President William Jefferson Clinton
The White House
Washington, DC

 

Dear Mr. President:

The moment of truth for the suffering millions in Sudan is upon us, even as that moment is shadowed by the terrible realities of human destruction that have proceeded from the last sixteen years of civil war. In south and central Sudan, the homeland of Christians and African traditional believers, two million have been killed, five million displaced, and many hundreds of thousands are at risk of starvation. Either America leads the way towards peace at this crucial historical juncture, or an unspeakable catastrophe evident to all will take its final, dreadful toll in a century already defined too fully by indifference and genocide.

Your powers to intervene in this great episode of human suffering and destruction are many, Mr. President. Your voice above all others – declaring to the world the reality of Sudan's agony – will be heard and heeded. We thus call on you to take a visible, personal stance on the genocide now taking place in Sudan, doing so by publicly meeting with such leaders as Elie Wiesel and with persons directly familiar with the policies and practices of the Khartoum regime. Such a step will powerfully educate the American people and the world to the fact of that regime’s genocidal policies. It will eradicate any remaining vestige of Secretary Albright’s recent, sadly pessimistic lament that “the human rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American people.” In sum, your public, personal attention to the realities of Sudan will create an environment for change and will help generate international resolve to bring about a just peace in Sudan through a reinvigorated IGAD peace process.

There are also explicit actions you can take to bring about a just peace. Critically, we call on you to fully and vigorously enforce your own Executive Order of 1997 toward the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and other companies now providing massive oil revenues for the Khartoum regime. The Order should be construed or amended to bar CNPC from access to U.S. capital markets so long as it continues to be a 40% partner in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company project, and so long as that venture provides the regime with millions of dollars in annual oil revenue.

Reportedly, CNPC and its investment banker, Goldman Sachs, will shortly seek to avoid the Executive Order and public censure by a “restructuring” scheme purporting to withhold IPO funds from CNPC's commitments in Sudan, Iraq and other terrorist states. The fungibility of money and the scale of CNPC's activities in Sudan thoroughly undermine the credibility of this contrivance. No such arrangement would have been permitted to evade America’s successful assault on South African apartheid, and it must not be permitted to do so in the service of Sudanese genocide.

Secretary Albright has also directed recent remarks at the second major source of the regime’s oil income – CNPC’s partner in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company project, Canada’s Talisman Energy, Inc. The Secretary made clear that she viewed with alarm the efforts of some countries “to help [Sudan] expand their [oil] drilling,” and indicated that she was “definitely going to discuss this with the Canadians.” We call on you to do so as well, directly and urgently with Prime Minister Chretien, and further ask you to endorse the growing movement of pension funds and investors to divest Talisman Energy stock and to enforce strictly your 1997 Executive Order by pursuing investigations into reports of possible violations by American companies until the IGAD peace process is successfully concluded.

A recent, remarkable Washington Post lead editorial of November 15 described an “oil-inspired softness on Sudan” caused by Talisman Energy, CNPC and Western oil companies seeking to engage in future projects in Sudan. The editorial expressed concern that:

peace hopes have been buried by the recent completion of an oil pipeline, promising $200 million or more a year in revenues. Rather than negotiate, the north declares that it will use its new oil wealth to stock up on military gear and win a victory on the battlefield. The government is bent on ethnic cleansing of territory surrounding other, as yet unexploited, oil fields. Once it has control of these, it will purchase yet more tanks and missiles.

We deeply share the concerns of Secretary Albright, powerfully elaborated by the enclosed editorial, and call on you to take all possible steps to ensure that the Khartoum regime is barred from receiving oil revenues with which it will insulate itself from, and undermine, the IGAD process.

Finally, we call on you to actively support the Sudan Peace Act as originally introduced by Senators Frist, Brownback and Lieberman, and to work more closely on issues involving Sudan with those Senators and with such House leaders as Congressmen Payne, Watts, and Wolf. We particularly urge strong Administration support for stripping from the regime any authority over the distribution of US food, medical and other humanitarian assistance – an authority with which it has systematically sought to starve the people of South Sudan into submission.

In a nationally televised dialogue with Elie Wiesel, conducted after the Kosovo campaign had been initiated and in the wake of Rwanda, you pledged to do all in your power to ensure that genocide would not occur again in Africa during your Presidency. We implore you, in the names of countless lost Sudanese, to raise the profile of Sudan and to add your public voice and leadership to ensuring the success of the IGAD peace process. In this regard, we believe it crucial for you to use your Executive Order and the authority of your office as a means of resolute economic communication: there will be no assisted oil development in Sudan – or the funding, directly or indirectly, of such assistance by US investors – until a just peace has been achieved.

 

Respectfully,