p h oto by ad r ian wyld/c p

A woman protests outside Talisman Energy’s annual general meeting in Calgary on May 1, 2001. Talisman left Sudan in 2003, but
the company still faces a civil lawsuit filed in the US by the Presbyterian Church of Sudan and a group of Sudanese individuals.

28 A L B E R TA V I E W S J U N E 2 0 0 6
 feature report
big oil on trial:
the story nobody’s
telling
A Calgary energy company is being sued in a New York court for
complicity in genocide. Back home in Alberta,
news organizations are happy to look the other way.
By jeremy klaszus
W
When Ottawa Citizen reporter Kelly Patterson heard
about new evidence being presented in the lawsuit against
Talisman Energy in the US District Court of New York, she
set to work. She got on the phone. She researched. For several
days, she investigated the latest chapter in a long story about
Talisman’s controversial involvement in Sudan.
The Citizen published her story on October 22, 2005,
almost three years to the day after Talisman CEO Jim Buckee
announced his company would be ending its stay in the war-
torn country, having been attacked from all sides for its pres-
ence there. From 1998 to 2003, the company was a 25 per cent
stakeholder in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company
(GNPOC), a consortium that included China’s and Malaysia’s
national oil companies. Talisman sold its holdings to a subsid-
iary of India’s national oil company in 2003.
Patterson’s story focused on a slew of previously confidential
documents that had recently been made public. The lawsuit
had been filed in the New York court on November 8, 2001, by
the Presbyterian Church of Sudan and a group of Sudanese cit-
izens and refugees. The suit names Talisman and the Sudanese
government as co-defendants, alleging they collaborated “in a
brutal ethnic cleansing campaign against a civilian population”
to enhance their “ability to explore and extract oil from areas
of southern Sudan.”
It continues: “The armed campaign, which… has resulted in
massive civilian displacement, the burning of villages, churches
and crops, and the extrajudicial killing and enslavement of inno-
cent civilians, is possible only through Defendants’ collaboration
and the Government’s use of equipment and infrastructure, such
as vehicles, helicopters, aircraft, roads and airfields, owned, char-
tered, constructed and/or maintained by Talisman.”
Talisman denies the allegations, calling them “baseless” and
“demonstrably false.” In court papers, Talisman has argued: “It
is not sufficient to show that Talisman Energy sometimes pro-
vided services to the Government of Sudan, and that it knew or
should have known in some general way that the Government
of Sudan was abusive of human rights…. As a matter of fact,
Talisman Energy never rendered any assistance to the Govern-
ment of Sudan. GNPOC, not Talisman Energy, had facilities
in Sudan.”
Th e Sudanese civil war —fought between the Arab
Muslim north and the mostly Christian and animist south—
has raged on and off since the mid-1950s. There was a hiatus in
the war from 1972 until 1983, but peace agreements collapsed
and fighting broke out again and continued until another
peace agreement was signed in 2005. Between 1983 and 2005,
an estimated two million people were killed and over four mil-
lion displaced.
The war was often portrayed as nothing more than a reli-
A L B E R TA V I E W S J U N E 2 0 0 6 29
 feature report
gious and cultural conflict between Muslims and Christians,
but human rights groups say it was more about resources than
religion. Southern Sudan is “one of the most underdeveloped
regions in the entire world,” according to a 2003 Human Rights
Watch report, even though it sits on vast amounts of oil.
It was into this mess that Talisman walked. Groups such as
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found that oil
revenues—including those that came from Talisman—directly
fuelled the war. When the GNPOC pipeline started operating
in 1999, oil money poured into Sudanese government coffers.
Oil accounted for just over 7 per cent of total government
revenue in 1999. In 2000, the first full year of production for
GNPOC, that number was up to 43 per cent. And as the rev-
enues increased, so did military spending.
Human rights groups also found that civilians were being
killed and driven from their homes near oil concessions.
Canada’s own 1999 fact-finding mission to Sudan found the
same things. “…[T]wo things are certain,” says the govern-
ment-commissioned Harker Report, released in 2000 by a
delegation led by special envoy John Harker. “First, the gun-
ships and Antonovs [Russian cargo planes used as bombers by
the military] which have attacked villages south of the rivers
flew to their targets from the Heglig airstrip in the Talisman
concession. Second, it is a prominent perception of southern
Sudanese that Talisman, ‘the Canadian oil firm,’ is in active col-
“I have watched soldiers going to
the battle be transported in our
company trucks,” reads one e-mail
from an employee in Sudan.
laboration with the GOS [Government of Sudan], economi-
cally, politically and militarily.”
The 300-plus pages Patterson obtained for the Ottawa Citizen
had been submitted by the plaintiffs as part of a failed motion to
elevate their suit to a class action. The documents include inter-
nal company memos and e-mails. Among them is a response
to the Harker Report written in 2000 by Mark Reading, Talis-
man’s security adviser at the time, who described the Sudanese
military’s use of the Heglig airfield­, which GNPOC had paid to
improve. “This bombing most certainly happened… the air-
strip was definitely used during this period to conduct war
against the South, of that there can be no doubt,” he wrote.
The company’s response points out that the Sudanese gov-
ernment, not Talisman, owned the Heglig airfield. Further-
more, it asserts, “there is no indication in any of the documents
or testimony that during the brief period that Antonov bomb-
ers used the government airstrip at Heglig, the Antonovs were
being deployed against civilian populations.” Talisman argues
that the planes were used against rebel groups, which is “con-
duct not violative of international law.”
In some of the e-mails made public, company employees
vividly describe what was happening on the ground in Sudan.
“I watched one of their [military] gunships refuel at our com-
30 A L B E R TA V I E W S J U N E 2 0 0 6
pany fuel tanks today,” says an e-mail dated November 2, 1999,
from Talisman employee Larry O’Sullivan. “I have watch [sic]
soldiers going to the battle be transported in our company
trucks… Nobody can tell me that this oil is not buying more
military power.”
To any reporter worth the notebook they write in, these doc-
uments had news value. The Alberta press, however, ignored
them completely, even though Patterson’s story was read-
ily available to the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald for
republication, since the Citizen, the Herald and the Journal are
all part of the CanWest Global chain.
“I think there were some problems with [the story],” says
Charles Frank, the Herald’s business editor. “There were some
legal issues with it. I think the decision here was that we weren’t
totally comfortable with that story, so we didn’t run it.”
The Citizen, however, was comfortable enough to publish it,
even after Talisman pressured them to fill the space with some-
thing else. “Talisman has a lobbyist who repeatedly phoned the
Citizen,” says Patterson. “He phoned both the business edi-
tor and the editor-in-chief, trying to convince them that we
shouldn’t run the story.”
As for legal issues, Patterson and the Citizen had their lawyer
examine the piece before it hit newsstands and the CanWest
wire. “We went above and beyond to ensure the company’s
point of view was well represented,” she says. “Our lawyers
combed over the copy very carefully.”
Talisman responded swiftly. David Mann, the company’s
senior manager of corporate and investor communications,
wrote a rebuttal, which the Citizen published. Mann chastised
the newspaper for printing “a very select number of excerpts
without proper context.” He denounced the allegations as “out-
rageous and implausible” and explained that Talisman was
being sued under an arcane law put to “imaginative” use.
T
Th e suit is being heard under the US Alien Tort
Claims Act (ATCA), a once-obscure law created in 1789 as
part of the Judiciary Act to extend court jurisdiction to non-
US citizens who violated international law. It’s not clear why
exactly the law was written, but legal scholars suspect the
ATCA applied mostly to pirates in the late 18th century. In
1980, an American judge blew a couple centuries worth of dust
off the law when the relatives of a Paraguay man who was kid-
napped and tortured by a police officer successfully sued the
offender. Since the late 1990s, the law has been used against US
and non-US companies.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Talisman case have already
negotiated settlements in prominent cases under the ATCA.
Both Stephen Whinston and Carey D’Avino were counsel in
suits filed by Holocaust victims against Swiss and German
 talisman
Soldiers from the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) stand guard over captured weapons. Talisman’s facilities and
employees were protected from the SPLA and other rebel groups through a security agreement with the Sudanese military.
banks and other companies for laundering money on behalf
of the Nazis and for supporting Nazi slave labour. Settlements
were reached and the victims were compensated.
“Fortunately for us, human rights law has progressed to a
point… where even governments aren’t allowed to do anything
they want to their own civilians,” says D’Avino. “And since a
sovereign is not allowed to commit certain crimes like geno-
cide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, certainly no
private entity is entitled to be absolved from participation or
aiding and abetting in those crimes.”
D’Avino says that if the Talisman suit goes to trial, “this case
will set landmark precedents with respect to corporate responsi-
bility for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Talisman has tried several ways to get the suit thrown out.
The company has twice argued in court that corporations,
unlike states, are incapable of violating international law. Dis-
trict Judge Allen Schwartz dismissed that argument as illogical
and “anachronistic” in March of 2003.
Another argument the company has repeatedly put for-
ward is that it shouldn’t be tried in US courts, but in Sudan
p h oto by r e ute r s
or Canada. “We are a Canadian company, we were operating
in Sudan, and the plaintiffs have decided to pursue this in a
US court,” says Mann. “But it’s a big, complicated world that
we live in. Our view is that courts in Canada are competent to
address or hear any similar claims.”
When Talisman argued this in New York, Schwartz noted
that an Alberta court would most likely apply “the law of the
place where the activity occurred”—in this case, Sudanese
sharia law. “Under Sudanese law, plaintiffs as non-Muslims
would enjoy greatly reduced rights,” Schwartz wrote in his
landmark opinion dated March 19, 2003, three days before he
died of a heart attack. He concluded that New York was the
most appropriate forum for the suit.
“The case is particularly significant because there’s no equiv-
alent to the ATCA in Canada,” says Craig Forcese, a law profes-
sor at the University of Ottawa. “The prospect of ever actually
litigating a Talisman-like case in Canada is theoretically pos-
sible, but there isn’t an easy way of doing it. It would be tough
and expensive and would require all sorts of new precedent.”
Furthermore, the plaintiffs have pointed out—and the judges
have backed them up—that Talisman is jurisdictionally pres-
ent in the US. Talisman owns Fortuna Inc. and Rigel Petroleum
Inc., two American subsidiary companies. Fortuna is one of
New York State’s largest gas producers. In an August 27, 2004,
opinion, District Judge Denise Cote, who took over the case
after Schwartz died, noted that Fortuna is a “mere department”
of Talisman, with the same board of directors and no employ-
ees of its own. Talisman itself also trades on the New York Stock
Exchange and has a sizable amount of American investment.
“If you’re accessing capital in a US market, then I don’t see
A L B E R TA V I E W S J U N E 2 0 0 6 31
 feature report
why it’s not fair that you should be subject to the jurisdiction of
courts within New York,” says Forcese.
A trial in the Talisman case is tentatively set for January
2007. Until then, Judge Cote has ordered both parties not to try
the case in the media—an order that Mann says frustrates the
company. “This is the conundrum we face,” he explains. “Some
media outlets feel inclined to report on the story even though
it’s before the courts and the judge has said really, she’d like
to have a chance to review the information before the media
assess the merits of the case.”
But Talisman has nothing to worry about in Alberta, where
the story simply doesn’t get covered in the mainstream press,
even though the media are as free to report on this as they are
on any other lawsuit. Investigative reporters at the Citizen and
Toronto Star have written several stories on the case over the last
year, but the last time a Calgary Herald journalist reported on
it was in 2003—unless you include a 145-word business brief
published in the Herald’s “Drill Bits” section in August 2004.
Since then, there has been only a sprinkling of wire stories bur-
ied inside the paper’s business section—and even wire copy is
treated as suspect at the Herald.
“Obviously we have to rely on news services for the cover-
age, and they may or may not be interested and they may have
specific agendas in the coverage,” says Frank. “I think that in
certain places, there are organizations and individuals who are
“I interviewed one little 8-year-
old girl, and a 12-year-old boy.
Each of them had had an arm
blown off,” says Slobodian.
interested in making big oil companies look bad. So that can
colour how you report things.” Frank describes the plaintiffs—
the Presbyterian Church of Sudan and a group of Sudanese citi-
zens and refugees—as a “small special interest group.”
In a 2002 column, Frank complained about the “gaggle of
international do-gooders” opposing Talisman. He condemned
their “tired, inflammatory rhetoric which, unfortunately, has a
way of garnering the attention of some of the less discerning
members of the local and national media.”
Later that year, when Talisman announced it was selling its
Sudan holdings, Frank lamented the company’s departure in
the Herald, praising the corporation as “one of the world’s most
socially responsible oil companies.”
Frank says it’s difficult to cover the case fairly. “Talisman,
because they’re involved in a court case, can’t really comment
on it. So I don’t feel that they’ve had a chance to rebut the
[allegations].”
Mann says it’s his job to ensure balance in coverage of the
case. “Our fundamental responsibility to shareholders, Talis-
man employees and the public at large is to make sure that it’s
clearly stated in any coverage of the lawsuit that first of all, we
haven’t been tried and convicted, and that we have consistently
and will continue to consistently deny these allegations.”
32 A L B E R TA V I E W S J U N E 2 0 0 6
I
I n M arc h 2 0 0 2 , Edmonton 630 CHED reporter Byron
Christopher got his hands on a copy of the plaintiffs’ amended
complaint. Despite the fact that no one else in Edmonton was
reporting on it, Christopher knew it was big.
“How can this not be news?” asks Christopher, a veteran
reporter who covered the Nicaraguan civil war in the early
1980s. “I was shocked when I read the court documents, the
allegations, and the fact that it had not been covered here. What
a big story.”
Christopher discovered first-hand one reason why the case
may have been kept out of headlines and off airwaves. He learned
that the plaintiffs’ lawyers claimed to have a May 7, 1999, memo
from the Sudanese petroleum security office that said mili-
tary forces would conduct “cleaning-up operations” in villages
near the Talisman concessions at the request of “the Canadian
company.” Government forces attacked the area two days later,
wiping out villages and killing civilians. The Harker delegation
found that “roads built by the oil companies enabled [military
vehicles] to reach their destinations more easily than before.”
Christopher says that when he contacted Talisman for com-
ment on the government memo, company spokesperson and
former Calgary Herald reporter Barry Nelson asked for the
spelling of his name and CHED’s address. A letter from Nelson
arrived at the station a few days later stating “the allegation
that Talisman ‘ordered ethnic cleansing in Sudan’ is entirely
false and defamatory and Talisman will vigorously defend itself
from this malicious attack.”
The letter had the desired effect—sort of. The station initially
balked at running the story. (CHED would later broadcast sev-
eral reports on the case.) Christopher, however, was not so eas-
ily dissuaded. When CHED hesitated, he sent the story to the
online alternative newsmagazine rabble.ca, which published it
on March 19, 2002. It would be four more days before the news
appeared in the Calgary Herald in the form of an Associated
Press wire story. The Edmonton Journal didn’t touch it at all.
“The end result is that it’s a lawsuit few people know about,”
says Christopher. “They know more about a lawsuit involving
two movie actors or some damn thing than they do this.”
Christopher was nervous about taking the story to another
news source, but decided it was more important than his or his
employer’s interests. “You’re always afraid,” he says. “But you
have to be honest with readers. They have to know what hap-
pened there…
“I’ve been asked before why I went over the station’s head on
this story, and the answer I always give people is that a report-
er’s first loyalty is to the audience or the readership. I’ve been
questioned about that at staff meetings. They ask, ‘What’s your
loyalty to the company?’ And I say, ‘What do you mean? I have
none. I’m a reporter. My loyalty is to the audience.’ ”
 talisman
During Talisman’s tenure in Sudan, CEO Jim Buckee faced many questions about the company’s activities. He consistently
denied any wrongdoing. Talisman says the allegations made against the company in the New York court are baseless.
While silence now surrounds the Talisman suit,
Alberta’s media haven’t always been this quiet about the com-
pany’s Sudan venture. Like the Herald, the Calgary Sun has
run only a handful of stories on the New York lawsuit, but the
paper did send a columnist to Sudan three times from 1997 to
1999. Linda Slobodian initially went to report on slavery, but
when Talisman moved into the country in 1998, she followed
that story. She came back from her 1999 trip with a damning
account of the company’s presence. In 2000, Slobodian wrote
in the Sun that because of Talisman, “our glorious maple leaf,
which stands for freedom, compassion and justice, is stained.”
Her sharply written, vivid reports of the carnage wreaked by
military bombing in the south seem uncharacteristic of a pub-
lication known more for its scantily clad Sunshine Girls than
its investigative reporting. Slobodian had gone where journal-
ists weren’t supposed to go—into a no-fly zone in the Nuba
Mountains in the south. The government had blocked any kind
of relief to the region, and Slobodian wanted to get the real
p h oto by ad r ian wyld/c p
story of how the Nuba people were being affected.
Slobodian found that the Antonov bombings had caused
immense suffering. “In this one case, we had just got there
and [the military] had just thrown a bomb onto kids who go
to school outside under trees,” says Slobodian, who is now
a senior reporter at the Herald. “There were a bunch of kids
killed. I interviewed two little ones—one little 8-year-old girl,
and a 12-year-old boy. Each of them had had an arm blown off.
This is what people in Sudan were living with every day.”
In a 2000 internal Talisman report made public in the New
York court last year, former company security adviser Mark
Reading described what an Antonov attack is like. “These
bombing runs are extremely terrifying to the people on the
ground because they can hear what is trying to kill them but
cannot see it,” Reading wrote.
“A lot of locals refer to this as ‘whispering death.’ This cer-
tainly is not precision bombing, and as we know, it leads to
many accidents. Schools, hospitals and a whole manner of tar-
gets have been frequently hit.”
Describing the situation in Sudan was no small challenge for
reporters and human rights observers. The Canadian Harker
delegation heard credible reports that when Talisman brought
a group of financial analysts and journalists to the Heglig air-
field in November of 1999, military use of the airstrip was
temporarily stopped. The Harker delegation itself received the
same special treatment when it visited a month later.
“We learned that, I think it was just the day before, they had
moved the Antonovs and the gunships off that airstrip,” says
Georgette Gagnon, a member of the Harker delegation and
the deputy director for Human Rights Watch’s Africa division.
“They moved them somewhere else so that when we got there,
you didn’t see anything.”
A L B E R TA V I E W S J U N E 2 0 0 6 33
 feature report
Documents made public in the New York court show Talis-
man even considered building a separate airfield for the Suda-
nese military, as company employees and management were
clearly uncomfortable with what they saw at Heglig.
A statement by Ian Taylor, Talisman’s former head of com-
munity relations in Sudan, says the new airfield was to be “out
of the sight of journalists and other unsympathetic visitors
to the oil concession area, thus allowing the Sudan military
to continue to expand aerial attacks against civilians without
the knowledge of the general public or international media.”
Before he died of a heart attack in 2004, Taylor wrote to his
brother: “I am haunted by nightmares of what I have witnessed
in Sudan…. I fear constantly both for the Sudanese people I’ve
lived and worked with as well as for my own soul.” In the end,
the company decided not to build the new airfield.
When journalists finally got access beyond the company-
guided tour, Talisman’s version of events on the ground was
found severely wanting. In December of 1999, Buckee was
quoted in the Herald as saying that the company hadn’t seen
any evidence of forced displacement: “We have diligently
investigated these allegations and found them to have no basis
in fact.” But in a story published in the The Globe and Mail later
that month, reporter Stephanie Nolen described child slavery
where Talisman said there was none, displaced people where
Talisman said no one had been displaced, and an absence of
Ottawa has sent two diplomatic
notes to Washington asking for
the Talisman case to be thrown
out of the New York court.
schools or wells where Talisman claimed to have sponsored
community development.
The Harker delegation would later discover that the inves-
tigation cited by Buckee had produced no formal report. Fur-
thermore, the person Talisman assigned to investigate the
displacement had never even been to Pariang, a region where
much of it had occurred. “I interviewed that investigator,” says
Gagnon. “He never went there, he never talked to victims or
witnesses or anything. So you can imagine what the investiga-
tion was like.”
While journalists were blinkered in Sudan, the
Canadian government’s role in the Talisman story went largely
untold in Alberta. It remains untold. Lloyd Axworthy, then
the minister of foreign affairs, sent the Harker delegation to
Sudan in 1999 to discover what was actually happening on the
ground. But as Human Rights Watch has pointed out, by allow-
ing Talisman to stay in Sudan, Canada failed to follow up on
the damning findings of its own report.
More recently, the Canadian government has tried to get the
Talisman suit thrown out of the New York court. Talisman’s
2005 Corporate Responsibility Report says the US Department
of Justice filed a statement of interest in the New York court
34 A L B E R TA V I E W S J U N E 2 0 0 6
“expressing the US government’s view that the lawsuit inter-
feres with US/Canada relations.”
What the report doesn’t say is that Washington filed the state-
ment at Ottawa’s—and ultimately Talisman’s—request. In July
of 2005, Toronto Star scribe Rick Westhead reported that Talis-
man sent a letter to then prime minister Paul Martin’s senior
foreign policy adviser asking the government to intervene on
the company’s behalf. Westhead obtained the letter through
Access to Information.
The Canadian embassy dutifully complied with Talisman’s
request by sending two diplomatic notes to the US Department
of State in 2004 and 2005. The second note, dated January 14,
2005, protested the policy ramifications of US courts exercis-
ing jurisdiction over a Canadian company. The note says the
Talisman suit “creates a ‘chilling effect’ on Canadian firms
engaging in Sudan.”
Upon receiving the second note, Washington filed its state-
ment of interest informing the court that the case frustrates
Canadian foreign policy. “Canada’s judiciary is equipped to
consider claims such as those raised here,” it read. But the
plaintiffs pointed out that Canada’s legal system isn’t at all suf-
ficiently equipped, and that the Canadian government had
consistently “stood mute” on Talisman’s involvement in Sudan.
District Judge Cote emphatically rejected Talisman’s, Ottawa’s
and Washington’s arguments, pointing out that the court had
already decided “Canadian courts are not able to entertain civil
suits for violations” of international law.
Professor Forcese calls the Canadian government’s position
“utterly unpersuasive.”
“The Canadian government is deeply hypocritical on several
levels,” he says. “They’re hypocritical on the specifics of the Tal-
isman case where, by its own admission in terms of the Harker
report from 2000, the Canadian government said this was a
bad thing that was going on, did nothing, and now there’s some
effort to hold Talisman to account and they’re actively resisting
it. It’s quite disturbing.”
Like most elements of this story, the diplomatic notes were
mentioned only in passing in the Alberta press. The newspapers
ran wire stories that cited the work of a reporter in Toronto.
As the Talisman case draws closer to its tentative trial date
of January 2007, it remains to be seen whether the Alberta
media’s silence will be broken. At the Herald, Frank says send-
ing a reporter to New York to cover the trial wouldn’t be out
of the question. “We like to view ourselves as reporting on the
industry in its entirety, so certainly it would be on the table,”
he says. “I think it’s an interesting story, and I think people are
always looking for the story behind the story.”
But if the story behind the story is going to be told in Alberta,
news organizations will have to stop sweeping it under the rug
and start actually reporting on it. “It’s a matter of public inter-
est,” says Forcese. “And as a matter of public interest, it deserves
comment in the media. It’s exactly the sort of issue that needs
to be discussed.” #
Jeremy Klaszus is the contributing editor at Alberta Views.