In Sudan, China focuses on oil wells, not local needs

China has invested billions in oil facilities and pipelines, but not in much else, say Sudanese locals.

from the June 25, 2007 edition

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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 Chinese simply do not care about us," says Martin Buywomo, Paloich's mayor. "They have no contact. They never even came to my tent to pay respects. They think we are lesser people." A member of the Shilluk tribe who attended British mission schools, Mr. Buywomo puts down the worn copy of George Eliot's 19th-century classic "Silas Marner" he is reading and continues sadly. "We see them in their trucks but they overlook us. If they saw us dying on the road, they would overlook us."

Buywomo rearranges the Chinese-made plastic pink flowers on his desk. "This is colonialism all over again."

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