Sudan civil disobedience: West Kordofan oil field workers down tools

Reports are being received of workers associations answering the call for civil disobedience in Sudan, following the violent dispersal of the Khartoum sit-in on Monday, and the breakdown of negotiations between the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the Alliance for Freedom and Change (AFC).

The Petro Energy Oilfield Operations Group Limited – Balila oil field in El Salam locality, West Kordofan, which includes Fula, FNA, Maki, Kiyi, Jake field, Hodeida, and Sufyan fields, has released a statement to this station condemning the Khartoum massacre, calling it “the betrayal made by the Transitional Military Council to our revolution and the Sudanese people as a whole”.

The statement announces that “the company entered into civil disobedience from the dawn of the June 4, 2019 in response to the request of the group of workers in the oil sector, which is a member of the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA).

“Petroenergy professionals raised the agenda of civil disobedience to the senior management of the company and provided a comprehensive explanation of the events to the foreign partner. This has led to the following decisions:

• The stopping of the periodic inspection in all field wells and that includes the absence of the detection of any technical failures and a complete paralysis of production in the wells.
• Stopping all regular maintenance and maintenance to repair the emergency errors that do not result in danger and safety issues and thus stopping pumping from these wells.
• Stopping all periodic inspections and periodic maintenance in all the primary processing units FPF as well as the CPUF.
• Stopping the sampling and testing of all wells and treatment units.
• Stopping the submission of periodic reports and emergency communications and all forms of communication for work.

The Petro Energy Workers Association declare in their statement that work is completely halted in all the oil fields. They also declare readiness to stop the oil pumping completely, saying that they will remain committed to a complete civil disobedience until further announcements from the SPA.

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