SUDAN
00.52 Pictures you were never meant to see: the hidden face of Africa’s longest civil war... a war that has already displaced four million people and killed more than two million... A war whose main objective and cause now is oil.
1.20 This young man was a Sudanese army cameraman. It was he who took these pictures of an offensive against the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in May 2001 that the government called Operation Restore Dignity... The government soldiers, many of them southerners and virtually indistinguishable from the SPLA, had set out in unusually high spirits.
1.50 Before going into battle, every one of them had been promoted...
2.04 Anticipating bigger pay packets on their return, they drove off cheering, riding in brand-new lorries.
2.14 Their armour was backed up by a powerful new weapon ...
2.17 ... a weapon deployed here for the first time in 19 years of war... This footage was captured on the battlefield by the SPLA. It’s damaged. But this weapon has been identified by British analyst Paul Beaver...
2.32 ... as a ballistic missile – which he believes can only have been bought with oil.
2.37 I can’t see how they’re going to have funded buying a short-range tactical ballistic missile any other way than in some way bartering oil.
2.47 But missiles didn’t win the day for the government. Nor tanks that were shipped into the country on the very day that the first barrels of oil were shipped out. Despite the purchasing power of oil, hundreds of young men including the cameraman died on this battlefield.
3.07 Sudan’s oil is located largely in the neglected African south... in areas the government must conquer before exploration can begin. In Ruweng County... Northern Upper Nile... and Western Upper Nile.
3.23 The government’s refusal to let the UN’s Operation Lifelife Sudan work in most of these areas means that the war for oil is waged out of sight... without witnesses to the abuses committed by both sides to control, protect or destroy the sources of production.
3.44 Sudan has known only 11 years of peace since winning independence in 1956... The SPLA took up arms in 1983 to fight against the domination of Moslem elites from the predominantly Arab north... and to demand that marginalized areas like the South share in the nation’s wealth... Today, most importantly, the oil that the American company Chevron discovered in 1978.
4.23 But it was only in 1999 that construction of a pipeline to the Red Sea made possible the large-scale development of oil... Canada’s Talisman operated a vast concession around the original Heglig and Unity fields. Much of it lay outside government control. Sweden’s Lundin IPC operated a new concession in Western Upper Nile. All of it outside government control.
4.50 Before oil, these areas held little strategic interest for the government. Now they had to conquered... and obstacles to oil exploration had to be moved away.
5.03 When pumping began in 1999, Taban Deng was governor of Unity State – the name the government gave Ruweng County... He was a native of Western Upper Nile...
5.15 - It is densely populated --.
5.18 And saw for himself how oil production became possible without peace... how the army pushed African Dinka and Nuer ever further from their homelands.
5.26 They move people forcefully, not peacefully. Chevron has done it through peaceful means. They used to compensate people. Now they move in in force. They start with shelling. They will shell the village and people to be scared and run away. What can be killed is to be killed, whether a human being or an animal. Now they will burn down the whole village.
5.53 This village, Bal, was burned in October 2001. It was one of dozens of villages that the government of Sudan destroyed – unremarked by the outside world - in a five-month offensive in Talisman’s concession.
6.10 The government troops burned food stores. They carried off crops that lay cut in the fields. They mined farms and water holes. Helicopter gunships flew so low that people hiding in the fields saw the gunners’ faces. Those who survived fled.
6.28 They can’t come back because they when clear the area, when they clear that location, the first they do is a buffer zone. They make now army deployment to protect the oil, the drilling rigs, from far. They make a buffer zone. There is no person who can come back now...
6.44 To clear Ruweng County in the 1970s, Khartoum armed Arab cattle-herders. The Arabs had motive to fight their African neighbours: desertification and drought were forcing them to look for new pastures.
6.59 Commander Peter Gadet, once a government soldier, defected to the SPLA in 1999. He saw how the Baggara drove southerners away.
7.11 The Arabs come to our villages. They take our children, take our cows, burn the houses and chase the people away. When they finish, the government brings the oil companies to start oil development. This is why we can’t compromise with them... Their aim is to get rid of all Africans... We ran away from them to save our race.
7.40 In Western Upper Nile in the 1990s, the government armed African opponents of the SPLA. In the resulting battles, both sides killed, burned and raped with impunity. This was the result of the government’s strategy of divide and rule, which Khartoum and the oil companies called tribalism...
8.02 But in 2002 this strategy collapsed when Peter Gadet and the government-backed Peter Paar made peace. Fighting together, they forced Lundin IPC to suspend its operations.
8.15 Under heavy pressure on the ground, the government unleashed its air force.
8.22 The entire population of this village - Ngop - fled after planes killed after six civilians.
8.29 In a tragedy repeated all over Western Upper Nile...
8.32 Two of the dead were children.
8.37 The government of Sudan and the oil companies working with it say no-one has been displaced by oil. They say the Dinka and the Nuer move because they are nomads. But they are not. They are pastoralists who move in search of water in the dry season... but who return to permanent settlements on higher ground in the rainy season, when the River Nile floods.
9.01 These are the people the government and the oil companies say do not exist: southerners who have been displaced by oil... They say they have lost all hope of ever returning to their homes.
9.20 Achol Deng fled from Jukobar, near Bal, in October 2001 after four of her neighbours died in a gunship attack. Then soldiers came and burned the village. She walked for three nights, still fearing gunships.
9.38 The helicopter gunships came. This baby was one month old when we ran away. His mother ran in a different direction and was killed there. I ran with the baby. I ran to the forest with the baby and stayed in the forest with the baby. His mother was killed by gunships.
10.06 The village of Wunkir did not exist before villages like Bal were burnt... It’s a dry and dusty, wind-blown place that is barely fit for human habitation.
10.18 Chigo Malwal watched as three of his family – two of them children – were killed by gunships in Bal. He says he settled here because he can run and hide in the grass if the gunships return.
10.32 We’ve been here for three months and the weather is very cold. It’s very hard on the children... If the gunships come, we’ll run away - some of us in this direction, some of us in that.... We won’t come back until they’ve gone... We can’t go home because our homes have all been destroyed.
10.58 Wahamet Duar and his wife Nyadar fled from Rier, where Lundin first found oil, in February 2002. They were able to remain in the area during Peter Paar’s alliance with the government. But after Paar made peace with the SPLA in the town of Koch, government forces drove all civilians away from Lundin’s wells and the all-weather road leading to them.
11.24 When we made peace in Koch, they sent a large force to fight us... They came with cars for the war and bombed with helicopter gunships and Antonovs all day - from morning to night... They killed the cattle and the children with Antonovs... Then they burned all the houses... The Arabs tell us: “We don’t want you here. We will take your land and your property and drive you out! If they find you, they slaughter you!
12.06 After Koch, southerners like these were rounded up all over government-controlled areas. They were given cursory military training and sent back to the South... told to defeat the SPLA to make oil exploration possible. This group managed to escape... and crossed the front line to Peter Gadet’s headquarters in Western Upper Nile.
12.2S They gave us guns and told us to fight... to kill our own mothers and fathers. But why should we fight so the Arabs can take the oil? This oil is ours.
12.45 Villagers like these say they don’t know why they’re being driven from their land. Many have never seen oil... don’t even know what is it. But the people from Bal and Jukobar have seen Talisman’s oilfields at Manga lit up at night... and say the government wants to drive them away so it can put up more lights.
13.06 As soon as we ran from our village, the government began building there. They brought the lights to a place called Manga... Manga. You can see the lights there. It’s three hours away from my village and you can see the lights.
13.29 The SPLA says it will continue fighting as long as oil flows without the consent of southerners. On the front line in Ruweng County, Commander George Athor refutes the companies’ claim that oil is bringing development.
13.46 You cannot make development where there is war. War is destruction. You cannot build when you are destroying... The war will not end without stopping these oil companies from their work.
14.04 Maria Nyaluak lived near Pultuni, site of a huge government garrison protecting Lundin’s operations. She says oil never brought her any benefits – no bore holes or medicines – even when her people were cooperating with the government..
14.24 The Antonovs came and took us by surprise. Then something came on the ground and fired at us. What’s killing us are the Antonovs and the helicopter gunships. There’s nothing for the people. We are dying of hunger. We will all die. They’re killing us all.
14.49 Before the war, Western Upper Nile had some services. This was once a clinic supplied by Operation Lifeline Sudan... But since oil came onstream and war came to Western Upper Nile, the government has denied OLS access to many strategic areas... And so southerners burned out of their homes... and denied relief in their own regions... are compelled to move even further away in search of food. Nhialdiu, once a thriving market town, was closed to relief workers for months before the government finally captured it in February 2002. Because of the government bans...
15.29 Health worker Joseph Chian had nothing with which to treat the sick...
15.34 But that didn’t stop them coming to see him.
15.41 His inability to do anything was terrible, he said - especially when the patient was a child.
15.47 The child with severe diarrhoea and the body very hot... He’s very weak... And I have nothing to help the child... We have run short of drugs for six months. Babies like this usually die – from diarrhoea! The oil companies working...
16.08 ... with the government that denies these people relief make much of the small projects they fund. Taban Deng saw these projects close up when he was in charge in Unity State.
16.18 Just temporary material is put and we are told that there is a clinic and a school. They are actually not mean even for the service of the people... The first person to be treated in those clinics not a child, is not a suckling mother. It’s the army, the soldiers, the security personnel. These are policies of displacement that are meant to continue depopulating our areas, to continue harassing our areas, to attract the life to be suitable for the settlers who are coming from north Sudan.
16.55 The oil companies argue that doing business with the government creates employment for southerners. When Taban Deng tried to get southerners employed in oil, he himself was displaced.
17.08 I was given four hours as governor of Unity State by the army to leave the area and I had to quit otherwise wouldn’t be talking here now. They told me to leave the area because I disagreed with the security people guarding oil... In Unity State, a normal citizen cannot get employment. He cannot be employed as a worker, he cannot be employed as a driver. He cannot be employed even as an expatriate. We have geologists that cannot have a job in the oil industry. Some of them are trained in Britain. They have got better training even than the Arabs working in the oil industry. They cannot get employment...
17.48 William Gatjang was a victim of the government’s belief that all southerners support - or spy for - the SPLA.. He grew up in Khartoum, but after leaving school, finding no work in Khartoum, went to Heglig to look for a job in the oilfields.
18.07 I went to the market to ask about work. I wanted to work for an oil company. While I was asking, security came and arrested me. They asked me where I was from. I said Khartoum. They asked me which tribe I was from and I told them I’m a Nuer... Five men with pistols arrested me. One of them punched me in the face. They grabbed me and threw me to the ground. My face was cut.
18.39 William was taken to a filthy, rat-infested jail and locked up with other young southerners.
18.44 Security officers came to the prison at midnight every night. They took us outside to the yard, beat us with sticks and kicked us. Five men held you – two at each end and one in the middle – and threw you up and down. The ground was hard and I’m left with many scars on my body. If you’re not a strong man, it can kill you.
19.26 Before oil, government soldiers often had to fight their way through forests like this... Government vehicles had trouble advancing... The terrain of Upper Nile is swampy terrain where fighting used to stop in the rainy season... But all this changed when the oil companies cleared the land and built elevated, all-weather roads.
19.55 They are knocking down trees. The area does not have huge forests. Our forests are only the acacia trees. They are clearing those forests so they make a clear fire ground for the army.... Unity state is a swamp area. It will be difficult for the army to move without those roads. It will be difficult for the army to protect oil companies without quick mobility.
20.21 Michael Chian was once liaison officer between Lundin IPC and the government militia of Paulino Matip. He says roads and bridges built by oil companies have given the government a clear strategic advantage.
20.35 The companies are really the very people that are facilitating the move of the Sudanese government that are working in the oilfields... First of all, this constructing of the roads...
20.47 Roads that cut deep into Ruweng County and Western Upper Nile... giving the army new access to rebel-controlled areas.
20.54 The troops goes first of all advancing. After they clear the area, depopulating the people and then the company came behind them with the pipelines. I have seen that when I was in the company really.
21.13 The oil companies say their roads help southern civilians. Taban Deng disagrees.
21.20 If they were meant for the people they are supposed to be made with the consent of the local authority. They don’t ask our opinion of how to make a road or where to construct that road. I have never been consulted or contacted to discuss construction of roads in the area when I was a governor! Those roads are made for security purposes – for the quick movement and intervention of the army. They are not done according to plan. And they are all made on aerial surveys. They are all straight roads. They don’t pass through the people. They don’t pass through the villages...
21.54 As the government troops move deeper into contested oil areas, they are increasingly dependent on support from planes that use airstrips built by the oil companies. Most importantly, the airstrip at Heglig....
22.08 Their Antonovs are taking off from Heglig for the south, for operations, bombarding the areas of the SPLA... I myself flew in a government Antonov with ammunition and troops in it coming to Heglig. At the same time I saw the Antonov taking off from Heglig transporting troops to Rier where the oil is and also to Leer. And sometimes they are using the company trucks to transport troops.
22.48 These two young men were students when they were taken from their home villages and forced into military service. They were flown into Heglig and from Heglig were driven down Lundin’s oil road. They were told they had to extend the oil road so the army could establish a garrison.
23.07 They took me to a camp in Khartoum and gave me a month’s training. Then they took us in a plane to the Heglig airstrip. They told us: now you’ll drive and fix the road... So we went to fix the road... But the SPLA ambushed us and brought us here.
23.25 Without the oil road, the conscripts couldn’t have been driven so deep into Western Upper Nile... where scores of them were killed.
23.35 Income from the oil pumped from under the land of some of the poorest people on earth... today accounts for about 20 percent of the government’s revenue. Services for the people aren’t improving. But the army is acquiring powerful new weapons.
24.01 You know to fight war you need resources. Sudan before was using the Arab resources through Iraq, through Iran and some Gulf countries. Libya! But now they don’t need anything from the Arab countries. But now they don’t anything from the Arab countries. They don’t need anything now. They’ve got the money now.
24.22 More than a million dollars a day with which weapons like this are now made in Sudan. Peter Gadet collected this gun from a factory in Khartoum before he joined the SPLA.
24.34 This gun is an anti-tank weapon, an RPG-9. It was made near Khartoum, in a place called Baguer. It’s modelled on a Chinese gun.It has no number, no manufacturer’s mark. Why? They don’t put any mark because they don’t want anyone to know where it’s made.
25.02 But it’s the widespread deployment of helicopter gunships that has traumatized civilians. They say the gunships are always “roaming”... shooting at you even as you run away.
25.17 Peter Gartut is a health worker... seen here visiting wounded soldiers. But he says most of the people he treats are civilians. And in recent years he has begun to see horrific injuries - no longer just simple bullet wounds like this.
25.37 Some of the civilians were wounded by bombardment of Antonov and helicopter gunships. That is very bad now to the community indeed. It also stopped the living of the community. The community used to think of an Antonov and a gunship every day. When they heard the sound of anything, although it is an NGO flight, the people used to run away. We firstly saw those gunships in 1999... and those gunships brought to Sudan in order to protect the oil and the oil companies to continue drilling that oil for the government of Sudan.
26.18 But no-one knew Khartoum had acquired missiles until the SPLA captured this film. The government still denies having these missiles – far less using them against its own citizens.
26.29 I’ve never heard of a short-range tactical ballistic missile being used in the war in Sudan. I think it’s the first time I’ve certainly seen any evidence of it whatsoever and it does mark in my view an escalation... If it is what I think it is, then it’s the first time we’ve seen an Iranian missile in Sudan... A range of about 110 kilometers. A very indiscriminate weapon. It has an error of about one to two kilometers.
26.55 But oil money is not only arming the government. It is also arming the SPLA. The SPLA commander who defeated this offensive was Malik Agar.
27.08 Before oil, the whole fighting was between two weak opponents, literally between two weak opponents. But now the balance starts shifting... They have acquired massive means of fire delivery. They are all brand new in terms of weapons, in terms of fighting vehicles, in terms of artillery. They are all brand new and they are massive.
27.35 And many of them are now in the hands of the SPLA...
27.39 We have captured most of these things. Most of these things they are literally captured by us. And then we have them now. And they are new!
27.51 But that brings little comfort to civilians who are...
27.56 Woman with cow heads ... exhausted by war...
27.59 Dead cow ... and who live always surrounded by death...
28.03 Their villages burned, their crops looted, their fields burned and mined, they are now reduced to eating leaves - not just in the hunger gap between harvests, but for much of the year.
28.20 Bal child What they want is medicine for their children... Development instead of death...
28.30 But instead of bringing development, oil is arming both sides in this terrible war... killing this generation of youth and, if the conflict continues, promising the bleakest of futures for the next.
00.52 Pictures you were never meant to see: the hidden face of Africa’s longest civil war... a war that has already displaced four million people and killed more than two million... A war whose main objective and cause now is oil.
1.20 This young man was a Sudanese army cameraman. It was he who took these pictures of an offensive against the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in May 2001 that the government called Operation Restore Dignity... The government soldiers, many of them southerners and virtually indistinguishable from the SPLA, had set out in unusually high spirits.
1.50 Before going into battle, every one of them had been promoted...
2.04 Anticipating bigger pay packets on their return, they drove off cheering, riding in brand-new lorries.
2.14 Their armour was backed up by a powerful new weapon ...
2.17 ... a weapon deployed here for the first time in 19 years of war... This footage was captured on the battlefield by the SPLA. It’s damaged. But this weapon has been identified by British analyst Paul Beaver...
2.32 ... as a ballistic missile – which he believes can only have been bought with oil.
2.37 I can’t see how they’re going to have funded buying a short-range tactical ballistic missile any other way than in some way bartering oil.
2.47 But missiles didn’t win the day for the government. Nor tanks that were shipped into the country on the very day that the first barrels of oil were shipped out. Despite the purchasing power of oil, hundreds of young men including the cameraman died on this battlefield.
3.07 Sudan’s oil is located largely in the neglected African south... in areas the government must conquer before exploration can begin. In Ruweng County... Northern Upper Nile... and Western Upper Nile.
3.23 The government’s refusal to let the UN’s Operation Lifelife Sudan work in most of these areas means that the war for oil is waged out of sight... without witnesses to the abuses committed by both sides to control, protect or destroy the sources of production.
3.44 Sudan has known only 11 years of peace since winning independence in 1956... The SPLA took up arms in 1983 to fight against the domination of Moslem elites from the predominantly Arab north... and to demand that marginalized areas like the South share in the nation’s wealth... Today, most importantly, the oil that the American company Chevron discovered in 1978.
4.23 But it was only in 1999 that construction of a pipeline to the Red Sea made possible the large-scale development of oil... Canada’s Talisman operated a vast concession around the original Heglig and Unity fields. Much of it lay outside government control. Sweden’s Lundin IPC operated a new concession in Western Upper Nile. All of it outside government control.
4.50 Before oil, these areas held little strategic interest for the government. Now they had to conquered... and obstacles to oil exploration had to be moved away.
5.03 When pumping began in 1999, Taban Deng was governor of Unity State – the name the government gave Ruweng County... He was a native of Western Upper Nile...
5.15 - It is densely populated --.
5.18 And saw for himself how oil production became possible without peace... how the army pushed African Dinka and Nuer ever further from their homelands.
5.26 They move people forcefully, not peacefully. Chevron has done it through peaceful means. They used to compensate people. Now they move in in force. They start with shelling. They will shell the village and people to be scared and run away. What can be killed is to be killed, whether a human being or an animal. Now they will burn down the whole village.
5.53 This village, Bal, was burned in October 2001. It was one of dozens of villages that the government of Sudan destroyed – unremarked by the outside world - in a five-month offensive in Talisman’s concession.
6.10 The government troops burned food stores. They carried off crops that lay cut in the fields. They mined farms and water holes. Helicopter gunships flew so low that people hiding in the fields saw the gunners’ faces. Those who survived fled.
6.28 They can’t come back because they when clear the area, when they clear that location, the first they do is a buffer zone. They make now army deployment to protect the oil, the drilling rigs, from far. They make a buffer zone. There is no person who can come back now...
6.44 To clear Ruweng County in the 1970s, Khartoum armed Arab cattle-herders. The Arabs had motive to fight their African neighbours: desertification and drought were forcing them to look for new pastures.
6.59 Commander Peter Gadet, once a government soldier, defected to the SPLA in 1999. He saw how the Baggara drove southerners away.
7.11 The Arabs come to our villages. They take our children, take our cows, burn the houses and chase the people away. When they finish, the government brings the oil companies to start oil development. This is why we can’t compromise with them... Their aim is to get rid of all Africans... We ran away from them to save our race.
7.40 In Western Upper Nile in the 1990s, the government armed African opponents of the SPLA. In the resulting battles, both sides killed, burned and raped with impunity. This was the result of the government’s strategy of divide and rule, which Khartoum and the oil companies called tribalism...
8.02 But in 2002 this strategy collapsed when Peter Gadet and the government-backed Peter Paar made peace. Fighting together, they forced Lundin IPC to suspend its operations.
8.15 Under heavy pressure on the ground, the government unleashed its air force.
8.22 The entire population of this village - Ngop - fled after planes killed after six civilians.
8.29 In a tragedy repeated all over Western Upper Nile...
8.32 Two of the dead were children.
8.37 The government of Sudan and the oil companies working with it say no-one has been displaced by oil. They say the Dinka and the Nuer move because they are nomads. But they are not. They are pastoralists who move in search of water in the dry season... but who return to permanent settlements on higher ground in the rainy season, when the River Nile floods.
9.01 These are the people the government and the oil companies say do not exist: southerners who have been displaced by oil... They say they have lost all hope of ever returning to their homes.
9.20 Achol Deng fled from Jukobar, near Bal, in October 2001 after four of her neighbours died in a gunship attack. Then soldiers came and burned the village. She walked for three nights, still fearing gunships.
9.38 The helicopter gunships came. This baby was one month old when we ran away. His mother ran in a different direction and was killed there. I ran with the baby. I ran to the forest with the baby and stayed in the forest with the baby. His mother was killed by gunships.
10.06 The village of Wunkir did not exist before villages like Bal were burnt... It’s a dry and dusty, wind-blown place that is barely fit for human habitation.
10.18 Chigo Malwal watched as three of his family – two of them children – were killed by gunships in Bal. He says he settled here because he can run and hide in the grass if the gunships return.
10.32 We’ve been here for three months and the weather is very cold. It’s very hard on the children... If the gunships come, we’ll run away - some of us in this direction, some of us in that.... We won’t come back until they’ve gone... We can’t go home because our homes have all been destroyed.
10.58 Wahamet Duar and his wife Nyadar fled from Rier, where Lundin first found oil, in February 2002. They were able to remain in the area during Peter Paar’s alliance with the government. But after Paar made peace with the SPLA in the town of Koch, government forces drove all civilians away from Lundin’s wells and the all-weather road leading to them.
11.24 When we made peace in Koch, they sent a large force to fight us... They came with cars for the war and bombed with helicopter gunships and Antonovs all day - from morning to night... They killed the cattle and the children with Antonovs... Then they burned all the houses... The Arabs tell us: “We don’t want you here. We will take your land and your property and drive you out! If they find you, they slaughter you!
12.06 After Koch, southerners like these were rounded up all over government-controlled areas. They were given cursory military training and sent back to the South... told to defeat the SPLA to make oil exploration possible. This group managed to escape... and crossed the front line to Peter Gadet’s headquarters in Western Upper Nile.
12.2S They gave us guns and told us to fight... to kill our own mothers and fathers. But why should we fight so the Arabs can take the oil? This oil is ours.
12.45 Villagers like these say they don’t know why they’re being driven from their land. Many have never seen oil... don’t even know what is it. But the people from Bal and Jukobar have seen Talisman’s oilfields at Manga lit up at night... and say the government wants to drive them away so it can put up more lights.
13.06 As soon as we ran from our village, the government began building there. They brought the lights to a place called Manga... Manga. You can see the lights there. It’s three hours away from my village and you can see the lights.
13.29 The SPLA says it will continue fighting as long as oil flows without the consent of southerners. On the front line in Ruweng County, Commander George Athor refutes the companies’ claim that oil is bringing development.
13.46 You cannot make development where there is war. War is destruction. You cannot build when you are destroying... The war will not end without stopping these oil companies from their work.
14.04 Maria Nyaluak lived near Pultuni, site of a huge government garrison protecting Lundin’s operations. She says oil never brought her any benefits – no bore holes or medicines – even when her people were cooperating with the government..
14.24 The Antonovs came and took us by surprise. Then something came on the ground and fired at us. What’s killing us are the Antonovs and the helicopter gunships. There’s nothing for the people. We are dying of hunger. We will all die. They’re killing us all.
14.49 Before the war, Western Upper Nile had some services. This was once a clinic supplied by Operation Lifeline Sudan... But since oil came onstream and war came to Western Upper Nile, the government has denied OLS access to many strategic areas... And so southerners burned out of their homes... and denied relief in their own regions... are compelled to move even further away in search of food. Nhialdiu, once a thriving market town, was closed to relief workers for months before the government finally captured it in February 2002. Because of the government bans...
15.29 Health worker Joseph Chian had nothing with which to treat the sick...
15.34 But that didn’t stop them coming to see him.
15.41 His inability to do anything was terrible, he said - especially when the patient was a child.
15.47 The child with severe diarrhoea and the body very hot... He’s very weak... And I have nothing to help the child... We have run short of drugs for six months. Babies like this usually die – from diarrhoea! The oil companies working...
16.08 ... with the government that denies these people relief make much of the small projects they fund. Taban Deng saw these projects close up when he was in charge in Unity State.
16.18 Just temporary material is put and we are told that there is a clinic and a school. They are actually not mean even for the service of the people... The first person to be treated in those clinics not a child, is not a suckling mother. It’s the army, the soldiers, the security personnel. These are policies of displacement that are meant to continue depopulating our areas, to continue harassing our areas, to attract the life to be suitable for the settlers who are coming from north Sudan.
16.55 The oil companies argue that doing business with the government creates employment for southerners. When Taban Deng tried to get southerners employed in oil, he himself was displaced.
17.08 I was given four hours as governor of Unity State by the army to leave the area and I had to quit otherwise wouldn’t be talking here now. They told me to leave the area because I disagreed with the security people guarding oil... In Unity State, a normal citizen cannot get employment. He cannot be employed as a worker, he cannot be employed as a driver. He cannot be employed even as an expatriate. We have geologists that cannot have a job in the oil industry. Some of them are trained in Britain. They have got better training even than the Arabs working in the oil industry. They cannot get employment...
17.48 William Gatjang was a victim of the government’s belief that all southerners support - or spy for - the SPLA.. He grew up in Khartoum, but after leaving school, finding no work in Khartoum, went to Heglig to look for a job in the oilfields.
18.07 I went to the market to ask about work. I wanted to work for an oil company. While I was asking, security came and arrested me. They asked me where I was from. I said Khartoum. They asked me which tribe I was from and I told them I’m a Nuer... Five men with pistols arrested me. One of them punched me in the face. They grabbed me and threw me to the ground. My face was cut.
18.39 William was taken to a filthy, rat-infested jail and locked up with other young southerners.
18.44 Security officers came to the prison at midnight every night. They took us outside to the yard, beat us with sticks and kicked us. Five men held you – two at each end and one in the middle – and threw you up and down. The ground was hard and I’m left with many scars on my body. If you’re not a strong man, it can kill you.
19.26 Before oil, government soldiers often had to fight their way through forests like this... Government vehicles had trouble advancing... The terrain of Upper Nile is swampy terrain where fighting used to stop in the rainy season... But all this changed when the oil companies cleared the land and built elevated, all-weather roads.
19.55 They are knocking down trees. The area does not have huge forests. Our forests are only the acacia trees. They are clearing those forests so they make a clear fire ground for the army.... Unity state is a swamp area. It will be difficult for the army to move without those roads. It will be difficult for the army to protect oil companies without quick mobility.
20.21 Michael Chian was once liaison officer between Lundin IPC and the government militia of Paulino Matip. He says roads and bridges built by oil companies have given the government a clear strategic advantage.
20.35 The companies are really the very people that are facilitating the move of the Sudanese government that are working in the oilfields... First of all, this constructing of the roads...
20.47 Roads that cut deep into Ruweng County and Western Upper Nile... giving the army new access to rebel-controlled areas.
20.54 The troops goes first of all advancing. After they clear the area, depopulating the people and then the company came behind them with the pipelines. I have seen that when I was in the company really.
21.13 The oil companies say their roads help southern civilians. Taban Deng disagrees.
21.20 If they were meant for the people they are supposed to be made with the consent of the local authority. They don’t ask our opinion of how to make a road or where to construct that road. I have never been consulted or contacted to discuss construction of roads in the area when I was a governor! Those roads are made for security purposes – for the quick movement and intervention of the army. They are not done according to plan. And they are all made on aerial surveys. They are all straight roads. They don’t pass through the people. They don’t pass through the villages...
21.54 As the government troops move deeper into contested oil areas, they are increasingly dependent on support from planes that use airstrips built by the oil companies. Most importantly, the airstrip at Heglig....
22.08 Their Antonovs are taking off from Heglig for the south, for operations, bombarding the areas of the SPLA... I myself flew in a government Antonov with ammunition and troops in it coming to Heglig. At the same time I saw the Antonov taking off from Heglig transporting troops to Rier where the oil is and also to Leer. And sometimes they are using the company trucks to transport troops.
22.48 These two young men were students when they were taken from their home villages and forced into military service. They were flown into Heglig and from Heglig were driven down Lundin’s oil road. They were told they had to extend the oil road so the army could establish a garrison.
23.07 They took me to a camp in Khartoum and gave me a month’s training. Then they took us in a plane to the Heglig airstrip. They told us: now you’ll drive and fix the road... So we went to fix the road... But the SPLA ambushed us and brought us here.
23.25 Without the oil road, the conscripts couldn’t have been driven so deep into Western Upper Nile... where scores of them were killed.
23.35 Income from the oil pumped from under the land of some of the poorest people on earth... today accounts for about 20 percent of the government’s revenue. Services for the people aren’t improving. But the army is acquiring powerful new weapons.
24.01 You know to fight war you need resources. Sudan before was using the Arab resources through Iraq, through Iran and some Gulf countries. Libya! But now they don’t need anything from the Arab countries. But now they don’t anything from the Arab countries. They don’t need anything now. They’ve got the money now.
24.22 More than a million dollars a day with which weapons like this are now made in Sudan. Peter Gadet collected this gun from a factory in Khartoum before he joined the SPLA.
24.34 This gun is an anti-tank weapon, an RPG-9. It was made near Khartoum, in a place called Baguer. It’s modelled on a Chinese gun.It has no number, no manufacturer’s mark. Why? They don’t put any mark because they don’t want anyone to know where it’s made.
25.02 But it’s the widespread deployment of helicopter gunships that has traumatized civilians. They say the gunships are always “roaming”... shooting at you even as you run away.
25.17 Peter Gartut is a health worker... seen here visiting wounded soldiers. But he says most of the people he treats are civilians. And in recent years he has begun to see horrific injuries - no longer just simple bullet wounds like this.
25.37 Some of the civilians were wounded by bombardment of Antonov and helicopter gunships. That is very bad now to the community indeed. It also stopped the living of the community. The community used to think of an Antonov and a gunship every day. When they heard the sound of anything, although it is an NGO flight, the people used to run away. We firstly saw those gunships in 1999... and those gunships brought to Sudan in order to protect the oil and the oil companies to continue drilling that oil for the government of Sudan.
26.18 But no-one knew Khartoum had acquired missiles until the SPLA captured this film. The government still denies having these missiles – far less using them against its own citizens.
26.29 I’ve never heard of a short-range tactical ballistic missile being used in the war in Sudan. I think it’s the first time I’ve certainly seen any evidence of it whatsoever and it does mark in my view an escalation... If it is what I think it is, then it’s the first time we’ve seen an Iranian missile in Sudan... A range of about 110 kilometers. A very indiscriminate weapon. It has an error of about one to two kilometers.
26.55 But oil money is not only arming the government. It is also arming the SPLA. The SPLA commander who defeated this offensive was Malik Agar.
27.08 Before oil, the whole fighting was between two weak opponents, literally between two weak opponents. But now the balance starts shifting... They have acquired massive means of fire delivery. They are all brand new in terms of weapons, in terms of fighting vehicles, in terms of artillery. They are all brand new and they are massive.
27.35 And many of them are now in the hands of the SPLA...
27.39 We have captured most of these things. Most of these things they are literally captured by us. And then we have them now. And they are new!
27.51 But that brings little comfort to civilians who are...
27.56 Woman with cow heads ... exhausted by war...
27.59 Dead cow ... and who live always surrounded by death...
28.03 Their villages burned, their crops looted, their fields burned and mined, they are now reduced to eating leaves - not just in the hunger gap between harvests, but for much of the year.
28.20 Bal child What they want is medicine for their children... Development instead of death...
28.30 But instead of bringing development, oil is arming both sides in this terrible war... killing this generation of youth and, if the conflict continues, promising the bleakest of futures for the next.