It should be high season for mangos, but along this jungle road the trees are bare of fruit. It has all been eaten, green and sour. Only a few minutes further on is Mabia, Sudan’s newest large-scale camp for “internally displaced persons” — refugees within their own country. People around here are hungry.

“They came with nothing, and they came to nothing,” says Karanja William, a Kenyan field worker with the World Food Program. “This is just an area that has been cleared. In fact, they are the ones doing the clearing.”

Less than six months old, Mabia is home to more than 21,000 people. This is rebel-held territory, deep in the south and close to Sudan’s border with the Central African Republic. It is about as far as you can get, without leaving Sudan, from the controversial oilfields held by Calgary’s Talisman Energy. But even here, no one can leave behind the politics of oil.

Mabia’s residents are hundreds of kilometres from their homes, driven out by a civil war in which oil money provides the decisive military advantage. And it isn’t lost on anyone that a Canadian company is helping to deliver that advantage to the Khartoum government.

War with Few Rules

Mabia’s story is a remarkable example of the brutality of a war that has fallen from the international radar. The story begins in Raga, a town captured in June 2001 by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). It was the largest settlement ever taken by the SPLA in their nineteen-year war for self-determination in the south.

Three months later, the northern government hit back. If there was any resolve to avoid civilian casualties, it certainly failed.

“Antonov [bombers] and gunships and jet fighters — they used to come and bomb everywhere, randomly,” said Fashir Kamun, a former Raga banker still in his workaday dress pants and V-neck sweater. “You might move for one hour to get food and so on, then you go again into your hole. That’s how we were living in Raga.”

By the end of September, the southern Sudanese majority in and around Raga had fled to outlying farms and villages. There, the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA), the SPLA’s humanitarian wing, organized the journey to Mabia. In mid-October, an estimated two-thirds of Raga’s population began walking south on forest paths. The trek — almost 700kilometres — took even the strongest more than a month to complete.

According to the SRRA, ninety-seven people died en route. There is no record of howmany others perished as government forces fought to recapture Raga County. “We expect they will find oil in Raga,” says Rizik Zakariah, the SRRA secretary for Raga. “Where there’s killing, there must be oil.”

Even if there is no oil, he adds, the government’s campaign to control Raga is part of a broader battle to protect existing oilfields. Raga is a western gateway — “the feeding route,” says Zakariah — to the garrison town of Wau. In turn, Wau is a strategic centre for the government’s protection of oil rigs and pipelines north and east of the southern Sudanese region of Bahr el-Ghazal.

“The government of Sudan is utilizing the land route from Raga, fully, in supplying Wau. A cut of one week will disturb the whole region of Bahr el-Ghazal,” he says.

No Peace with Oil

Zakariah is optimistic that Sudan is moving closer to peace, but like many southern Sudanese, he sees oil as a principal barrier to any solution. International watchdogs estimate that the northern government spends more than CDN$1-million per day, or $365-million per year, on the war with the SPLA.

Meanwhile, Canada’s Talisman Energy reports that it paid CDN$250-million in resource royalties to Khartoum in 2001. And, of course, Talisman is not the only corporation paying oil money to the northern government. While Talisman is the largest independent oil firm working in Sudan, it remains a 25 per cent partner in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company — alongside the state oil companies of Sudan, China and Malaysia.

For now, the Raga refugees are safe from the front lines of Africa’s longest-running civil war. Even in Mabia, however, they can’t completely escape the reach of government forces fuelled by oilfield income. Khartoum continues to control the airspace over rebel territory, and in April the government banned all flights to an airstrip near the Mabia camp.

For now, aid can come by road: a twenty-two-truck convoy driving hard for five days can deliver a single month’s supply of oil, wheat and pulses. In the pounding summer rains, though, Sudan’s ruined roads can become impassable.

“If the road conditions deteriorate and the flight ban continues, we will be in a very hectic situation, because there will be no way to bring food,” says Karanja William. He speaks quietly, in understated tones. “It will be better for the international community to speak up on this.”