SUDANDYING FOR OIL March 2001 – 19’48
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| Nhialdiu burned | The village of Nhialdiu in rebel-controlled Western Upper Nile... burned to the ground by militias backed by the government of Sudan... Nhialdiu is close to the great divide between Sudan’s African south and Arab north, on the front line of its war. Its people are sitting on top of the country’s most valuable resource – the resource for which Nhialdiu has been destroyed (if there are no astons: as Paul Savage of Christian Aid explains).
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| Sync PAUL SAVAGE, Christian Aid
| This place was a thriving market place full of traders and people coming around and doing their business. And now it has been reduced to almost nothing. There used to be hundreds of cattle here being sold during the day every day. Traders were coming to bring things and take the cattle away as part of their trade... In Nhialdiu and in Western Upper Nile everybody is being pushed away in order that the oil reserves beneath this land may be exploited.
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| SPLA forces | The southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army have been fighting for equality with the Arab north for the past 18 years. (CIRCLING) Now they are fighting to prevent the frontiers of oil being pushed forward. A new pipeline has made Sudan an exporter of oil... and huge tracts of southern Sudan – tracts still controlled by rebel forces like these - are being sold to foreign oil companies.
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| Commander Peter Gadet dressing
| Commander Peter Gadet is the man in charge of the SPLA forces on the front line of the oil war – just south of the government-controlled town of Bentiu.
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| Close up of Gadet | He belongs to the Nuer (PRONOUNCED NOO-AIR) tribe, one of the two main tribes in southern Sudan and the tribe most affected by the re-launching of the oil industry...
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| Lacing shoes
| a tribe that has been massively displaced. |
| Gadet looking up | Gadet’s own family has been displaced and driven south as government forces clear oil-rich African villages for fear they may support the SPLA.
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| Gadet saluting
| Gadet is the only SPLA commander who has posed any threat to the government on the oil front. He tells his men they are fighting not a religious war – but a war against the government’s grab for oil.
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| Sync Gadet
| We are here to show the world that the oil in Bentiu is our oil. You saw how the government last year used helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers against us. This is how war is fought. But we know that the land cannot be taken from the air. These planes will never land here to chase us away. Whatever the government does with their aircraft, bombing us, this oil will not be defended by aircraft.
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| Set-up William Gatjang
| The people of southern Sudan are gaining nothing from oil. William Gatjang left school in the Arab north to look for work in the oilfields. When he arrived at Heglig, headquarters of main oil consortium, he went to the market to ask where to apply for a job. The response was immediate.
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| Sync William Gatjang | Five armed security officers arrested me. One of them punched me in the face, leaving a scar here. They threw me in a car, took me prison and locked me up.
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| Listening shot
| Every night at 12 o’clock, the security officers came back to the prison.
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| Sync William
| We were taken out to the yard where we were beaten with sticks and boots. Five people held you - two on each side and one in the middle - and threw you up and down. I understood that they didn’t want a southerner, and especially a Nuer, to work in the oilfields.
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| Tree bridge | Gadet’s forces were allied with the government for years. They defected back to the South late in 1999 - a week after the new pipeline opened.
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| Sync Gadet - wide | We left the government in September 1999 because of the atrocities we saw and the terrible things the government did to our people in the oilfields. (TIGHT) The government has armed the Arab cattle-herders and turned them into militias. These militias are now targeting the people who live around the oilfields.
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| SPLA fighters marching in | The SPLA is attempting to keep a presence in oil-rich areas that government militias are systematically targeting. But so far it’s a losing battle. In Nhialdiu, they returned to an empty shell.
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| Topshot of child | Straw huts torched by the militias are now good for nothing but firewood.
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| Child picking up bundle of sticks | In Nhialdiu alone, almost 20,000 people were burned out of their homes. They picked up the little that was left to them – and moved away.
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| Clinic exterior | Nhialdiu’s once well-equipped clinic is today an empty ruin.
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| Close up of health worker Joseph Chian
| Health worker Joseph Chian still comes to the clinic...
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| Coughing man
| Men, women and children still come for help.
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| Sitting ladies | ... They wait patiently even though they know that...
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| Joseph beckoning woman over | ... he has nothing to give them – no matter how minor their ailment.
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| Mother seated on the ground | This mother, like so many others, was forced to drink dirty water when she fled from Nhialdiu... seeking safety from the militias in the swamps that surround the river Nile
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| Close up of child | Now her youngest child is dying.
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| Sync Joseph Chian | The child with severe diarrhoea and 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! |
| Women entering river | All around Nhialdiu children are dying of diarrhoea. It is often caused by drinking water from stagnant ponds like this...
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| Close up of water lilies
| In the absence of crops, their mothers are giving them food – like these water lily roots – that is not suited to their young stomachs.
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| Close up of squinting kid
| Nhialdiu’s children still come to the classes given by teacher Michael Soar Garfan.
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| Wide of teacher and kids | But Nhialdiu’s “school” is almost as poorly equipped as its clinic...
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| Close up of boy | Its pupils sit on the ground in pools of ashes, without pencils or paper
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| Sync Michael | I teach under trees because our classes were burned when a war took place just four or three months ago. We escaped from this area to another place. When we came back we found There is not any class or any rooms left. So we decide to continue our class under this tree.
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| Women listening | Watched by villagers who, in this wasteland, have little else to do.
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| Sync Michael | Before the war in this area we had very good schools. All schools were built. We had school buildings. We had school materials that we received from Unicef and other organisations. This time we have no school materials at all. Classes were burned and we have no pens. We have nothing! It is a very bad school now!
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| OLS sequence
| The United Nations runs a huge relief operation for southern Sudan from this base in northern Kenya. The mandate of this army of aid workers is to serve all war-affected areas of Sudan. But this mandate is not being enforced because of bans by the Khartoum government on the delivery of relief...
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| Wide of elders under tree | ... Especially to oil-rich areas like Nhialdiu.
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| Elders | After emptying oil-rich areas by burning them, the government has to keep them empty. It achieves this by obstructing relief...
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| Plane landing... | The few aid agencies that work outside the UN’s umbrella can fly into areas banned by the government.
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| Paul Savage unloading plane
| But they do so at their own risk. And the help they bring is only a small drop in the ocean of the people’s need.
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| Sync Paul | People here are just beginning to drift back from where they thought it was safe. But there’s no medical facilities, no water, no education, there’s no relief coming in from outside... This area has received very little help, especially since the oil began to be exploited. The UN has been denied access to most parts of this land. And therefore the people here have suffered not only by being displaced and pushed off their land, but by being denied the access and the humanitarian assistance which they need – in huge quantities.
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| Walkpast Joseph and Agostino
| In the absence of help from the United Nations, Joseph Chian and his colleague Agostino Gartut, an agricultural worker, have returned to Nhialdiu to try to rebuild their community. They are in no doubt about it: oil is the source of their trouble.
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| Sync Joseph | The government doesn’t want relief to reach the civilians here because their programme is to remove everyone here - all the people who are near the oilfield – so that they make sure that the oilfield is going well. They want to remove everybody here for the safety of the oilfield.
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| Sync Agostino Gartut | This is not our place of before. We were staying in Heglig where the oilfield is. They chased us from there up to this village.
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| Clinic/woman with bundle | A village that has been invaded by the surrounding forest as the frontiers of oil are pushed forward.
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| Water women | For the moment it is calm here now. But memories of the flight from Nhialdiu are still very raw.
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| Sync Joseph Chian
| It was really difficult because the government militia was firing indiscriminately.. People running, leaving everything... The running was difficult. We crossed a lot of rivers. One of them was deep. After we arrived there into the deep one it was only having one canoe. We can to take the whole people. So children and the old people died in the river and the others who are young managed to cross. It was a very, very, very, very desperate situation.
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| CU | And it still is... The militias left nothing standing.
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| Sync Agostino | The things we planted like mango trees and lemon they break them and cut them down- at the root – and threw them away. The people can’t even get wild fruit because they can’t enter the forest. We left from this place and all the animals entered the area because the grass grew up. Nobody can enter that forest. There’s wild fruit in that forest, but we have no way to get it.
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| Tam civilians | Deprived, for the moment, of access to one of their most important resources, and concerned for the suffering of their children, civilians converge on Commander Gadet’s headquarters in the hope that here they may find something to help ease their plight.
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| Wounded soldiers | But the SPLA doesn’t even have medicines for its own wounded soldiers... In places like this, young men are dying from minor wounds that a simple course of antibiotics would cure. But there are no antibiotics... no beds... not even any bandages. Health workers like Peter Majuoy (pronouced Maj-woy) make their daily rounds out of a sense of duty – not because there is anything they can do to alleviate the suffering that they see all around them.
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| Sync Peter Majuoy | We have 47 wounded soldiers here but we don’t have medicine for them because when we fled the area we went up to northern Bahr el-Ghazal. When we returned back we didn’t received medicine from medical NGOs... The health of civilians here in WUN is very poor because some of the civilians were wounded by bombardment of Antonov and helicopter gunships... We saw the first helicopter gunships in 1999. Those gunships were brought to Sudan to protect the oil and the foreign companies to continue drilling that oil for the government of Sudan.
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| Gvs of clinic | Increasingly, southerners like these are pointing a finger of blame not at the government – but at the foreign companies working with the government.
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| Sync Gadet | The oil companies are helping the government in many ways. The companies have made roads for the government and provided it with airstrips. One example is the oil industry’s airstrip at Heglig where military planes land... I have been in military headquarters. I know what these multinational companies working in Heglig are doing. (CLOSE UP) The government is pushing us away by air and by land. We are being defeated by the oil companies and the government’s international allies – not by the government itself.
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| POWs | These young men were students when they were conscripted by the government of Sudan and sent to the front with little training and no warning. Their point of transit was the airstrip at Heglig – a bush airstrip before the consortium led by Canada’s Talisman Oil upgraded it.
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| Sync | We landed at the company airstrip in Heglig. We spent two weeks in Heglig. After that we were sent to fight and were captured by the SPLA armed forces. And now we are in the hands of the SPLA armed forces
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| Cutaway | The Heglig airstrip is critical to the government’s war effort.
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| Sync | Our total was 250 soldiers come together from Khartoum to Heglig - and from Heglig to fight, Yes!
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| Set-up Michael Chian
| Before he defected to the SPLA, Michael Chian was a liaison officer between Sweden’s Lundin oil and the government’s militias. He mapped out all the roads being built by the oil companies. Many lead not to drilling sites – but to the front line of the oil war.
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| Sync Michael Chian | All the roads going to the government garrisons, especially like Mayom and Wangkei, are being built by the company now.
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| Close of new roads
| But they are being used by the government to clear areas for oil.
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| Sync Michael Chian
| The government are depopulating people – first of all burning the villages. I have seen this when I was working with the company. Once... If there is any resistance made by those people they are killing them and chasing the others, looting their cattle and sending them away from the villages. So it is very, very, very rough. It is very rough. It is very rough work.
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| Walk-down weapons | Rough work that is being carried out with weapons like these weapons captured by Gadet’s forces. Many are now being made in Sudan – in factories that the government itself acknowledges are funded by oil... Before he defected from the government, Gadet collected rockets like this from a factory in Khartoum.
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| Gadet sync | This gun is an anti-tank weapon, one of the new products being made in Sudan, at a place called Baguer. There is no manufacturer’s mark on it. The intention is to conceal the place of origin. This company began work in 1998, the year when oil exploration was stepped up.
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| Dressing sequence
| This is a rebel group that seems to have no shortage of recruits, even if some are unacceptably young. The youths who join Gadet’s ranks at least have guns to fight with and clothes to wear - something that cannot be said of all southerners... They may not all have complete uniforms and some of them may have to improvise much of the time. But their morale appears to be high and they are among the best-drilled of all the SPLA’s fighting forces.
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| Greens sitting
| As long as oil is paying for guns, Sudan’s war will never end and boys like these will continue to die.
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| Gadet dancing 26 | No amount of cheer-leading will change the fact that the SPLA is not winning the oil war. GADET’S FORCES ARE INCREASINGLY EMBROILED IN INTER-TRIBAL FIGHTING PROVOKED IN PART BY GOVERNMENT DIVIDE-AND-RULE TACTICS.
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| Gadet advancing | AS SOUTHERNERS ONCE AGAIN FIGHT SOUTHERNERS, THE OIL INDUSTRY IS ADVANCING RELENTLESSLY...
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| Butt slapping | bringing not prosperity...
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| Gun in air | But death.
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