Talisman's AGM a study in contrasts

Oil company says it's not to blame for dictatorship and forced evacuation of Sudanese - refugees and supporters in the street say otherwise...

By: Penney Kome

  CALGARY: Talisman Energy's annual general meeting was a study in contrasts. Downstairs, in the fresh air and sunshine, about 200 Sudanese, some in their African clothes, jumped and shouted in a loud, colourful demonstration. Upstairs, plainclothes security guards contained and guided a sea of shareholders - mostly white faces and gray hair above gray suits - as they filed in to occupy most of 750 seats spread across three dimly-lit, heated hotel ballrooms.
  Downstairs, the sounds were drums and bullhorns and ululations. Upstairs, a bank of six or seven technicians smoothly controlled three big screens full of movies, Power Point presentations, and live feed from two on-site videocams. No other electronics were allowed in the room, neither tape recorders nor TV cameras.
  But the starkest contrast was between two sharply different views of what is happening on the ground in Southern Sudan, where Talisman is extracting oil and gas from a 20,000 square mile zone that was originally inhabited by the Dinka and Nuer indigenous peoples. From the annual report, it seems that about 10 percent of Talisman's oil production comes from that area.

Medicins Sans Frontiers and the International Red Cross still won't speak to Talisman staff

Talisman says it's trying
  "Nobody denies that tragic things are going on in Sudan," said Talisman president and CEO Jim Buckee, repeatedly. "The question is, what should we do about it?"
  Buckee champions "constructive engagement", the idea that Talisman can be a moderating influence on President Lt. Gen. Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir's military dictatorship.
  "We think the right response is to stay there, doing the best we can," he said, pointing out that Talisman persuaded the other members of GNPOC to adopt a formal Code of Ethics in business practices. As for charges of wholesale population displacement, Buckee displayed 1965 satellite photos that showed the land around the city of Bentiu as "uninhabited plains," with no people to displace.

Sudanese refugee says Talisman is spinning
  In the audience, Sudanese refugee Martin Yak was outraged by those pictures. When the tightly orchestrated AGM portion finished - in about 30 minutes - and the Q&A session arrived, Martin Yak lined up at the microphone with other Sudanese refugees, local firebrand Mel Middleton, and members of the Task Force on Churches and Corporate Responsibility including Georgette Gagnon and Joy Kennedy.
  "There were 200,000 people and their livestock in Bentiu and the villages around it," said Yak, when it was his turn to speak. "I should know! I was Commissioner for Bentiu. Your satellite pictures show a desert!"
  Peter Widdrington, chair of the Talisman Board, intervened to say that he had just visited Bentiu recently, and "there's been a massive population build-up," in recent, which he said refuted accusations of forcible population displacement.
  "The people who live there now are not Dinka, or Nuer," Yak responded. "They are new inhabitants." Widdrington let him talk, and then cut him off. But subsequent questions from the microphone kept coming back to the same issue.
  Buckee denied that his company played any role in displacement. "The war was going on for a long time," before Talisman got involved in 1998, he said. Then he added, "If Talisman was not there, you wouldn't even know about it."
  Not so, responded Clint Booney of the Presbyterian Church. "We were involved with Arakis [the company whose holding Talisman bought]. We told you in December 1999 that development cannot happen in a war zone."
  "Half of Africa has internal conflict," retorted Buckee. "Most people say that trade and development lead to peace." Insisting that Talisman has brought prosperity, schools and a hospital to the oil zone, Buckee referred questioners to the Corporate Responsibility Report, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, and (he said) "a work in progress."
  But there have been problems, he acknowledged. A reader browsing the CSR finds references to the "Bentiu Emergency," for instance, when tens of thousands fled to Bentiu "to escape inter-factional fighting." Talisman provided some supplies and issued some news releases.
  Unfortunately, references to humanitarian agencies on the scene, "gave many readers the false impression that these organizations were working directly with Talisman to provide aid." Such reports put aid workers in danger of reprisals from local guerilla groups. Project Sudan says that Medicins Sans Frontiers and the International Red Cross still won't speak to Talisman staff.
  Responding to calls for Talisman to get out of Sudan, Jim Buckee said that there are offers on his desk every day, from companies that do not hold open shareholder meetings [eg, Asian government companies]. Other sources say that Talisman's technical expertise would be hard to replace, especially since ­ as the Talisman Annual Report acknowledges - US law forbids US companies from doing business in Sudan while the civil war rages.
  Church groups would like to see the US law mirrored in Canada. Talisman, anticipating $1 billion in profit this year, does not see any reason to change its current practices. "You can't attribute guilt or blame to us because of [the Sudanese government's] actions, " said Jim Buckee, "Talisman gets criticized because we're big."

Read more/Do more:
Task Force on Churches and Corporate Responsibility

media release on Talisman shareholders' meeting

Emulate Me background information on Sudan

Carol Off's report for CBC's The National

*****************

Background: The United Nations reported that some two million people have died and more than 4 million have been displaced during the conflicts throughout Southern Sudan. Critics charge that hundreds of thousands of native people have been slaughtered or driven out of the 20,000 square mile oil development zone, to make way for the GNPOC oil consortium in which Talisman holds 25 percent.

The conflict is extremely complex. Sudan lies just south of Egypt, with its capital in the northern city of Khartoum. The civil war that has been raging in the South almost continuously since Sudan's independence in 1956 involves ethnic (mainly Arab-African) as well as religious (Islam-Christian or animist) elements.

Penney Kome is a Calgary author and journalist and Editor of Women'space - www.womenspace.ca.

Other articles from the Kome connections

Posted, May 07, 2001

[ Front Page ]