Sudan's Perfect War

Randolph Martin

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Summary:  After years as a pariah, Khartoum has now deftly managed to end its political isolation. The success of its new alliances and the completion of an oil pipeline, however, mean that northern Sudan could indefinitely continue its bloody civil war against the south. Only the United States has the power and prestige to help end the violence and push for a peace that would be in everyone's interests.

Randolph Martin is Senior Director of Operations at the International Rescue Committee. He has travelled extensively throughout Sudan over the last 20 years and lived there from 1985 to 1989.

Sudan has also built new business partnerships with several of the world's major oil companies: Malaysia's Petronas, China's National Petroleum Company, Sweden's Lundin Oil, Austria's OMV, France's TotalFinaElf, and, perhaps most controversially, Canada's Talisman Energy. These relationships have boosted Sudan's diplomatic respectability. Prior to the oil boom, for example, Western diplomats in Khartoum seemed largely concerned with Sudan's chronic droughts, floods, refugee crises, and human-rights violations. Since oil entered the picture, however, foreign emissaries have become more circumspect in their criticism of the regime.

There is yet another, even more direct and disturbing way that petroleum has affected Sudan's war. Because the oil fields lie almost exclusively in the south, the government has redoubled its efforts to wipe out resistance in the area and consolidate its control. Numerous reports from a variety of U.N. agencies, foreign governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) indicate that Khartoum is now working hard to displace populations from the oil concession areas.

Such activities have not escaped notice, however, and foreign oil companies have suffered criticisms for their complicity. Of all the foreign operators, Talisman Energy seems to have received the most attention -- in part because it is the largest of the overseas oil corporations involved and in part because the world seems to hold a publicly owned Canadian business to a higher moral and ethical standard than it does for Chinese or Malaysian firms. Grass-roots efforts in Canada and the United States have put pressure on Talisman and its shareholders to divest or suspend operations until Sudan halts its war and human rights abuses. Talisman has argued in response that its investment in Sudan is encouraging peace. Talisman employees tout their social contributions and the importance of oil revenue to Sudan's development, and they claim that there have been no civilian evictions from the areas where Talisman is working.

Indeed, a number of published reports indicate that oil exploration and exploitation have had only limited negative effects on the prospects for peace. These reports are typically financed by oil interests, however, and based on tours through government-held areas. Not surprisingly, such claims have been flatly contradicted by organizations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, various U.N. special rapporteurs on Sudan, the Canadian Assessment Mission to Sudan (the "Harker mission") and, most recently, the NGO-sponsored "Report of an Investigation into Oil Development, Conflict and Displacement in Western Upper Nile, Sudan," published last October. These latter documents are particularly troubling, as they reveal a pattern of offensive military operations conducted from oil industry airstrips in an effort to clear civilians from rebel-held portions of the concession areas.

GO SOUTH, YOUNG MAN

It is hard to discuss Sudan's civil war without accounting for the role that Islam has played in the conflict. Although not an insubstantial factor, however, religion alone does not explain the war -- and it should not be enough to prevent peace from coming to Sudan.

Until now, of course, Khartoum's insistence that Sudan be governed by Islamic law has been a major source of tension. For most southerners, the war is as much about cultural freedom as it is about sharing national resources. Yet Arab northern Sudan is not an Islamic fundamentalist culture. Traveling through the region, a Westerner does not sense the kind of deep antipathy and xenophobia found in states such as Iran, the Taliban's Afghanistan, or Pakistan. As noted earlier, Sudan's main Islamist party, the NIF, has never commanded a significant popular following, and it has gained and retained power only through intrigue and coup.

This lack of popular support for Islamist injunctions has led to a slow erosion in the implementation of the shari`a throughout the country. In southern garrison towns, few traces of Islamic law can be found. And in the north, the more extreme regulations and punishments have faded from practice.

Political Islam, therefore, may well be diminishing in importance as a factor in Sudan's civil war. Although powerful Islamists remain among the ruling elite -- including, most notably, the country's vice president -- al-Bashir's regime has managed to build new, non-Islamist pillars of political power. The NIF itself has been fractured into its theologically indistinguishable successor, the National Congress -- now in power -- and al-Turabi's Popular National Congress.

Still, ending the north-south feud will not be easy. The war is more like a clash of civilizations than a battle of religions. Many Arab Sudanese view the conflict in ways similar to how nineteenth-century Americans perceived the conquest on the western frontier: as their manifest destiny. Northerners feel contempt for southern culture, a divine duty to subjugate the region's inhabitants, and a sovereign right to exploit its resources. Indeed, if northerners had their way, war in the south would ultimately be resolved in the same way as the one in America's west: through the subjugation of the native peoples and relinquishment of local resources to the northern conquerors.