Report of an Investigation into Oil Development, Conflict and Displacement in Western Upper Nile, Sudan
Commissioning Agencies:
Canadian Auto Workers Union
Steelworkers Humanity Fund
The Simons Foundation
United Church of Canada, Division of World Outreach
World Vision Canada
October 2001 (pdf)
For a short period in the late 1990s, a peace agreement between the Government of Sudan and Riek Machar’s SSIM/A allowed for the extension of government authority into some of the rural areas of the concession, enabling expansion of oil development and completion of the pipeline from the oil fields north to Port Sudan. SSIA forces had joined the government and were formed into the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF). The collapse of this peace agreement in 2000, the growing conflict between Government of Sudan forces and the former SSDF/SSIA forces, now regrouped as the Sudan Peoples’ Defence Forces (SPDF), and the increased presence of the SPLA in the area have apparently prompted a modification of the government’s military strategy. The new strategy in Western Upper Nile, this report suggests, is both more violent and more territorially focused, involving coordinated attacks on civilian settlements in which aerial bombardment and raids by helicopter gunships are followed by ground attacks from government-backed militias and government troops. These ground forces burn villages and crops, loot livestock and kill and abduct people – mainly women and children.
The increased intensity of the attacks, and the increased importance of oil in the war economy, have provoked attacks on oil installations by anti-government forces and further intensification of military activity on all sides. Pro-government and anti-government forces in conflict with one another have burned and looted villages in all areas of Western Upper Nile.
The known involvement of oil companies in the conflict extends to the documented use of their facilities by Government of Sudan armed forces. The oil companies are therefore, knowingly or unknowingly, involved in a government counter-insurgency strategy that involves the forced displacement of local people from rural areas of the concession.
Following the finding by the Canadian Assessment Mission to Sudan (the Harker mission) in December 1999 that helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers of the Government of Sudan had armed and re-fueled at Heglig and from there attacked civilians, Talisman acknowledged formally that its Heglig airstrip had been used for military purposes. (Heglig is a government garrison town that is the center of Talisman’s oil (GNPOC), the oil consortium that comprises the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Petronas Carigali (the national petroleum company of Malaysia, or its subsidiary Petronas Carigali Overseas Sudan Berhad), Sudapet (the Sudan state petroleum company) and Canada’s Talisman Energy (Talisman).
The same Petronas of Malaysia, business partner in good standing with the World Bank, that now sits in judgement upon President Idriss Déby and his parliament. A 2004 video of this consortium’s handiwork can be viewed on the Ideation Group website that hosts the pdf report.
Eastern Sudan, where according to this report, the next storm front is gathering?
SUDAN: SAVING PEACE IN THE EAST
Africa Report N°102 – 5 January 2006
International Crisis Group (pdf)
The people of eastern Sudan have struggled with successive governments in Khartoum for greater political autonomy and wealth sharing since independence. For decades, the contest was non-violent, led by the Beja Congress, a political organisation founded in 1958 to represent the region’s major tribal group. In 1995, however, in response to repression, imposed Islamic fundamentalism and land expropriation, the Beja Congress took up arms to force the government to address the grievances or be overthrown. That same year it joined the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the umbrella organisation of opposition political parties and groups,1 and began military activities in the East in coordination with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/SPLA, henceforth SPLM), the major, southern Sudan-based insurgency. At times the fighting was heavy, but the government managed to contain most of it to the area bordering Eritrea.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed by the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the SPLM on 9 January 2005 addresses the latter’s presence in eastern Sudan by stipulating the withdrawal of its military forces by 9 January 2006, but it does not provide a mechanism for transferring authority of the opposition-controlled areas to the government of Sudan or for dealing with the presence of other armed groups, such as the Beja Congress. Nor does it address the grievances of the people of eastern Sudan, who are arguably the country’s most politically marginalised, with a worse humanitarian situation than parts of Darfur.2
“At times the fighting was heavy, but the government managed to contain most of it to the area bordering Eritrea.” As if it had a choice? Eritrea and Ethiopa is one instance where the United States has been an arms supplier to both sides of a conflict. But Eritrea has been of strategic importance to the U.S. since 1946 when it began working the system with Britain for “the cession of all Eritrea to Ethiopia in full sovereignty, if not Ethiopian trusteeship over the whole territory.”
To conclude, the United Nations is an organization, which is still working to safeguard the interest of Great Powers, leaving aside the goals of its establishment, which is serving for peace and human dignity. What mattered in the disposal of the Former Italian Colonies was not the wishes and welfare of the inhabitants as stated on the declaration of the Four Powers Peace Treaty with Italy but rather it was the strategic interest of the Great Powers. After World War II, on the bases of bilateral agreement with Emperor Haile Selassie, United States engineered a UN sponsored federation between Eritrea and Ethiopia in exchange for a twenty-five-year lease on the base in Asmara and use of port facilities of Massawa. Consequently Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia. The emperors of Land-locked Ethiopia historically coveted Eritrea’s Red Sea ports, but were never able, totally, to capture them. The United Nations gave Ethiopia what she had never been able to win by force of arms.
After Ethiopa and Eritrea signed a peace agreement in December 2000 the Security Council at the UN chose not to extend a one-year arms embargo. As the fighting rages on, despite Ethiopia’s refusal to abide by the Final and Binding judgement announced by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague on 13 April 2002 that stated a country in defiance of the Border Commission (Eritrea-Ethiopia Border Commission-EEBC) peace treaty should be sanctioned, the U.S. refuses to do so. And the UN has been no less biassed even as “The 1998-2000 fighting between Eritrea and Ethiopia over the disputed border is estimated to have resulted in the death of over 100,000 people.”
And where did Sudan’s once non-violent Beja Congress get their arms in 1995? According to this report one major source is the United States:
Yet from 1991-1995, the U.S. provided military assistance to 50 countries in Africa, 94% of the nations on the continent. Although military assistance to Africa began to decline in the early 1990s, more recent years have seen new increases in training and weapons exports. Between 1991-1998, U.S. weapons and training deliveries to Africa totaled more than $227 million.[36]
Because many of the recipient countries remain some of the world’s poorest, the U.S. government provided around $87 million in foreign military financing loans (subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars) to cover the costs, increasing the debt burden that is already suffocating the continent.[37] The DRC alone owes more than $150 million in outstanding DoD loans, with Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan owing another $160 million combined.[38] These loans, accrued while corrupt dictators were serving as U.S. clients, have further contributed to the economic hardships of these nations by saddling them with unproductive military debt.
And this U.S. “assistance” shows no signs of abating. On the contrary, according to Funding Doubled for “Anti-Terror” Forces in Africa by John Lasker [ 15 February 2006 Inter Press Service ], the U.S. is building a military presence in Africa. “Maya Rockeymoore, a board member of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington think tank, told IPS that, ‘The United States is creating this build-up under the guise of counter-terrorism. The reality is they’re protecting the oil resources from the encroachment of other nations that are also interested in the oil, such as China.'” Yet Israel is China’s second largest arms supplier? So long as atrocities are only committed against unpeople the deals can go on.
So as “the Bush administration is using its February presidency to push for a stronger peacekeeping operation” in Sudan, whilst making no grand announcements it intends to dry-up its arms shipments, will that operation focus on the South? This is the area most activists have focussed on, after all, especially religious organisations. And this is the moral president. Unlike Bill Clinton, who stood by as hundreds of thousands perished in Rwanda, but sent in bombers when 2,000 died in Kosovo.
I mean to say, isn’t this akin to sending in the wolves to feast on the carcasses? Does anyone really expect these perpetrators of misery to end suffering as they simultaneously inflict it?