• Business Day (South Africa): Emerging markets

invest," Jeffrey Bader, of the Brookings Institution, explains about China's grim hold on Sudan, "they see that the international oil companies have basically locked up most of the good reserves, and they don't have the technological ability to compete. So they look at the niches. And the niches often are places where the big boys won't go. That's one of the reasons we're bumping into the Chinese in places like Iran and Burma and Sudan. Only 23 percent of the world's known oil reserves are open for ownership by foreign oil companies, so China's fighting for a piece of that 23 percent. And Sudan is one of those countries where you can still get a piece."
I flew with the U.N. from N'Djamena to the town of Abeche in mid-March, a couple of weeks after the Chinese had completed their takeover of Block H. Abeche is the last big town in eastern Chad, a jumping-off spot for everyone headed to the front line or beyond, into Darfur. White Toyota Land Cruisers painted with the logos of international relief agencies share the dirt streets with rebel pickup trucks bristling with automatic weapons. There are foreign mercenaries in Abeche-Mexican and Ukrainian pilots contracted by Deby to fly his outdated helicopters-and American intelligence agents and idealistic young relief workers and journalists trying to pick up rides into Darfur. (Al-Bashir has pretty much shut down access from Sudan to the area, for obvious reasons, so journalists are forced to sneak across the border from Chad in rebel pickup trucks.)
I arrived just as elements of the two main rebel groups in Darfur-the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement-began a meeting about unifying their strategy. The S.L.A. members were spread out under some shade trees just past the army checkpoint north of town, and the jem was a short distance away in a dry wadi by a cluster of mud houses. The conventional wisdom was that if the two groups could present a unified front there was no way Khartoum could defeat them, but Khartoum had been extremely adept at keeping them apart-and sowing terror and chaos in Darfur was one way of doing that.
My jem contact was an erudite middle-aged man named Tadjadine, who spoke fluent English and had spent time in the United States. I parked my truck by the wadi and was led to a group of 20 or 30 men seated on an old rug in the shade of a tree. Plastic chairs were brought and tea was prepared and I was introduced to each man, one by one. They were possibly the most educated group of rebels in the world: there was a doctor from London and a lawyer from Eritrea and a professor-in-exile who was lying on his back with an IV drip in his arm. He said he had some kind of intestinal ailment. Almost all of the men spoke English, and many had been to the United States. Among them were a few men in camouflage who did not speak English. They were field commanders who had just come in off the desert in the trucks we saw parked along the wadi.
We sipped tea in the incredible desert heat and I asked questions about the war. For the moment there was a lull in the fighting in Darfur itself, and the chaos had shifted westward across the border into Chad and south into the Central African Republic. Janjawid were crossing the border and attacking villages inside Chad; incredibly, people were now fleeing into Darfur for safety. It was a world turned upside down. "Darfur was a sovereign state until 1916," jem chairman Ibrahim Khalil told me. "Now 95 percent of the population lives on half a dollar a day. We don't have a single paved road. We are fighting for very basic human rights, like education. We are fighting for drinking water. Our country is not poor; we are living on a big cistern of petroleum. And the central government is killing us like snakes."
We talked for an hour or more, the jem ministers insisting that, although war was not the answer, it was the only way to force Khartoum to negotiate. When I asked about China, wise nods rippled through the group. "Chinese relations with another country are purely economic," one of the men said. "Those relations only last as long as they get what they want. The Chinese in Sudan are absolutely indifferent to whether people live or die."
After our meeting, as if for proof, I was shown an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back of a jem pickup truck. It was a Chinese-made twin-barreled 14.5-mm. heavy machine gun that the jem had captured from the Sudanese Army in battle. jem's deputy secretary of political affairs, Abdul-Aziz Mour, said that they had captured four or five such weapons four months earlier. They were obviously part of a weapons package that China had provided to Sudan at some point. China is the only major arms exporter in the world that has refused to sign arms-sales agreements that include human-rights considerations.
Mour is 38 years old and said he had studied political science in Khartoum before fleeing to avoid arrest for sedition. His dissertation was on Chinese-Sudanese relations, and all he had to do to finish his degree was return to Khartoum and defend his thesis at the university. For that he would have to wait for peace or for the al-Bashir regime to fall.
"I think the Chinese have a master plan," Mour told me the following day when I returned to the jem camp to talk to him. Evening was falling, and the sounds of village life-a goat bleating, children laughing-mixed with the occasional ringing of rebel cell phones. Groups of jem soldiers sat under the trees or in the wadi smoking cigarettes. "Some analyses say that China wants to challenge the West not militarily but economically," Mour went on. "They were colonized by the West, and they have to return this act. Africa is essential for this strategy. African votes brought China to the U.N. Security Council. The Chinese treat Africans as equals because they, too, were colonized. Especially in Sudan: the English general Charles Gordon was sent to China with the colonizing army and then from there to Sudan, where he was killed [beheaded by anti-Ottoman Islamic rebels], in 1885. That makes China have very special feelings for Sudan."
Dark had fallen by the time we finished our conversation, and the mosquitoes were out. Swatting at them, Mour said that in Sudan both China and the United States are known as "oil mosquitoes." It is not, he said, a complimentary term.
Last January, just as the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation was clinching its deal for Chad's Block H, Chinese president Hu Jintao began a 12-day tour of Africa to strengthen political and economic ties. He started in Cameroon, where China is building a sports stadium and has pledged $100 million in soft loans (i.e., those with below-market interest rates), and continued on to half a dozen other countries where Chinese political and business interests converge. Virtually every country on the tour played an important part in China's economic plans, but also raised thorny diplomatic issues for President Hu. Just seven weeks earlier, South African president Thabo Mbeki had said publicly that African countries risked falling into a "colonial relationship" with China if they didn't insist on equal trade-a severe blow to China's preferred image on the continent.
In Liberia, Hu found himself having to sidestep the fact that, during that country's civil war, China had been widely condemned for buying tropical hardwoods from President Charles Taylor, who used the money to buy arms. In Zambia, Hu canceled an excursion to the country's copper-producing region because of the threat of demonstrations. China is heavily invested in the area, but it is highly unpopular because of the poor working conditions and high mortality rates in its copper mines.
"The Chinese are interested in resources and markets and allies," I was told by Marc Wall, the American ambassador in Chad. We were sitting by the embassy pool at the end of the workday, and at a certain moment several hundred bats left the fruit trees where they sleep and descended on the pool to drink. The ambassador was unperturbed by the frantic activity behind him. "Those are all their motivations for their interest in Chad, but, frankly, overriding all their interests is the last. China is potentially a major strategic competitor but also a major economic force at all levels. Not just the low-wage, cheap-merchandise kind of thing, but also they've got the technological capacity to challenge industries that we kind of consider our own. There are balance-of-power academics predicting a global struggle ... but I think it all depends on how we and they manage the process of their emergence on the world scene."
Also left out of Hu Jintao's tour were several countries where the Chinese have attracted international concern over their policies. In Gabon, China is buying up enormous amounts of tropical hardwood and illegally prospecting for oil in a nature preserve. In Zimbabwe it has sold $240 million worth of arms to the highly repressive Mugabe regime. And in the Democratic Republic of the Congo it's an open secret that many children work in the Chinese-owned cobalt mines. One could compile the same sort of list of Western misbehavior in Africa, of course, but recent public-awareness campaigns over such things as blood diamonds, child labor, and human-rights violations have started to change the way Western companies do business. They are becoming-to use a well-worn diplomatic term-responsible stakeholders. After half a century of atrocious conduct in Nigeria, for example, Shell and other Western oil companies have been forced to scale back their operations because the level of violence-and bad press-has gotten so high.
But what to an American C.E.O. might now look morally or financially alarming can still just look like a good business deal to the Chinese. Unfettered by environmental and social concerns, China has committed $4 billion to oil exploration in Nigeria, for example; signed an $8 billion deal to build a railroad across the country; and sold the government a fleet of gunboats to patrol the militant-infested Niger Delta. They are committing these resources just as Western companies are reducing their involvement in the country.
And the problems in Nigeria pale in comparison with those in Angola, where China extended a $3 billion line of credit that will, of course, be guaranteed by future oil revenue. According to the public-interest group Transparency International, Angola at that time was one of the top 10 most corrupt countries in the world, based on the calculation that as much as 12 percent of its yearly gross national product-roughly $6 billion-simply vanishes. Seventy percent of the population of Angola lives on less than a dollar a day, life expectancy is 36 years, and the rate of infant mortality is one of the highest in the world.
The loan allowed Angola to spurn an International Monetary Fund offer that would have required guarantees of transparency and responsible governance. In exchange, China gets 40,000 barrels per day of crude oil and has a guarantee that 70 percent of associated construction contracts will go to Chinese businesses. In a country where local industry is struggling to gain momentum after nearly three decades of civil war, it was a devastating blow. Now thousands of imported Chinese workers are constructing office buildings, apartment complexes, hospitals, schools, highways, railroads, and an airport in Angola. They even use imported Chinese cement.
In September 2004, President George Bush sent shudders through the diplomatic world by using the word "genocide" in reference to Darfur. It is a word that makes statesmen cringe because the 1948 Genocide Convention clearly requires the community of nations to protect civilian populations from genocide-even one perpetrated by their own government. The problem with this doctrine is that it flies in the face of China's absolutely non-negotiable insistence on sovereignty. In China's opinion, no international body can reach inside a nation, as it were, and tell the government how to run its affairs. The sovereignty wall protects China from censure on everything from human rights to the seizure of Tibet to government censorship. Not only would putting U.N. peacekeepers into Sudan jeopardize China's vast oil interests, it would be the thin end of a wedge that could breach sovereignty all around the world.
For three years, China has threatened to veto any U.N. Security Council vote that proposed sanctions or military force against Sudan. (The United States has had economic sanctions in place against Sudan since 1997, but they are undermined by the fact that the United Nations is not participating.) As a result, those proposals-though much discussed-have never actually made it to a vote. That started to change in 2006. China found itself coming under withering criticism not only from Western countries but also from African leaders, who finally seem to have become troubled by the carnage in Darfur. If there is one imperative more important to the Chinese than Sudanese oil-which, after all, supplies only 7 percent of their needs-it is good relations with other African countries. Without those countries, China's vast ambitions on the continent are dead.
"Africa represents 53 countries, 48 of which recognize Beijing," points out former ambassador Shinn. "That's more than one-quarter of the General Assembly of the United Nations. And they rely on that support not only in the General Assembly but in some of the separate commissions, like the human-rights council."
Adding to China's woes was a very successful publicity campaign threatening a Western boycott of the Beijing Olympics-"the Genocide Games," as they were nicknamed-if China didn't change its position on Darfur. As a statement about its new position in the world, the Beijing Olympics are integral to China's plans for the next century, and the last thing it wants is an international boycott.
The diplomatic world runs on shades of meaning and nuance too subtle for most people to pick up, and in this case the entire dynamic changed when Chinese assistant foreign minister Zhai Jun told President al-Bashir that he hoped Sudan would show more "flexibility" on Darfur. A word like that reverberates through the diplomatic world like someone taking a hammer to a church bell, and immediately things began to shift. Within days, Sudan publicly agreed to Kofi Annan's peacekeeping plan, which featured a 20,000-man "hybrid" force of United Nations and African Union troops.
"Sudan doesn't want a larger, more effective peacekeeping force in Darfur, because they're still fighting a major counter-insurgency," says John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group. "They believe they can defeat the rebels militarily over time. They're not winning battle after battle, but they're winning the larger battle by sowing so much instability and conflict between groups and factions in Darfur. They are basically destroying the non-Arab population in Darfur in order to destroy the rebellion. The rebels pose no strategic threat and it's potentially a winnable conflict."
Prendergast's fear is that Sudan will balk at the last minute and refuse entry to the United Nations. If Khartoum is willing to take limited losses from nato-led air strikes, then nothing would prevent the regime from cutting off food aid to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in camps. "Just like Saddam in the 90s, Khartoum could hand out food and say, 'Kids are starving to death because America attacked with its warplanes,'" Prendergast says. "And half the world would believe that."
In that case, once again, it would be up to China.
The irony of China's new position in the world is that-precisely because of its intransigence over situations like Darfur-it has a huge amount of leverage. One word from China and four years of negotiations become unstuck. The tragedy in Darfur-and perhaps a future tragedy in Chad-is fueled by China's reliance on brutal regimes for access to oil. That reliance, however, stems directly from Western domination of more easily accessible supplies. For example: in 2005, a state-owned Chinese oil company tried to buy the American oil giant UNOCAL for a price that was $1 billion higher than that of the closest Western bidder. Reaction in the U.S. Congress was so blistering that UNOCAL accepted the lower bid rather than open the door to China.
"Don't underestimate the anger that came out of the failed UNOCAL bid," says Africa expert J. Stephen Morrison. "This was proof positive the United States was going to block Chinese aspirations to become a globalized energy front. You had an acceleration of the Africa strategy directly tied to the UNOCAL defeat."
As long as China remains shut out of the Western oil markets, it will inevitably turn to countries like Sudan to meet its energy needs-and will wind up protecting violent, repressive governments like the one in Khartoum. Any long-term soloution to Darfur will require a truly global energy strategy that allows China greater access to world oil wealth. And that will require a significant sacrifice from the West-which, after all, now uses the vast majority of the almost 90 million barrels of oil consumed worldwide every day.
Meanwhile, the killing continues. On March 31, janjawid horsemen thought to be from Sudan rode 25 miles into Chad and attacked two villages in the area of Koukou-Angarana. Villagers who survived the attack said that the janjawid were backed up by heavily armed insurgents on trucks and that they were deliberately targeting the men of the village, while women could buy their lives with jewelry or other valuables. Others said that the killing was completely indiscriminate.
"Hundreds of homes had been burned," the U.N. reported, and "an overwhelming stench came from the rotting carcasses of domestic animals that had been hit by stray bullets, consumed by fire or died of thirst, as the owners had no time to untie them. Famished and frightened dogs barked incessantly."
The first reports were of 60 or 70 people killed, though those numbers are now thought to be way too low. Three or four hundred deaths are more likely. International reaction to the attack was outraged but transitory, and within days the incident was subsumed by news from other parts of the world.
Another 300 or 400 people were dead, though; another two villages were turned into a stinking wasteland. Another sliver of human dignity was gone forever. n
Copyright Conde Nast Publications, Inc. Jul 2007
Caption: ED KASHI; OIL TOIL A Nigerian worker and a Chinese contractor at a French-owned oil-drilling installation in Nigeria.; PHOTOGRAPHS BY TEUN VOETEN; BORDER WAR Far left, a Chinese weapon seized in Abeche; left, Chad-backed rebels near the border of Darfur.; MAP BY JOYCE PENDOLA; CENTER OF THE STORM A map of the area in central Africa visited by the author.; PHOTOGRAPHS BY TEUN VOETEN; WAITING FOR PEACE Above, child refugees in Forchana, Chad; right, a Chadian general surveys the wreckage of war.; LEFT, PHOTOGRAPH BY TEUN VOETEN; WARM WELCOME Above, a Chinese billboard in N'Djamena, Chad; right, Chinese president Hu Jintao and Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir last February.; MARK LEWIS; ON TRACK Chinese workers build a railroad line in Angola last December.; Page 126: From Corbis. Page 134: Right, from EPA/ Corbis.
Document GVAF000020070711e37100005
Two Paths for the Planet
Gelbspan, Ross

3,303 words

1 July 2007

American Prospect

FAMP

45

Volume 18; Issue 7; ISSN: 10497285

English

© 2007 American Prospect. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Will we rewire the world with clean energy-or descend into political chaos, social disruption, and climate hell? And will Washington get with the program?
HUMANITY IS STANDING AT A CROSSROADS BETWEEN a more just, peaceful world and an increasingly chaotic, turbulent, and authoritarian future driven by a succession of climate-driven emergencies. We could find ourselves struggling to survive a desolate era of climate hell marked not only by a degraded and fractured society but also by more authoritarian governments.
But the good news is that the bad news is at last being taken seriously. With the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change synthesizing the work of some 2,500 scientists, there are no longer serious deniers. An alternative path could lead not just to a pullback from climate disaster, but to a more peaceful and cooperative world. Why? Because the private, corporate forces that have produced the climate emergency are powerless to cure it. As even many in the private sector now admit, the necessary solutions will require new feats of cooperation among governments, new collaborative regulation of energy and the environment, as well as new social investments in renewable technology and a global system to distribute them.
The challenge has been taken very seriously in Europe-where leaders want much stricter goals for the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol beginning in 2012. In May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought agreement by industrial nations to cut emissions 50 percent by 2050 at the June G-8 summit. But U.S. negotiators accused the Chancellor of ignoring their concerns. Prior to the summit, Bush seemed to undermine the G-8 by calling on the U.S., India, China, Mexico and Australia, and 10 other major polluters to craft a new carbon-cutting framework by 2008. James Connaughton, senior U.S. climate advisor, kicked off the summit by declaring the United States would not accept the EU goals. In the end, the U.S. agreed only "to seriously consider" the non-binding vows by the EU, Japan, and Canada to halve emissions by 2050. Bush's plan for the 15 large polluters could allow his successor to work more closely with the EU on the next phase of Kyoto. But, despite bravely optimistic words by Merkel and Tony Blair, Bush undermined the EU push to substantially slow the pace of climate change. His promise to "seriously consider" greater future cuts fell far short of the commitments the EU had wanted.
Ultimately, the challenge is as simple as it is overwhelming: Humanity must cut its use of coal and oil worldwide by about 80 percent in a very short time by shifting to clean energy. The predominant view of that gargantuan challenge casts it as mainly technical: that energy systems will remain centralized; that private market forces will make that energy transition; and that our current form of social and economic organization will remain fundamentally unchanged.
But that picture has it backwards. The technical remedies favored by the big energy companies are mostly the wrong ones, such as "clean coal" and mechanical carbon sequestration. Their purpose is often to serve the interests of big oil and big coal, not to produce the most efficient or cleanest technologies, much less socially effective applications of their use.
What's required is significant government action, and on a global scale. In that respect, the carbon crisis could be a profoundly transformative opportunity to begin to reverse the growing and unsustainable gap between the world's rich and poor, to rescue the democratic process from the growing reality of corporate domination, and to launch a coordinated global transition that could fundamentally alter historical power relationships.
OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES, THE TRANSITION IS BEGINNING IN earnest. The Netherlands, Germany, France, and the U.K. have already vowed to cut their carbon emissions by 50 to 80 percent over the next 45 years. The EU has just agreed in principle to cut carbon levels 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
European cities, regions, nations, and the EU are also leading the world in developing more energy-efficient systems of transportation and construction, and in helping private industry develop new forms of renewable energy technology. This effort did not occur spontaneously because the oil companies or public utilities or private developers saw the light, or because market forces saw profit opportunities. Europe's renewable energy path happened as a result of careful public policies, informed by public planning, including taxes on carbon energy use, subsidies for development and use of clean energy, regulations on building standards and public utility purchases, and leadership on the Kyoto Protocol process.
Europe's new willingness to press Washington harder on this issue did not begin with this year's G-8 meeting. In fact, several governments contemplated legal action against the United States as early as the summer of 2001. At that time, representatives of the French, Swiss, and Canadian governments said in background conversations with me that they were planning to bring the United States to court under the World Trade Organization. Their argument was that the WTO prohibits governments from subsidizing their products. And if their countries were drawing down their emissions according to the Kyoto schedule and the United States was not, they were planning to petition the WTO to level stiff taxes on American exports on the ground that the United States was "carbon-subsidizing" its exports. That initiative was aborted, months later, by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But it resurfaced last November when then-French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed taxes on imports from countries that refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
The United States, as the world's most disproportionate energy consumer, is in a position either to lead an energy transition, or to thwart it. A pro-active U.S. role has been blocked by both the Bush administration and big oil and coal. Beginning in the early 1990s, the coal industry mounted an extensive campaign of deception and disinformation, covertly paying a tiny handful of "greenhouse skeptics" several million dollars and buying them a great deal of air time to persuade the public and policy-makers that climate change was either nonexistent, negligible, or due to natural causes.
As recently as October 2006, President Bush tapped Lee Raymond, the recently retired chief executive of ExxonMobil, to help chart America's energy future. Despite Bush's belated admission in his 2007 State of the Union address that climate change is real, Bush's policies are essentially unchanged and the White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody coal. The Democrats are only marginally better. Climate change has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money.
EVEN BEFORE BUSH LEAVES OFFICE, THAT POLITICAL paralysis may now be changing, as growing segments of the business and