March 9, 2002	Saturday	Zilhaj 24, 1422

NGOP (Sudan): Under the drone of a government bomber circling overhead, the village of Ngop in oil-rich Western Upper Nile lies as quiet as the grave. Its entire population fled after four women and two children died during an aerial bombardment. Inside a straw hut sliced by shrapnel, the outline of the body of a child is still etched in blood in the sand.

A few miles away, Wahamed Duar shelters from the blazing sun under a thorn bush where he now lives with his wife Nyadar. For the second time in two years he has been blasted out of his home near Rier, site of the most productive oilfields in Western Upper Nile.

“They bombed with helicopter gunships all day long, from morning to night,” he said. “Then soldiers came and took all our properties. They took women and children and burned the village. They took all the cows. If they caught you, they cut your throat.”

In recent weeks the government has unleashed a ground and air offensive to create a “cordon sanitaire” around the oilfields, the most active front line in the 18-year war between Sudan’s Islamist rulers and the African rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Paradoxically, the cause of the offensive is a peace agreement between two southern factions, the SPLA and the Sudan People’s Democratic Front whose new unity poses an unprecedented threat to the government’s control of oil in the region. The agreement not only ended a “period of cooperation” between the Khartoum government and the SPDF, it resulted in the formation of a joint southern rebel force to attack the government’s most valuable resource — oil.

CONVOY DESTROYED: Facing strong new military opposition from the rebels, Sweden’s Lundin Oil suspended its activities in Western Upper Nile on January 22. A few days later, the rebels destroyed a government convoy trying to secure the road to the oilfields.

“The forces of the SPLA control the oil road,” Commander Gadet of the SPLA said. “The company cannot use the road. Any cars we see, we shoot. Now southerners are getting together, making politics and war together.”

Relying heavily on air power, government troops and militias attacked and burned villages close to the oilfields and the oil road, driving ordinary people from all areas previously controlled by the SPDF. To swell the ranks of Khartoum’s army, southern males were rounded up all over the government-controlled north and forced into military service.

Gabriel Leih, a middle-aged man press-ganged last month as he travelled to Khartoum with his family, succeeded in escaping during a battle in Western Upper Nile. He said his orders had been to “defeat the SPLA to open the oilfields. Burn the villages! Loot anything you find in front of you — children, women, cattle!”.

Sudan’s civil war, which has taken more than two million lives and displaced more than four million people, gained a new dimension in 1999 with the successful exploitation of oil by foreign companies in the south, and the opening of a pipeli