This is the fourth of a six part series that considers the issue of prophecy and human justice. Read Parts One, Two and Three here.

In the present article, we will look at indications of direct divine intervention which has enabled the unique Lundin court case to come about. We know from the prophet Isaiah that God intervenes when we fail to execute judgment on oppressors:

The LORD saw that there was no justice, and He was offended. He saw that there was no man — He was amazed that there was no one interceding; so His own arm brought salvation (59:15-16).

Yet God can be subtle (1 Kings 19:11-13; Isa 45:15; Zech 4:6), so evidences of His interventions are not always obvious. Sometimes they can only be seen if sought for; in other words, they require faith to be noticed. This means that attempts to discern such discreet divine actions are open to interpretation and are prone to potential error, for mere mortals can never know all that God does, just as we cannot fully understand His strategies (Job 11:7; Rom 11:33-34). My attempts to describe the possible interventions by God to bring Lundin to justice should therefore be read in this light, and with the caveat that I might be mistaken.

Sudan conflict

Prior to the secession of South Sudan in 2011, the Islamic-orientated government of Sudan held the northern part of the country and fought to establish control over southern areas that were occupied by rebels, where the population was mainly Christian or traditional deist. This gave an apparently religious flavour to the civil war, although the disputes were primarily about the control of territory and oil resources, pitted between different racial/ethnic and cultural groups, i.e. Saharan Arab vs. Sahelian African, as seen when Sudan’s government fought fellow Muslims in Darfur during 2003-20.

The Lundin family knew what they were getting into, for they had been involved since 1991 in Sudan’s emerging oil industry ...

The first public protests against the oil industry’s activities in Sudan’s war zone were made by a Canadian ecumenical coalition and by Sudan’s churches in July 1995, just before Sudan started to produce oil. This doubled Sudan’s GDP from 1997 to 2003, with a corresponding five-fold increase in foreign exchange earnings that allowed the government to quadruple its military expenditure, including the purchase of the Soviet-made helicopter gunships that were used to kill and drive civilians off its oilfields.

In 1997, Swedish oil company Lundin acquired a leading stake in an exploration licence in Sudan’s war zone, and in May 1999, announced its discovery of large oil deposits. Atrocities in that oilfield first hit Swedish news a year later in May 2000; Lundin’s executives fended off the allegations by claiming they were unaware of what was happening, or blamed it on tribal infighting.

Degree of exposure

But their mistruths were exposed in May 2001, when Christian Aid released a report that detailed the appalling plight of the civilians in Lundin’s licence area. Company executives responded with smooth talk and a string of falsehoods that provided the Swedish population with an easy excuse to ignore the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese civilians.

Oil massively exacerbated Sudan’s civil war by both raising the stakes in the conflict and financing the means to wage that war.

Lundin sold its share in the concession in June 2003 for a 93 million USD profit and closed its operations in Sudan, which seemingly buried the controversy. No-one in Sweden cared enough to demand justice for a faraway people who had been made destitute to enable Sweden’s banks, pension companies, and its private investor elite to make significant capital gains. Imagine, in light of Proverb 6, how angry God must have been:

There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies, and a person who stirs up conflict in the community (16-19).

Fight for justice

From my own interpretation of subsequent events, I believe God then raised up a team of people to bring Lundin to justice, as all the Sudan campaigners (including myself) had given up on that cause.

In December 2005, Lundin announced plans to re-commence oil exploration in Sudan, this time in an adjacent licence area to the one where they had reaped huge profits in 2003. Having got away with alleged complicity in mass murder, they should have prudently sold their stake in that concession too, but the temptation to make another fortune was evidently too great to refuse. That venture would prove to be a dud, for after drilling three dry wells, the company pulled out in August 2009.

I believe God then raised up a number of people to bring Lundin to justice, because all the Sudan campaigners (including myself) had given up on that cause.

But by then it was too late, for the news in 2005 about starting operations in that concession had spurred me to document the atrocities that had taken place in their former licence area during 1997-2003. To achieve that, I needed a precise understanding of what had happened in Lundin’s oilfield, and I therefore sought out journalist Julie Flint, who had made many clandestine visits into the Lundin concession during the oil war. We met in London in March 2006 while she was on a brief stopover from the US to Lebanon.

When I returned to my office in Denmark the next morning, I immediately became aware that God had pre-empted my first act, for I was told that a Swedish student had just volunteered to do six months full-time work prior to starting a law degree. At exactly the right time, God provided a qualified researcher to compile the required database of Swedish news articles with quotes by Lundin’s directors and managers, plus lists of attacks on villages in the Lundin licence. This confirmed His promise in 2 Corinthians 9: 'God is able to make every grace overflow to you, so that in every way, always having everything you need, you may excel in every good work' (v8).

We usually think of God’s provision in terms of what we need, but the Lord also provides us for the tasks that He desires us to do. In a similar way, I had by this time been given experience of a new method to document war crimes through using satellite images. I had worked with a remote-sensing expert in 2004 to determine the scale and locations of burned villages in the Darfur conflict that had raged since 2003 , and the same expert confirmed from a provisional study that satellite images could map the progress of Lundin’s oil development activities in Sudan during 1997-2003, and document some of the human tragedy that had ensued.

It would have been impossible for company employees not to have known what was happening.

It was now possible, for the first time, to quantify historical population displacements from the area, which provided irrefutable high-tech proof that war crimes had occurred on a massive scale in Lundin’s concession at the same time as their oil operations. It would therefore have been impossible for company employees not to have known what was happening.

ECOS & Unpaid Debt

All of the aforementioned information was presented to the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan (ECOS), who took over the Lundin dossier, completed the satellite study, and put together a comprehensive report with much additional information. This was printed and sent to Lundin in November 2008 to get their comments before it would be released. Lundin’s lawyers immediately threatened legal action against ECOS and its associated organisations if the report was made public, forcing ECOS to amend the report to reduce the possibility of litigation. The updated version of Unpaid Debt would not be ready until June 2010.

With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now see that the plan to release the ECOS report in November 2008 would have had no long-term impact. It would have garnered some press attention, but would have failed to achieve its objective because a news story does not automatically trigger a criminal indictment. But by threatening legal action, Lundin inadvertently delayed the release of the report until the right moment for it to launch a police investigation.

Business in Blood and Oil

Unknown to us in 2008, a detailed report containing convincing evidence of atrocities, and of Lundin’s knowledge of them, had to be accompanied by a formal filing to the relevant prosecution authority to initiate criminal proceedings. It also appears that God wanted Swedish citizens to be involved — to enable reconciliation between Sweden and Sudan — because that was what happened next. In January 2010, journalist Kerstin Lundell published a short book in Swedish whose title translates as Business in Blood and Oil: Lundin Petroleum in Africa. It repeated some of the allegations against Lundin, and gave their counter views.

The book was read by Swedish lawyer Sten de Geer, who immediately sent it to the Swedish State Prosecutor for International War Crimes, requesting an investigation into possible war crimes by Lundin in Sudan. His first filing got lost, so he filed again a month later, and after yet more months of no response, Sten called Prosecutor Magnus Elving who responded that the book contained insufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation.

The bureaucratic delays — likely the Divine intervention again — proved important for buying time until the updated and improved ECOS report Unpaid Debt was released, just before Elving would have formally closed the filing. Two weeks after the report was made public, Elving announced that he was launching a criminal investigation into Lundin Petroleum’s activities in Sudan. Over 80,000 pages of evidence have since been amassed by the prosecution against Lundin, some of which will be revealed during the court case over the next two and a half years.

Lundin’s refusals

There is an interesting irony in the progression of events that have brought Lundin to face justice. The company should have heeded a warning in 1997 that appeared in the New York Times just days before they signed the fateful contract with the Government of Sudan, but they refused. They should have heeded the many prophetic voices during 1999-2003 that demanded the company halt its oil exploration, but they refused. Later from 2008 they were repeatedly asked to compensate the victims of their operations, but they refused. Now in 2023, the company’s top executives are being tried for a grave criminal offence; they could straightaway admit their guilt, but will likely refuse.

his means they will be publicly shamed during an excruciating court process over the coming years that will give them a bad name and damage their personal reputations into eternity.

Lundin has received multiple opportunities to stop and redress its misdoings, which I sense were repeated God-given invitations to put right their wrongs. Had they met any of these requests, I believe they would not have faced further demands. But with each refusal, the consequences for them have become progressively more severe, with ever more costly demands. Their situation is reminiscent of Pharaoh, who brought upon himself greater punishments each time he refused to obey God through the requests of Moses. It echoes Isaiah 26:

But when grace is shown to the wicked, they do not learn righteousness;
even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil
and do not regard the majesty of the Lord.
Lord, your hand is lifted high, but they do not see it.
Let them see your zeal for your people and be put to shame (10-11)

Only two of Lundin’s executives are currently on trial; the other board members and staff who were involved in its miserable oil venture in Sudan are still enjoying a period of divine grace; but they should beware the long arm of human law that may in time catch them too. Let us eagerly expect further interventions from God, for the current court case against Lundin in Stockholm could be the start of more to come.

Phil Clarke is a former aid worker and executive director of the Danish branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, and is currently the director of the independent war crimes investigation agency Bloodhound that he co-founded in 2006. He has been closely involved with efforts to bring Lundin to justice since 2001, and produced the report Justifying Blood Money in 2013 to expose Lundin’s lies to shareholders while it explored for oil in Sudan. His debut novel Falling Night was published in 2023, based on the experiences that led him from humanitarian aid to documenting war crimes.