City takes stand against Sudan

Charlottesville will not invest in companies that do business with the Sudanese government, the City Council decided Monday, indicating its disapproval of the east African government’s actions in Darfur.

“We should not be supporting dictatorial regimes,” Councilor Satyendra Huja said in an interview. “It’s one way of showing our displeasure.”

The city’s actions follow 27 states and 19 other cities in adopting divestment policies from Sudan to ensure they do not monetarily support businesses that sustain Sudan’s oil, power, mineral and military sectors. The U.S. government says assets from those areas have been used to enable genocide in Darfur.

“The world is linked economically,” said Laura Harris, president of UVa’s Students Taking Action Now: Darfur and one of the resolution’s authors. “It’s a matter of choosing to regulate that interaction in a conscious manner.”

Charlottesville’s resolution, co-proposed in the spring by two University of Virginia students, was crafted from a similar proclamation passed by the university’s Board of Visitors in 2006.

On Aug. 28, the city’s Retirement Commission passed an amendment to the investment policy that would stop investments in multinational companies that directly support the activities of Sudan’s government.

A preliminary investigation of Charlottesville’s $87 million in investments revealed that the city does not hold any stock and does not have mutual fund exposure to any company that collaborates with the Sudanese regime of Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

“We’re going to do what we can do to stop what’s going on over there,” said Bernard Wray, Charlottesville’s finance director and a member of commission.

Since 2003, the regime and local Arab militias, known as janjaweed, have carried out a treacherous campaign against non-Arab residents of Darfur, a western region of the country. The United Nations estimates the death toll from the conflict at 300,000, with more than 2.5 million people displaced from their homes.

The violent actions taken by the janjaweed in collaboration with Sudan’s government inspired Congress to pass a law in December 2007 encouraging state and local governments to adopt Sudan divestment measures to boost economic pressure on the regime. A divestment bill passed the Virginia Senate earlier this year but died in a House subcommittee.

Charlottesville officials have passed similar resolutions previously — in the 1980s, the City Council put in a place a divestment policy toward the apartheid regime in South Africa. But activists say divestment policies are becoming more important in an increasingly globalized economy.

“There are clear ties showing that the Sudanese government uses a lot of the money they get to buy arms for the janjaweed,” Harris said.

According to a report from the Genocide Intervention Network’s Sudan Divestment Task Force, more than 70 percent of the country’s oil revenues go to its military expenditures.

“As long as you’re making international investments, you already have the potential to be involved,” Harris said.

Wray said updates from quarterly reports will allow Retirement Commission members to monitor potential investments in the Sudanese government from the city’s chosen companies.