Darfur, Oil, Money

This is from the LA Times today:

In Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have perished in what the United States calls a genocide, the killing has been supported by profits from companies helping the government of Sudan tap its vast reservoirs of oil, according to services that research corporate conduct for investors. The firms include China's Sinopec Corp., Malaysia's Petronas, and Schlumberger, based in the Netherlands Antilles — whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation's most significant connection to the Sudanese oil industry, however, is through Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Bill Gates is a Berkshire director, and Berkshire's chairman, Warren E. Buffett, is a trustee of the Gates Foundation. Berkshire holds a $3.3-billion stake in PetroChina Co., a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, the biggest player in Sudanese oil.

Buffett has pledged $31 billion worth of Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation in annual installments, beginning last year with $1.6 billion. In 2009 and afterward, the foundation expects Berkshire's wealth to fund about half of its charitable awards — which have included more than $34 million for emergency refugee and health services in Sudan, plus a share of at least $167 million more in regional health grants.

But some of Berkshire's wealth comes from PetroChina, whose parent company supplies a large part of the money that underwrites Sudan's military — as well as the janjaweed, according to the United States and the United Nations. The infusion of Berkshire stock places the Gates Foundation in conflict with its own efforts to help victims of the Sudanese civil war.

It's hard to keep your hands clean in this world. But that's the way things go in the aid business. And it's not just oil companies. Pharmaceutical companies, grain processors and others fuck over Africa every day but then invest in aid projects. Industry always hedges its bets and supports both sides in a conflict. Support Hitler, support the Janjaweed but make a show of helping the victims.

Oil in Somalia?

This is not really a blog. I don't really have the time or patience for that. NomadNet has -- since it went online in 1994 -- been a repository of information about Somalia, foreign aid, and Western misadventures in Africa. I often posted articles that I didn't agree with because I thought they were interesting or should be read. One of the first pieces I posted in those early days was one called The Oil Factor in Somalia. It sat in the archive for years, getting hit on occasionally, but largely forgotten. Suddenly, however, there are thousands of hits on the piece. It's been cited in blogs and web sites across the internet as if it's some leaked piece of damning confidential intelligence. (See The Final Call, among others.) It's not. The fact is that oil company interest in Somalia remains minimal and perfunctory. Oil companies, like the CIA, keep their greasy fingers in as many foreign pies as possible. Turn over any rock in an African desert and you'll find an oil man.

This isn't to say that nefarious forces are not at work in Somalia, Darfur, and other places. And, as the Final Call article asks, where is the outrage over the recent bombing in Somalia? Are Americans willing to tolerate any atrocity so long as our government does it in the name of fighting terror?

These are the important questions and they should not be obscured by flimsy oil-industry conspiracy theories that ultimately serve only to undermine those very arguments. You've got to do better than a 14-year-old article from the LA Times.