Sources
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88

 
TAZARA ... a journey by rail through world-history © KJS / 2009
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CHAPTER 66



Do you know what a „BLOG“ is, Dag? Did not exist in your time …
A BLOG contains many words that everyone who wants it can write online so that everyone who wants it can read them online — digital ciphers on flickering monitors, a personal diary accessible on the World Wide Web as a log-book of private thoughts about public events, often bizarre, sometimes propagandist …


2 You want to know whether these records are, ultimately, not a deception of the path that you have described yourself for your life? These records …

O yes, Dag, your diary, handwritten, as we presume, as part of your heritage given to a friend …
2 When he had it published in Stockholm under the title „Vägmärken“ the book had a sensational success although it should have disappointed expectations. Nothing of politics, nothing of economics or of society from that world that was your home as descendant of an old family of Swedish nobility. Many were baffled to meet instead of a cool and tight-lipped politician a religious thinker, a man of meditation and prayer, a „Christian Statesman“, a poet …

2 … were marks along the way, erected once you had reached a point where you would need them as fixed points that were not to loose. And as that, they remained. But your life has changed, and now you have to calculate with possible readers. Perhaps, you even hope for them! For some, it may have a meaning to trace the path of destiny of someone who did not want to talk about it as long as he was alive. Yes, but only if your words are sincere, beyond vanity and self-admiration.

Well, „BLOGS“ of the Internet-age are rather talkative — but, above all, uncensored. With regard to the latter, they can form sometimes a corrective of … how was it called earlier on?

CONTROL! REPLAY OF YOUR OWN WORDS, PLEASE!

… digital ciphers on flickering monitors do lead into a fictitious world manipulated by specialised handymen of ageless profiteers of conflicts in the real world.

Thank you! Such a „weB-LOG“ is now flickering on our monitor.
Everything that we heard so far about the SUDAN was, more or less, a quotation of male writers only: Karl May for example, or Wilbur Smith. Therefore, we proudly present now a female addition, please welcome:
Frau Martina Kausch from Neunkirchen in Germany — maintaining the WeB-LOG „Kausch & Friends“ where she noticed:.


That Sudan’s borders have been drawn artificially and not formed in wars of conquest can be established with one brief gaze on the map: they run along a ruler and are mostly rectangular. Such type of borders provide a first hint that foreign powers have agreed on them, more or less peacefully, with neighbouring colonial powers. Another hint you may find in a history-book that would be bold enough to focus on Africa’s history …

„The Scramble for Africa! — Does it tell you something, Miss? — The race for the juiciest slices of African roast meat, cut precisely by a carving knife.
That was my time! If you draw a line from Cape Town to Cairo, that’s what I did, and you draw another line from Dakar in West Africa to the Horn of Africa in the East, that’s how the French would have loved to do, then both lines intersect in Easter Sudan, near the town of Fashoda, explaining its strategic importance. The French east-west axis and the British north-south axis could not co-exist; the nation that could occupy and hold the crossing of the two axes would be the only one able to proceed with its plan.
A French force of just 120 soldiers and 7 French officers set out from Brazzaville under Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand with orders to secure the area around Fashoda as a French protectorate. They were to be met there by two expeditions coming from the east across Ethiopia, one of which, from Djibouti.
After an epic 14-month trek across the heart of Africa, the Marchand Expedition arrived on 10 July 1898, but the other Expedition failed to make it after being ordered by the Ethiopians to halt, and then suffering accidents in the Baro Gorge.
On 18 September, a powerful flotilla of British gunboats arrived at the isolated Fashoda fort, led by Sir Herbert Kitchener. As the commander of the Anglo-Egyptian army that had just defeated the forces of the Mahdi at the Battle of Omdurman, he was in the process of re-conquering the Sudan in the name of the Egyptian Khedive. Both sides were polite but insisted on their right to Fashoda.
At the end, Kitchener’s better nerves helped grandmamma to turn the draw into a victory. After some more failed efforts, the French government quietly ordered its soldiers to withdraw. In March 1899, the French and British agreed that the source of the Nile and the Congo rivers should mark the frontier between their spheres of influence. …

Grandmamma? …

„Well, that has always been my name for my old homeland, for Britain’s power. I know that some people believed I would think of Queen Victoria, quite often called ‚Europe’s Grandmother‘; through her nine children she was related with almost every European nobility — the German Kaiser was her grandson!
But for me it was rather ‚Britannia who rules the world‘.
I lived in an epoch of splendour with greatest expansion of political power, with economic prosperity, with imperial expansion, with India as an Empire! …“

… and with cultural shallowness and Victorian prudery, Mr. Rhodes, which somehow — as we are still going to learn — had repercussions on your heritage! …
Frau Kausch, please, continue on your BLOG.


Why am I focussing on Sudan?
In Western Sudan, there is the region of Dafur which, a couple of years ago (2003) was in the centre of media interest. We are all remembering the pictures, or not?
In the Sudan, there is not much than sand and OIL! And this gives me an opportunity to provide a little hint how economy and politics are working bag to bag, and hand to hand.
(And should you visit me on the Web, you’ll find all sources nicely organised to be clickable!)
In 1977, Texas-based „Chevron“ (Texaco-Group) found during test-drills South of the Nuba-Mountain range rich oil-sources. That mobilized the Sudanese government to re-draft borders of the federal regions in order to bring these oil-sources under the control of the North. Unfortunately, people living in these areas had to be driven away because government wanted fast drilling and fast filling of its coffers.
But due to the fact that fighting in the area continued, „Chevron“ sold in 1983 its concessions to Canadian „Arakis Oil Corporation“, which holds one quarter of the concession since. Another forty per cent are held by Chinese companies, thirty per cent by Malayan companies, the rest by government-controlled Sudanese companies. French, Austrian and U.S.-companies got also some concessions.
The project to construct a pipeline between the oil-region and Port Said received in 1983 two loans by the German „Federal Ministry of Economical Cooperation“ (BMZ).
Production by Chinese, Malayan, Canadian and Swedish companies started in 1999 under heavy military protection. The result in 2000 was eight million tons of crude oil; the net-income for the government in this year was calculated at three hundred million dollar.
Okay, at this turn I interrupt for a personal remark: Do you remember the pictures we saw a couple of years ago on our screens? Do you remember the well-fed, well-clothed children who looked with their great eyes into the cameras? Do you remember the excellently built houses and tents in which the inhabitants of that country lived?
No? You only remember starvation and misery? Think, what may have happened to the three hundred million U.S.-dollars of oil-profit…
In 1999, a research, organized by the Canadian government, focussed on consequences of the forced oil drilling for environment and civil population. The results were horrible: intensified fighting in the area, escape and expulsion of people, slave-type labour conditions, burnt soil …
Of course, all quotes above are deformed and taken out of their context. That’s why I try to find out what our government, that is the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, does say about the reasons for the misery in Dafur. — I read:

„Traditionally, African tribes which are resident in Dafur, for example Fur, Zaghawa and Massalit, compete with Arab-nomads for scarce resources. Such tensions were controlled for a long time through established traditional mechanisms of conflict solving. The conflict, however, was aggravated since the 80s through shrinking of pastureland and water resources caused by desertification and spells of drought. In addition, there is the government’s drive for Arabization that uses the existing potential for conflict to pursue own interests
The Janjaweed-militia undertook, partly in close cooperation with the Sudanese government and without fear of punishment, most serious crimes against humanity and atrocities against civil population. A commission of inquiry, established by the UN Secretary General, reported mass executions, mass rape, expulsion and forced hindrance of return of refugees to their villages. The Sudanese government also blocked over many months efficient humanitarian assistance for Dafur.
The commission’s report of 2005 clarifies that military actions by the Sudanese army were directed not that much against targets of rebels but rather undertaken to terrorize civil population. But rebels are guilty as well of serious crimes against humanity and of war crimes. The Darfur-conflict has cost so far an estimated 200.000 lives.“

All this, I am told by Berlin’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Internet.
Do you read anywhere anything about oil? I didn’t … I only found information about ethnic conflicts and disputes about pastureland and water, about malicious rebels and an even more malicious government. No word about the real reason why the population was driven away: to get access to the oil-sources …
I am thrilled now to find out whom I have disappointed again — only because I am warning not to agree immediately with every demonstration of solidarity.
We have to reflect our own system, our own claims, our own way of life in principle! But, perhaps, we are not ready to do it.
With every click on this keyboard, with every CD I am burning, with every kilometre I drive by car, with every packing I tear open, I am supporting activities as described above: to produce such packing you need oil, to produce a CD you need oil …
Do you guess where I am driving at?
And this beginning of thinking does not taste well, isn’t it?


Thank you, Frau Kausch! And we seem to guess whose taste you did not meet in any case — isn‘t it, Mr. Rockefeller? Catchword CHEVRON!

By 1911, with public outcry at a climax, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Standard Oil must be dissolved under the Sherman Antitrust Act and split into 34 companies. Two of these companies were Jersey Standard (Standard Oil Company of New Jersey), which eventually became Exxon, and Socony (Standard Oil Company of New York), which eventually became Mobil.
Over the next few decades, both companies grew significantly. Jersey Standard, led by Walter C. Teagle, became the largest oil producer in the world. It acquired a 50 percent share in Humble Oil & Refining Co., a Texas oil producer. Socony purchased a 45 percent interest in Magnolia Petroleum Co., a major refiner, marketer and pipeline transporter. In 1931, Socony merged with Vacuum Oil Co., an industry pioneer dating back to 1866, and a growing Standard Oil spin-off in its own right.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Jersey Standard had oil production and refineries in Indonesia but no marketing network. Socony-Vacuum had Asian marketing outlets supplied remotely from California. In 1933, Jersey Standard and Socony-Vacuum merged their interests in the region into a 50-50 joint venture. Standard-Vacuum Oil Co., or Stanvac, operated in 50 countries, from East Africa to New Zealand, before it was dissolved in 1962.
Other Standard Oil break-up companies include Standard Oil of Ohio which became SOHIO, Standard Oil of Indiana which became Amoco after other mergers and a name change in the 1980s, Standard Oil of California became the CHEVRON CORPORATION.


And what happened to Chevron in Sudan?
1977, oil found close to the Nuba Mountains!
1983, concession sold to Canadians?
Because of ongoing fighting in the region?
Twenty years later, a Chinese majority sits at Sudan’s oil sources?
Another management-failure to be ironed out by Room 5600?



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