News — sudan

Sudan is one of the world's last frontiers. Once thought of as a vast desert l and was, the land was home to an advanced and mysterious civilization, an ancient kingdom of Africa known as Kush. The kingdom dealt with Pharaohs from Egypt and the emperor's from Rome. Their Nubian leaders known as Black Pharaohs left behind an array of archeological sites dotted along the Nile and the count of Egypt. The Black Pharaohs controlled the trade routes connecting central Africa with ancient Egypt; this accumulated them with immense wealth and power. Do you think Egypt's culture and influence are credited to the Black Pharaohs of Kush?

The Second Sudanese Civil War was an intense 22-year conflict between the central government in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).  The war started in southern Sudan but spread to other places including the Nuba mountains and the Blue Nile region. Two million people died in this conflict but the war also led to the creation of South Sudan as an independent nation in 2011.

The terms of the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1972, which ended the first Sudan Civil War, were violated several times. In 1978, President Gaafar Nimeiry wanted to take control of the newly-discovered oil fields located on the border region between north and south Sudan.  In 1983, President Nimeiry violated the agreement by imposing Sharia Law across the nation and abolishing the mostly Christian Southern Sudan Autonomous Region.  Most South Sudanese people and other people who were non-Muslim living in the north were now punished by Sharia Law.

In response, rebels from South Sudan formed the Southern Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA), led by John Garang, to fight the central government in Khartoum.  As in the first war, child soldiers were recruited by both sides but were more frequently used by the SPLA.  In April 1985, a coup occurred.  Nimeri was ousted and the new government rescinded his 1983 decree and made other overtures designed to reconcile the north and south. In May 1986, the new Khartoum government led by Prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and the SPLA led by Col. John Garang met in negotiations for the first time. At the same time the SPLA and other Sudanese political parties met in Ethiopia where they fashioned the Koka Dam declaration which called for abolishing Islamic law and convening a constitutional conference for the entire nation.

In 1988, the SPLA and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a political party in Sudan, agreed on a peace plan which called for a cease fire and the abolition of military pacts with Egypt and Libya which had supplied the Khartoum government with weapons.  In February 1989, the Sadiq al-Mahdi government approved the peace plan but fighting continued into the 1990s with atrocities and human rights abuses occurring on both sides.

In July 2002, the Government of Sudan and the SPLM reached an agreement known as the Machakos Protocol, named after the town in Kenya where peace talks were held.  The talks continued into the following year and finally on January 9, 2005, the Government of Sudan and the SPLA signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement which ended the civil war.  The agreement also called for the creation of South Sudan in 2011, six years after the war ended.

On August 19, 1998, 14 cruise missiles flattened El-Shifa, Sudan’s largest pharmaceutical factory producing essential medicines for people in the then-largest country in Africa. Then-U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered the attack on the factory and a training camp in Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania two weeks earlier by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.

A total of 79 missiles was launched from a submarine in the Red Sea, with 14 hitting El-Shifa industrial facility adjacent to a residential area in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. One person died in the middle-of-the-night strike, and 10 were wounded.

Clinton said at the time that El-Shifa was part-owned by bin Laden, the main suspect for the bombings of the embassies, and was producing nerve gas.

The U.S. based its case on a single soil sample supposedly acquired by the CIA from outside the El-Shifa main gate. However, when journalists from across the world toured the bombed site days later, they realized that something was amiss. Records and documents that remained at the site clearly showed that the plant produced ‘antibiotics, malaria tablets and syrups as well as drugs for hypertension, diabetes, ulcer, tuberculosis and rheumatism, a report noted.

Another report stated that half the supply of the then-standard drug for malaria, chloroquine, and most of the veterinary drugs used in Sudan came from the plant. In effect, Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the third world, suffered from an immediate shortage of these supplies. And the worst was yet to come.

But before that, journalists at the bombed site also observed what American intelligence had failed to notice – that the plant/factory was privately owned and part-financed by a development bank in Kenya. Saleh Idris, a Sudanese-born businessman, was the owner of the plant. Shortly after the incident, the U.S. government froze his bank assets, including almost $24 million held with the Bank of America. He subsequently filed a civil suit in a U.S. court against the Treasury Department and the Bank of America claiming that his assets were blocked even though there was a lack of evidence that his plant was involved in the production of materials for chemicals weapons, one account noted.

But moments before a court response was due, the U.S. government unfroze the assets. Still, the charges linking Idris to ‘international terrorism’ were not dropped. And although the charges were not being pursued, Idris sued the U.S. government in federal court in Washington for unjustifiably destroying the plant, for defaming him, and for failing to give full compensation for the facility’s destruction.

A federal judge however dismissed the lawsuit and an appeals court upheld the dismissal. “The appeals court ruled the case involved a political question covered by a legal doctrine that means the suit cannot be reviewed by the judicial branch,” Reuters reported in 2010.

But a debate about whether the El-Shifa plant ever posed a threat took place within the U.S. government at the time, and that debate remains unsolved.

Then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen said that, before the strike, the U.S. was not aware that El-Shifa was making medicines. Curiously, the plant had before the attack signed a large U.S.-approved United Nations oil-for-food contract with Iraq. Thus, part of the medicines produced at El-Shifa were being exported to Iraq. To observers, America’s bombing of El-Shifa was to give a clear message: “Help our enemy and pay the price.”

Years before the missile attack, intelligence reports had indicated that “Iraq had shifted some chemical weapons capacity to Sudan.” This emerged years before bin Laden was kicked out of Sudan in 1996 following pressure from Washington. Bin Laden had been in Sudan’s capital Khartoum for five years, building farms, bridges, roads and his al-Qaida terrorist group. Two years after he was expelled came the Sudan missile strike.

The country was struggling to emerge from years of economic struggle, dictatorship, police and military brutality when the strike occurred. Amidst famine, El-Shifa was the only factory that was producing cheap tuberculosis drugs and veterinary drugs in Sudan when it was destroyed. A public health disaster may have been the result if replacement medicines had not been provided immediately, authorities said. Still, months after the attack, an epidemic of meningitis hit Sudan. Scores of children and adults lost their lives due to lack of antibiotics for treatment.

To Dr Idris Eltayeb, chairman of El-Shifa’s board, the bombing of Sudan’s largest manufacturer of medicinal products was “just as much an act of terrorism as at the twin towers”.

“The only difference is we know who did it,” he was quoted by the Guardian. “I feel very sad about the loss of life there, but in terms of numbers, and the relative cost to a poor country, this was worse.”

Today, millions of people in Sudan are struggling through an economic crisis that has deepened as the country emerges from years of isolation and conflict. Inflation has risen to more than 300%, with shortages of essential items like food, medicine and other commodities.

South Sudan's government and the rebels of the National Salvation Front (NSF) announced in Rome the signing of a ceasefire agreement.

The National Salvation Front, which mostly operates in the country's southern states has clashed frequently with gouvernmental forces.

But thanks to a international mediation, firefights should stop between the two forces.

"What were the results of this meeting? It was the commitment of the parties to the ceasefire and, above all, the decision to organise a meeting between the military from both sides to ensure that the opposition is included in the mechanism for monitoring ceasefire violations" said secretary-general of Sant'Egidio, Paolo Impagliazzo, who leaded the negociations between the government representative Barnaba Marial Benjamin and National Salvation Front (NSF) representative, Thomas Cirillo Swaka.

Despite efforts by other rebel groups, the National Salvation Front, hadn't signed the September 2018 peace deal. Thomas Cirillo, the leader of the rebel group has agreed to a ceasefire earlier this year, but it hadn't been respected.

Over 380 000 have died and 4 million people, a third of the country's population have been displaced, in a seven lyear long civil war, that officials now hope to finally bring to an end.

South Sudanese oil marketing giant Trinity Energy Ltd is set to inject $10 million worth of new investments in its Kenyan operations and also plans to build a $500 million crude oil refinery in South Sudan to serve the region with refined petroleum products.

The firm, which controls close to 40 per cent of the South Sudanese oil market, is planning a 40,000 barrels per day (bpd) modular refinery at Paloch in the oil-rich Upper Nile State, with the potential of expanding capacity to 200,000bpd, as well as petroleum storage facilities at Nesitu, in the south of the country.

South Sudan has the third-largest oil reserves on the continent after Libya and Nigeria, estimated at 3.5 billion barrels, with much of it yet to explored.

The refinery, to be built by American firm Chemex, is expected to be operational in two to three years, with plans to start distribution of refined petroleum products to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo by road, owing to the absence of railway and pipeline connectivity between these countries.

The EastAfrican has learnt that the feasibility study and the designs for the proposed refinery have already been concluded with Afreximbank together with big regional banks operating in Juba expected to provide financing.

"We are already making steady progress towards our refinery project. We have already identified and secured land for the refinery in Paloch. We have engaged Chemex of the United States as the project manager for this project. Separately we are close to tying up project preparatory work financing from Afreximbank and this will aid in the engineering and design work for the facility," the firm's chief executive Robert Mdeza told The EastAfrican in an interview.

"Various discussions are ongoing with financiers for the various facets of our business. We have opted for segmented approach so that we can kick off with the low-hanging opportunities such as our working capital requirements as we work our way towards financing for the larger projects like the refinery," he added.

Competition

Trinity's refinery will upstage Uganda, where the commencement of the construction of the $4 billion refinery at Kabaale in Hoima district has been pushed to 2025 following the delay in the conclusion of the Final Investment Decision on the basin-wide upstream oil development project.

Initially, the FID was expected to be reached in September and the projected completed in three years.

The Kabaale refinery is expected to process an estimated 60,000 barrels of oil per day with an initial output of 30,000 barrels per day at the time of the commissioning of the project.

Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi had been allocated a combined 40 per cent shareholding in the refinery, translating into an eight per cent stake for each, with 60 per cent of the shares reserved for private investors. However, only Tanzania took up its full share of eight per cent while Kenya took up 2.5 per cent.

Rwanda and Burundi had not expressed interest in the facility by the expiry of the extended period set aside to do so in 2016. As a result, Uganda was compelled to take up an additional 11.5 per cent shareholding in the Hoima-based refinery, bringing its total shareholding to 19.5 per cent, with French oil giant Total SA taking up a 10 per cent stake.

Trinity Energy is not new to the region, and was incorporated in 2013 with majority ownership by Trinity Holdings which is 90 per cent owned by a local South Sudanese businessman Akol Emmanuel Ayii.

Currently, the firm supplies substantial volumes of refined products to South Sudan, effectively stabilising domestic supply and demand for refined oil products.

"We are now embarking on our next phase of growth with major projects lined up in South Sudan including a 40,000bpd refinery as well as growing our footprint outside of South Sudan. This will be instrumental in our plans to enhance energy stability particularly for South Sudan and our landlocked neighbours," said Mr Mdeza.

The country is seeking to increase crude oil production to pre-conflict levels of 350,000bpd, which is expected to significantly contribute to economic growth and sustainability.

Last year, Africa accounted for more than 7.9 million bpd in oil production, an output level that has significantly dropped from nearly 10 million bpd in the period between 2005 and 2010 largely due to lower global oil prices.

The construction of the refinery in Paloch is expected to strengthen the firm's bid of expanding its operations across the East and Central African region through a combination of acquisitions and greenfield investments as part of its five-year (2020-2024) growth and expansion plan.