At the end of the 1990s, a Swedish company called Lundin Oil started drilling in a war-torn region of what was then Sudan. To secure the drilling sites, the company contracted with the Sudanese government. Over the next several years, the price of oil skyrocketed, and Sudanese government and allied forces displaced, as human rights groups estimate, 160,000 people in the area, bombing and burning their villages. The groups say some 12,000 people were killed.
Two former executives of the company, which has since been renamed and reconfigured, are now defendants in the longest criminal trial in Swedish history — it began in September 2023 and is expected to continue through next May. They stand accused of complicity in war crimes. The defendants reject the charge, and the company maintains that there is no legal basis for the prosecution. The company also disputes the casualty figures.
I went to Stockholm earlier this month to watch a couple of days of the hearings. I was mostly interested in the trial’s other historic distinction: It is the most ambitious effort since Nuremberg to hold corporate executives accountable for alleged complicity in war crimes. Following World War II, owners and leaders of three companies — Flick KG, I.G. Farben and Krupp — were accused of profiting from and aiding Hitler’s war and the Holocaust. But those efforts fizzled. Within a few years, all of the accused were free and in possession of their fortunes. The case against the Lundin executives seeks to set a new precedent: to establish that corporate complicity in war crimes can be severely punished.
To an American, the tone of the Stockholm trial is remarkable. There is little pomp and no visible drama: no judicial gowns, no theatrics, no “All rise” and no gaveling. Six judges — two professional judges and four nonprofessional, or what the Swedish call lay judges — and the court stenographer all sit at a long table, with no hierarchy evident among them; all wear modest business clothes. The prosecutor questions the witness in a monotone. No dramatic flourishes, no arguments weaseling their way into witness examination, few objections and no exclamations — just a calm, deliberate, even tedious inquiry into the facts.
The two executives on trial are Ian Lundin and Alexandre Schneiter, but when I was in Stockholm, the prosecution was questioning Ken Barker, who was the highest-ranking Lundin employee in Sudan at the time and is a witness in this case. (He has not been granted immunity and was warned at the start of his testimony that his statements could be used against him.) Barker, a British citizen, ran the operation on the ground for much of the time with which the trial is concerned. He reported directly to Ian Lundin and had frequent interactions with Ian’s father, Adolf, the founder of the company, before the father’s death in 2006.
Prosecutors projected onto four large pull-down screens around the courtroom, the weekly reports Barker wrote to his superiors at the company’s headquarters in Geneva. He described the situation on the ground, enumerating the events of a given week: The Sudanese Army was behind schedule on the construction of a road it had promised the company; an army truck was ambushed; 12 soldiers killed; one rebel killed; the army is amassing troops in the area where the company was drilling. In a report dated August 2001, he wrote that the army was active near the rig. “This is a cleanup operation on some scale and I would not care to comment on the breach of any humanitarian principles that may be involved,” he wrote. “It is beyond reasonable doubt that there is some displacement and cleansing going on.”
Barker is 79. Like other witnesses in this case, he has trouble remembering what happened 25 years ago. This is an issue at many war crimes prosecutions: Investigations often take many years, and by the time cases come to trial, witnesses and perpetrators are often frail and their memories are unreliable.
On the morning of the second day of his testimony, Barker sat outside Courtroom 34 in Stockholm District Court, waiting for the green light that announces the doors have opened. He put aside his tattered paperback copy of “The Lord of the Rings” to chat with the few spectators waiting for the start of the hearing: Martin Schibbye, a Swedish journalist who is writing a book on the trial; a Swedish criminologist who is part of an academic study of the trial; and me.
Barker told us that he and his wife often catch each other in memory lapses. That morning, when he was paying for breakfast, he couldn’t remember his debit card pin. It’s an age thing; he talked about it with some amusement. So, of course, he had only a vague memory of many of the incidents the prosecutor was asking him about. But that wasn’t the only issue, he said. He was an engineer; he had been trained to solve precise problems. The oil lay at a certain depth. Or the rig had to be shut down for a certain number of days because of bad weather. But can you calculate what justice is? Especially after so many years.
In 1963, when Hannah Arendt, in dispatches from the Nuremberg trials, described “the banality of evil,” she was widely misunderstood as trivializing the crimes of which the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann was convicted. In reality she was describing the ease with which some people go along with hideous crimes. Not driven by deep conviction or rage, they simply don’t bother to think about the monstrous consequences of their actions. The idea, controversial at the time of her writing, doesn’t seem particularly radical now, when we have so much more evidence of the human capacity for both atrocity and indifference.
Before Barker’s testimony, the court heard from the 32 plaintiffs — former and current South Sudanese residents who described being terrorized by government-backed forces, having their villages destroyed, family members killed, and children captured and being forced into military service.
On the second day of Barker’s testimony, one of the prosecutors, Annika Wennerström, pressed him for his opinion of the events he’d been reporting on.
“My view was that it was part of the war,” he responded. “The war had been going on since 1956, and this was an extension.”
The civil war in Sudan does go back to the mid 1950s. In 1978, the American company Chevron found oil there. In the decades that followed, control over oil fields became central to the armed conflict. During the second Clinton administration, the U.S. government imposed severe sanctions on Sudan in response to what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described as the Sudanese government’s “continued sponsorship of international terrorism, its effort to destabilize neighboring countries and its abysmal record on human rights.”
American companies had to cease operations in Sudan. Lundin Oil apparently saw this as an opportunity. In a 1997 interview, Adolf Lundin told a television reporter that the sanctions got rid of the competition his company faced in Sudan. “One could say that we thrive in maximum unrest,” he said. The journalist interviewing him asked him if some regimes were more “appealing” than others. Perhaps they are, Lundin allowed, “but we observe that dispassionately. The only thing we want is the concession. And the regime itself we must treat as a normal negotiating partner.”
The defense argues that there is nothing illegal about this approach. The company didn’t ask for anyone to be killed, it says; it wanted peace. And it contracted for what the company describes as only “a small guard force” to “provide passive protection for personnel and equipment.” In the bigger picture, the defense says it’s not a crime to drill for oil in a dictatorship, or in the middle of a war, and it’s not a crime to cooperate with the local authorities, whoever they are and whatever the tactics they use to maintain their power or facilitate the extraction of their resources.
This argument is similar to that made by the defendants in Nuremberg’s industrialists trials. In those proceedings, the defense argued that the accused had simply been doing business as business was done at the time and in the place where they had found themselves. Many of them were acquitted, and the sentences of the rest were commuted soon after the trial ended. Alfred Krupp, the only one of those industrialists whose property was confiscated, was pardoned and granted restitution.
In the decades since Nuremberg, the logic of the industrialists’ defense largely held. The most ambitious international justice effort — the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — hardly considered the economic dimension of the war. The International Criminal Court, similarly, has focused on military and political but not corporate leaders. More recently, however, national courts have taken up a handful of such cases. In 2007, Chiquita Brands International pleaded guilty to financing a designated terrorist organization, after it paid off a Colombian rebel group, and last year a Florida court ordered the company to pay more than $38 million in damages to some of the organization’s victims. The French cement company Lafarge has pleaded guilty in the United States to providing material support to terrorist groups including ISIS, which it paid to protect its plant in Syria, and agreed to pay a $778-million fine. The company is now in French criminal court, fighting additional charges over payments to these groups. And Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, has prominently advocated holding corporations responsible for enabling and profiting from the genocide in Gaza.
A few things made the Lundin trial possible. One is the legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which holds that — because the laws governing war crimes are agreed upon by many nations and because war crimes are of concern to all of humanity — such crimes can be prosecuted in any country. In reality, there is nothing universal about universal jurisdiction: Whether a country takes up a case depends on national laws and procedures as well as political will.
Sweden is a special case. Its national identity has been that of a “moral superpower,” as the Swedes put it. This identity, in turn, has dictated that Sweden open its doors to refugees — and though the Swedish welcome has worn thin in recent years, hundreds of thousands of people who fled conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere now live in the country.
Some of these newcomers were victims of war crimes, and their presence spurred Swedish prosecutors to action. The country has created special law-enforcement units for war crimes. In 2016 a Swedish court convicted a man for participating in the Rwandan genocide and sentenced him to life in prison. Other cases have stemmed from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Syria, Iraq and Iran. But unlike the Lundin trial, all of them have involved direct or indirect perpetrators of the crimes, never the complicity of corporate actors.
And then there was one very determined prosecutor, Magnus Elving. When he was working on the Rwandan genocide case, someone sent him a book on Lundin Oil and Africa, written by a Swedish journalist. Elving began an investigation that lasted over a decade and included interviewing victims and witnesses all over the world. In 2018, the police searched the Lundin offices in Geneva; many documents they found there are being reviewed at the trial. (Elving developed cancer, forcing him to retire in 2018; he died the year the trial began.)
In 2001, the Presbyterian Church of Sudan, along with people displaced from what became oil fields, brought a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Talisman Energy, a Canadian oil company that was operating in Sudan around the same time as Lundin. Talisman argued that the United States did not have jurisdiction, but a federal judge ruled that, in part because the Sudanese government’s actions were considered genocide and because the U.S. government had classified Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism, a federal court could take up the case. Several years later, however, different judges found that the plaintiffs couldn’t prove that Talisman had purposefully aided and abetted war crimes.
Swedish law contains the concept of reckless intent. Fanny Holm, a legal scholar who has been following the trial, told me that this makes Swedish law different from international criminal law, which contains only direct intent (the perpetrator intended to commit the crime) and indirect intent (the perpetrator was aware that a crime would occur). Reckless intent means, in essence, that the perpetrator is indifferent to a crime that will likely occur. The case the Swedish prosecutors are making is that the information was there — in international newspapers, on BBC radio and television and in the memos found in the Lundin office and projected onto the walls of the courtroom. It was there but executives contracted with the Sudanese government anyway, and this constitutes complicity in a war crime.
On the second day of Ken Barker’s testimony, Wennerström, one of the prosecutors, asked a series of questions about reports Barker had received of burned villages, which the company apparently interpreted as a form of traditional farming. Barker kept repeating that he remembered nothing about this issue.
“But with 70,000 people displaced, who would farm under such circumstances?” Wennerström pressed, apparently asking Barker to think about the issue now, even if he didn’t think about it 25 years ago. “Who would engage in slash-and-burn agriculture?”
“I don’t know what the locals had in mind,” Barker responded with an audible note of annoyance.
One of the judges let out a laugh, prompting the presiding judge to issue a stern reprimand.
It is as if the Swedish system were designed to underscore that this trial, unlike many war crimes trials (including the one Arendt wrote about), is not a show trial. There is nothing showy about it, and the outcome is not preordained. It may be the longest criminal trial in Swedish history, and it may be legally novel, but it is a very normal trial of some very normal people. The Nuremberg trials showed us that normal people can commit war crimes for normal reasons, such as wanting to make a profit or to keep their job. What hasn’t been normal is to see them held accountable.
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