LITMIR.BIZ

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village called Pariang in Upper Nile province, near the Heglig oil field. They were Dinka. They had owned many cows. Then twice, the year before and the year before that, the Baggara Arabs had come to Pariang with guns. The Baggara rode on horses and donkeys. The government had given them the guns. The Dinka had no guns. The Baggara shot some people and captured others, particularly children. The people who survived the second raid on Pariang came here. The children of Pariang had never been found.

      A man in the crowd shouted ‘Chevron’, and angry babble erupted. Wiping the sweat off my face, I asked the translator what the man had said.

      ‘They say the jallaba are stealing their land for Chevron. Chevron has found oil on their land, and the jallaba want it.’

      I looked at Bob.

      He nodded. Pariang was near Bentiu. Chevron, which held the oil concession in that part of Sudan, had first discovered oil in commercial quantities in Bentiu in 1978. But the company had suspended its operations after southern rebels killed four of its workers in 1984. A lot of southerners claimed the government was arming the Arab militias to attack southern villages in that area and clearing the land so Chevron could resume work. But there was no way to confirm such reports, since the oil fields were located in the war zone and the government seldom gave foreign journalists permission to visit them.

      I asked about conditions in the camp.

      Everyone began to shout. They had no medicine, not enough food. They pointed to their bellies and turned their palms up in supplication. Children were dying of diarrhoea. Children got hungry and ate the rubbish. A man pulled me up from the crate, past a blur of cardboard shanties. There! he exclaimed, pointing at some children who were poking through a field of garbage with sticks. The rest of the crowd caught up with us. Someone else pointed to a lone Arab riding through the camp on a donkey loaded with a tank of water. They had no water except what they could buy from jallaba like him. People were dying from malaria, diarrhoea, measles, tuberculosis, meningitis.

      Bowls of merissa appeared. The voices became slurred, angrier. A man pushed his way forward, yelling and jabbing his finger at me and Bob.

      ‘He wants to know why people are hearing this in Britannia and Europa and are not helping us. You have lots of money, but you do not help us.’

      I had no answer.

      THE NEXT MORNING I went to the big brown Chevron office building in the centre of town. I wanted to ask about the attacks the camp dwellers said had driven them out of Pariang. But the Sudanese watchman said the office was closed. I went to see a Canadian journalist I’d met at the Acropole. Carol Berger knew as much as anyone about Chevron’s dealings in Sudan. She’d spent three years there as a stringer for the BBC before being deported for breaking the news of the rebel attack on the oil company’s Rub Kona base camp. (She returned a year later after Nimeiri was overthrown.) She was tall and slim, with short brown hair, blue eyes and a slight limp. She loved the insanity of Sudan, and she had seen a lot of it, having covered the last famine as well as the waning days of Nimeiri’s regime. She laughed when I told her how shocked I was by Hillat Shook. What would I think, she asked, if I knew that in addition to everything else, Hillat Shook was actually the site of a hazardous waste dump? When Carol arrived in Khartoum in 1981, the Chevron building had been a hive of activity. In those days, the oil company expected to annually produce oil worth £180 million by 1986. But after Nuer rebels killed four Chevron workers, the oil company shut down its operations. At Chevron’s request, Carol said, Nimeiri began supplying the Baggara tribes of southern Kordofan in early 1984 with automatic weapons to secure the oil fields. But this only intensified the fighting between the local Nuer and Dinka people and the Baggara. Finally Chevron told the Sudanese president that ‘some kind of political settlement in Upper Nile’ would have to be a precondition for oil exploration to resume.

      Nimeiri had pinned all his hopes on the oil. He entered into a secret deal with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. In return for equipping and training a southern militia that could keep the SPLA out of Bentiu, Khashoggi was to get half the proceeds of any oil revenues that would accrue to the Sudan government. Khashoggi was to draw his militia from the Nuer people who made up most of the population in the Bentiu area and were traditional rivals of the Dinka. But the Khashoggi deal failed when the Nuer kidnapped the team Nimeiri sent to negotiate with them. (Carol was particularly amused by this twist.) Nimeiri then tried to open negotiations with the SPLA, relaying an offer to make John Garang, the SPLA leader, vice president of Sudan and economic administrator of the south, and to give six of his colleagues cabinet posts. But Garang turned down the offer, and a few months later Nimeiri was overthrown by his generals while on a visit to Washington. (The United States, aware of Nimeiri’s increasing unpopularity and fed up with his corruption, did nothing to stop the coup.)

      When Sadiq took power after the 1986 elections, he stepped up arms deliveries to the Baggara militias known as the murahaleen. The Baggara had been the backbone of the Mahdi’s rebellion, and they retained their loyalty to his great-grandson. They traditionally pastured their cattle and horses along the Bahr el-Arab’and Bahr el-Ghazal rivers, which ran through the oil fields. In 1984 and 1985 the Baggara Arabs cleared the land around Bentiu of its inhabitants. The Nuer who lived closer to Bentiu were told to move south of the river. The Dinka were driven off towards the north, the people I met from Pariang probably among them. The following year the SPLA led an assault on the oil fields that gave control of the area to the rebels. As Carol and I sat talking in Khartoum, the murahaleen were fighting all along the Bahr el-Arab to take control of the pastureland and the oil beneath it.

      Sadiq’s government was even more desperate than Nimeiri’s to get the oil flowing. In the early 1980s, foreign aid had paid for almost three-quarters of Sudan’s annual budget. But with the cold war waning, the United States and other rich countries were losing interest in the Horn of Africa. US aid to Sudan had shrunk from $350 million in 1985 to about $72 million, and the embassy expected it to fall further. After all the excesses of the 1970s, Sudan owed more money to the International Monetary Fund than any other country in the world. Carol was frustrated with the Western diplomats who believed Sadiq’s high-flown protestations about his plans to develop Sudan. They thought he was like them because he’d gone to Oxford, she said. To her, he seemed more like the feudal leader of a Muslim clan that spent much of its time bickering over how to divide up the country’s wealth.

      Sadiq’s cousin, Mubarak al-Mahdi, had argued violently not long before with some Chevron executives. Mubarak was Sadiq’s closest confidant. He was also close to Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, the president of Libya and a patron of Sadiq’s who had given him the backing to stage several armed rebellions against Nimeiri. Reportedly Mubarak had been entrusted with the funds Qaddafi gave Sadiq to win the 1986 elections. After his victory, Sadiq had given his cousin a vital new task: to get Chevron to resume drilling. But the Americans refused, citing the danger the rebels presented to their personnel. Oil prices were at a low of $16 per barrel. As the US ambassador to Sudan, Norman Anderson, later wrote, Mubarak accused the Americans of using Sudan’s civil war as an excuse to wait for the price of oil to go up. Mubarak warned the Americans that if Chevron didn’t want to drill in the south, the Sudanese would find another company that did. The French company Total, for example, already owned large concessions in the far south, near the towns of Bor, Kapoeta and Pibor. Total might be willing to drill where Chevron was not. Chevron held its ground. The company had invested more than $1 billion in Sudan, but as Anderson wrote, it did not want to ‘make itself again a target’ or ‘incur large new expenses in uncertain political and economic conditions without reasonable prospects of a return on investment’. The al-Mahdis fumed, but the oil remained underground.

      I KNEW OF ONLY one person who had visited the Sudan for pleasure. She was a friend from London who’d gone to visit Patta Scott-Villiers, an old schoolmate who also happened to be a friend of Emma McCune. When I called my friend to say I was going to Khartoum, she suggested I look up Patta and her husband, Alastair, who was Band Aid’s representative there. By coincidence I had spent my first night in Sudan in a room at the Acropole that Band Aid kept as an office. The walls were decorated with posters of Bob Geldof and Princess Diana. The floor was stacked with yellowing telegrams addressed to the Scott-Villierses about famines past. Clearly, they had seen all of this before.

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