PEAK OIL AND NATIONAL SECURITY:

A Critique of Energy Alternatives

by George Caffentzis

The discussion of energy politics in the US is now dominated by two competing paradigms. One is promoted by the Bush Administration and its corporate allies; the other by a wide assortment of liberal and left-wing NGOs and analysts (and occasionally by corporate supporters of the “Gore-wing” of the Democratic Party including, at times, John Kerry).

The Bush paradigm is all too familiar: the “real” energy crisis has nothing to do with the natural limits on energy resources, but is due to the constraints on energy production imposed by government regulation and the OPEC cartel. Once energy production is liberalized and the corrupt, dictatorial and terrorist-friendly OPEC cartel is dissolved by US-backed coups (Venezuela) or invasions (Iraq), the free market can finally impose realistic prices on the energy commodities (which ought to be about half of the present ones), while stimulating the production of adequate supplies and a new round of spectacular growth of profits and wages.

This presidentially-approved paradigm is receiving decisive practical criticism from millions of pro-Chavez demonstrators and voters in the streets of Caracas, and from thousands of resistance fighters in Falluja and Najaf. I will leave its fate in their hands.

In this article I examine the other, more sympathetic energy paradigm. Its key components are: (a) the claim that the time when oil production permanently outpaces discovery of “new” oil is nearing (often called “the Peak Oil hypothesis”); (b) a view of the United States as being a powerful nation-state whose government is moved by “national security” imperatives in its energy politics. This paradigm is politically problematic for those opposed to the Bush Administration’s imperialist energy policy, not because its component parts are completely false, but because these parts come together to form a misleading and disarming totality.

In order to make good on my criticism, let me review the paradigm’s component parts. Oil consumption is growing, old oil fields are drying up, and new fields—objectively rare–are expensive to find and exploit. A price hike of dramatic proportions looms

PEAK OIL

Up until early modern times, miners, natural philosophers and other “experts” believed that gold, silver and other minerals were vegetable-like in that when mined they would literally grow back like a snipped rose bush. This insight in the case of coal and its hydrocarbon cousins in gaseous and liquid form was not wrong in principle (they are the residue of ancient organisms), but it was mistaken as a practical maxim, for the time it would take normal geological processes to transform organic matter into coal, natural gas and petroleum is on the order of millions of years. Consequently, these fuels are, for all intents and purposes, finite, non-renewable energy resources.

This finitude forms the theoretical basis of modern geology. But it has often haunted capitalists extracting profits from the production of the major energy-producing hydrocarbons, since the extent of this finitude was difficult to gauge—e.g., in the late 19th century there was a fear that coal supplies would soon run out. Is the exhaustion of coal, oil and natural gas near (a couple of decades) or far off (a couple of centuries)?

The energy industry in the past tended to put the actual total exhaustion of coal, natural gas and oil reserves as far into the future as plausibly possible. But the industry’s deferral of its death has recently been abandoned. (This was, perhaps, signaled by British Petroleum’s re-tagging of its acronym as “Beyond Petroleum”). It is increasingly recognized that the decisive question posed by the finitude of oil is not the static one: how much time there is from the present to the pumping of the last drop of oil out of the last extant field on the planet. Th important question is dynamic: when will oil production permanently outpace new finds, begin to deplete the world’s reserves and to tendentially decline? This inflection point, of course, will occur much earlier than the complete depletion of oil, gas and coal. It is often called “peak oil,” since it is the point when production definitively outpaces the replacement of exhausted fields by newly discovered ones. Once this “peak oil” point is reached and passed, geology and economics dictate a new era of expensive oil.

Oil companies are now desperately trying to position themselves to stake out and possess the remaining oil areas on the planet. According to the widely recognized reasoning, if the companies do not make their claims now, they will be left out of the price boom in the first half of the 21st century caused by a decline in production and an increase in demand. This consensus is based on the work of M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, who accurately predicted that US non-Alaskan oil production would peak around 1969 (the actual peak was in 1972). Extrapolating Hubbert’s work on the US to the whole planet, geologists like Colin Campbell, Jean H. Laherrere and Craig Bond Hatfield have noted that the number and size of new oil discoveries have been falling since the 1960s and are rapidly heading to zero. They also note that the larger fields are usually found first, while there are diminishing returns on new exploratory wells recently.

In sum, oil consumption is growing at approximately two percent per year, while the old oil fields are drying up and new fields are expensive to find and exploit as well as being objectively rare. Hence, once again, a price hike of dramatic proportions looms.

It follows that the owners of large quantities of “old” oil still in the ground (mostly the governments of Middle East OPEC nations) are becoming notionally richer by each coming year even if they do not extract any oil during that year, and that all the profit to be made out of the production of “new” oil now lies in the hitherto neglected geographical “margins” of the planet. Both conclusions invite scenarios licensing imperialist interventions.

On the one side, Middle East governments’ nationalized “banks of ‘old’ oil” are becoming even more desirable objects of control and possession as the local “peak oil” points are met and passed outside the region. Thus the US government’s sudden interest in invading Iraq and Iran and occupying them—as its troops are already stationed in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain—is immediately understandable.

On the other side, it is exactly in the drive to the margins to find “new” oil that all the horrors of the primitive period of the oil industry are returning. Indigenous people must be driven from their lands; previously uncontaminated waters and lands must be polluted; cultures, peoples and ecologies must be exterminated. But these peoples—from the Chiapans to the U’wa to the Ogonis to the West Papuans—are resisting their own extinction by stalling the oil industry’s self-proclaimed final advance, through threatening to commit collective suicide (the U’wa in Colombia) or through armed confrontations (the Ijaws on the oil platforms in the Niger Delta).

THE U.S. AS A NATION-STATE AND NATIONAL ENERGY SECURITY

The second basis of this anti-Bush paradigm is simple: the US is a nation-state with recognized territorial borders and its government is presumably primarily interested in satisfying its constitutional injunction: to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” The state and citizenry are presumably put into danger when vitally necessary goods are imported from outside its territory, especially from states that are either ideologically or economically hostile. National security would therefore be increased by an import substitution policy that would produce these necessary goods at “home.” In so doing, of course, the need for engaging in foreign military adventures diminishes.

This argument (a sort of pacific mercantilism) holds good for energy in general and oil in particular. There is hardly any natural stuff more vital for social and capitalist reproduction in the US than oil. But beginning in the early 1970s, oil production in the “lower 48” has fallen to the point that more than 50% of the oil burned in the US is now imported. Since oil reserves are increasingly concentrated in OPEC nations, especially in the Middle East, and these nations are turning hostile, the US faces a national energy security crisis.

Given these principles and facts, the supporters of this paradigm argue, the solution to national insecurity created by energy dependency is a strategy of import substitution, i.e., the US government should invest in an effort to derive most of the nation’s energy required for socio-economic reproduction from domestic sources. Such a result would eliminate the need for invading and occupying Iraq (and other belligerent OPEC countries) in order to directly control the oil fields there.

The paradigm’s supporters emphasize the urgency of implementing such an import strategy with the approach of “Peak Oil.” As the actual hydrocarbon “stuff” in the planet’s subsoil decreases, there is even more temptation for energy-importing countries (like China) to aggressively, and desperately, insure themselves a continuous supply. If the US continues on its path of increasing energy dependency, it will soon be competing with other nuclear-armed states for the final pools of subterranean petroleum, with deliriously catastrophic consequences.

CRITIQUE OF THE PEAK OIL/NATIONAL SECURITY PARADIGM

This anti-Bush paradigm, though correctly appealing to anti-imperialist fervor and ecological anxieties, is problematic since it poses the question as a matter of “oil dependency” and not of the inevitable consequences of the present system of commodity production. It does not recognize that: oil is a commodity (not a thing); the oil industry is devoted to making money profits (and not producing oil); the US government is essentially involved in guaranteeing the functioning of the world market (and not in the energy “security” of its citizens); and energy politics involve classes in conflict (and not only competing corporations and conflicting nation-states).

In brief, it leaves out the central players of contemporary life: capitalists and workers. Somehow, when it comes to writing the history of petroleum, capitalism, the working class, and class conflict are frequently forgotten in a way that never happens with oil’s earthy hydrocarbon cousin, coal. Once we put capitalism and class conflict into the oil story, the plausibility of the Peak Oil/National Security paradigm lessens. Let me breakdown my points of criticism:

(a) Oil is a commodity

Oil in a capitalist society is not produced to satisfy human needs and desires (although as a commodity it must satisfy some desire, real or contrived). It is produced to make profit and to increase control over and accumulate human labor (which requires the creation of a universe of misery)! Even if oil was the elixir of life, as long as it could not make a profit on sale, it could just as well be sewer water as far as capitalism is concerned.

In other words, oil must be a commodity to have a value—but oil is not just like any other commodity. It creates even more mysteries and metaphysics than its average cousins. First, it is a basic commodity, since it is involved directly or indirectly in the production of most other commodities. Its price changes affect the prices of almost all other commodities and hence wages and profits throughout the world. Also, its production process has a high organic composition, i.e., it involves large amounts of machines and equipment and relatively little direct labor. Finally, it has a rent component in its cost. All of these elements together make of oil a special commodity from the point of view of political economy, and they undermine the Peak Oil/National Security paradigm.

Basic commodity. Surely, the price of oil can influence the rest of the capitalist system in the way interest rates can. Oil prices ultimately have a power much more general and diffused than it immediately appears simply because oil is involved in the production of most other commodities. The many economic models since 1973 that have correlated world and regional recessions with oil price hikes empirically express this connection. Consequently, those who control the nationalized oil companies of the OPEC nations are crucial to the functioning of contemporary capitalist production not only because of the importance of oil for actual production of plastics and transport of steel, but also because of the larger economic consequences of any change in oil prices they charge. When government and corporate officials in NY, Washington and London look at the composition of the OPEC leaders and see only Islamic terrorists and nationalist revolutionaries this clearly poses not only a political and military threat; it is most immediately an economic one for them.

Transferred value. Most commodities do not sell at their values; otherwise highly demanded commodities like oil would not be produced, since their almost labor-less production would not generate enough surplus value directly. Consequently, some value from branches of production which require less investment in machinery and plant (e.g., textiles) must be transferred through market competition into the branches like the oil industry which require much more investment in technology. This means that oil is a commodity that is the object of the collective interest of capitalists around the planet. Any attempt to run such an industry in a way that would be detrimental to the general capitalist interest will face opposition from a vast assembly of individual capitalists around the world. (As Kissinger said in the early 1970s: “Oil is too important to leave it to the Arabs.”) Thus oil companies are closely monitored (and regulated) by capitalist governments domestically and internationally. It is not only the US oil companies that are vitally interested in the fate of the oil reserves of Iraq; there are behind them many other kinds of corporations in the US, Europe and Japan whose profits will depend upon that fate as well.

Indeed, there is such a collective (almost communal) capitalist concern for industries that (a) produce commodities with high levels of machinery and little direct labor and that (b) are important to the production of commodities, they can easily be the object of political and military action by a capitalist class domestically and internationally. Sometimes this action can be legislative. For example, Rockefeller’s oil operations were the initial target of the “anti-trust” movement in the late 19th and early 20th century US. But sometimes this action can be violent and prompt wars—as can be seen from the British attack on Ottoman Iraq in WWI to the 2003 US/UK invasion of Saddam’s Iraq.

Rent. Rent is one of the categories of political economy that is clearly relevant to the oil industry. There is a rent that goes to the owners of the oil fields due to the fact that not all underground oil is the same. Some is “sweet” (i.e., it has a low sulphur content), some is not; some is deep, some is not; some is on land, some is not; some requires a lot of technology to find, some does not. Clearly, if the price of oil is roughly the same throughout the world, then the owner of the territory where the oil has positive characteristics can charge rent (and expect to be paid it). Indeed, there is probably some “Absolute Rent” in the rental costs of oil that is paid simply as tribute to the regime of private property even when a company is producing in the worst oil areas. All this rental value comes from the transferred value from the rest of the capitalist system. Again, there is a collective capitalist interest in its part of the cost of oil.

Indeed, there has been a capitalist critique of “rent-seeking” throughout the modern history of political economy. Rent is presumably the epitome of unproductive income. This critique still goes on today in the textbooks of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism. However, for all the critique of the rentier, rent still is a decisive form of income in a capitalist society, as any New Yorker will attest! But the productivist ideology that has its roots in John Locke’s defense of English colonialism in the late 17th century is always waiting on the horizon to be brought in to justify attacks on the rights of the rentier. If the rentier, exercising the right of exclusion, disrupts the productive development of a profitable industry, then there is a right of the “more productive” to lay claim to the right of exclusion. Therefore, war is always on the wings of all rental claims.

Since oil is a “peculiar” commodity in all these dimensions and is crucial to the functioning of world capitalist production, the considerations appropriate to understanding its role in world economics and politics are not merely technical or scientific. US capitalists and the US government alike are vitally involved in the fate of the world oil industry independently of whether corporations based in the US import oil or not.

(b) The US is not a nation-state any more, if it ever was.

The primary function of the contemporary US government as far as energy policy is concerned is not defined in the Constitution’s famous preamble. Indeed, even if the US economy was completely self-sufficient in energy production and no longer dependent on imports from OPEC countries, the US government would still be instigating “oil wars” for at least two reasons.

First, the US government would still need to guarantee the profits of the major energy corporations that are involved in “foreign” production and often need US military assistance (cf. from the Iranian coup in 1954 to the Iraq invasion of 2003). Second, the US government (in both its Democratic and Republican embodiments) is “responsible” for the survival of the neoliberalism/globalisation project as a whole. Profit-making is now (as it has always been) dependent on the world market, and today this market’s rules are determined by the WTO, the World Bank and IMF, institutions that are committed to a neoliberal doctrine.

The main problem with neoliberal/globalisation is that for it to “work” the system must be global and the participating nations and corporations must follow the “rules of trade” (including trade in services, patents and copyrights) even when participation goes against their immediate self-interest. In a time of crisis, however, there is a great temptation for many participants to drop out of or bend the rules of the game, especially if they perceive themselves to be chronic losers. What force is going to keep the recalcitrants (both old—those who refused to be part of the game—and new—those who dropped out) from proliferating? Up until the 1997 “Asian Financial Crisis,” most of the heavy work of control was done by the IMF and World Bank through the power of money. Since then, it is becoming clear that there are countries that will not be controlled by structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and the fear of being exiled from the world credit market if they do not follow the instructions of the IMF and the World Bank.

The most illustrious recalcitrants are the Bush-baptized “Axis of Evil” states—Baathist Iraq (one of the last of the national socialist states), Iran (one of the last fundamentalist states after the demise of the Taliban) and North Korea (one of the last of the communist states)—but there are many other Islamic, national socialist and communist governments that have not transformed their economies into neoliberal form. This list will undoubtedly grow unless there is a check, in the form of a world police officer that will increase the costs of an exit.

The neoliberal order needs an equivalent of the role Britain played for the liberal capitalist system of the 19th century in order to function. Bill Clinton and his colleagues believed that the UN could eventually be used by the US government as such a force. The Bush Administration disagrees and concludes that the US will have to act in its own name to enforce the rules of the neoliberal order, and that action must at times be military. In the end, it is only with the construction of a terrifying US Leviathan that the crisis of neoliberalism will be overcome and the regime of free trade and total commodification will finally be established for its Millennium.

The invasion of Iraq is a crucial step in this construction process. It is seen by Bush as a sacrifice of US human and capital resources for the greater capitalist good (hence, perhaps, the continual evocation of “God” in the administration’s rhetoric). There is some truth in the Bush Administration’s claim that the present war on Iraq (and future wars on the remaining problematic OPEC countries, if the more “extreme” elements of the Administration have their way) is not about oil per se. It is about imposing a uniformly neoliberal structure on countries that, because of their ability to receive transferred value through their oil sales, have been able to evade the rules of the global market. Indeed, oil is the main internationally-traded commodity that is not regulated by WTO rules to this day.

The Bush Administration’s project of policing the neoliberal order might have been possible, if there promised to be but a few recalcitrants to and migrants from the neoliberal order. However, this is not likely. For neoliberalism does not seem to have been able to deliver on the “sustained growth” that raises all ships even in its halcyon days in the late 1980s. On the contrary, experience shows that it does not even raise 20% of the “ships” it had claimed to do in its inception. This means that many millions in the Third World who aspired to membership in the local ruling class and the many billions who simply wanted an increased wage have been devastated by the course of neoliberal globalisation and have become its implacable enemies in the 1990s and early 21st century.

Consequently, there will be wars fought by US troops aplenty in the years to come, if the US continues to play the British Empire of 21st century neoliberalism. For what started out in the 19th century as a tragedy, will be repeated, not as farce, but as catastrophe in the 21st. At the same time, it is not possible for the US government to “retreat” from its role, without jeopardizing the neoliberal/globalisation project itself. Thus the supporters of the Peak Oil/National Security paradigm are offering up a questionable connection between energy import substitution and the path of imperialism. As logicians would say, energy dependence might be a sufficient condition of imperialist oil politics, but it is not a necessary one.

(c) Peak Oil?

Are we actually witnessing the oil industry’s “final advance,” with the moment of “Peak Oil” nigh? We should be as skeptical of the early 21st century Hubbertian “end of oil” as we were of the Club of Rome’s “limits to growth” scenarios of the late 1960s. For oil is inevitably surrounded by an ideological aura. It is impossible to read the lineaments of history solely from the limits and constraints of nature, especially in a capitalist society where “nature” is often playing surrogate for the commands of a ruling class (cf. the long, continually revived career of “Social Darwinism”). The problem with the debate concerning the hypothesis is simply that while the geological reasoning Hubbert used is compelling for predicting oil use, the class consequences of such reasoning are far less compelling.

For the “Peak Oil” hypothesis is now becoming a the justification for an attack on pensions, wages and workers’ guarantees in the so-called advanced capitalist countries. Presumably, the increased cost of finding new fields and their increased rent in an era of Peak Oil will require an increase in the mass of exploited labor. The permanently increased energy costs presaged by the “Peak Oil” hypothesis are now a convenient way for capitalists to invoke the need for “austerity” (for their workers) long before the actual exhaustion of oil, natural gas and coal is on the horizon.

Thus this hypothesis is an even more pernicious tool in class struggle than the energy limitation ideology of the 1970s. But the apparently logical connection between the “end of cheap oil” and reduced wages and working class expectations is simply a mirage. The hidden assumption of Peak Oil ideologists is that increased energy prices (for corporations) inevitably require a reduction of the wage rate instead of a reduction in the profit rate. In other words, Peak Oil politics assumes that the working class will finance the transition from cheap to expensive oil come what may. Given the present configuration of class forces in the US, this assumption is perhaps a good bet, but it is a far from necessary outcome.

CONCLUSION

Given our critique of the Peak Oil/National Security paradigm, one can understand why the Bush Administration’s paradigm is appealing to many in the US working class. First, it has a much more plausible account of the US government’s general role in the world economy and its specific role in controlling the price of oil. No one seriously believes that the US capitalist class is going to abandon its “global reach” or its profit-making just for the sake of providing a reliable, domestically-produced energy supply to US workers. Second, it offers to members of the US working class an understandable role in the future division of labor, i.e., as mercenaries and low-level managers of the world market in energy. Incidents such as the horrible deaths of the four “contractors” in Falluja in April 2004 are increasingly to be seen as “work accidents” that go with the territory, and not as exceptional circumstances. Third, it seems to imply that US military dominance will be applied in the service of the working class’ need for oil energy.

Thus, the key oil issue in contemporary class politics in the US is not the one addressed by the Peak Oil/National Security paradigm, viz., the notion that US corporations and workers are economically dependent on an imported commodity that is increasingly becoming more “expensive” and that the political project of our era is to have a US economy self-sufficient in energy. The problem is that a significant minority of US workers see their only secure future in a neoliberal/globalised world with its main recalcitrants—the OPEC countries—policed by a military recruited from the US working class. One cannot explode this enclosing vision of the future by offering a logically and politically alternative project of national energy independence that does not challenge the neoliberal order.

——
George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and a coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.

This article originally appeared Feb. 9 in Metamute.
http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=29 &NrSection=10&NrArticle=1480

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE PEAK OIL/NATIONAL SECURITY PARADIGM

Colin J Campbell, and Jean H Laherrere, “The End of Cheap Oil,” Scientific American, vol. 278, no. 3, March 1998

JE Hartshorn, Oil Trade: Politics and Prospects, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993

Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2001

Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Oil Dependency, New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2004

Paul Roberts, The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2004

Also by George Caffentzis:

“The Struggle for the Petroleum Commons: Local, Islamic, and Global,” WW4 REPORT #105
/105/planetwatch/petroleumcommons

See also:

Tim Corrigan reviews The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, WW4 REPORT #112
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See our ongoing coverage of the global oil shock
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

MIXING OCCUPATION AND OIL IN WESTERN SAHARA

by Jacob Mundy

“We preferred that occupation,” Salim says, pointing to the Spanish news channel on his television, “to this one,” he says gesturing toward Moroccan settlers walking past his West Saharan shop window.

Western Sahara is a disputed territory sandwiched between Mauritania and Morocco, on the north African coast of the Atlantic ocean. The current struggle for control began in 1975 when Spain ended its colonial occupation and rule of Western Sahara and hastily handed over administration of its former colony to Morocco. Refugees fleeing their homes in Western Sahara, joined the nascent independence movement named Polisario, and declared the region a sovereign republic, setting off a guerrilla war.

Today, if the Oklahoma City-based Kerr-McGee Corporation gets its way and begins extracting oil and gas in contested Western Sahara, another volatile element will be added to the region’s long-standing dispute.

On the dusty streets of the sleepy Western Saharan capital, Al-‘Ayun, where I met Salim, and around the world, Morocco finds little open support for its continued occupation. Not one country or international organization recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. The United Nations defines the largely uninhabited Colorado-sized area as Africa’s last remaining colony.

But Morocco has found allies in its claim of sovereignty over Western Sahara in the corporate world. One of its more recent friends is Kerr-McGee. In 2001, the company signed a hydrocarbon “reconnaissance permit” with the Moroccan government to explore areas off the coast of the Western Sahara. Since inking the deal, Kerr-McGee has been assessing the results of a “large 2D seismic grid” of the region and a 2004 “drop core survey.” Kerr-McGee has renewed its contract several times, with the current agreement set to expire this October.

A Fortune 500 company founded in 1929, with more than $5 billion in revenue in 2004 and over $14 billion in global assets, Kerr-McGee “is one of the largest U.S.-based independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies, with proved reserves of more than 1.2 billion barrels of oil,” according to its website.

The area of Kerr-McGee’s interest, the Boujdour Block, is a 27 million-acre expanse claimed by Western Sahara. The Block stretches from the Sahara’s cliff-lined shores to depths of more than 10,000 feet in the Atlantic Ocean.

Are there significant quantities of oil and gas off the shore of the Western Sahara? No one knows for sure. In neighboring Mauritania, Woodside Petroleum, Australia’s second-biggest oil and gas company, is expected to start pumping in 2006. The Chinese government is also heavily involved in offshore Mauritanian petroleum prospects. From the middle of the Sahara to all along the coast, West Africa is fast becoming an importance source of oil and gas for the United States.

But in Western Sahara, with uncertainty about ownership adding to the risk, oil companies are reluctant to commit resources. French oil “super-major” Total, which also contracted with the Moroccan government in 2001 to explore off the Saharan shores, withdrew in 2004 for “business” reasons.

The Norwegian geological survey firm TGS-Nopec has also abandoned its interests in the area. Contracted to carry out the research for Total and Kerr-McGee, and with 85% of its survey completed, TGS bowed to intense grassroots pressure in 2003. After dozens of shareholders divested, TGS issued a public statement announcing that it “has decided not to undertake any new projects in Western Sahara without a change in political developments.” The subsequent withdrawal of two minor companies for similar reasons left Kerr-McGee as the only foreign company working with Moroccan oil interests in the area.

For now, Kerr-McGee is holding firm and keeping quiet about its Saharan prospects. “[U]ntil we have completed the analysis and evaluation we cannot speculate on future activities,” external communications specialist John Christiansen told this reporter.

Kerr-McGee’s stockholders may also be less than fully informed about the risks of investing in a contested territory. In its 2004 report and a letter to shareholders, Morocco-but not Western Sahara–appears under a map titled “Targeting World Class Prospects.” And although the words “Western Sahara” appeared in Kerr-McGee’s 2003 report, the reference was omitted in the 2004 version.

Western Sahara is far more visible at the United Nations, where its fate is under the management of the Security Council. That body is torn between Morocco’s close relations with several permanent members, especially France and the United States, and the Western Saharns’ right of self-determination under customary international law.

The right goes back to 1974, when Spain promised the Western Saharans a chance to hold a popular referendum on whether they wanted to join with Morocco or become independent. Before the vote could be held, Morocco invaded, claiming the Western Sahara as a historical part of Morocco. Since 1991 the United Nations has been promising the Western Saharans another chance to vote, but fearing it might lead to independence, Morocco has rejected any proposal that challenges its “territorial integrity.”

“This issue is really not unlike the Arab-Israeli dispute: two different peoples claiming the same land,” said James Baker, former US secretary of state and key UN mediator in the dispute between 1997 and 2004 . “One is very strong, one has won the war, one is in occupation and the other is very weak,” he told Wide Angle, a New York television show produced for the national Public Broadcasting Service (PBS.)

With the discovery of significant hydrocarbon deposits in the Western Sahara, the power equation has grown more complex. The potential wealth provides the Moroccan government with strong motivation to hold onto the contested territory and to shun the peace process.

“Morocco is seeking to impose a fait accompli,” says Kamel Fadel, a representative with the Western Sahara government in exile, “as well as implicate foreign companies and interests in its illegal occupation of our country.”

Kerr-McGee contends that its interests are not biasing the peace process. “Kerr-McGee, by its Reconnaissance Permit, has not prejudged or prejudiced such efforts, and we hope to make a contribution to the development of this area and its people,” Christiansen says.

The Norwegian government, for one, believes that Kerr-McGee’s actions are indeed prejudicial. Citing its own ethical guidelines, the Finance Ministry’s advisory council called on the national retirement fund to divest its $52 million in Kerr-McGee stock: “The Council regarded [the exploration] as ‘a particularly serious violation of fundamental ethical norms’ e.g. because it may strengthen Morocco’s sovereignty claims and thus contribute to undermining the UN peace process.”

“It actually says in the Petroleum Fund’s ethical guidelines that it is highly problematic to invest in occupied and Non-Self Governing Territories,” says Ronny Hansen, spokesperson for the Norwegian Support Committee for Western Sahara, which helped bring the situation to his government’s attention. “The guidelines also make specific reference to Western Sahara. So when we called for disinvestment, the fund had an easy decision to make.”

Hansen hopes that a mix of public exposure and financial divestment will drive Kerr-McGee out of the Western Sahara. Responding to Kerr-McGee’s claim that its contract with Morocco, in its present form, is perfectly legal, Hansen argues, “Kerr-McGee offers political legitimization to the Moroccan occupation and contributes in escalating the conflict. This is crystal clear.”

Kerr-McGee spokesperson Christiansen counters: “Again, we support the ongoing efforts of the United Nations to find a permanent and amicable solution to the Western Sahara issue. Kerr-McGee, by its Reconnaissance Permit, has not prejudged or prejudiced such efforts.”

Not only are there serious questions as to whether Kerr-McGee is helping Rabat (the Moroccan capital) strengthen its hold on the Western Sahara, and thereby undermining the peace process, but Morocco may not have a legal right to offer oil and gas exploration contracts in the contested territory.

Given the Western Sahara’s international status as a colony (i.e., a Non-Self-Governing Territory), the United Nations called for an official legal opinion in 2001, shortly after Morocco offered the Western Saharan concessions to Kerr-McGee and Total.

The following February, UN Under-Secretary General for Legal Affairs, Hans Corell, offered an opinion that gave ammunition to both sides.

“The UN under-secretary for legal affairs has confirmed that we acted lawfully in contracting with Morocco,” Christiansen says. “Neither the United States nor the United Nations recognizes any other administrative authority or government in that territory.”

In Kerr-McGee’s favor, Corell’s opinion said, “The specific contracts are not in themselves illegal.”

But Fadel, representing the government in exile, counters that by undermining the legitimacy of Morocco’s occupation, the opinion actually confirms the illegality of Kerr-McGee’s contracts.

Another passage in Corell’s opinion seems to support Fadel: “[I]f further exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara,” the UN official wrote, “they would be in violation of the principles of international law applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.”

In its most simple form, the issue may boil down to the common sense proposition that only the side with legal sovereignty can legally grant exploration and extraction rights.

According to Corell, the 1975 Madrid Agreement “did not transfer sovereignty over the Territory, nor did it confer upon any of the signatories the status of an administering Power, a status which Spain alone could not have unilaterally transferred.”

“[A]s far as International Law is concerned,” Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos recently told the Spanish parliament, “Spain remains the administering power” of the Western Sahara, and its hand-off to Morocco was never legal.

Even Morocco’s allies have had to clarify their position on the status of the Western Sahara. On the conclusion of a bilateral free trade deal with Morocco in July 2004, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said: “The United States and many other countries do not recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and have consistently urged the parties to work with the United Nations to resolve the conflict by peaceful means. The Free Trade Agreement will not include Western Sahara.”

Despite Rabat’s intransigence and Kerr-McGee’s legal parsing, the exiled Saharan government has remained optimistic. It has even offered its own licenses to competing oil companies for the same areas off the Western Saharan coast, although these deals will only come to fruition if their nation achieves independence.

Fadel is certain that this will happen soon enough. “Most colonial powers cling to power until the last minute and Morocco is not an exception,” he said. “The [Moroccan] regime knows deep inside that they have failed to win the heart and minds of the Saharan people despite 30 years of occupation and that they have to leave sooner or later. Our hope rests on our faith in the determination and will of our people and the justice of our cause.”

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Jacob Mundy served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco (1999-2001) and is a member of Western Sahara Resource Watch. He is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the conflict with Stephen Zunes.

This story originally appeared July 21 in CorpWatch.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12506

RESOURCES:

History of Western Sahara
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Friends of the Western Sahara
http://www.friendsofthewesternsahara.org

See also our last news update on Western Sahara
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

DARFUR: THE OVERKILL

The Janjaweed Spin Out of Control

by Rene Wadlow

The on-going conflicts in the provinces of Darfur in western Sudan are a textbook example of how programmed escalation of violence can go out of control. It is increasingly difficult for both the insurgency and the government-backed forces to de-escalate the conflict which has been called with reason “genocide.” It will be even more difficult after the war to get the pastoralists and the settled agriculturalists to live together again in a relatively cooperative way.

Darfur (the home of the Fur) was always marginal to the politics of modern Sudan and to the two phases of the North-South civil war, which took place from 1954-1972 and 1982-2005. In the 19th century, Darfur, about the size of France, was an independent Sultanate loosely bound to the Ottoman Empire. It was on a major trade route from West Africa to Egypt, so populations from what is now northern Nigeria, Niger, Mali and Chad joined the older ethnic groups of the area, the Fur, the Masalit, the Zaghawa and the Birgit. Nomads from Libya also moved south into Darfur. As the population density was low, a style of life with mutual interaction between pastoral herdsmen and settled agriculturalists with some livestock developed. Increasingly, however, there was ever-greater competition for water and forage made scarce by environmental degradation and the spread of the desert.

France and England left Darfur as a buffer zone between the French colonial holdings –what is now Chad–and the Anglo-Egyptian-controlled Sudan. French-English rivalry in West Africa had nearly led earlier to a war, and a desert buffer was of more use than its low agricultural and livestock production would provide to either European colonial power. It was only in 1916 during the First World War when French-English colonial rivalry in Africa wilted before the common German enemy that the English annexed Darfur to the Sudan without asking anyone in either Darfur or the Sudan if such a “marriage” was desirable.

Darfur continued its existence as a peripheral and environmentally fragile area of Sudan. It was marginal in economics but largely self-sufficient. Once Sudan won its independence in 1956, Darfur was deemed politically as well as economically marginal. Darfur’s people have received less education, less healthcare, less development assistance, and fewer government posts than any other region. Southerners were given governmental and administrative posts in the hope of diminishing the violent North-South divide. There was no such incentive to “share the wealth” with Darfur. Its political weight was lessened still further in a 1995 “administrative reform,” when Darfur was divided into three provinces: Northern Darfur, Western Darfur, and Southern Darfur. Some areas that were historically Darfur were added to Northern and Western Bahr El-Ghazal. The division of Darfur did not lead to better local government, nor to additional services from the central government. It must be added that Darfur’s local political leadership showed a special skill in supporting national political leaders just as they were about to lose power–first Al Sadig Al Mahdi (1989) and then Hassan al-Turabi (2001).

During the North-South civil war, Darfur, as a largely Muslim area, supported the North, and some militias from Darfur formed raiding parties to attack villages in Northern Bahr El-Ghazal. However, Darfur’s leaders counted for little in the long North-South negotiations which finally led to a power-sharing accord in January 2005. Wealth from the oil fields, largely situated on the edge of the North-South dividing line, had been a prime issue in both the war and peace negotiations. Under the accord, oil wealth is to fund development programs for the South, while preserving a unified Sudanese state.

Ironically, it was the North-South peace negotiations which set the stage for the Darfur revolt. In 2000, Darfur’s political leadership met to draw up a “Black Book” which detailed the region’s systematic under-representation in national government since independence. The “Black Book” marked the start of a rapprochement between the Islamists and the secular radicals of Darfur who both wanted a better deal for the region. Three years later, these two tendencies took up arms as loosely allied guerilla groups, the more secularist Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Islamist-leaning Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

However, at the level of the central government, the “Black Book” led to no steps to address the political and economic position of Darfur. This lack of reaction convinced some in Darfur that only armed action would bring recognition and compromise, as the war in the South had done.

In July 2002, the government of Sudan and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed a framework protocol for peace in Machakos, Kenya. It seemed that peace was at hand. Therefore, if Darfur was to share in the potential new prosperity, armed violence to gain attention for the cause had to be undertaken soon. The two Darfur groups, SLA and JEM, started to structure themselves, gather weapons and men. The idea was to strike in a spectacular way that would lead the government to take notice and to start wealth-sharing negotiations. They did not envisage a long drawn out conflict of the countryside against the towns of Darfur.

By February 2003, the two groups were prepared to act, and in one night attacked and destroyed many of Sudan’s military planes based at El Fasher. The Sudan military lost in one night more planes than it had in 20 years of war against the South.

However, the central government’s “security elite”–battle hardened from its fight against the South but knowing that the regular army was over-extended and tired of fighting–decided to use against Darfur techniques that it had used with some success against the South: arming, and giving free reign to militias and other irregular forces.

Thus the government armed and directed existing popular defense forces and tribal militias in Darfur. The government also started pulling together a fluid and shadowy group, now called the Janjaweed (“the evildoers on horseback”). To the extent that the make-up of the Janjaweed is known, it seems to be a collection of bandits, of Chadians who had used Darfur as a safe haven for the long-lasting insurgencies in Chad, remains of Libya’s Islamic Forces which had once been under the control of the Libyan government but left wandering when Libyan policy changed, probably some daytime police and military (the Janjaweed acting nearly always at night), and some traditional nomad leaders from Darfur.

The central government gave these groups guns, uniforms, equipment, and indications where to attack by first bombing villages. But they gave no regular pay. Thus the militias had to pay themselves by looting homes, crops and livestock, by taking slaves and raping women and girls. Village after village was destroyed on the pretext that some residents supported the SLA or the JEM; crops were burned; water wells filled with sand. As many people as possible fled to Chad or to areas thought safer in Darfur. The campaign has now lasted over a year and a half. As the acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr Bertrand Ramcharan, stressed: “First, there is a reign of terror in this area; second, there is a scorched-earth policy; third, there is repeated war crimes and crimes against humanity; and fourth, this is taking place before our very eyes.”

The United Nations set up an International Commission of Inquiry which confirmed the worst fears of the deliberately destructive nature of the conflict, the intended consequences of which are to destroy a way of life. The Commission of Inquiry as well as the UN Commission on Human Rights has recommended that those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity be tried by the International Criminal Court. This will be the first major test of the new court, and thus will be important to watch and analyze.

It is not clear to what extent the central government can now control–or disarm, as the UN has requested–the Janjaweed even if they wanted to. Darfur now represents a classic case of how violence spins out of control and goes beyond the aims for which it was first used by the powerful. For the moment, it is hard to see how the violence can be reduced. The African Union has sent in military observers to oversee a non-functioning ceasefire. Talks between the government of Sudan and the JEM and SLA leadership in the Nigerian capital Abuja have broken down. The Sudanese government has honed its survival instincts for a long time, ably playing its “Arab” character for support within the Arab League and its “African” role within the African Union. There is little external support for the JEM and SLA. However, they have been able to get arms on the international “gray market.”

The situation in Sudan will be discussed by the UN General Assembly in New York just after a September summit devoted to reform of the UN–in part to cope better with intra-state conflicts such as that of Sudan. The UN and especially its Commission on Human Rights has played an increasingly active role. The Commission’s 2005 resolution on Sudan stressed three path-making elements which merit wide attention:

a) the key role that is to be played by the International Criminal Court in the Hague; b) the increased cooperation and mutual support between the UN system and the African Union; c) the emphasis on preparing now for post-conflict reconstruction and ecologically-sound development based on “promoting the peaceful social coexistence between different tribes in Darfur.”

As with all UN resolutions, much will depend on the follow-up which will be taken by governments and non-governmental organizations. We can all help build awareness of the innovative thinking expressed in the Sudan resolution and the need for concerted action.

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Rene Wadlow is editor of the online journal of world politics Transnational Perspectives and an NGO representative to the UN at Geneva. Formerly, he was professor and director of research of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, University of Geneva.

This story originally appeared in the Aug. 24 edition of Toward Freedom.
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/557/1/

RESOURCES:

“Sudan: The Shadow of a Death” by Rene Wadlow, on the death of Sudanese leader John Garang http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/537/1/

“Dying in Darfur” by Samantha Power, including interview with Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal,
The New Yorker, Aug. 30, 2004
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040830fa_fact1

“Sudan Research, Analysis and Advocacy” by Smith College professor Eric Reeves
http://www.sudanreeves.org/

See also:

“Darfur: NATO Prepares Intervention” by Wynde Priddy, WW4 REPORT #109
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WW4 REPORT’s last news update on Sudan
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution