Who Is Guilty When Business Profits From War?
The Nuremberg trials showed that ordinary people can commit war crimes for ordinary reasons, such as making money or keeping their jobs. What has been far less common is seeing them held accountable.
In the late 1990s, a Swedish company, Lundin Oil, began drilling in a war-affected region of what was then Sudan. To secure its drilling sites, the company entered into contracts with the Sudanese government. Over the following years, as global oil prices rose sharply, Sudanese government forces and allied militias displaced an estimated 160,000 people, according to human rights organisations. Villages were bombed and burned, and around 12,000 people were reportedly killed.
Two former executives of the company, which has since been renamed and restructured, are now on trial in what has become the longest criminal case in Swedish history. The trial began in September 2023 and is expected to continue until May next year. The men are accused of complicity in war crimes. They deny the charges, and the company argues that there is no legal basis for the prosecution. It also disputes the casualty figures cited by human rights groups.
I travelled to Stockholm this month to observe several days of the hearings. I was particularly interested in the trial’s wider significance. This is the most ambitious attempt since Nuremberg to hold corporate executives criminally responsible for involvement in war crimes. After the Second World War, senior figures from three companies Flick KG, I.G. Farben and Krupp were tried for profiting from and supporting the Nazi war effort and the Holocaust. Those cases largely failed. Within a few years, all the accused were free and had regained their wealth. The Lundin case seeks to change that history by establishing that corporate complicity in war crimes can carry serious consequences.
To an American observer, the tone of the Stockholm trial is striking. There is little ceremony and no visible drama. There are no gowns, no theatrical gestures, no calls to “All rise” and no gavel. Six judges, two professional and four lay judges, sit together at a long table alongside the court stenographer. They wear ordinary business clothing, and there is no obvious hierarchy. The prosecutor questions witnesses calmly and without flourish. There are few objections and no dramatic exchanges, only a slow, careful and sometimes tedious examination of the facts.
The two executives on trial are Ian Lundin and Alexandre Schneiter. During my visit, however, prosecutors were questioning Ken Barker, the most senior Lundin employee based in Sudan at the time. Barker, a British citizen, ran operations on the ground for much of the period under scrutiny. He reported directly to Ian Lundin and regularly communicated with Ian’s father, Adolf Lundin, the company’s founder, until Adolf’s death in 2006. Barker is a witness in the case and has not been granted immunity. He was warned that his testimony could be used against him.
Prosecutors displayed Barker’s weekly reports to company headquarters in Geneva on large screens around the courtroom. These reports described events on the ground in a matter-of-fact way: delays in road construction promised by the army, ambushes on military vehicles, numbers of soldiers killed, and the build-up of troops near drilling sites. In an August 2001 report, Barker wrote that the army was active near the rig. He noted that this appeared to be a “cleanup operation” and added that he would not comment on possible breaches of humanitarian principles. He wrote that there was “beyond reasonable doubt” some level of displacement and ethnic cleansing taking place.
Barker is now 79 years old. Like many witnesses in long-running war crimes cases, he struggles to recall events from 25 years ago. Such cases often take decades to reach court, and by the time they do, memories have faded and witnesses are elderly.
On the second morning of his testimony, Barker sat outside Courtroom 34 at Stockholm District Court, waiting for the signal that proceedings were about to begin. He put down his worn paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings and chatted with the small group of spectators: a Swedish journalist writing a book on the trial, a criminologist involved in an academic study of the case, and myself.
Barker spoke openly about his memory lapses. That morning, he said, he had forgotten his debit card PIN while paying for breakfast. He described this with some humour, attributing it to age. Unsurprisingly, he said he remembered little of many events raised by prosecutors. He also explained that he was an engineer, trained to deal with precise facts: the depth of an oil deposit, or how many days a rig was shut down due to bad weather. Concepts like justice, especially decades later, were far harder to measure.
In 1963, writing from Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt introduced the idea of the “banality of evil” during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was widely misunderstood as minimising Nazi crimes. In fact, she was describing how easily people can become involved in horrific acts, not out of hatred or ideology, but through thoughtlessness and routine obedience. At the time, the idea was controversial. Today, given what we know about human behaviour, it appears far less radical.
Before Barker testified, the court heard from 32 plaintiffs, current and former residents of South Sudan. They described being terrorised by government-backed forces, seeing their villages destroyed, family members killed, and children abducted and forced into military service.
When prosecutors asked Barker for his view of the events he had reported on, he said he believed they were simply part of the wider war. Sudan’s civil war, he noted, had been ongoing since the 1950s, and he saw these actions as an extension of that conflict.
Oil has long played a central role in Sudan’s wars. In 1978, the American company Chevron discovered oil there. Control of oil fields later became a major driver of conflict. During the Clinton administration, the United States imposed strict sanctions on Sudan, citing its support for terrorism, regional destabilisation and severe human rights abuses. American companies were forced to withdraw.
Lundin Oil saw opportunity where others were forced to leave. In a 1997 television interview, Adolf Lundin said sanctions had removed competition. “One could say that we thrive in maximum unrest,” he remarked. Asked whether some regimes were more attractive than others, he replied that the company observed such matters dispassionately. All it wanted, he said, was the concession, and the regime was treated as a normal negotiating partner.
The defence argues there was nothing illegal in this approach. The company did not request violence, it says, and only sought stability. It maintains that it contracted for a small guard force to provide passive protection for staff and equipment. More broadly, the defence argues that drilling for oil in a dictatorship or war zone, and cooperating with local authorities regardless of their methods, is not a crime.
This argument closely resembles those made by industrialists at Nuremberg. Many were acquitted, and others had their sentences reduced or overturned. For decades afterwards, this logic largely prevailed. International justice efforts focused on military and political leaders, not corporate actors.
More recently, however, national courts have begun to challenge this pattern. Chiquita Brands admitted to financing a Colombian armed group and was later ordered to pay damages to victims. Lafarge pleaded guilty in the United States to providing material support to terrorist organisations in Syria and agreed to a large fine. It now faces further proceedings in France. There have also been calls at the United Nations to hold companies accountable for enabling atrocities elsewhere.
The Lundin trial is possible largely because of the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows war crimes to be prosecuted anywhere. In practice, whether this happens depends on national law and political will. Sweden has long seen itself as a moral actor on the world stage. It has accepted large numbers of refugees, including many victims of war crimes, and has created specialist units to investigate such cases.
Most previous cases in Sweden have involved direct perpetrators. The Lundin case is different because it focuses on corporate complicity. It is also the result of one determined prosecutor, Magnus Elving, who pursued the investigation for more than a decade. He died the year the trial began.
Swedish law includes the concept of reckless intent. This means that a person can be held responsible if they were indifferent to crimes they knew were likely to occur. Prosecutors argue that the evidence was widely available — in media reports, internal documents and company communications — yet executives continued to work with the Sudanese government regardless.
During questioning, prosecutors asked Barker about reports of burned villages that the company had interpreted as traditional farming. Barker said repeatedly that he could not remember. When asked how farming could continue with tens of thousands displaced, he replied, with irritation, that he did not know what local people were thinking. One judge laughed briefly before being reprimanded.
The Swedish system appears designed to avoid spectacle. This is not a show trial, and its outcome is uncertain. It involves ordinary people, calmly examined, in an ordinary courtroom. Nuremberg taught us that ordinary people can commit extraordinary crimes for mundane reasons. What remains rare is seeing them face justice.
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
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