Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights

Book excerpt: For twenty years, southern Sudan has been the site of a tragic and brutal civil war, pitting the northern-based Arab and Islamic government against rebels in African marginalized areas, especially the south. More than two million people have died and four million have been displaced as a result. In 1999, anew element radically changed the war: Sudanese oil, located in the south, was firs exported by the central government. The human price of this bonanza is immeasurable. The government, using oil revenues and aided by co-opted southerners, rained a scorched earth campaign of mass displacement, bombing, and terror on the agro-pastoral southern civilians living in and near the oil zones. The displaced number in the hundreds of thousands.