The Sudan Handbook

thE intERnational PREsEnCE in sudan 285

OLS 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 of

The 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).