17 June 07 – At 5pm Tuesday 19 June, Labour deputy leadership candidate Peter Hain MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, will address a public meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Genocide Prevention, called to discuss targeted divestment and sanctions on over the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Darfur.
Massive investments by companies
The meeting will see publication of a new dossier on Darfur Divestment by the Aegis Trust, detailing British companies and institutions with holdings in Sudan’s oil sector; Barclays, for example, hold shares to the value of at least £381m in oil companies operating in Sudan. The dossier sets out a strategy for targeted divestment to increase the economic pressure on Khartoum and reduce funding for mass atrocities.
Sudan’s oil revenues have increased seventy-fold in recent years, from US$61m in 1999 to to US$4.5bn in 2006, helping the government to triple military expenditure (between 1997 and 2004) and pay the Janjaweed militia responsible for so much of the killing.
Stopping a racist government’s oppression
Peter Hain, who has been a Government minister since 1997, was a strong advocate of boycotts and other action against the apartheid regime in during the 1970s and 1980s.
“The boycott of during apartheid helped to stop a racist government oppressing its black population, and proved what can be achieved when people take a moral stand against human rights abuses,” he says. “The international Darfur divestment campaign, on which Aegis has taken a valuable lead, can have the same effect in.”
Eight countries have now initiated targeted Darfur divestment campaigns. Four companies – ABB of Switzerland, Siemens of Germany, Rolls Royce of the , and CHC Helicopter of Canada, have withdrawn recently from , largely in response to the Darfur divestment movement.
As with the proposed Oil Trust Fund, recently put forward by the Aegis Trust and Human Rights Watch, the Darfur Divestment campaign is designed to minimise adverse humanitarian consequences by excluding development and humanitarian projects from being targeted. An Early Day Motion about the Oil Trust Fund, tabled by John Bercow MP, will be on the order paper by Tuesday morning.
