At a hotel by the Nile, politicians and civil society representatives from oil producing regions are indignant about the activities of oil companies in their home areas.
Entire villages have been uprooted to make way for oil firms to dig sand out of the ground for the oil roads. Millions of trees have been cut, with their proceeds not seen anywhere. As well, hundreds of thousands of people, they say, have been displaced without compensation.
“What happened in Northern Upper Nile does not make sense,” said Gatkuoth Duop Kuich, a member of parliament from Jonglei and the chairperson of the Land and Natural Resources Committee in the Parliament of the autonomous Southern Sudan. “People were forced off their lands and everyone just watched.”
The Oil War, as Kuich refers to the 21-year civil war that ended with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, taught the people that oil explorers value money more than human life.
To be fair, oil was just a factor, otherwise southern Sudanese would not have been fighting the Khartoum government as early as the 1950s. But oil was a major factor, and it kicked off more marginalization of the South.
In the late 1970s, the Sudanese central government dishonored a peace agreement signed with the rebels in 1972, rejected returning Abyei to the South after oil was discovered there, and murdered Abyei politicians who were visiting the area, touching off an uprising in 1981.
Three years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended the war, the people in oil producing areas are still fighting on.
At the conference, the participants are from different areas. They came from Abyei, Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile provinces, which will determine through a referendum in 2011 whether to belong to the South or the North.
Oil companies to be reigned in
In Jonglei, upon the arrival of the White Nile Company, the mistrust by the local people nearly led to a community war. White Nile, which in Jonglei operates in partnership with the British Ascom, was seeing its hold on oil Block B challenged by rival Total and started to fan community sentiments against the French company. That was easy to do. During the course of the war, Total had annually paid $1.5 million to Khartoum to renew its rights to the oil block after it suspended operations because of the fighting. While a purely business decision, many in the South saw it as having gone to bed with the enemy.
A year after White Nile and Ascom were made to drop their challenge against Total, the anti-Total tempers have tapered off, but pockets within the community still feel short-changed.
“Total gave an undisclosed amount of money to Jonglei State for community development, but we advise them to come with proper legal documents and to respect the community,” Kuich said. “Ascom has done nothing.”
But it is not just Ascom. A whole host of drillers and prospectors are behaving unethically, as far as the European Commission (EC) on Oil in the Sudan (ECOS) sees.
“No single company has ever shown true compassion with the victims,” says the report ‘Whose oil?’ released in April 2008 by IKV Pax Christi and ECOS. “No company has made an effort even to assess the level of suffering and destruction that has been inflicted upon these people to secure its operations.”
Unity and Upper Nile provinces, where oil drilling has gone on for years, bore the brunt of the government actions at a time the world was not looking. In Unity, White Nile Petroleum Company (WNPOC), a Petronas-led consortium, arrived in 2006. The consortium went about building a low-sulphur crude oil venture. Two years later, the officials report at least two dozen people dead from contaminated water.
And according to ECOS, around Paloich, in northern Upper Nile, cases have been documented of entire villages being dug out to obtain sand for the oil roads. “Even the ancestral graves disappeared into the new roads,” says the report. “To secure the oil fields, tens of thousands of people were killed, maimed or wounded, women raped, boys and girls abducted.”
According to the report, many of the displaced still live in dire circumstances, some in the desolate slums of Khartoum, others in local centers like Bentiu.
“Security in Upper Nile State is not good because the community is angry about being displaced by oil communities without compensation,” Kuich said. “This is what we are seeking: We need our communities to be compensated in developmental ways — build schools and hospitals and engage in other projects.”
And because a history of an oil communities’ empowerment is nonexistent, communication between the communities, the oil firms, and government remains weak.
“Until recently, the issue of oil could not be talked about openly,” said Deng Chulol, another MP from Jonglei, referring to the fact that since oil firms started operating here they have ignored the communities. Politicians feared the oil firms and social workers did not want to be seen to oppose the all powerful oil firms, backed by the government machinery. The result? Oil firms got away without fulfilling obligations.
“They destroy the environment, grab land and other resources,” Kuich said of the oil firms.
But not for long, lawmakers from oil-rich areas are saying. They have formed an independent body that wants to regulate the activities of oil explorers in the country. The body, according to the MPs, would work according to international oil standards.
The Sudan Oil Human Security Initiative (SOHSI) would work both as a pressure group and a community representative. It would have separate certificates for northern and southern Sudan. The plan is to make the initiative an affiliate of the National Petroleum Commission. Under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the NPC, with equal representations of the North and the South, has the final say on oil in the country. The government in Khartoum relented only last year to form the body, after refusing to do so for two years, for fear of losing control, according to analysts.
The new initiative by the lawmakers from the oil producing regions, Kuich said, is a realization that the NPC won’t do much unless the people rise up and demand their representation to the commission. The body would hold oil firms to international standards, and development commitments.
The communities would still need a lot of good luck. At the end of the day, the new venture would depend on government goodwill because a law must still be passed to empower the new body as an arbiter in disputes between the communities, government and the oil firms.
John Luk Jok, the Minister of Mining and Energy in Southern Sudan, has offered himself to spearhead the law. He has no choice. Luk comes from Unity State, which produces an estimated half of all the oil that Sudan exports. Plus, the peace agreement mandates that the communities have a say in all issues of oil management in their areas.
The energy ministers from the Southern Sudanese Government and the Khartoum-based national government have formed a high-level committee within the National Petroleum Commission.
Luk explained that the NPC has resolved to form another committee that would exclusively look into the issues of the environmental impact and whether oil firms are actually developing the community projects they are meant to when they win the oil concessions.
“The committee will look into the oil mathematics to see how to improve the areas where these companies are operating,” Luk said, adding that the new group would be incorporated into this committee.
Community empowerment
Sudan’s failure to reign in those oil firms that are behaving badly is caused less by a lack of laws and more by a failure to empower communities to hold the oil drillers, long backed by the Khartoum-based government, to some standard.
According to ECOS, some 150 laws exist to curb the destructive effects of oil development, but the government is reluctant to create the implementing mechanisms. Such laws derive their authority from the peace agreement and the constitution.
Luk pointed out that the Interim Constitution of Southern Sudan stipulates that each citizen has a right to a clean and healthy environment. “It is the duty of each and every citizen to monitor the environment,” he averred.
But can they? The new initiative will test that statement.
The founders of the body are full of optimism. Mohammed Osman works with Peace Direct-UK, an NGO that supports local peace-building in conflict areas. He sees the initiative as the door to peace in the sensitive oil areas of Blue Nile, Darfur, Jonglei, South Kordofan, Upper Nile, and Unity provinces.
Taban Kiston, program officer Southern Sudan Law Society, said “We are sure people are gong to receive the idea of SOHSI positively. Communities are always interested in what develops them.”
A participant from Jonglei State said that SOHSI is very much welcome but she believes it will work better after the CPA and the 2011 referendum, a time when, according to her, “proper laws will be in place.”
