GUEST COLUMNIST: Blood money for retirement

One of the key tactics in bringing change to South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s, and ending the hateful system of apartheid, was divestment -- the decision by large institutional investors to terminate their shareholdings in companies culpably doing business in South Africa. But given the difficulty of determining culpability, divestment was controversial in some quarters. Such a policy, it was argued, forced companies to withdraw from South Africa, thereby ending their chances of working to improve, if only incrementally, economic and social practices. People argued in good faith on both sides of the issue. The world of Western investment faces a much less ambiguous situation in contemporary Sudan, geographically the largest nation in Africa. Here there is a fierce moral clarity and urgency to the need for a rapid divestment from the singular North American corporate presence of significance -- Talisman Energy Inc. of Calgary, Alberta. For Talisman, one of Canada's largest corporations and its largest oil and energy concern, has allowed itself to become partners with the National Islamic Front regime, which dominates the government of Sudan. What this means is that Talisman is an economic ally of a radical Islamic regime that is engaged in a brutally destructive civil war with the people of southern Sudan, who are largely animist or Christian in religion. This is the same regime that the U.S. Congress recently declared to be "genocidal" in its conduct in the long-running civil war; a war in which, exemplifying a truly terrifying inhumanity, two million human beings have perished, the vast majority civilians in the south. It is a conflict that has created almost five million refugees, the largest crisis of its sort in the world. It is a war that as recently as last summer's famine brought more than two million people, mostly children, to the edge of starvation. The Khartoum regime -- which came to power by coup in 1989 -- has systematically used humanitarian food aid as a weapon of war, has regularly ordered the bombing of civilian hospitals, has encouraged a merciless trade in human slavery and has recently accelerated an intense scorched-earth campaign to clear the oil fields and oil pipeline areas -- this last effort in evident service of Talisman's billion-dollar capital investment in the oil project and Khartoum's hopes for revenues from the impending flow of oil. Talisman has, along with its investment partners in China and Malaysia, agreed to send 5 percent of its revenues to Khartoum. Estimates of the amount of oil that will flow now range up to more than 250,000 barrels per day. This is an extraordinarily significant source of income for the cash-strapped Khartoum regime, which spends about $1 million per day on the war, much of it borrowed against anticipated oil revenues. How will these new revenues be spent? One answer was provided recently by Sudanese Parliament Speaker Hassan Turabi, the most influential member of the NIF regime. He declared publicly that oil revenues would be used to build factories for missiles and tanks -- which of course would better effect a final military solution to the racially and religiously driven conflict with the people of the south. This destructive war effort, in which casualties would likely be more than 90 percent civilian, will be fueled by Talisman-generated oil money. Indeed, the bombers that frequently target clearly marked civilian hospitals will continue to fly on the oil that Talisman has provided. The tanks that destroy villages throughout the south will run on oil that flows because of Talisman. What is Talisman's response to the numerous and painfully consistent accounts of human destruction that come from the press as well as the most respected humanitarian and human rights organizations working on the ground in the south of Sudan? In the main, Talisman doesn't respond or responds only to snippets of news or responds dismissively. Most shamelessly, Talisman declares itself to be a beacon of benign Western influence, investing for the economic development of all of Sudan. But this self-serving claim ignores Talisman's role in the oil-driven devastation of the south. There exists nothing like a sustained rebuttal or response to the enormous and rapidly growing body of reports on the desperate situation there. Talisman's disingenuous and distorting pronouncements on the greatest humanitarian crisis of the last half-century must not obscure the terrible spectacle of human suffering that is before American and Canadian Talisman shareholders. In such circumstances, it would seem especially incumbent upon those in positions of moral and educational leadership to consider the consequences of their shareholding in this corporation. For the American professoriate, this will entail reflecting on the fact that the College Retirement Equities Fund -- the primary retirement investment vehicle for American higher education -- holds 262,000 shares of Talisman. No doubt this in not widely known, nor its consequences generally appreciated. But that must change and those who understand the implications of this large shareholding must pressure CREF to divest, even as they must inform colleagues and urge further divestment pressures upon CREF. Students also can make known -- to one another, to their teachers and to CREF (at feedback@tiaa-cref.org) -- their dismay at the role of Talisman in their teachers' retirement investment portfolio. Collectively, students and teachers can force a presently unyielding CREF to sell its significant stake in Talisman. Only by refusing to own, in any fashion, shares in a corporation that has so clearly revealed its willingness to trade in genocidal oil, can investors be free of complicity in Sudan's agony. For if South Africa demonstrated the power of divestment, Sudan demonstrates a human suffering that gives to divestment the force of an unambiguous moral imperative.