No oil for blood

Tired of waiting for the world to act in Darfur, activists have spurred a growing divestment movement aimed at foreign companies that do business with Sudan.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Politics, News, Sudan, Katharine Mieszkowski, Darfur

April 29, 2006 | Some of the corpses had their ears chopped off, others their eyes torn out or limbs dismembered. Brian Steidle has seen firsthand the mutilated victims of the "Janjaweed" militias in Sudan's Darfur region. He's seen the charred remains of villagers who'd been burned alive in their torched huts. He's watched as one village, home to 20,000, was looted and burned.

For more than three years, the Janjaweed, backed by the Sudanese government, have waged a brutal war against two rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. In a vicious campaign, labeled genocide by the U.S. in 2004, they have murdered tens of thousands of civilians who belong to the same ethnic groups as the rebels.

Steidle, a 29-year-old former U.S. Marine, served as an unarmed military observer and U.S. representative to the African Union's peacekeeping mission in the region for six months beginning in September 2004. Now he's a leader in a growing grass-roots movement to pressure the international community to stop the slaughter in Darfur. He has been crisscrossing the country, visiting universities, church groups and community centers, showing "Tour for Darfur: Eyewitness to Genocide," a chilling set of photos he took while he was an observer in the region. Steidle is also endorsing a strategy that has not been so widely embraced since the days of apartheid in South Africa: divestment.

The United Nations has declared Darfur the worst human rights crisis in the world today. Some international observers put the death toll as high at 400,000, and more than 2 million people have been displaced by the crisis. Yet the U.N., the U.S. and the European Union have consistently failed to take any serious punitive actions against the Sudanese government. The U.S. has pushed for a stronger world response to the crisis, but its diplomatic efforts have continued to flounder. Just this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged NATO to assume a larger role in Darfur. "We've seen a lot of strong words from the president and the administration, but they're just words," says Steidle.

Tired of waiting for the international community to respond, activists, including students and religious and humanitarian groups, are calling on the Bush administration to support a stronger multinational force in Darfur. And in recent months, they have launched a growing divestment movement to hold public and private companies doing business with Sudan accountable -- and, ultimately, to try to change Sudan's behavior. It's estimated that U.S. state public pension plans alone have invested $90 billion in companies important to the Sudanese government. Activists have persuaded universities, including the entire University of California system, to withdraw financial holdings from key companies operating in Sudan. And some U.S. states are not waiting for the federal government. Illinois is in the process of divesting billions from companies doing business with the African nation.

Activists believe that if they can put enough economic pressure on companies doing business with Sudan, those companies will in turn put pressure on the Sudanese government to change its policies. Skeptics say that divestment won't have an impact quickly enough.

Many leading Darfur activists will participate in a Washington rally on Sunday, which marks the deadline in the latest round of peace talks between the Sudanese government and Darfur rebels. Save Darfur, a coalition of 164 religious and humanitarian groups, is sponsoring the rally. It is expected to draw tens of thousands of visitors and will feature actor George Clooney, who has just returned from Darfur, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. Similar events are planned for San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Austin.

Steidle, who will show his photos at the Washington rally, wholeheartedly endorses the divestment campaign. "A lot of people are concerned that these divestment programs are going to hurt the people of the country, the way that the sanctions against Iraq hurt the people," he says. "That's not what a divestment campaign against the Sudan would do. It would not hurt the people already affected by the genocide. They are people who have lost everything already."

The Bush administration may be talking tough on Darfur, but critics say its war on terror has caused it to act with trepidation. Since the '90s, when it harbored Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, Sudan has been designated a terror state by the U.S., meaning American companies, with few exceptions, have not been allowed to operate there. But in recent years, U.S. intelligence has turned to Sudanese officials, including some considered architects of the Darfur genocide, for information on suspects in the global war on terror. Critics charge that the U.S. has been reluctant to take tough action because of the Sudanese government's strategic importance in the fight against al-Qaida.

While U.S. companies don't operate in Sudan, Chinese, Russian, Malaysian and Indian companies do, and billions of dollars of stock in those companies are held by U.S. universities and state pension plans. "The international actors that are most blocking international action on Sudan are China, Russia and India," says Jason Miller, 27, an M.D. and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California. "China and Russia are especially important because they both sit on the U.N. Security Council, where they have veto power. They've blocked almost every single substantive resolution regarding Darfur to date. It's totally transparent what they're doing. They're protecting their companies' interests."

Next page: Targeting corporate villains, while trying not to hurt the Sudanese