When Will Fidelity Investments stop funding Sudans civil war?
Fidelity holds some five million shares of stock in Canadian-based Talisman Energy, Inc., making it the company’s largest private investor. By virtue of that investment, Boston’s mutual-fund giant is supporting a company that contributes to slavery, murder, and famine in southern Sudan. Since 1955, Sudan has been ripped apart by a bitter civil war: north versus south, Arabs versus Africans, Muslims versus Christians and animists. With the backing of the government in Khartoum, the northern Arab Muslims have long held the upper hand in this war, displacing and even enslaving southern Africans (see “Africa’s Invisible Slaves,” News, June 30, 1995). Since 1983, the most recent phase of the war has been fueled in part by the desire to control the southern Sudanese oil fields discovered by Chevron in the 1970s. The government in Khartoum has made no secret of its desire to amass oil profits, with which it can buy helicopters, tanks, bombs, and guns to use on its southern neighbors. Indeed,
