As Canada Normalizes Relations with Sudan, Religious Freedom Panel Shows Folly of Ignoring New Capital Markets Reality

(Washington, D.C.): In one of the most bizarre policy disconnects in recent memory, the government of Canada announced yesterday that it would “reestablish a diplomatic presence” in Sudan — even as a study commissioned by Ottawa’s Minister of Foreign Affairs confirmed the worst: Revenues generated by the Canadian firm Talisman Energy, Inc. as a result of the firm’s 25% stake in Sudan’s Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC) are having the effect of aiding and abetting genocide by the Khartoum regime.

The study, entitled “Human Security in Sudan: the Report of a Canadian Assessment Mission,” found that “oil is exacerbating the conflict” that has already caused the murder of over 2 million people in southern Sudan. The report was prepared by John Harker and concluded: “It is difficult to imagine a cease-fire while oil extraction continues, and almost impossible to do so if revenues keep flowing to the GNPOC and the government of Sudan as currently arranged.” (Emphasis added.)

Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy chose to ignore this and other ruinous findings, including confirmation that Khartoum helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers that have flown bombing missions against southern Sudanese villages are operating from “the Heglig airstrip in the Talisman concession.” Mr. Harker cites “credible reports” that such operations have been “more or less constant since May 1999, interrupted not by protest but by such events as the appearance in the area of a team of financial analysts taken to Heglig by Talisman.” He notes moreover that “during our own visit, the military aviation was relocated to Muglad, a town northwest of Heglig.”

Axworthy told a press conference in Ottawa that far from immediately applying sanctions against Talisman (pursuant to the Special Economic Measures Act, Canada’s counterpart to the United States’ International Emergency Economic Powers Act or IEEPA), Canada would instead normalize relations with Sudan. With chilling sang froid, Axworthy declared that: “Canada continues to believe that engagement and dialogue are the most appropriate tools for advancing the cause of peace in Sudan.” It is hard to imagine doing greater violence to the already sorely debased term “engagement” than in the present context of pursuing “dialogue” with a regime like Khartoum’s that continues to “engage” in slave-trading, genocide and the sponsorship of terrorism.

In an appearance today before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Casey Institute’s Chair Roger W. Robinson, Jr. reacted to this appalling performance on the part of America’s northern neighbor and ally. He declared that “The Canadian government’s action [in restoring diplomatic ties with Sudan] is a slap in the face to all those familiar with the facts on the ground in Sudan.” In Mr. Robinson’s prepared testimony (see the attached), he briefed the Commission concerning the implications of efforts by Talisman and a subsidiary of its oil consortium partner in Sudan, the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), to secure funding on the U.S. capital markets. He urged that those markets, instead, be leveraged to advance peace in that long-suffering country.