afrol News, 10 September - As the UN Security Council is debating a US draft resolution on the Sudan crisis, based on colliding views whether a genocide is or is not happening in Darfur, the issue of Sudan's oil is becoming a key factor. If an oil export embargo is approved, China and India would lose their influence over Sudan's vast oil reserves and a Khartoum regime change would open up these resources to the West. The US is in favour of sanctions, China is against.
The population of Darfur is presently, as the UN puts it, suffering from "the world's worst humanitarian crisis." It is well documented that the Khartoum government bares much of the responsibility for this immense suffering, which the UN calls "ethnic cleansing" and the US yesterday called "genocide". It is however also well documented that the US through its closest African allies, helped train the SLA and JEM Darfuri rebels that initiated Khartoum's violent reaction, as afrol News reported on Tuesday.
While the US and UK governments are urging the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Sudan due to Khartoum's "acts of genocide" and to stop the humanitarian crisis, many Asian and African countries are sceptical to the sudden rush to condemn Khartoum. They suspect that the real interests behind the proposed sanctions and opening for the use of military force against Sudan is motivated by other than humanitarian motives to meet the Darfur crisis - a crisis which the West actually helped create.
After all, Sudan is believed to hold Africa's greatest unexploited oil resources, even greater than those of the Gulf of Guinea. US oil companies are barred from operating in Sudan and other Western companies are chased from the country by the Washington administration. The Canadian oil company Talisman Energy is even facing charges of "complicity in genocide and war crimes" in a US court due to its past engagements in Sudan. At present, Asian oil companies dominate the field in Sudan.
For China, Sudan has become an important oil provider and an important country to build a national sector of internationally operating oil companies. The rapidly growing Asian economic giant has urgent strategic needs to secure its own oil sources - only during the first seven months of this year, Chinese oil imports had risen by 40 percent compared to the anterior year. An estimated six percent of China's oil imports are from Sudan, a number that Beijing officials want to increase. Large investments are already made and others are planned.
China's state-owned oil company China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) owns a 40 percent share of the local Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC), which controls two of the most important oil fields in the Western Upper Nile Province. Starting in mid-2005, China's CNPC is foreseen to produce oil in the Melut Basin east of River Nile. Other Chinese companies are involved in the construction of the 1,392 kilometre long pipeline from the Melut Basin to Port Sudan at the Red Sea and in the US$ 215 million project of constructing an oil export terminal port in this Sudanese city.
Other important players in Sudan's slowly growing oil industry are mostly from India and Malaysia, two other industrialising Asian countries with urgent strategic needs to secure their parts of the world's oil production in an ever fiercer competition with US interests. India's ONGC Videsh and Malaysia's Petronas have bought substantial shares in Sudanese oil fields as Western companies have been pressured to divest in the country during the last years.
For China, India and Malaysia, therefore, the US draft resolution on sanctions against Sudan to the UN Security Council poses a direct economic threat. Just hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell told a US legislative committee that the killings in Darfur over the past year "constitute genocide", the US representative in the Security Council, John Danforth, presented the draft that included an embargo on Sudanese oil exports. China, as the only Asian power with veto rights in the Council, however has announced its willingness to block these sanctions.
The pressure on China and other Security Council members is however immense. Global human rights groups, an almost united world press corps and powerful political groupings hold the view that the world is obliged to stop the "genocide in Darfur". Not stopping it would mean being co-responsible, as when the world failed to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Time has run out for Khartoum, which should have acted earlier to stop the "Darfur genocide", they say. China would face strong condemnation if it blocks the UN resolution. The Germany-based Society for Threatened Peoples already yesterday released a statement titled: "China's thirst for oil prolongs genocide in Darfur."
Critics however hold that it was the Western thirst for Sudanese oil that in fact started the fighting in Darfur by training the SLA and JEM (anti-Khartoum) rebels. Chaos in Sudan, German analyst Uwe Friesecke told afrol News, will give Western powers an opportunity to intervene militarily and provoke a change of the unpopular Islamist regime in Khartoum. With new powers thus handed to the World Bank and the IMF to open up Sudan's economy, the country's vast oil reserves would be accessible to Western oil companies, the analyst holds.
According to Mr Friesecke, it is no causality that the powers that are "dictating the peace" between Khartoum and South Sudan - the US, UK, Norway and Italy - are all countries with big oil interest. The US has a declared aim of making Africa one of its main oil providers. Norway bases its economy on oil and is to host an upcoming donor conference for Sudan. Norway's ever-expanding state-owned oil companies are present in many similar zones. The UK and Italy also host major oil companies. "There are made detailed plans for post-peace Sudan in the West," maintains Mr Friesecke, referring to US government sources.
While the debate over the UN Security Council's upcoming Sudan resolution is turning into a power struggle over Sudan's future oil production, more than 1.2 million civilian Darfuris remain displaced and without sufficient international aid. Humanitarian organisations speak of severe lack of funds to secure decent food, water and housing to the many displaced. Most Western powers decrying the "ethnic cleansing and humanitarian crisis in Darfur" have contributed with very little funds, except the US, which is by far the largest donor.
NATO chief calls for strategic partnership between NATO and EU on Sudan
We apparently use the African Union for spreading pseudo democracies in Africa in the same manner we use the HT in Asia. The African Union from their mission looks to be ours. The African Union has now asked NATO another organization we control to help in Sudan. Slick, we are finally in Sudan and no one will be the wiser.
"The African Union is very much on the lead, that way it should stay. It is an African mission but NATO will assist the AU in the fulfillment of this mission," De Hoop Scheffer told journalists after meeting Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.
It is only now that Sudan has become a base for Chinese oil operations that we are ‘concerned’ about the Sudanese.
China uses Sudan not only for their oil; Sudan is also the base for Chinese oil operations elsewhere in Africa. And it appears China is willing to trade weapons for oil to Sudan’s radical Islamist government among others.
"China has sought energy cooperation with countries of concern to the United States, including Iran and Sudan, which are inaccessible by U.S. and other western firms. Some analysts have voiced suspicions that China may have offered WMD-related transfers as a component of some of its energy deals," noted the Commission. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/6/17/135930.shtml #msg-3645404
The main investor in the Sudanese oil industry is the China National Petroleum Company, and China is Sudan’s biggest trading partner overall.[2] It has been alleged that there are Chinese soldiers in Sudan protecting Chinese oil interests there, and that these troops have engaged in skirmishes with the rebels.[3] Moreover, while there are numerous foreign oil companies present in Sudan, it is precisely in Southern Darfur that the Chinese National Petroleum Company has its concessions. USAID, the American humanitarian agency, has helpfully provided a map of Sudan showing precisely where the oil concessions are. http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/map_oil.pdf) #msg-3678761 #msg-3758175
Because Sudan is as a ‘country of concern’ along with Iran the United States can only watch as other countries avail themselves of oil and gas from these two large producers. A predicament the United States will attempt to remedy by various means.
-Am
NATO chief calls for strategic partnership between NATO and EU on Sudan AFP Jun 1, 2005, 11:37
LJUBLJANA: Latest developments in Sudan's western region of Darfur underline the need for a "genuine strategic partnership" between NATO and the European Union, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Tuesday. "The European Union is a genuine security actor, there is no question about it. This is about making the Union a stronger partner, not a counterweight," De Hoop Scheffer told legislators meeting in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana at a spring session of NATO's Parliamentary Assembly (PA).
De Hoop Scheffer said he was pleased to have seen in Europe a "greater realism about the challenges that are involved in playing a sustained, meaningful security role, and greater awareness of what NATO already offers."
He made the remarks commenting on the situation in Darfur and a call sent to the European Union and NATO by the African Union (AU) for their peacekeeping mission in Sudan's troubled region.
"NATO will answer the call," and provide logistical support to the African Union peace mission," De Hoop Scheffer said and added that would mean "participating in air-lifts, transporting extra forces the African Union needs in Darfur from the countries where they come from, all from Africa."
He added "NATO is not going to put combat troops on the ground in Darfur but provide other forms of support."
"The African Union is very much on the lead, that way it should stay. It is an African mission but NATO will assist the AU in the fulfillment of this mission," De Hoop Scheffer told journalists after meeting Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.
At its plenary session Tuesday, NATO's Parliamentary Assembly discussed the situation in Darfur and adopted a declaration backing the international community's efforts to achieve peace in the Sudanese region.
"The PA encourages the European Union and NATO to work together in a spirit of cooperation and complementarity to provide the requisite logistical and financial support in areas such as strategic airlift, training in command and control, in operations planning," the PA statement said.
The two-year-old conflict in Darfur between Khartoum, government-backed militias and two rebel groups, has killed between 180,000 and 300,000 people and displaced more than two million and is considered to be one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
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