Blood Oil

[spiritvoyager]

If Americans want to get a clue about how ominous the economic (and aparently political) foothold is that China has gained in the U.S. is ( See my post in  Scary new development, economic collapse and soon in Current Events), we should take a closer look at what has been happening in Sudan.

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Telegraph.co.uk  4-23-05

Almost unnoticed by the outside world, China has become the key player in Sudan's oil industry.

Beijing has invested £8 billion in Sudanese oil through the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), a state-owned monolith. The cost of Khartoum's new refinery alone was about £350 million.

Without this windfall gain - likely to be far larger this year - President Omar al-Bashir could not maintain his military machine, let alone wage war against rebels in the western region of Darfur. Nor could he hope to withstand the international pressure that his bloody campaign in Darfur has brought upon him.

In fact, China shamelessly curried favour with Mr Bashir by speeding up this mammoth [oil refinery] project so it could be finished in June 1999 - the tenth anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.

China is now dependent on Sudan for seven per cent of all its oil imports. Hence Beijing has gone to great efforts to shield Mr Bashir.

[In September 2004]  the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1564, threatening Sudan with oil sanctions unless it curbed the violence in Darfur. But China immediately rendered this meaningless by pledging to veto any bid to impose an embargo.

Critics accuse China of being Sudan's chief international protector.

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The rest of the article is at:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht...wsud23.xml

 

Online News Hour  April 25, 2006

On a recent trip to Darfur, Ken Bacon, president of the nonprofit group Refugees International and a former Pentagon official, spotted evidence of Chinese weapons in use in the Darfur conflict.

"I saw rocket shells with Chinese markings on them in an area about 30 or 40 kilometers outside of El-Fasher," Bacon said.

El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, is home to one of the largest evacuee camps in Darfur. The area has been marked by the Janjaweed militia as a target for raping women who leave the camp in search of food and water.

Some evidence, including eyewitness accounts and media reports from Sudan, say China has supplied the country with arms in the past, but questions remain about whether that is still occurring. An unclassified CIA report from 2003 detailing international trade of ballistic missiles and nuclear, chemical and advanced conventional weapons showed that Russia had supplied Sudan with military aircraft and weapons, but detailed nothing about a Sudan-China connection.

But according to Bacon, "There is a military and arms relationship between China and Sudan. Late last year in the Sudanese press there was a story saying that Sudan was buying some jet fighters from China and that they've purchased other sophisticated military gear from China."

Human Rights Watch also supports Bacon's claim. The organization reported that as early as 1969 the Chinese government brought arms to Sudan. The group said arms sales rose in the 1990s as Sudan's civil war raged and that China sold Sudan antitank mines, ammunition, tanks, helicopters and jet fighters.

The United Nations has imposed an international arms embargo against selling to parties to the Darfur conflict, including to the Janjaweed and to the rebel groups, but no such embargo exists against selling to the Khartoum government.

"I don't mean to suggest that China is violating any embargos, but there clearly is an arms sales relationship," Bacon said.

China has remained mum about any arms deals with Sudan.

"The Chinese government doesn't talk about the arms sales," Wan said. "This is very sensitive. They are quite open about economic interests, but they don't normally talk about how arms sales factor in."

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There is more at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/chin...25-06.html

Christian Science Monitor (from the June 25, 2007 edition)

Sudan's oil production averages 536,000 barrels a day, according to estimates by the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Other estimates say it is closer to 750,000 barrels a day. And there is an estimated 5 billion-barrel reservoir of oil beneath Sudan's 1 million-square-mile surface, almost all of it in the south of the country, an area inhabited mainly by Christian and animist black Africans who fought a 21-year civil war against the Arab-dominated Muslim government of the north.

The vast majority of this oil, 64 percent, is sold to China, now the world's second-largest consumer of oil. And while neither Khartoum, China, nor Petrodar release any statistics – this is generally believed to be an oil deal worth at least $2 billion a year.

China's National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is the majority shareholder in both Petrodar and the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, two of the biggest oil consortiums in Sudan.

CNPC has invested billions in oil-related infrastructure here in Paloich, including the 900-mile pipeline from the Paloich oil fields to the tanker terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a tarmac road leading to Khartoum, and a new airport with connecting flights to Beijing.

But they have not invested in much else here.

Locals live in meager huts, eating peanuts with perch fished out of the contaminated Nile. There is no electricity. A Swiss charity provides healthcare. An American aid group flies in food and mosquito nets. Most children do not go to school. There is no work to be found. Petrodar, for one, has its own workers – almost all of whom are foreigners (mostly Chinese, Malaysians, and Qataris) or Sudanese northerners. The consortium hires Paloich residents only rarely, for menial jobs.

It's a picture of underdevelopment not unusual in Sudan's semiautonomous south. While some pockets – like the regional capital of Juba and the bigger towns of Rumbek and Wau – have seen some economic revival since the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, the majority of the south remains mired in abject poverty.

Locals blame their lot on oppression by Sudan's Islamist government and the long war with the north. But they also blame the Chinese.

"[The Chinese] moved us away so we would not see what was going on. They were stealing our oil and they knew it," says Abraham Thonchol, a rebel-turned-pastor who grew up near Paloich. "Oil is valuable and we are not idiots. We were expecting something."

US-based Chevron was the first oil company to arrive here, setting up operations in the 1980s. "They employed us," says Mr. Thonchol. "We helped with the drilling, drove them around, and worked as cooks. "

The second group of oilmen to show up was not as benevolent, say many locals. Thonchol's cousin, Peter Nyok, a 6-foot, 6-inch, member of the Dinka tribe with traditional lines carved on his forehead and six missing front teeth, says it took a while for locals to differentiate between Westerners – and the Chinese that came later. "They looked like whites to us. We could not detect any difference, except, maybe, that they were shorter," he says. "But then we found they behaved differently."

Chased out by civil war in the mid 1980s and '90s, and later kept away by pressure from human rights groups, Chevron and other Western companies left the oil fields for others. Canadian Talisman Energy, faced with a divestment campaign, was forced to sell its 25-percent stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company in 2002.

Chinese firms were more than happy to fill the void.

But the Chinese operations were marked "from the beginning," by a "deep complicity in gross human rights violations, scorched-earth clearances of the indigenous population," says Sudan activist Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Giving expert testimony before the congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission last August, Mr. Reeves claimed the Chinese gave direct assistance to Khartoum's military forces which, in turn, burned villages, chased locals away from their homes, and harmed the environment while prospecting for oil.

Brad Phillips, director of Persecution International, an aid group working in South Sudan, has seen the destruction firsthand. "The Chinese are equal partners with Khartoum when it comes to exploiting resources and locals here," he says. "Their only interest here is their own." He would love to see the Chinese sponsor a school here, he says, or a clinic, or an agricultural program, or "anything for the people." But there is nothing like that in sight. Just miles of desolate land.

The rest of the article is at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0625/p11s0...tml?page=3