thE intERnational PREsEnCE in sudan 285OLS undoubtedly saved many lives and saw a vast, if unquantifiable,
financial, logistical and human effort. Questions about impact and the
accountability of international agencies ran throughout its duration.
Controversy was omni-present: aid fuelling conflict or creating depen-
dency, besides persistent northern accusations of neo-crusading Western
charity. The conspicuous distance between the stated intentions of
international interveners, and the willingness and capacity to adapt
these ideals in practice, was a recurring source of discontent. The idea
of humanitarian protection, for instance, was widely held to refer to
protecting relief agency assets rather than civilians, and the incongruence
between the promotion of human rights by OLS and its inability to make
such notions material realities was criticized during workshops dissemi-
nating humanitarian principles. At times these also became forums of
critique against international agencies and saw supposed beneficiaries
measuring the lack of fit between humanitarian or human rights aspira-
tions and the reality of their wartime predicaments.
The world woke up very late to the human devastation of the wars in
southern Sudan. Given the nature and duration of these conflicts, the
region received very little attention compared with that which Darfur
would attract after April 2004. Nonetheless, as outside involvement in
Sudan broadened from the 1990s, it was accompanied by a growing global
concern with human rights issues. Prominent in these were campaigns
about slavery and abduction, including internationally-sponsored slave
redemption schemes sponsored by evangelical groups such as Christian
Solidarity International. Sudan’s oil development was initially upstaged
by attention to continuing humanitarian crises. The 1998 Bahr al-Ghazal
famine, for example, which eventually produced a huge airdrop opera-
tion by the World Food Programme, occurred just as the construction
of Sudan’s oil infrastructure was launched, and as Chinese and other
companies rushed to build the pipeline and Khartoum refinery to send
and sell oil overseas.
Another area of human rights advocacy has focused on the wartime
operations of oil companies, which increased following the creation ofThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC) in 1997 by
(www.riftvalley.net).