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Equatorial Guinea has long been one
of the poorest and most neglected nations on the planet, but within
a few years the country could be producing as much as 500,000
barrels a day--one per capita--which would make it sub-Saharan
Africa's third-largest producer behind Nigeria and Angola. Thanks to
oil, Equatorial Guinea's economy is projected to grow by 34 percent
this year, more than twice the rate of any other nation's. It is
also thanks to oil that under George Bush there's been a slow but
steady blossoming of relations between the United States, which buys
almost two-thirds of Equatorial Guinea's petroleum, and the
government of Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who took
power in a coup in 1979.
Musselman, an affable, balding man
wearing a blue dress shirt and cowboy boots embossed with his
initials, describes himself as "an unabashed fan" of Equatorial
Guinea, and it's easy to see why. Dallas-based Triton was founded by
William Lee, who ran the firm until 1993, when Triton was accused (and
later convicted) of bribing Indonesian government officials.
Musselman took charge five years later, after putting together a
$350 million rescue package, but Triton was still floundering until
it made a big oil strike here in 1999. Largely due to its Equatorial
Guinea stake, Triton was recently purchased by oil giant Amerada
Hess, and Musselman is here with that company's chairman, John Hess,
for meetings with Obiang.
What makes Equatorial Guinea
especially important today, Musselman says, is political turmoil in
the Persian Gulf and other regions from which the United States
imports petroleum. "There is plenty of instability in the world, and
the more diverse supplies of oil we have, the better off things
are," he says. "Knock on wood, this country is stable and the
president is sincerely trying to improve things. It's not going to
turn into suburban Washington, but it could be a model for this part
of the world."
With its newfound oil wealth and
tiny population, Equatorial Guinea could indeed be a model in a
region known for dictatorial rule and gross corruption. But that
prospect seems unlikely given that the Obiang regime is generally
considered to rank among the world's worst--an assessment shared not
only by human rights groups but also the CIA. The agency's current
World Factbook says that America's new strategic partner is a
country "ruled by ruthless leaders who have badly mismanaged the
economy." From outside the villa walls, it's easy to see how the CIA
reached that conclusion.
Bringing the Oil
Home
During the cold war, the United
States viewed Africa as a major battleground with the Soviet Union
and poured billions of dollars of economic and military aid into the
continent. After the collapse of Communism, though, American
interest waned. As recently as 1995, a Pentagon report concluded
that the United States had "very little traditional strategic
interests in Africa." But during the past few years, Africa has
become a growing source of American oil imports--especially West
Africa, which in oil parlance is considered to include Angola as
well as Nigeria, Congo Republic, Gabon, Cameroon and now Equatorial
Guinea. The United States already buys 15 percent of its oil from
West Africa--nearly as much as comes from Saudi Arabia--a figure
expected to grow to 20 percent within the next five years and,
according to the National Intelligence Council, to as high as 25
percent by 2015.
The Bush Administration's national
energy policy, released last May, predicted that West Africa would
become "one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for the
American market." The year before, Paul Michael Wihbey of
Washington's Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
described West Africa as "an area of vital US interest" in testimony
before Congress. He proposed the creation of a new South Atlantic
Military Command that would "permit the US Navy and armed forces to
more easily project power to defend American interests and allies in
West Africa." The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon further heightened American attention to Africa, with
national security planners urging that the United States seek to
diversify supplies of oil away from the Middle East.
There's been virtually no public
discussion or debate about America's growing appetite for West
African oil, though it has significant economic, military and
geopolitical implications. While these countries are not Islamic
regimes--a fact frequently emphasized by American strategists--US
allies in West Africa are not especially attractive. In Angola,
petroleum revenues have allowed the government of José Eduardo dos
Santos to build a vast military and internal security apparatus.
Other than oil, Angola produces little besides artificial limbs for
war victims, but dos Santos has become by some estimates one of the
world's fifty richest people. Nigeria, though it formally made the
transition from military dictatorship to democratic rule in 1999, is
also a disaster. The army has committed several massacres of
civilians since President Olusegun Obasanjo took power, and a
parliamentary report recently accused his administration of
corruption and ineptitude. "The Middle East presents a number of
problems, but most West African regimes are neither stable nor
democratic," says Terry Karl, a professor of political science at
Stanford University and author of The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms
and Petro-States. "Oil development in that context is likely to
buffer authoritarian rule and foster corruption, instability and
environmental destruction."
None of this has dimmed West
Africa's allure in foreign policy circles. In January the Council on
Foreign Relations hosted an event on the growing importance of
Africa ("America's Response to Terrorism: Managing Africa's Oil
Revenues in a Changing Global Climate"), and Wihbey's institute held
a similar affair. The latter, at downtown Washington's tony
University Club, was attended by oil company executives, Bush
Administration officials, corporate lobbyists and representatives
from a number of African embassies, including Teodoro Biyogo Nsue,
Equatorial Guinea's ambassador to the United States (and General
Obiang's brother-in-law). Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs Walter Kansteiner gave the introductory talk, which had the
vague ring of a revival meeting sermon. "African oil is a national
strategic interest," he told the crowd. "It's people like you who
will...bring the oil home." Other speakers included Lieut. Col.
Karen Kwiatkowski, an Air Force officer assigned to the Defense
Secretary's office, who said the United States needs to step up
military training for African oil producers so that those countries
can "secure their property, their investment and our investment."
__________________________________
Washington and
Malabo: The Ice Age
Not so long ago, Equatorial Guinea
didn't register as even the tiniest blip on Washington's radar
screen. Roughly the size of Maryland, the country is composed of a
few islands--including Bioko, home to Malabo--and a square of land
on the continent wedged between Gabon and Cameroon. Average life
expectancy is 54; malaria, yellow fever and other diseases are
rampant; and much of the population is engaged in subsistence
farming of rice, yams and bananas.
The political picture is as grim as
the economic one. The only former Spanish colony in sub-Saharan
Africa, Equatorial Guinea gained independence in 1968. The country's
first ruler was Francisco Macias Nguema, a West African version of
Idi Amin who banned opposition parties and in 1970 appointed himself
"President for Life"--the first of a string of self-decreed titles
that included "Leader of Steel," "Implacable Apostle of Freedom" and
"The Sole Miracle of Equatorial Guinea." As many as 50,000 people,
roughly 10 percent of the population, were murdered during the
Macias years--some were crucified along the road to the airport, for
the benefit of visiting diplomats--and 80,000 fled the country. In
1979 the Sole Miracle was overthrown and subsequently executed by
Obiang, his nephew.
Obiang was no reformer: As head of
the National Guard and later commander of the armed forces, he
played a major role in carrying out the terrible repression of the
Macias years. And while he hasn't ruled as brutally as his
predecessor, he's been sufficiently cruel that one Western diplomat
has called him "a known murderer." The State Department's most
recent report on worldwide human rights, released March 4, says that
the government employs "the psychological effects of arrest, along
with the fear of beatings and harassment, to intimidate opposition
party officials and members," and that the country has never had a
"free, fair and transparent" election. A case in point was Obiang's
"re-election" to a seven-year term in 1996, which he won with 99.2
percent of the vote. Three years later his ruling Democratic Party
of Equatorial Guinea won seventy-five of eighty seats contested in
national legislative elections that were flagrantly rigged.
Obiang's economic record is also
abysmal, and only the discovery of oil has prevented the country
from sinking into complete misery. "It's a corrupt, rotten
government," says Frank Ruddy, US ambassador to Equatorial Guinea
during the Reagan years. "The people there deserve better than the
crooks they've got."
For years US officials looked upon
the country as a laughingstock. Ruddy told the story of how one of
Obiang's top aides, who was fortunate to benefit from diplomatic
immunity, was once stopped at New York's JFK airport with a suitcase
full of marijuana. The police had little trouble making the bust:
The aide's bag had a hole in the side, and he was trailing pot as he
strolled through the terminal. There's a story famous in CIA circles
about how two of Obiang's intelligence operatives came to Washington
in the mid-1980s to meet top agency officials. The Guineans went
shopping at a suburban Virginia mall beforehand and came to the
meeting dressed in identical outfits: black business suits and
electric Nike sneakers.
A less amusing illustration of the
Obiang regime's nature came in 1994, when the US ambassador in
Malabo, John Bennett, was threatened with death after calling for
improved human rights conditions. The threat came in a message
thrown from the window of a passing vehicle--which eyewitnesses said
was driven by a government official--that warned Bennett, "You will
go to America as a corpse." Two years later, the Clinton
Administration shut down the US Embassy in Malabo, and relations
have been handled from Cameroon ever since.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020422/silverstein/2
_____________________________________________
The Thaw
Just a few weeks after the embassy
closed its doors, several US companies found significant petroleum
reserves off the coast of Equatorial Guinea. Subsequent discoveries
led firms such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, as well as small
independents like Ocean Energy, Vanco and Triton, to invest a
collective $5 billion in Equatorial Guinea. Sweetening the deal for
the oil companies is the fact that the Obiang regime gave them as
much as 87 percent of the oil receipts. (That figure has now dropped
to about 75 percent, but it's still far above what they get in much
of the Third World, which is frequently 50 percent or less.)
As US economic interests grew, a
slow political shift in Washington-Malabo relations emerged. In June
of 2000, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation approved $373
million in loan guarantees for construction of a methanol plant in
Equatorial Guinea, its largest program ever in sub-Saharan Africa.
Two US companies--Noble Affiliates and Marathon--together hold an 86
percent share in the plant. Five months later, Louisiana
Representative William Jefferson led the first-ever Congressional
delegation to Equatorial Guinea, taking along representatives of
Baton Rouge-based Shaw Global Energy Services. Several Congressional
staffers also traveled to the country, among them Malik Chaka, a top
aide to Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House Subcommittee
on Africa. "There's still a great deal of room for improvement in
terms of democracy and transparency, but they are desirous of closer
relations with the United States," he says. "We need to take
advantage of that by working with them."
In general, though, the Clinton
Administration did little to improve relations with Obiang. The
primary reason, according to oil company officials, was opposition
from Susan Rice, Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs. "Obiang began to reach out in the late 1990s to improve his
image, but there was little to suggest that there was any substance
to it," she recounted during a recent interview. "Equatorial Guinea
was a poster child of undemocratic practices."
All independent observers of
Equatorial Guinea share that assessment. Freedom House, the
conservative human rights organization, lumps the country in a group
with North Korea, Burma, Iraq and a few other pariahs as the world's
most oppressive regimes. The State Department's human rights report
states, "The government's human rights record remained poor.... The
security forces committed numerous abuses, including torture,
beating, and other physical abuse of prisoners and suspects."
A Bush official I spoke to said he
didn't see any signs of improvement in the Obiang regime's
practices, and he asserted that the Administration will not ignore
human rights violations to accommodate the oil industry. "Our policy
is to advance human rights and democracy," he said. "There's no
trade-off here."
Despite such talk, there's been a
marked if unpublicized improvement in Washington-Malabo ties since
Bush took office. Last November Bush quietly authorized the opening
of a new US Embassy in Malabo (one site being considered is on land
owned by the oil companies), a huge victory for the Obiang regime. A
well-placed government source told me that the Administration will
soon remove Equatorial Guinea from a list of fourteen African
nations that are barred on human rights grounds from receiving trade
benefits under a bill passed by Congress in 2000. Meanwhile, the
State Department has given the green light--barring unforeseen
Congressional opposition--to a program under which Military
Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), a private firm led by
high-ranking Pentagon retirees, will train a Guinean Coast Guard
that can protect the offshore oilfields. "They do have a poor human
rights record, but so did the Nazi government, and we did pretty
well with Germany after World War II," says retired general Ed
Soyster, a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who works
at MPRI.
The political thaw has come in
response to intense lobbying from the oil industry, which has sought
to portray Obiang as a born-again reformer and, more credibly,
Equatorial Guinea as a potentially huge new source of oil. "For a
long time our relationship with Equatorial Guinea revolved around
human rights," one oil company official told me. "That's a
legitimate concern, but now that the energy picture is changing,
that introduces something to balance out the dialogue."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020422/silverstein/3
__________________________________________
"We've found in excess of 500
million barrels of oil here, and we expect that to grow to at least
1 billion--and that's not to say that we won't find more. This is
one of the hottest spots in the world right now." The speaker is Jim
Musselman, head of Triton Energy, and the spot he's talking about is
Equatorial Guinea, a tiny nation located on the west coast of Africa.
We're sitting in the front room of his comfortably appointed
government villa in the capital city of Malabo, and though it's
blistering hot outside, the villa's interior is pleasantly cool.
It's one of dozens that the government, flush with oil revenues, has
built for visiting foreign dignitaries and businessmen, and that sit
inside a walled compound guarded by soldiers posted in towers spaced
alongside the perimeter.
Equatorial Guinea has long been one
of the poorest and most neglected nations on the planet, but within
a few years the country could be producing as much as 500,000
barrels a day--one per capita--which would make it sub-Saharan
Africa's third-largest producer behind Nigeria and Angola. Thanks to
oil, Equatorial Guinea's economy is projected to grow by 34 percent
this year, more than twice the rate of any other nation's. It is
also thanks to oil that under George Bush there's been a slow but
steady blossoming of relations between the United States, which buys
almost two-thirds of Equatorial Guinea's petroleum, and the
government of Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who took
power in a coup in 1979.
Musselman, an affable, balding man
wearing a blue dress shirt and cowboy boots embossed with his
initials, describes himself as "an unabashed fan" of Equatorial
Guinea, and it's easy to see why. Dallas-based Triton was founded by
William Lee, who ran the firm until 1993, when Triton was accused (and
later convicted) of bribing Indonesian government officials.
Musselman took charge five years later, after putting together a
$350 million rescue package, but Triton was still floundering until
it made a big oil strike here in 1999. Largely due to its Equatorial
Guinea stake, Triton was recently purchased by oil giant Amerada
Hess, and Musselman is here with that company's chairman, John Hess,
for meetings with Obiang.
What makes Equatorial Guinea
especially important today, Musselman says, is political turmoil in
the Persian Gulf and other regions from which the United States
imports petroleum. "There is plenty of instability in the world, and
the more diverse supplies of oil we have, the better off things
are," he says. "Knock on wood, this country is stable and the
president is sincerely trying to improve things. It's not going to
turn into suburban Washington, but it could be a model for this part
of the world."
With its newfound oil wealth and
tiny population, Equatorial Guinea could indeed be a model in a
region known for dictatorial rule and gross corruption. But that
prospect seems unlikely given that the Obiang regime is generally
considered to rank among the world's worst--an assessment shared not
only by human rights groups but also the CIA. The agency's current
World Factbook says that America's new strategic partner is a
country "ruled by ruthless leaders who have badly mismanaged the
economy." From outside the villa walls, it's easy to see how the CIA
reached that conclusion.
Bringing the Oil
Home
During the cold war, the United
States viewed Africa as a major battleground with the Soviet Union
and poured billions of dollars of economic and military aid into the
continent. After the collapse of Communism, though, American
interest waned. As recently as 1995, a Pentagon report concluded
that the United States had "very little traditional strategic
interests in Africa." But during the past few years, Africa has
become a growing source of American oil imports--especially West
Africa, which in oil parlance is considered to include Angola as
well as Nigeria, Congo Republic, Gabon, Cameroon and now Equatorial
Guinea. The United States already buys 15 percent of its oil from
West Africa--nearly as much as comes from Saudi Arabia--a figure
expected to grow to 20 percent within the next five years and,
according to the National Intelligence Council, to as high as 25
percent by 2015.
The Bush Administration's national
energy policy, released last May, predicted that West Africa would
become "one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for the
American market." The year before, Paul Michael Wihbey of
Washington's Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
described West Africa as "an area of vital US interest" in testimony
before Congress. He proposed the creation of a new South Atlantic
Military Command that would "permit the US Navy and armed forces to
more easily project power to defend American interests and allies in
West Africa." The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon further heightened American attention to Africa, with
national security planners urging that the United States seek to
diversify supplies of oil away from the Middle East.
There's been virtually no public
discussion or debate about America's growing appetite for West
African oil, though it has significant economic, military and
geopolitical implications. While these countries are not Islamic
regimes--a fact frequently emphasized by American strategists--US
allies in West Africa are not especially attractive. In Angola,
petroleum revenues have allowed the government of José Eduardo dos
Santos to build a vast military and internal security apparatus.
Other than oil, Angola produces little besides artificial limbs for
war victims, but dos Santos has become by some estimates one of the
world's fifty richest people. Nigeria, though it formally made the
transition from military dictatorship to democratic rule in 1999, is
also a disaster. The army has committed several massacres of
civilians since President Olusegun Obasanjo took power, and a
parliamentary report recently accused his administration of
corruption and ineptitude. "The Middle East presents a number of
problems, but most West African regimes are neither stable nor
democratic," says Terry Karl, a professor of political science at
Stanford University and author of The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms
and Petro-States. "Oil development in that context is likely to
buffer authoritarian rule and foster corruption, instability and
environmental destruction."
None of this has dimmed West
Africa's allure in foreign policy circles. In January the Council on
Foreign Relations hosted an event on the growing importance of
Africa ("America's Response to Terrorism: Managing Africa's Oil
Revenues in a Changing Global Climate"), and Wihbey's institute held
a similar affair. The latter, at downtown Washington's tony
University Club, was attended by oil company executives, Bush
Administration officials, corporate lobbyists and representatives
from a number of African embassies, including Teodoro Biyogo Nsue,
Equatorial Guinea's ambassador to the United States (and General
Obiang's brother-in-law). Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs Walter Kansteiner gave the introductory talk, which had the
vague ring of a revival meeting sermon. "African oil is a national
strategic interest," he told the crowd. "It's people like you who
will...bring the oil home." Other speakers included Lieut. Col.
Karen Kwiatkowski, an Air Force officer assigned to the Defense
Secretary's office, who said the United States needs to step up
military training for African oil producers so that those countries
can "secure their property, their investment and our investment."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020422/silverstein/ |
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