Archaeological evidence has confirmed that the area in the north of Sudan was inhabited at least 60,000 years ago. A settled culture appeared in the area around 8000 B.C., living in fortified mud-brick villages, where they subsisted on hunting and fishing, as well as grain gathering and cattle herding. Skeletal remains suggest that a blending of negroid and Mediterranean populations occured during the Neolithic period (eighth to third millenia B.C.) and has remained relatively stable until today in northern Sudan.

VBS: I’m surprised that there seems to be oil at the root of all the conflict in Sudan. We’ve always been told in the media that it’s an issue of racial genocide.
Shane Smith: I never understood the conflict until I went there. Why are they killing all these people, cutting their arms off and throwing them in the wells? Well, that’s a terror tactic. But it also makes the villages and towns that they do it in unlivable afterwards. So I didn’t understand what the motivation was. Why ruin the land that you’re raiding?

Right. It didn’t seem to be about one group claiming rights to territory.
Yeah. If you wanted to use the land for your cattle, you wouldn’t be able to once you’d poisoned the wells. So it isn’t to use the land, it isn’t to take their women… What is it for? They are all the same religion. Darfur is known as the most religiously conservative place in Sudan, and they are all Muslim. So it’s not Arab on black as it’s being purported in the media. It didn’t make any sense to me.

How did oil come into it?
Sudan was one of the poorest nations in Africa. They had a huge famine in the early 1980s, just like Ethiopia. So once they found oil in the south around the same time, they freaked out and sent all these paramilitary groups, much like the janjaweed, down there and kicked all the people off the land, then started taking the oil out of the ground. These groups were not officially affiliated with the government but they were secretly government sanctioned. So the government could safely say, “It’s got nothing to do with us!”

When exactly did all this start?
In 1983. That civil war went on for nearly twenty years, killed approximately two million people, and displaced four million. They finally enacted a peace agreement (CPA) to unite north and south Sudan. The UN is in Sudan especially to monitor that agreement. But then—bang!—same thing happened again, elsewhere in the country. The janjaweed started killing people in Darfur and the government was saying, “It’s not us doing it,” but—again—doing very little to stop them.

And it was because they had found oil in Darfur at that point?
Right. They kick everyone off the land where the oil is, wherever in the country it’s found.

So what we’re talking about are government-orchestrated ethnic cleansings that are actually fronts for oil mining operations.
Yes. And that’s the interesting thing. In fact, we could point our finger at America for the early days of it, because Chevron sank the first well in Southern Sudan. But now, America is in massive disfavor there after we dropped Tomahawk missiles on a baby food factory outside Khartoum.

Oh man, I remember when that was in the news.
We said that we thought it was bin-Laden’s chemical weapons plant. It ended up being a baby food factory!

Jesus.
Not so good for America-Sudan relations. When we went down south in Sudan and saw the wells, we found out that it’s all Chinese companies there now.

The plot thickens…
China doesn’t have any of America’s problems of bad press in the Middle East or Africa, or people back home saying they shouldn’t buy conflict diamonds or whatever. China is in very good favor in those parts of the world. And when we were in Sudan, China had just given 2 billion dollars in aid to African countries. So Africans are like, “We love China.” In turn, China comes in and says, “We’ll take your oil and your gold. We don’t give a shit about your conflicts or who hates who here.”
America has totally lost Africa.

Is the labor all Chinese too?
Chinese and Malaysian. The camps are all enclosed. All the money that Sudan gets from these wells goes to the north to Khartoum. The south of Sudan is supposed to get two percent, but they have no auditing there so it’s like, “Two percent of how much… Who knows?” You’re down there, and you’re in the poorest areas in the world, and they are right next to oil wells that are pumping out oil for China. Everyone likes to say that America is addicted to oil, but I’d say it’s the entire world that’s addicted.

INTERVIEW BY VBS STAFF