Harvard announced on Monday that it will sell its stake in PetroChina Company Limited, which has invested over $1 billion in a joint venture with Sudan to increase that country’s oil exports.
Harvard’s decision makes the University the first institutional investor to cut ties with PetroChina in response to the Darfur crisis. Harvard’s statement said that:
This decision reflects deep concerns about the grievous crisis that persists in the Darfur region of Sudan and about the extensive role of PetroChina’s closely affiliated parent company, China National Petroleum Corporation, as a leading partner of the Sudanese government in the production of oil in Sudan.
Oil is a critical source of revenue and an asset of paramount strategic importance to the Sudanese government, which has been found to be complicit in what the U.S. Congress and U.S. State Department have termed "genocide" in Darfur and what a United Nations commission of inquiry recently characterized as "crimes against humanity and war crimes . . . [that] may be no less serious and heinous than genocide."
Harvard’s investment in PetroChina through the New York Stock Exchange exceeds $4 million (Harvard has additional holdings of PetroChina of undisclosed value through the Hong Kong Stock Exchange). The Crimson quotes Samantha Power of the Kennedy School of Government on the potential effect of Harvard’s action:
[She] said that divestment is an "unproven tool" in the effort to deter genocidal regimes, but that Harvard’s move could "unleash a contagion effect."
"This alone is not going to change Darfur. But this sends a very important political signal to the government of China, to the government of Sudan, and to other institutions that are shareholders in Sudan and Sudanese oil investments," Power said.
Harvard blogger James Moore notes that aside from issues of human rights, there is a sound strategic reason for concern about China’s activities in Sudan and their relationship to genocide:
China is truly the west’s next major competitor on the world stage — and China is investing now to shape a very different future from one we would want.
At the center of China’s program to shape the next world, China is securing oil sources for the next decade. China is making a strong push into the Middle East and Africa, as well as South Asia. Sudan provides China’s oil exploration and oil services base in Africa, and the Sudanese oil fields are China’s only major international discovery and production success to date.
The reason that the very shaky government of Sudan can perpetrate a genocide despite strong international condemnation is that it is so uncritically supported by China.
More to the point, China is actively courting Middle East and African oil producing nations, becoming the preferred partner to authoritarians and Islamists who are fearful of the United States. The result is an emerging bloc of nations sharing authoritarian values combined with market capitalism. These nations are becoming the core of a rapidly evolving economic and diplomatic ecosystem whose sphere of influence that quietly but strongly rivals that of the US.
This ought to be an issue that unites liberals and conservatives, realists and idealists, neocons and oldcons. The unity would add even more force to Harvard’s action. But the Crimson reports that reaction to Harvard’s action from the Harvard faculty "wasn’t universally favorable."
John Womack Jr. ’59, Bliss professor of Latin American history and economics, characterized the [Harvard’s] decision as "hypocrisy."
"The University found something that it probably doesn’t have much of a stake in or that it’s ready to sell anyway for its own reasons and has ignored many, many other cases in the past which are on the face of it probably worse," Womack said.
Worse on its face than genocide? What could Professor Womack possibly mean?
Perhaps he just opposes divestment petitions as symbolic actions of uncertain practicality — or thinks that, as a matter of principle, they should never be used, even where (a) both Congress and the Secretary of State have declared that Darfur involves genocide, (b) the UN has found Sudan complicit in systematic crimes against humanity, (c) oil is a strategic asset to Sudan and the source of the funds necessary to its actions in Darfur, and (d) China’s actions raise not only a threat to Darfur but a strategic challenge to the United States as well.
Not likely. Professor Womack is a signatory to the Harvard petition to divest from Israel.