At the EU summit at the weekend there was the usual feverish excitement - hundreds of journalists with their laptops, drinking in the bar, watching the television screens, clustering around spokesmen emerging from the talks. So - Turkey's application has been put on hold. That's plenty written about elsewhere. I have a feeling this is one area where even elite public opinion (just read the Guardian blogs) is pretty much united - against. But for the purposes of what I want to write today, what is interesting is how Sweden's foreign minister made a minor splash, quoted even in the British paper. Sweden hasn't had a guided foreign policy for years now, and its practitioners have been silent on the European scene.
But the new foreign minister is Carl Bildt, a man of a strong personality, much experience (ex Swedish prime minister, chief peace negotiator in the Balkans, a kind of godfather of Baltic independence.) and many European contacts. He is well known in Brussels, frequently contributes to the op-ed pages of the international press, and sits on the board of various EU think-tanks. He is highly respected.
His appearance in the international press is in connection with his hard core pro-enlargement stance, rare among Europe's leaders these days. This will probably earn him friends among liberals elsewhere. But in fact - in a story I have been researching for two weeks (see passim) - he has not always acted so selflessly in favour of the underdog. (if you assume Turkey is the underdog in these negotiations.)
I am thinking about his involvement in the Sudan.
During what one could call his relative wilderness years - when he was without a formal heavy post from Balkans peacemaker in 2001 until his surprise appointment as foreign minister in October - Bildt was a prominent figure in Lundin Oil, one of the biggest investors in Sudan's growth industry - the oil that fuels an arrogant regime's defiance of the world. The association made him rich. It is also quite controversial.
I wonder if Carl Bildt ever dreams about little black boys, hunted, running for their lives.
Hydrocephalic, uselessly lolling heads, small sticklike legs like pistons powering through the dust, as Antonov bombers circle overhead. A boy, separated from his parents, that disappears into the swamp, or becomes a child soldier - if he is not killed by the horsemen who come riding in behind the bombers.
He must have known - well before the oil development started. Six months before the company he had business interests in, Lundin Oil, Sweden's largest independent, started developing its concession there were negative reports about what was happening in a neighbouring concession, owned by Canada's largest independent oil company, Talisman, from a number of respected NGOs, UN figures and from a Canadian human rights commission.
This is what the UN's Sudan rapporteur wrote. Leonard Franco, on oil development in western Upper Nile, October 1999:
[Reports available to the Special Rapporteur indicate that] “long-term efforts by the various Governments of Sudan to protect oil production have included a policy of forcible population displacement in order to clear oil-producing areas and the transportation routes of southern civilians….”
This is what a Canadian government Harker report set up in response to Talisman's prospecting said a few months later.
"On 9 May 1999, a new offensive was launched from the Nuba Mountains and Pariang. Antonovs and helicopter gunships supported troops using armoured personnel carriers. Roads built by the oil companies enabled these to reach their destinations more easily than before. From April to July 1999, the decline in population in Ruweng County seems to have been in the order of 50%.”
"The civilian population living in oil fields and surrounding areas has been deliberately targeted for massive human rights abuses---forced displacement, aerial bombardments, strafing from helicopter gunships.”
This is what Amnesty wrote in May 2000: ”Government forces have used ground attacks, helicopter gunship and indiscriminate high-altitude bombardment to clear the local population from oil-rich areas. This massive displacement of the local population followed the deployment of additional weaponry and forces specifically drafted in to protect the oilfields. The military tactics of the government's security forces of destroying harvests, looting livestock and occupying the area is designed to prevent the return of the displaced population."
A few months passed before Lundin, having made no acknowledgment of the reports, forged ahead in its own sector, . Southern Sudan is without doubt one of the most underdeveloped areas in the whole world; in an area the size of France, the population of 8m black Africans have been held back by decades of neglect by central government, Khartoum in the Arabised North; there was one stretch of tarmac road in the whole region, in the centre of the administrative capital of Juba; in nsome areas maternal mortality rates are one third, and a child much more likely to die giving birth than complete primary school.
The six month wet season made work harder - a paved road was needed.
As in the neighbouring Talisman sector, villages were situated in the way of the road and needed to be cleared. One of the first villages attacked in Lundin's sector was Chotyiel, in October 1999. On hearing gunships, 80-year-old Liu-Liu ran to the
forest with six of his grandchildren. "We dug a hole for the children and put a blanket on top," he said. "Then soldiers came to burn the houses. Helicopters flew overhead. If they saw you, they killed you. We stayed 20 days in the forest eating wild fruit. It was not easy to move as we had blind people there. The Arabs are forcing the road to the village. They’re going to Rier, to the
oilfield."
A few days later, the village of Kuach was attacked by troops who arrived in lorries. "When I heard bullets I took one child and ran naked to the forest,’ said Simon Dual, a father of two. "But it was far and three people were killed as they ran. When I went back the next day to see what had happened, I found the house burned and the body of my child, Stephen, in the fire. They want to chase us off our
land because they want the oil."
Journalist Julie Flint, who covered the events, wrote that "the second wave of displacement [after Talisman] came as Lundin attempted to build its road. Many of those displaced in this fighting escaped with nothing but the clothes they were wearing when government forces attacked their villages.".
"It it was a story, from villages all the way down to Rier - villages like Chotyiel, Guit, Dhor Riang, Chiengyar, Chotyien. Small villages - some of them with barely 1,000 inhabitants - but villages that made up a relatively densely populated area despite the swampy nature of the land."
Of course it's not black and white. Two groups of southern militias that were used by the government defected to the opposition to fight the government for southerners' right to oil, they fell out and fought each other. But it is also true that Lundin and Talisman were the facilitators for the violence, and that Canadian human rights delegation led by Sudan expert John Harker, sponsored by the Canadian foreign ministry, visiting Sudan in December 1999 interviewed many people who felt that the oil discoveries had brought nothing but ill. "Did a foreign oil company ask our permission to take our oil, and sell it? Why is a rich country, taking our oil without our permission, and without any of benefit to us?” one eyewitness that Harker interviewed said. “We are going to lose our lives for oil,” one civilian predicted. Referring to their displacement, burned houses, disease, and dead children, he said: "The discovery of oil has caused these problems—before, the Arabs weren’t able to exploit the oil but now they can with the help of the west. The Arabs are united against us and want to push us out.” Another simply stated to the Canadians, “By the time your report is out we will be dead. The [government of Sudan] will kill us because you visited.”
By August 2000, NGOs reported flying in relief plaves over the Lundin oil road and seeing an empty landscape, all villages deserted, and government armed posts every few kilometres. Tens of thousands of southern Sudanese had been displaced.
Soon after, the respected organisation Human rights Watch, who had sent Lundin a letter early on what of the repeat activities that were happening, received a reply expressing scepticism that the violence was taking place, blaming a shortage of Lundin's own staff on the ground.
So what did Carl Bildt – prominent board member and adviser at Lundin - have to say when he was finally interviewed about this in April 2001, by a Swedish journalist? By now yet another UN special rapporteur had written about the displacements, yet another report by a western NGO, Christian Aid, had come out, and there were numerous international journalists' accounts.
Bildt said: "To leave the area - which is the consequence of stopping all activities - would be both wrong and dangerous. Everyone wants us to remain in one way or another. That applies to all people there - they rather would like us to do more and more.”
Then he said: “And neither the UN nor Amnesty have said we should leave - while they say clearly that the activities shall be carried out in such a way that they contribute to the respect for human rights. These are good demands - and we plan to live up to them.”
He then said:
"After careful checks been able to say that the reports about planned and extensive people displacements in the area where Lundin is active do not correlate with reality.”
Finally he said Swedish TV: "As far as I understand it's a matter of moving a number of people. This is not completely unusual, it is as in Sweden when you build motorways."
So there was no change of course. Though he represented a commercial operation, it is strange that one of Europe's premier statesmen seems to have dropped his humanitarian negotiating instincts: in the interview, he talked blithely about the southern Sudanese preferring to have a western democratic presence than the Chinese. But his company did not walk the walk by putting any of that western superiority on display: no concern for human rights of the displaced (which of course they denied against the evidence existed), no constructive attempt put pressure on the regime by withdrawing expertise and work until a ceasefire had been obtained (while holding on to the concession), no distancing from the regime by dialogue with the rebels, no follow-up of the suggestion to set aside a trust fund from oil revenues for the south, no attempt to ban military flights from oil company airfields and stop the flight ban on relief flights, no attempt to institute monitoring processes independent of the small number of own security guard and the inveitably biased Government of Sudan forces that maintained their larger security to ensure that those human rights were lived up to, no call to have the International Labour organisation monitoring recruitment to the oil concession, which excluded southerners ...is it any wonder given past western exploitation and Lundin's own his in the area that the rebels continued fighting. The fighting continued unabated, as rebels who felt disenfranchised from the oil wealth they felt was theirs poured into the cleared areas and harassed the government troops and the oil workers.
Lundin pulled out, then pulled out permnanently. Talisman had pulled out of their concession a year earlier. But there was a difference. The Canadian government had written the Harker report, deeply critical of their largest independent company's activities. The Swedish government had done no equivalent thing. Talisman pulled out because of human rights pressure. Lundin pulled out because of the security situation. The attitudes of the two companies as expressed by their spokesmen was also different. Jim Buckee, president and chief executive of Talisman Energy Inc., the Calgary company at the heart of a controversy over the exploitation of Sudan's southern oilfields, wrote to shareholders this week saying, "I would like to make it clear that Talisman is vehemently opposed to forced relocation for oil development and I personally believe such practices are abhorrent." Carl Bildt said, more defiantly: "It would be easy for the company to leave but the oil will still be in ethe ground, and others would take over. The Chinese are the ones who want to expand in Sudan."
Failure to engage successfully in Sudan hasn't harmed Lundin's profits, from other territories - cashing in on the company's share options and shares have made Carl Bildt the richest politician in Sweden. The Swedish press have left him alone; while they managed to get the arts minister sacked for the heinous crime of not having paid her TV licence. “The media are awed by his reputation,” said Egbert Wesselink of the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan.
Regarding his presence at the recent EU summit, left wing political commentator Lena Mellin wrote effusively of the right-wing foreign minister after giving him a five star "power rating." "In the area of foreign policy, not many people beat him. He knows everyone worth knowing in the world," she cooed.
As for many of the displaced, their fates are not recorded since that slew of reports in the 2000-2003. "None of them have received compensation," says Julie Flint, the Sudan expert. Perhaps they now make up some the 1.5m southerners in displacement camps outside Khartoum. Bildt refuses to answer questions on either the regime of Sudan or his past involvement there, to the Swedish press. His deputy, Gunilla Carlsson, wrote an op-ed piece a few months ago urging UN intervention in Darfur. Now she is silent. The exact closeness of Bildt's relationship with the Sudan regime - (called genocidal by secretary of state Colin Powell, and subject to US sanctions)- which after all granted Lundin a concession and provided itys "security" - would be interesting to look at. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is very hostile to UN intervention in Darfur. And the new Swedish foreign policy, clearly, has not spoken out against Bildt's old Khartoum interlocutor - in contrast to Blair, for instance,who talks of EU sanctions.
It is sad that a talented man who aspires to be Europe's foreign minister based on his achievements to undo the vicious effects of ethnic cleansing in Europe seems to have this murky story of forced displacements in Africa hanging over him. This most productive of men - who keeps a blog and a website devboted to his essays and daily musings - reaelly does need to explain himself regards his involvements in a country and company that have provided his main source of income in the last five years. His last vaguely Sudan related published words came in October on the death of Adolph Lundin, the roguish, bucaneering patriarch of the oil company that bears his name and Bildt's patron. lavishing him with share options in several of his companies. In a short comment, Bildt cited him as an inspiration while adding that he wasn't a man of the "fine salons". We would like to know more.
