Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment. I’m Dori Smith.
We talk with journalist and author David Morse this time. Morse visited South Sudan in December. His articles on the region have added the dimension of oil rights to the already complex story of Darfur. He writes that, “Oil rigs are now drilling on land seized from black African farmers – who have been killed, raped, and driven off their land by their own government through its proxy militias, known as Janjaweed, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing now in its third year.”
We hear first from Yale Law student Lauren Jacobson of the group –They convinced Yale University heads to divest from companies doing business in Sudan and have now helped Connecticut lawmakers arrive at the same decision. The effort to stop the genocide in Darfur got a boost from the state of Connecticut when the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to divest state pension funds from firms doing business with Sudan. Connecticut joins Illinois, New
Jersey, and Oregon in passing legislation calling for divestment from companies doing business in Sudan. Much of the heavy lifting was done State Treasurer Denise Napier.
Lauren Jacobson of Stand is also involved in the National Student Divestment Task Force, a group of students coordinating divestment campaigns all over the country.
Lauren Jacobson: There was a lot of communication between the treasurer’s office and some of the students at the Yale Law School that were working on this. The bill that they came up with initially was not everything that the law students wanted but they needed to get the stamp of approval from the Treasurer’s office and they came up with a compromise that everyone seems to be pretty satisfied with.
Dori Smith: Letters were sent to multi-national companies, eleven of them, including some of the corporate giants like Royal Dutch Shell Group and Marathon Oil Company doing business with Sudan. Just talk about those letters and what the impact of those letters may have been on this process.
Lauren Jacobson: Divestment is seen as a last resort so the process that they went through in sending these letters to the corporations goes through the process of trying to change their policies or encourage these companies to change their policies before we take our investments out of them. And they received very little response from the companies as was pretty much expected. So then after they at least tried to reach out to the corporations then at that point there is nothing left to do except divest.
Dori Smith: Talk about your motives and how this all has come together for you.
Lauren Jacobson: Stand has been working here at Yale and then now we have moved on to Connecticut to get these institutions to divest endowments and pension funds from companies that are doing business in Sudan. And the hope with this is not necessarily that each individual act of divestment will pressure the companies and pressure the government of Sudan to end the genocide but as part of a larger divestment movement that has been going on all across the country we can make a powerful collective statement.
Dori Smith: Now this was a process that made a great deal of difference in other parts of the world in the past. South Africa.
Lauren Jacobson: Right, yeah South Africa is the big one that we have pointed to because it also served as a precedent at Yale and in Connecticut for divestment because this is something that they had done before during apartheid and recognized that it was something important to do right now while the genocide is going on.
Dori Smith: When did Yale divest and what kinds of other processes are going on that you know about?
Lauren Jacobson: Yale divested in February I believe and leading up to that there had been a lot of student pressure. We had a rally and petition with about 1500 signatures and there was also a lot of coordination within the university administration, the Yale Law students worked to prepare a lot of the research that went into the policy that they then adopted. So that was really successful and serves as one of the driving forces for Connecticut divestment.
The same model that Yale used was also recently used in passing a New Haven City divestment resolution. And before Yale divested Stanford had already divested, Harvard had divested a year before, it kind of ballooned at least to some extent, Amherst divested, Dartmouth, a number of universities and three states before Connecticut had divested. Each act was really building on the last.
Dori Smith: Lauren Jacobson of the Yale group Stand.
A spokesperson from State Treasurer Denise Napier’s office said the intention of a recently passed Sudan Divestment Bill 5632 is to send a strong message to corporations doing business in Sudan. Lawmakers hope it will pressure companies to start talking with state leaders about the way their investments in Sudan affect conditions of genocide in Darfur. The bill won bipartisan support after efforts by the Connecticut Save Darfur Coalition and Stand.
We turn next to David Morse. His articles on Darfur have appeared in Commondreams TomDispatch and other publications.
David Morse welcome to Talk Nation Radio.
David Morse: Thank you. It’s nice to be here Dori.
Dori Smith: Let’s talk first about your trip to Sudan in December. Where did you go and why?
David Morse: I visited South Sudan this past December. I spent time in the city of Juba which is the capital of this new semi autonomous South Sudan, it’s semi autonomous under the new comprehensive peace agreement. I also spent time in Northern Kenya at Kakuma refugee camp where I interviewed Sudanese refugees.
Dori Smith: The purpose of your going?
David Morse: That’s complicated. I feel driven to this particular task. That isn’t quite the word; led might be a better word because it feels like a pull rather than a push. But I need to talk with these people. I think about them every day. They are very important to me and I had to lay eyes on them myself and I also wanted to just understand things that you can’t get long distance. The sense of the spirit of this town where this new government has been set up where the officers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and army hold court around picnic tables under Mango trees overlooking the Nile. And they are accessible but they are in the throes of transforming themselves from a revolutionary movement into a government and it’s a fascinating time to be there.
Dori Smith: You may have gone to this region to talk about genocide there and what can be done to stop it and to help anyone who is trying to build a safer environment for the people of the region but you also wound up looking at some of the other big pictures that have to do with globalization perhaps and with the economics, and you are author of articles in Tomgram, here’s one: Darfur as a Resource War –let’s talk about that title.
David Morse: Oil almost from the beginning of the North-South conflict in Sudan has figured prominently in the hostilities. It was the Khartoum Government’s redrawing of internal district lines to include the oil fields in the South that triggered the 22-year-long civil war which took an estimated 2 million lives. And I sat down with the Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement when I was there in December and he told me, you know we are remaining on a war footing. We are going to stay armed and that oil is important to us we are not going to let it go.
Not easily done because Khartoum has its troops there in the oil fields. Khartoum is dragging its feet on the boundary commission that will decide exactly where those boundary lines should go and it’s a government that has a history of strategic delays. So I think the whole peace agreement is at risk and could go to pieces any time. It really bears careful monitoring.
In any case it continues to be about oil and one of the reasons that I think the world has become jaded to the genocide, there are a couple of reasons, but certainly one of them is that we don’t really want to acknowledge that it is our highly oil consuming life style that’s driving this genocide.
Dori Smith: Let’s just insert into the discussion the fact of rising oil prices internationally but specifically in America.
David Morse: Well they are rising everywhere. And while it’s true, yes they are rising in America, they are almost coming up to the place where they really ought to be in terms of equity and discouraging the huge SUVs and other vehicles that we have. But if you then look at the same thing going on elsewhere you see with oil prices more than doubling in the past year, roughly speaking, Khartoum which derives most of its revenues from oil has twice as much money now to spend on weapons. And this gets played out all over the globe. So its no wonder that Bolivia two days ago announced the nationalization of its oil fields and gas fields.
So this is up for grabs. Common people are beginning to I think shake off a kind of yoke which assumes that industrial nations with the ability to extract oil get to have it. You know, by paying off leaders, and they are saying enough. There’s quite a widespread movement. And it certainly informed the North-South struggle.
Darfur is in some ways a sub set of that North-South struggle. We are talking about the western region of Sudan that is about the size of California which has a population of between 7 and 8 million people. There the basis for the conflict in the North-South which included religion is slightly different but again it involves the same dynamics of the struggle for resources. You’ve got oil in Southern Darfur. You’ve got oil to the east and the upper Nile region. And then you’ve got oil further west in Chad. So my fear and it’s an idea that unfortunately is haunting me right now, is that Darfur will get even worse. That it will be a buffer between the Chinese and Indian oil drillers in the east and in Central Sudan and on the other hand the U.S. and Canadian oil interests to the west in Chad.
Dori Smith: How did you happen to wind up talking with some members of Sudan’s People’s Liberation Movement? What led you to that point?
David Morse: Well of course they are the principle players and I was unable to talk, and in some sense I guess unwilling to talk to Sudan Government officials. Since I was denied a visa I couldn’t really go to Khartoum and I did find myself in the position of, once I was in South Sudan, of being able to talk with a number of prominent people. I actually had hoped to speak to the Vice President but that didn’t happen. You know I just ran out of time.
So the man I did talk to is in charge of the day to day functioning of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. He is Pagan Amad; also it turns out a poet. And we sat and talked and he described his vision of the future for Sudan and described the arbitrariness with which the boundaries have been established. He said it was only by, you know accident that he happened to be born in Sudan and by implication everybody is an accident in that sense of their birth and circumstances.
In the case of Africa of course the boundaries were established at the convenience of the colonial powers so there is a strong regional consciousness. And one of the things I was hearing from him was that a solution to the problems of the region have to be addressed at the regional level. You have to deal with problems of Northern Uganda for instance and Ethiopia and it isn’t one country suffering problems in a vacuum.
Dori Smith: His name again is?
David Morse: He is Pagan Amad.
Dori Smith: Now has this gentleman been able to get any press coverage?
David Morse: I don’t know whether he has had contact with other journalists or not. I was there on the ground and able to talk with him and I felt very fortunate. He has a very broad vision and is a pretty extraordinary person I think. But no I’ve not seen his name elsewhere and I think that was probably the circumstance of a new country just being in its start up mode. They are changing from being a revolutionary movement to a government in charge of things like basic services, postal service, and all of that stuff, and how to deal with the conflicts that remain following the civil war. That’s one of the big tasks you know, I mean on the physical end of things you have to clear out mines and that process is slow. On the social level you are talking about trying to get people past the rivalries and in some cases the wish for vengeance that has followed the conflicts, part of which was inter-tribal.
Dori Smith: What kinds of things do you see as possible outcomes to all of his efforts? You know what kinds of things, if you want to look into the future for a minute, are possible in the region as a result of his efforts?
David Morse: Oil is at the center once again. They need those revenues. Khartoum has dragged its feet in sharing the revenues as they are supposed to. That is under the comprehensive peace agreement
The South Sudanese Government is supposed to have half of those revenues so that’s a cornerstone. It involves improving the infrastructure. He was very conscious as a young person. As he was growing up he realized that he didn’t have access to education. That the Arabist government in Khartoum had and that the more privileged people of Khartoum because part of the conflict is urban versus rural. And so he is setting about trying to address that. He is trying to bring gender equity. He mentioned that specifically so that women are I think by the constitution entitled to a certain percentage of the appointments.
So it’s a broad social agenda. One hopes. I certainly hope that they get the chance to implement it. They will be a much more progressive government, much more concerned with social justice, much more egalitarian, and that will be a huge asset in the region.
Dori Smith: Do you think though that they can make progress where they might be able to get support? Because in the latest peace negotiations even though we see a kind of limited support some of the bad guys in this picture are not any longer included in the sanctions that were talked about and so there is this very limited kind of pressure being applied, and certain players have gotten off scott free and with impunity. So do you think that someone like your friend there can find any way to apply leverage using some of the international organizations or other nations like America?
David Morse: I think so. I mean the scene at Juba was not only the members of the legislature assembling and officers of his type, military people, but it also includes NGOs and they are savvy enough to use those people’s expertise and funding and so forth.
One of the things that’s happened is the Lord’s Resistance Army which is a really crazy and brutal movement in Northern Uganda, it makes regular incursions as far north as the capital, as Juba, and I had at least one NGO person tell me that he thought that they were backed by Khartoum and that they were making it very difficult for the NGOs to function to really help. But right now in general and apart from that problem the NGOs have focused their efforts much more in South Sudan in ways that they can be helpful. And I’m hopeful that that can be very productive and serve as a model for the rest of Sudan.
Dori Smith: Talk about this issue of the AU again as it relates to that portion of the Sudan you are talking about, Central Sudan. I know you have mentioned the Chad Sudan border and deteriorations there and then specifically the interplay between what the African Union would do, what the United Nations would do in this situation; is that true all the way into Central Sudan that same discussion about who will get involved or is this a different discussion depending on which region you are talking about?
David Morse: Different discussion in that there are 10,000 UN peacekeeping forces now in South Sudan and they are enforcing the comprehensive peace agreement. Darfur is a separate political entity and the subject of a separate peace agreement that’s now being attempted. And you have a very limited African Union presence there of about 7,000 troops. Of those 7,000 at least a third are unarmed police and observers. It’s not a significant number when you compare it for instance to let’s say the number of policemen in New York City or in Paris. We’ve got 7,000 peacekeepers to patrol an area the size of California.
Moreover, their mandate is extremely limited to protecting the observers of the peace and it does not include protecting civilians. So Khartoum regularly keeps them out of areas where its surrogate forces, its militias, are attacking villages and that kind of thing. It’s simply not a robust enough force to really do any good.
So what’s being advocated is to fold AMIS, which is the acronym for the African Union’s Peacekeeping force in Darfur, to fold that force into the UN and then to augment it with help from NATO in the form of mostly logistical support, communications support, that kind of thing. I think no one wants to see a lot of white soldiers come in. It just would be counter productive and would be seen as a foreign intrusion and it really by all rights is not considering the difficulty the African Union has had summoning the political will to do this it is nevertheless an indigenous effort in the sense that this is the continent trying to please itself. Not an easy task.
So the idea is to create a more robust African Union peacekeeping force, double or I think probably triple in size, but I think even George Bush is saying double it to perhaps 14,000 troops and widen its mandate so that they can protect civilians.
Dori Smith: You come right out and say in your article that the Bush Administration’s policy towards Sudan and the rest of Africa is driven by oil. And so we see risk factors in that part of the world in the Sudan and in the Middle East and in both cases oil as the driving principle. Just comment on the drama of where this takes us in our minds about what we need to do and about the size of the problem therefore when we realize what it is.
David Morse: Well some of it is just math. You look at the rising usage of oil, petroleum products in the world, and it’s going up in a fairly straight line and then you look at supply and you realize that peak oil is if not here about to get here. And I think politically speaking its here. So you watch then the decline in supply and there is a huge gap that has to be filled. What do you do when China wants to have a higher standard of living and equates that with the kind of consumptive American lifestyle of automobiles and so forth? India wants its turn at the trough. And you know we are talking about half the world’s population suddenly living like Americans. Historically we are a tiny percentage, a relatively small percentage of the population and we have consumed more than half the resources, well over half, and now China is right up there with us and still thirsty, still hungry, still growing at a pretty substantial rate per year.
So it all doesn’t add up and I think it’s important not to just be China bashing about this. I think it does create a kind of ethical watershed where we have to say to the Chinese, we want you to take some responsibility for human rights consequences of what you are about but at the same time to own our own short fallings and to concede that we’ve got to make room for others at the table.
Dori Smith: We’ve heard for many years now about the oil industry in Nigeria and the huge impact it has had there. But let’s talk about both the industry and also those who are working with the oil industry. Name some names of these corporations and talk about how this is all growing and developing.
David Morse: Exxon Mobile is a big mover and shaker. It has interests in Chad. Cliveden oil –a Canadian, I guess nominally a Swiss registered corporation has interest there. Petro China in Sudan has put enormous stakes that is enormous resources into building the pipeline. I think it was about 1400 miles to the Red Sea in order to get its oil, once it had extracted the oil, to get it to port. It built that pipeline in a matter of months, less than a year and a half, using imported Chinese laborers. When they died, and this was sometimes a 120 degrees during the summer, when they died their ashes were sent back to China.
It was an enormous undertaking and China was able to commit to it because it’s a state owned corporation. That’s an aspect of all of this that I think is going to be very significant as we examine the prospects for the future.
Chevron by comparison was the first discoverer of oil in Sudan but ceased operations when the bullets started flying. So the contrast between those two companies I think is predictive of the battle ground ahead.
The other factor I would introduce into that is that if our private oil companies, companies like Texaco and Exxon, as they become involved in war torn regions, which will increasingly become the case, I have to suspect that private security firms, private armies, will be the norm. We’ve already seen the effort to out source some of that function of the Military of the past ten years. We’ll see more of it.
Dori Smith: Now we are also talking about oil exploration companies, companies that build roads like Halliburton. And we know that name certainly from the Iraq war zone. Just talk about the impact of the former Vice President’s company in the region and how that could also affect this.
David Morse: I don’t know as Halliburton has a presence and I could be wrong in Sudan, I would actually point to another company and it’s not an American company it’s a Canadian Company and that’s Talisman. There is now a law suit under way in which the Presbyterian Church of Sudan is suing Talisman oil and the government of Sudan in connection with the wrongful deaths and depravation of homeland and so forth.
Dori Smith: I want to just read one of your lines in your piece “In short,” you say, “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.” –David Morse just talk about that, the energy policy as we know written by the former head of Halliburton none other than Vice President Dick Cheney.
David Morse: Yes and I think you are absolutely right on. These hearings were held behind closed doors. People have tried to get, the Sierra Club and others have tried to get even documentation of who attended them and that was denied by the Vice President, it was one of the earliest signs really of Dick Cheney’s intransigence; so we don’t know who crafted that policy but it’s clearly not in the interest of human beings. It’s in the interests of the oil companies.
Dori Smith: David Morse thanks so much for joining us.
David Morse: Thank you Dori it was a pleasure to be here.
Dori Smith: Journalist and author David Morse, http://www.david-morse.com His articles on Darfur have appeared in Common Dreams, TomDispatch, and other publications. Author of The Iron Bridge David Morse is also a poet. He wrote about being in Connecticut but thinking of Darfur in “Waiting for Spring.”
I take the first pew in this rough church,
Seat myself on flat stones and look up
at fractured bedrock bulging skyward,
vertical black stripe painted by groundwater
curved into a bow, picture the arrow flying
across the valley and try not to think about
Darfur, or the woman at the embassy of Sudan
whose job is to delay requests for visas,
or flies dabbling in a dead baby’s wound,
women’s eyes dulled by rape and loss
of everything; helicopter gunships, devils
on horseback. This is Connecticut,
green land waiting for spring to untie
the black knot of winter. Soon will come
choirs of spring peepers, skunk cabbage.
Last night on a hill above Greg’s sugar shack
I inhaled the soft sweet fragrance of maple sap
funneling steam into moonlight, looked up
and saw the diaphanous shape of Africa
curling from Cape Town to the Horn.
For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of WHUS Storrs, Radio for the People at the University of Connecticut. WHUS.org to listen live Wed. at 5 PM. talknation.org and for transcripts and discussion.
Darfur Genocide is Rwanda in Slow Motion, by David Morse
Murder from Darfur to Cairo (by David Morse)
War of the Future: How oil drives the genocide in Darfur
http://www.populist.com/05.morse.html
David Morse Web Site