MaxedOutMama

The uproar may be astounding to outsiders. But in Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment has the upper hand in defining women's freedoms, the issue touches on the kingdom's strict Islamic lifestyle.

Conservatives, who believe women should be shielded from strange men, say driving will allow a woman to leave home whenever she pleases and go wherever she wishes. Some say it will present her with opportunities to violate Islamic law, such as exposing her eyes while driving or interacting with strange men, like police officers or mechanics.

"Driving by women leads to evil," Munir al-Shahrani wrote in a letter to the editor of the Al-Watan daily. "Can you imagine what it will be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men."

But al-Zulfa contends neither the law nor Islam bans women from driving. Instead, the ban is based on fatwas, or Islamic edicts, by senior clerics who say that any driving by women would create situations for sinful temptation.

In a recent interview with the Egyptian daily, Al-Ahram, Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande said massacres in his country continued unabated under the very nose of the United Nations which has troops stationed in the region and that neither the UN nor the international community had lifted a finger....

But all of a sudden, and as a result of foreign intervention exploiting internal dissent, Darfur province in western Sudan has the world’s attention. The media exaggerated the size of the rebellion portraying what is happening in the province as the largest humanitarian tragedy in the21 st century. Claims of mass murder, rape and other violations of human rights appeared in every media organ and the Khartoum government was attacked as no other government in the world has ever been.

A monitor of African affairs may ask why all this sudden interest in Darfur and this blatant intervention in Sudan’s internal affairs while massacres in Rwanda and other parts of the world were still going on.

Foreign powers have sought by all means to derail the Sudanese peace talks between the north and south before adding fuel to the fire in Darfur. Those powers drove some tribes to rebel against the legitimate government in Khartoum in order to open the door to foreign intervention and the ultimate disintegration of Sudan into tiny tribal entities to serve their strategic interests.

The Sudanese government’s oil policy has stayed more or less the same since the precious commodity was discovered in the south of the country in 1979 by US company Chevron. This policy is based on two major factors: protecting the oil regions from internal conflict and southern armed forces; and exploiting the conflict between the Nuer and Dinka tribes by financing one at the expense of the other in order to maintain a strategic balance in the oil-producing regions.

In Sudan, the deliberate, forcible displacement, without notice or compensation, of tens and even hundreds of thousands of civilians from the southern oil regions in Western Upper Nile/Unity State has occurred during several periods since the discovery of oil in the south, and is still occurring. The means are military, used by government army or government-armed militias against civilian populations in the context of a war that has been going on for almost twenty years. The oilfields have become the “main conflict area” in Sudan, according to the U.N.1603

The government’s military campaign in the oil producing regions was specifically designed to clear the civilian population out of the area to facilitate oil production. In this regard, the oil companies clearly benefited from grave and systematic abuses by the state—without such a vicious displacement campaign, the companies would not be able to operate, or so the government seemed to believe. The government chose to depopulate the areas rather than reach and keep peace agreements or other arrangements with those who lived in and had a historical claim on the land.

The oil operations, on-line since August 1999, have introduced a new source of revenue to a very abusive government, enabling it to increase its expenditures for military and security operations during which egregious rights violations continue to be committed.. After receiving this new income, the government escalated the level of warfare in the south, the Nuba Mountains, and the east, illustrated by the more frequent use of helicopter gunships and increased aerial bombing hitting civilians and civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, relief centers, churches, and schools. The government admitted that it was spending its oil income to build its own arms and munitions factories, and its own budget figures showed that it was spending a substantial chunk of its oil income on defense....

GNPOC and its non-Sudanese members, Talisman Energy, Petronas Carigali, and the China National Petroleum Company; and Lundin, OMV, and Petronas Carigali; operating respectivel in Blocks 1, 2 and 4 and in Block 5A throughout most of the period covered by this report, are not able to avoid complicity in these abuses. They cannot reliably ensure that they and their operations, individually or jointly, do not facilitate or benefit from human rights abuses. Indeed, they operate in the midst of the abuses, arguing that their presence alone, and small-scale development assistance, constitutes responsible corporate behaviour.

For these reasons, Human Rights Watch concludes that the companies are inappropriately operating in Sudan and should suspend their operations unless and until the steps recommended below are taken by both the companies and the government of Sudan.