In an interview with Business Edge last week, Talisman Energy Inc. president and CEO Jim Buckee talked about the Calgary oil company’s future and its operations in war-torn Sudan. Today, in a guest opinion column, Morris K. Yoll, a member of Sudanese Community Relief and Rehabilitation in Alberta, responds to that interview.
Dr. Jim Buckee, Talisman’s CEO, now hopes the worst is over and that acts of so-called “charity” are going to silence his opponents.
If he really believes this, he is living in a dream — a dream which has become a nightmare for my people. The ghosts of the dead in southern Sudan dwell in the oilfields.
An “engagement” policy in Sudan inadvertently helps the National Islamic Front’s military junta, which is waging a scorched-earth war of genocide and forceful displacement from the oilfields against the Southern Sudanese people.
The government is able to secure access to the contested oilfields in South Sudan without having to address the fundamentally immoral nature of the oil exploitation.
Since the current round of civil war in the Southern Sudan began in 1983, the objective of the Sudanese regime has been to either totally eradicate, or to Islamize by force, the southern people. The National Islamic Front has declared a Jihad (Islamic holy war) against the South.
Using government-armed militias to wage constant attacks, villages are raided and looted for cattle and human slaves.
Women who are captured are exploited as concubines and children are forced to work in the most degrading and brutal circumstances. Thousands of Southern Sudanese women and children are languishing in slavery in northern Sudan today.
These militia raids, incited by the NIF regime, have caused massive displacement of people who are now suffering from starvation, disease and dislocation.
With oil revenue, the National Islamic Front has intensified its indiscriminate bombing of villages, schools, medical facilities and properties in Southern Sudan more than ever before.
The NIF has acquired new, sophisticated weaponry and is now beginning to produce its own weapons and munitions, enabling its military to escalate terror in the South more efficiently and on a daily basis.
Since Talisman entered Sudan, the Sudanese junta’s military expenditures have doubled, according to IMF reports.
The bombing of civilians has increased. Slave raids by militias have increased and human displacement has skyrocketed. For the majority of Southern Sudanese people, the situation has become catastrophic — not better.
The conditions of slavery meted out by NIF sponsored militias against southern Sudanese is well documented by credible organizations, including the Canadian government’s Harker Commission, as well as two UN Special Rapporteurs and numerous independent NGO and human-rights researchers.
But now, it seems, Talisman is resorting to a frightening argument to justify the continued exploitation of southern Sudanese resources.
It says that because world oil supplies are dwindling, companies will need to pursue oil exploration in areas plagued by civil wars and oppressive regimes. This is scary. Does the West’s right to pursue its gluttony for oil supercede the right to life of oppressed indigenous people?
Do Talisman executives and their supporters really believe that it is the duty of Southern Sudanese people to give up their land, their homes, their way of life and even their lives, so that oil companies can continue to make profits and satisfy the unsustainable, wasteful lifestyles of the self-indulgent western world?
