Carl Bildt, Lundin Oil and Sudan
Carl Bildt, bien connu in Brussels as one of the EU's former top diplomats, has just been appointed Sweden's foreign minister.
And since Sudan and its 200,000 dead is topical at the moment, it might be a good moment to take a look at Bildt's links with the Swedish oil firm accused, so that prospecting and pumping could take place in the oil rich state, of killing and displacing thousands of innocent Sudanese civilians. Their crime: to live on top of, and en route to oilfields that the company was seeking to develop.
Bildt, 57, was Sweden's prime minister from 1991-94, and his lasting achievement is to persuade the sceptical Swedes to join the EU. They are still the EU's most reluctant members: net support is five percent, lower than the UK figure. Next he became the EU's peace broker in the Balkans,
In a peripatetic lifestyle subsequent to that, picking up speaking assignments - he was the adjudicator at a Brussels conference on EU foreign policy a few months ago - writing foreign policy articles, leading (as a largely absent leader) his moderate party to another defeat, he also picked up a good dozen or so consultancies and board memberships - including that of Lundin Oil, run by his good friend, Adolf Lundin, the income from which helped support and indeed make Bildt rich during his quest for a formal position from 2001 to his appointment in Stockholm last week.
Adolf Lundin appears to have been the classic oil entrepreneur: born in 1932, trained as an engineer, he started his career with Royal Dutch Shell, but then struck out on his own, with his company Lundin oil in Switzerland, on the philosophy of taking big risks - prospecting in often dangerous areas - and winning big. When Lundin died - by coincidence, after a battle with leukaemia, long retired - in the same week as Bildt got his new job - his newly elevated friend praised the oil magnate fulsomely to Swedish newspapers: "He was a man of the small saver, not the elegant salons. He was a great entrepreneur who had no fear of failure; of a kind we really need more of in Sweden."
One of Lundin's projects was in the Congo; another was in the Sudan, where his company was one of several risk-taking independents that started prospecting in the late nineties the rich oil potential in the savannah land areas that which made up the border area between the rebel, black south and the Arab north, ruled by an Islamist regime, who had been at war for twenty years.
In an interview with the newspaper Dagens Nyheter's veteran Africa correspondent, Anna Koblanck, in April 2001, Bildt explained the positive benefits of Lundin's prospecting and development in the area.
Arguing that Lundin's presence provided stability he said: "We give opportunities to development and an increased security against attacks and war. If the international presence disappeared it would increase attacks and insecurity.”
The truth, however, is a bit different, at least according to a number of contemporaneous press and NGO reports, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and, most bluntly, Christian Aid:
"Wide stretches of southern Sudan are being
subjected to a ruthless ‘scorched earth’ policy to clear the way for oil exploration and to create a cordon sanitaire around the oilfields. As new areas of exploration open up, and oil companies facilitate troop movements by building roads across swampland and bridges across rivers, the war expands and the scorched earth advances.”
Explorations started in March 1999, when Lundin drilled an exploratory well at Thar Jath,10 miles from the Nile, and reported finding as many as 300 million barrels of ‘excellent’ reservoir quality oil in its concession known as block 5A. According to the report, a month later, the government moved troops to Thar Jath and adjacent areas,
displacing tens of thousands of people. Fighting led to suspension of drilling, and but it began again in January 2001 ‘within days of the
inauguration of the 75 kilometre all-weather road’, built by Chinese workers and paid for by Lundin at the cost of $400,000 per kilometre.
While the road was being built, a government airstrip extended, the oilfield tripled in size, and government militias and troops and burnt and depopulated the entire length of the road in preparation for its completion.
In visits to a neighbouring area, Christian Aid found thousands of villagers telling the same tale: Antonov planes arriving to bomb the villages. helicopter, burning the villages and killing anyone who was unable to flee – in most cases, the old and the very young.
‘All the villages along the road have been burned,’ said John Wicjial Bayak, a local official who had been driven from a village close to the oil road. ‘You cannot see a single hut. The government doesn’t want people anywhere near the oil.’
Carl Bildt, bien connu in Brussels as one of the EU's former top diplomats, has just been appointed Sweden's foreign minister.
And since Sudan and its 200,000 dead is topical at the moment, it might be a good moment to take a look at Bildt's links with the Swedish oil firm accused, so that prospecting and pumping could take place in the oil rich state, of killing and displacing thousands of innocent Sudanese civilians. Their crime: to live on top of, and en route to oilfields that the company was seeking to develop.
Bildt, 57, was Sweden's prime minister from 1991-94, and his lasting achievement is to persuade the sceptical Swedes to join the EU. They are still the EU's most reluctant members: net support is five percent, lower than the UK figure. Next he became the EU's peace broker in the Balkans,
In a peripatetic lifestyle subsequent to that, picking up speaking assignments - he was the adjudicator at a Brussels conference on EU foreign policy a few months ago - writing foreign policy articles, leading (as a largely absent leader) his moderate party to another defeat, he also picked up a good dozen or so consultancies and board memberships - including that of Lundin Oil, run by his good friend, Adolf Lundin, the income from which helped support and indeed make Bildt rich during his quest for a formal position from 2001 to his appointment in Stockholm last week.
Adolf Lundin appears to have been the classic oil entrepreneur: born in 1932, trained as an engineer, he started his career with Royal Dutch Shell, but then struck out on his own, with his company Lundin oil in Switzerland, on the philosophy of taking big risks - prospecting in often dangerous areas - and winning big. When Lundin died - by coincidence, after a battle with leukaemia, long retired - in the same week as Bildt got his new job - his newly elevated friend praised the oil magnate fulsomely to Swedish newspapers: "He was a man of the small saver, not the elegant salons. He was a great entrepreneur who had no fear of failure; of a kind we really need more of in Sweden."
One of Lundin's projects was in the Congo; another was in the Sudan, where his company was one of several risk-taking independents that started prospecting in the late nineties the rich oil potential in the savannah land areas that which made up the border area between the rebel, black south and the Arab north, ruled by an Islamist regime, who had been at war for twenty years.
In an interview with the newspaper Dagens Nyheter's veteran Africa correspondent, Anna Koblanck, in April 2001, Bildt explained the positive benefits of Lundin's prospecting and development in the area.
Arguing that Lundin's presence provided stability he said: "We give opportunities to development and an increased security against attacks and war. If the international presence disappeared it would increase attacks and insecurity.”
The truth, however, is a bit different, at least according to a number of contemporaneous press and NGO reports, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and, most bluntly, Christian Aid:
"Wide stretches of southern Sudan are being
subjected to a ruthless ‘scorched earth’ policy to clear the way for oil exploration and to create a cordon sanitaire around the oilfields. As new areas of exploration open up, and oil companies facilitate troop movements by building roads across swampland and bridges across rivers, the war expands and the scorched earth advances.”
Explorations started in March 1999, when Lundin drilled an exploratory well at Thar Jath,10 miles from the Nile, and reported finding as many as 300 million barrels of ‘excellent’ reservoir quality oil in its concession known as block 5A. According to the report, a month later, the government moved troops to Thar Jath and adjacent areas,
displacing tens of thousands of people. Fighting led to suspension of drilling, and but it began again in January 2001 ‘within days of the
inauguration of the 75 kilometre all-weather road’, built by Chinese workers and paid for by Lundin at the cost of $400,000 per kilometre.
While the road was being built, a government airstrip extended, the oilfield tripled in size, and government militias and troops and burnt and depopulated the entire length of the road in preparation for its completion.
In visits to a neighbouring area, Christian Aid found thousands of villagers telling the same tale: Antonov planes arriving to bomb the villages. helicopter, burning the villages and killing anyone who was unable to flee – in most cases, the old and the very young.
‘All the villages along the road have been burned,’ said John Wicjial Bayak, a local official who had been driven from a village close to the oil road. ‘You cannot see a single hut. The government doesn’t want people anywhere near the oil.’
List of atrocities
In other atrocities featuring in the report, one village was bombed ten times
before government troops finally burned out the residents. One of the first villages attacked 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.’
Then in March 2000 government troops supported by Antonovs and helicopter gunships attacked the village of Dhorbor, on the first stretch of the oil
road. Local officials reported more than 30 villagers killed.
On 11 May 2000 it was the turn of the village of Guit. Mary Cuoy heard shots at 4am. ‘I had a 3-year-old grandchild sleeping with me,’ she said. ‘I took her by the hand and left everything. In the morning, some people went back and saw soldiers taking the cows. Every hut was burned.’
The worst atrocity happened in the village of Nhialdiu, when on July 15 2000, government militia attacker the village already swollen with refugees, rounded up all the elderly, put them in a hut and torched it.
“Tens of thousands of people were displaced – many went to Khartoum, where they remain,” Andrew Pendleton, a senior programme officer at Christian Aid who authored the report, told me last week. “We had many people on the ground reporting for us, including Julie Flint.”
Another drilling closure followed, then more killings – documented by Sudan watcher and journalist Eric Reeves - where a helicopter gunship n the
and Lundin pulled out of block 5A in 2003, selling its share of the concession to Malaysian Petronas.
Today, the argument has shifted to who knew what and when. A lawsuit in US federal courts is taking place where Talisman, a Canadian company that operated the concession next to Lundin's is sued by Sudanese plaintiffs saying that they operated hand in glove with the government, according to Reeves.
Lundin enjoyed the same sort of security, and the Human Rights watch reports makes it clear Lundin - and therefore Bildt - knew of the campaigns carried out as the road was being built in the year 2000, since it was completely obvious to anyone in the area. The Christian Aid report quoted an aidworker saying in August of that year: “As one flies along the new oil road , the
only sign of life are the lorries travelling at high speed
back and forth to the oilfield. Small military garrisons are clearly visible every five kilometres.”
Eric Reeves says. " Lundin knew, had to have known, what was happening. I sent
what I wrote to them; and pretence of ignorance of what was happening
in Block 5a is just that: pretence.
“Carl Bildt is simply lying if he says that the oil company did not know
what was occurring in its concession. If nothing else, I told them."
In his peripatetic years, Bildt has kept a blog (www.bildt.net) and weekly newsletter in both English and Swedish where he pontificates freely on global issues, ranging from essays on the Peace of Westphalia, Hard and Soft power to analyses of the Russian security. Strangely, in seven years of newsletters, he can only once find the space to comment on the Sudan. He wrote: "Lundin could simply leave Sudan, and I can simply leave Lundin. But if that happens there will be a bunch of other rich buyers of the concession. That would be the simplest. But what would be the better for that?"
The whole thing is quite sensitive as Bildt has made Swedish relations with United States a priority, yet the US has had comprehensive trade sanctions against Sudan since 1997 - no companies, including oil companies, are allowed to operate in the country. New laws by California and a growing number of other states are forbidding their business from buying into companies - any from any country - that has investment in Sudan; Lundin still retains concessions in one sector.
As for Bildt, who left his Lundin responsibilities on his appointment and stands to make a small fortune from selling shares in a Lundin sister company, it’s interesting to speculate what he is thinking. His boss, the new Swedish prime minister, confessed to the press two ministers’ transgressions – hiring cleaners under the table and failing to pay their TV licences. The Swedish press were not happy and they were sacked. Bildt’s doings are far more controversial; yet it seems strange Bildt hasn't been mentioned in this context. With Koblanck a member of staff, Dagens Nyheter at least must be aware of Bildt's activities in Sudan. To this writer, it is sad that Europe's most prominent campaigner against ethnic cleansing seems to implicated in it happening in Sudan.
