On trial: oil and war crimes

Hello, it's Ada here and you're listening to the Sloan Newscast from the Observer. This week, a question of culpability. I remember vividly the morning of the 24th of February 2022. It was a Thursday and I was woken up by the sound of my phone ringing at 5am. It was my boss. I worked for a news agency at the time on the Europe desk. He was calling me to ask, "How soon I could get into the office?" It had finally happened. After a couple of tense weeks of Putin threateningly amassing troops on Ukraine's borders, Russia had launched its ground invasion. I sat on the tube that morning, looking at everyone around me in the carriage and wondering if they knew yet. Had these people on their morning commute realized that the unthinkable had just happened, the ground war in Europe was now a reality. I'd spend the next year of my life editing the horrifying images of war. In the end, I couldn't hack it. But those kinds of images followed me out of that job, because in the time since and with the proliferation of conflict in other parts of the world, war feels closer than ever, living on our phones and on our social media feeds. It seems unlikely that there are more wars happening now than ever before, but it feels like it. After the end of World War II, the idea of a rules-based order of accountability and justice equally applied to all, even the idea of free trade seems to have given way to something more brutal. An era of strongmen and a survival of the fittest attitude towards international relations. In the face of these challenges, institutions like the International Criminal Court and the UN have revealed themselves to be almost toothless. But tucked away in an unassuming courtroom in Stockholm, Sweden has spent the past three years prosecuting a war crimes trial of its own, against one of its own. The London Oil Company stands accused of aiding and abetting war crimes in South Sudan in the late 90s and early 2000s. It's a landmark case, the first trial for corporate responsibility that holds individual executives accountable since Nuremberg. Last week, after three years, the trial finally came to a close. Now, the judges must deliberate. If found guilty, the former chairman of the company could face up to ten years in prison. So are we on the cusp of a new international legal precedent? Is this a precursor to a changing of the tides? Or is this trial the product of something far more specific about Sweden? My colleague, Francisco Garcia and I, went to Stockholm to investigate. Today is May 14. We are living to really capture all the main recognitions of a block by the aim. There is this really incredible movie that the prosecutor has shown when Alexander Schneider in 1997, he does an helicopter trip in the block 5A and the helicopter lands in Rubecona. I'm sitting in the vast glass chamber, the houses of the canteen of Stockholm District Court, speaking to Martin Chibi. He's an investigative journalist, who's been covering the trial since his very first hearing back in December 2023. He's describing a video we're watching. The man in this video is a defendant in a case that's being heard in the courtroom upstairs. This video is a part of the prosecution's evidence. Here is the old chevron deposit. Chevron, as in the oil giant, and a competitor of the company Alexander Schneider, works for. And he walks around in the old chevron base, so this kind of rusty warehouse is, and there are these, I don't know what you call them, bore crones or something for the drilling equipment. Alexander Schneider is in this part of the world to scope out how viable it might be to drill for oil. He surveys the remnants of his competitors' efforts, who fled the region as the violence around them intensified, but he doesn't seem too phased. Here we are at the main base of Chevron in the P�unas. Here they have the Ponton on the river, where they were unloading. They keep coming from classrooms. They have a mid-story bed. And he just stands there and films, his guards and the machine guns and at that time, of course, he didn't know what would happen, but it's rather interesting. What would happen is war, decades of it, and more brutal and devastating than anyone could have imagined. The video is filmed in what was then known as Sudan, but it's now a part of South Sudan. Maybe Alexander's attitude was buoyed by an interview that his boss, Adolf Lundin, had given a few weeks earlier. "I mean, flu say it, you've land." "Oh, it's in Swedish, but he says things like. " "We've been in the event of ill-democraticering of land." "We thrive in maximum unrest. We, the spearhead of capitalism." "Maybe capitalism and sput spits." "And we work without regard to political risk. Limiting yourself to operating in safe countries is like starting a marathon with a broken leg." Adolf Lundin died in 2006, but it's his son, Ian, who is heading the family company's work in South Sudan. And there are a lot of, I mean, Sweden we call it a small spotter, but kind of, you know, small savers, not the big players that kind of has bought into this idea of, you know, the Swedish cowboy going aboard, you know, pulling up his sleeves and finding oil and, you know, making himself and all the other people rich. So I mean, it's the closest we get to the Dallas family or something if you have to find some kind of comparison in cultural similarities in Sweden. Historically, there isn't a great precedent for how cowboys treat the native population, but then again, much like South Sudan in the late 1990s, the Wild West is a lawless place, right up until it isn't. Ian Lundin, the former chairman, and Alexander Schneider, ex-CEO of Lundin Oil, now stand accused of aiding and abetting war crimes, charges which they vociferously deny. It's a landmark case in Sweden, but also for the world. The last time corporate leaders were brought to court over war crimes was at Nuremberg in the 1940s. Though the scope of the Lundin case is unique, it is just one front and a larger global battle for corporate accountability. Last summer, a Colombian court handed down 11 years of prison time to seven former executives of the Swiss fruit company, Tchaikita, in connection with payments made to paramilitary groups. In mid-April of this year, a Paris court sentenced Bruno Lefonton, the former chief executive of French cement company Lafage, to six years in prison for payments made to Islamic State and other jihadist groups to protect their Syria operations between 2012 and 2014. But it is no exaggeration to say that the Lundin trial could change the course of legal history. The prosecution hopes the guilty verdict will set a global precedent to show that powerful companies and their wealthy representatives can be held accountable for complicity in the gravest of crimes. It took 13 years for the Lundin case to come to trial. Most of the plaintiffs made up of the Sudanese employees of the company, civilians and child soldiers, had been waiting for this moment for most of their lives. So is the case against Lundin finally justice at work? When we were in our village, I've never heard of something called oil. My name is Gatquot Leardio, I was born in 1989 in Doar, South Sudan. It was 1997 when Lundin started looking for oil in Sudan. When the company came, at first they were a bit peaceful, they were just people who were just looking for the oil. They told us about the oil, we don't know what the oil means and what it was. So they came with their cars and other things that they put on the ground to check where they get the oil. So sometimes when we move around we find some red flag that they put on the road where they mark those places. These red flags were set down to mark places for exploration where the company thought they were likely to find oil reserves. Then we picked the flag that we play with them, then because for us we don't know exactly what is happening. At the time, Gatquat was 8 years old, living in the village of Dua with his mother and his younger brothers. Gatquat's father had 28 wives, he tells me. So he has a lot of other siblings in nearby villages, but his immediate household is small. From what he says, it's a fairly typical village in Unity State, mudhuts, dusty trails, nothing much in the way of modern infrastructure. There's been civil conflict in Sudan for generations. It has pitted government forces against a revolving cast of opposition militias and armed groups in an ever-shifting landscape of alliances and counter alliances. North versus South, newer versus Dinka, regime versus splintered opposition. The first Sudanese civil war started in 1955. The most recent iteration of the conflict re-erupted in 2023, but at this particular moment in 1997 in Dua, Gatquat says there was a period of relative peace. Oil was initially discovered in what is now South Sudan in the 1970s. The American company Chevron had won the concession. They pulled out in the 1990s, increasingly spooked by the rising tide of violence. This is when the people from Lundin oil came knocking, sniffing an opportunity. They told us that they put something in our area oil that we should move away from the area. Our elders told them that this is our ancestral area, we don't have any other area. We cannot move away from this area. Gatquat admits that his recollection of some details is shaky. He's 37 years old now, and in particular, he says he finds it hard to recall the passing of time and specific dates. Some memories, though, of vivid. It was very early in the morning I was just helping my mother. My mother was just milking the cows. I was just helping her. We saw something, a gunship, a helicopter gunship coming. It was my first time to see something big like that and to see something making a lot of noise, something like that. Then we came out, we just looked at it, then the villagers, all of them, they came out to see what is this that is making noise. Everyone was just came out, old children, and we were just washing what is coming. We thought that it was something good. Then I just saw a flash, it was a bullet, then it exploded into our heart, then everything was just on fire. Then they started shooting at us. Then I ran to my mom. My mom just covered us like this, me and my younger brothers. Then they shoot on her, on her body, the bullet pass through her body. Then they hit me on my leg, I painted. Then everything was just burning. I woke up, I found that I was the only one alive. Everything was just burning. They killed everyone, my mom passed away, my younger brothers also. When I woke up, I found everything was just burning and they left. No one can really say for certain who is in that helicopter. According to contemporaneous NGO reports, it was most probably the Sudanese army. Gatquah says he saw military uniforms, but when I ask him who he holds responsible for the death of his mother and brothers, it was the Lundin. Gatquah blames Lundin oil. We stopped to take a break and suddenly we have visitors. This is a clip from a documentary by a Swedish journalist who was invited to Sudan by Lundin in 2001. Two years after the helicopter gunship attack, it was also shown to the courtroom by the prosecution. A group of child soldiers appear as if from nowhere. They are from one of the militia groups who are fighting one another in the area, though it's hard for an outsider to say which group it is. The interviewer turns the camera to Ian Lundin. How do you feel about this? The child's soldier is protecting the oil fields. In the background of the shot, three boys in military style khaki clothing. None of them looks any older than 13. One is holding an assault rifle, another smiles at the camera, and a third smaller than the others, lingers in the corner of the frame. It's Gatquah. When the soldier came, they just found only me, the village was just banning, then they took me away from the area. Gatquah's father was a local militia commander at the time. It's his soldiers who come and collect Gatquah. So my dad told me that mum is dead, so I should. I have to join him, then I move with him. At this stage in the war, his father's militia is fighting against the government, but that would soon change. Then in 2001, that is when I managed to hold my gun. Then I was always with him. When my dad signed agreement with them, we were just working for them, we were just protecting them. The them in question here is Lundin oil. We were placed in the. There were a military barracks that they put along the road. Those military barracks, there are many. Lundin used them for the protection, so we were the one protecting them. Only two years after Gatquah watched his village burn to the ground, he found himself part of a militia, tasked with protecting a company that he believes killed his mother. I didn't even know that maybe one day there will be something like this, that will be accountability for what they did here. Lundin's position is that the militia was not there to protect the oilfields, that they were part of a factional civil war. The company also maintains that they had no say or influence over the actions of the Sudanese army. When you watch the two video clips of Adolf and then Ian Lundin, you get a sense of how different the two men are. Ian doesn't seem to possess the same bombast as his father. He doesn't look or talk much like a Swedish oil cowboy. He's slicker than that, a polished businessman. Even as he stands between a pair of child soldiers, and responds to the documentary maker. Well, I think to protect the whole field is a general generalization. I'm very upset about seeing child soldiers in general. I think I have children myself to see children with this age carrying arms is a very disturbing fact. Ian Lundin's defence lawyers say that there is no evidence that a helicopter gunship even carried out an attack on Gatquois Village. And if it did, Lundin certainly had nothing to do with it. On the other side of the world, in Stockholm, a decade later, a prosecutor called Magnus Elving was working on a case against a man accused of taking part in the Rwandan genocide. Magnus Elving, he was fantastic. It doesn't matter, it was complicated. He always looked at the plaintiffs, the small people, and I said, it doesn't matter if it was in the South Sudan, Africa or wherever around the world. Nothing is too difficult for him. Gordon Yelmashon is a lawyer and worked with Magnus for many years. I'm at him in Central Stockholm. It's a gloriously sunny day. And we settle into a park bench to talk about his old friend. When you're talking every day, we decide to invite telephone. And we've all become very close friends and many other than many, I've not seen many, but some prosecutor may be just like me. Maybe just drop the case in the waste paper basket, because this is too complicated. We cannot prove what happened. It retakes too much time. As I said, we have not enough with the police men or prosecutors who can work with this case, but not Magnus. It's because of myself being the one who, in one way, has started all these kind of cases. And if you're wondering why Swedish lawyer is prosecuting a crime that happened in Rwanda, it's because of something called universal jurisdiction. The idea is that there are some offenses so heinous they transcend the ordinary limits of national law. Impunity should have no borders. That means that it doesn't matter where and where the crime has been committed. We have the possibility and also the obligation to prosecute and investigate cases. So in 2010 when Magnus Elving hears about Lundin oil's activities in South Sudan, he already had experience bringing war crimes to court and winning. But this would be something different from what he'd prosecuted before. Corporate responsibility, aiding and abetting, rather than directly committing a war crime. That is very big difference between all the other cases, because they have point him out of the other cases. In the run a case they say, "I knew I saw you there. I was five meters from you when you were killed in your baby." For example, I saw you there and that is why this case is more complicated. And legally it's more difficult to prove. And Magnus shelves the idea, until he receives a second account of Lundin's time in South Sudan. This time from an NGO report, the report is called Unpaid Death. The Unpaid Death Project started in 2000 when increasingly very hideous stories came out of South Sudan about targeted violence against villages, civilians, in what appeared a war over controlled the oil area that Lundin was exploiting at a time with its consortium. This is Egbert Vesselink. He represents the other strand of this mission to bring Lundin oil to justice. Go work for Bax, that's Dutch peace and human rights movement. And he's been working on this even longer than Magnus. In the comprehensive peace agreement that ended the civil war between North and South in 2005, there was an article that said that victims of oil exploitation had the right to compensation by the signatures to the contract. The basic demand that the companies who used to be active in the violent period had, and the government of course of Sudan, had no obligation to compensate the population. The Sudanese government has never paid out any such compensation. So Egbert began to wonder if the companies themselves could be held accountable. The first step was to gather together all of the available evidence, contemporaneous NGO reports, eye witness statements, and consolidate it all in one place. It would take years to put together. Egbert worked with a network of organisations to track down those witnesses. Most of them living in refugee camps abroad or resettled far from home. And it was that document which convinced Magnus Elving to begin the process of taking Lundin's executives to court. But the Magnus Elving told us that he expected the investigation to take several years. He said three to five years. Well, you know, it took 13, so that was not a. yeah, that's a very long time. I've spoken to several people who knew Magnus. By all accounts, he was relentless. In the end though, he would not be able to see the case through to its conclusion. Elving was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, and taken off the case a year later, against his wishes. He died in December 2023, aged 71, just two months after the Lundin case finally came to trial. When I ask Horan what it takes to do this kind of work, he told me it takes an emotional toll, but that this emotion was an essential part of the job. The combination of being emotional and professional. That is, you have to separate it when you're on the court, then you must be more correct. But it's very important to show the bike lines that I really feel for them. So when I had that there is a court case, then I decided to testify. When I read the court, I was just praying because for me, I have issues with. it's a bit flicking. So when I read the court, it was the moment that I was praying for many years. I was so happy and I was so calm that I had to talk in a way that I may not get shocked on the way, or maybe I may not spoil everything. In total, testimony has been heard from 32 plaintiffs, half of whom were flown in from a round the world to attend the trial in person. They told stories of appalling suffering about bearing witness to a litany of crimes alleged by the prosecution. They include but not limited to rape, unlawful killing, torture, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and the recruitment of child soldiers. The first to take the stand was a priest, James Ninhru Dong, who spoke of the structure the company brought on his village and the loss of 14 of his family members. Other plaintiffs included former employees of the company, who described having witnessed Lundin's expat staff providing direct, logistical support to the military and allied militias, including giving the money, fuel and transportation. Another plaintiff told a story strikingly similar to Gatquas, a quiet village life suddenly shattered around the time that Lundin arrived in Sudan. Government forces attacking, having to flee, his mother not killed, but captured and raped, all in order, he believes, to clear the land, to build roads and pipelines for the oil sites. I was just praying that let me read the court and tell them exactly what I saw. Gatquas too wants to hold Lundin to account. The death of my mum and the death of the civilian, the death will be where we are at kill. The prosecution alleges that Lundin oil would have at least known about the destruction of these villages and they argue that the company benefited from being able to take possession of the land that was cleared of civilians so that they could drill for oil, usefully marked by those red flags that they planted. They also claim that the company had arrangements with the Sudanese military to enable local militias to protect the oil fields, militias like the one led by Gatquas father, and that the company was privy to the army's bombing campaigns, with almost two decades of reports and investigations to support them, the prosecution team had every reason to feel confident about their case that a fence's job has been to cast out on that entire body of evidence. The courthouse is an imposing building in the centre of Stockholm. My producer Ada and I make our way through the security and up to wide and echoing flights of stairs. There are lawyers milling around, chatting amicably, one even walks past with a tray of pastries before disappearing through one of the many doors lining the long corridor. We all wait outside courtroom 34 and then the light above the door turns green, which is our cue to go inside. The courtroom is as you'd expect wood panelled with tall ceilings and lattice windows, but without the wigs and gowns you might find in an English court. I called ahead to ask if my producer and I needed our press cards to enter a pretty standard requirement in the UK, but no they said just turn up. The trial is open to the public too, and on our first day there two teenagers sitting in front of us giggling occasionally. It's different in another way too. You can actually record proceedings. Six judges to experience professionals along with four lay judges sit across a thin table at the front of the court accompanied by a stenographer. If a hierarchy exists among them, it's impossible to make out. The judges face a fixed in positions of unflinching neutrality. One source, a prosecution witness, had jokingly expressed as dismay at their stoicism, dead fish eyes as how they put it to me. We're there in the final weeks of the trial, and it's the fence's turn to present their closing arguments. Their strategy, broadly speaking, has been one of aggressive denial. There have no evidence about one single war crime and they have not even single out and said that this happened at that place. I managed to catch one of the defence lawyers, Togney Vetterbe in the canteen when the court breaks for lunch. So they think that they can have someone convicted for complicity to war crimes without proven a single war crime. What the prosecution has says of defence is just a theory spread by groupthink rather than a robust case. So the problem here is that they let time go and then they start up something just on the hunch because when the starting investigation they don't have a crime, they're looking for a crime and when they don't find the crime they go on even so and they convince themselves. They also call on the question the accuracy of the evidence the prosecution has provided, how precise the translations where the DNGOs find their sources for these reports. Other diagrams presented exactly the scale and publicly at least their confident. "Is it, um, you and London, does he feel like for about what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, now there's no, it's 100%. It's not a question, really." On the second day a woman sits in front of us, doodling in her notebook and sying with exasperation at certain points. We get chatting in the break. Her name is Christine Betrush. She's actually someone I've been hoping to speak to. She gave evidence as a witness for the defence earlier in the trial. She's worked for Lundin since 1999 and these days she still works as an advisor to the company but lives mainly in Switzerland. At the relevant time I was a head of corporate responsibility later vice president corporate responsibility and my role was to translate company practice into a code of conduct into relevant policies. Christine is not necessarily the sort of person you might expect to be on the side of big oil. We might produce her, Ada calls her up a week later, she's getting ready to fly to Ukraine where she does humanitarian work. She's mid-packing, she says. And as Ada asks her first question Christine lights up a long slim cigarette in excels thoughtfully before answering. And what threw you to that work? I'm interested in sort of how you ended up in Sudan. It's actually interesting because I have a I have a dual background. I mean, it's story and an emulator by by training and I was particularly interested in colonial issues and post colonial issues and Slavic civilization because I consider the Soviet Union was an empire with colonies. So I was trying to draw parallels and why Lundin to be frank I would have never worked for any other oil company. I would have never worked for the likes of Shell or VP, not that I want to comment about them. It's just that here it was a it was a family founded company and I knew the family and the family value. The first time I went to Sudan, I saw that you know all the things they had already done from the Lundtropic sign. So I think my role was more to translate it into business conduct but whatever I did it had been pre-existing in the bounds. There are many opposing perspectives in any trial and in this case in particular, but I'm struck by how starkly different Christine's characterization of the company is to Gatquoise. Christine sees her appointment to the job of president of corporate responsibility as a sign that the company actually had good intentions in Sudan. I would say that everything we did had a positive impact on the population who various work. For the oil operations, we hired local people. You know for our seismic operations, we had so we did local hires, we did local training, we did medical assistance, educational assistance, we did all of that. Any suggestion otherwise, she says, is presumptive, even prejudiced. And of course, and I don't want to be insulting to journalists, but as you know, a good story is not a good oil company is doing good work. A good story is the big bucks are, you know, are against the poor Africans. And by the way, very racist, you know, the Africans are not the, you know, those innocent dumb people that are being portrayed, some of the smartest people I've ever met in my life were in Sudan, extremely sophisticated people. When it comes to those people who work in the region alongside her, the NGOs and researchers, people like Eggbert Vesselink, who she knew personally, she thinks they meant well. I really think that, you know, the road to hell is paid by good intentions. And that's how I would describe the work of the NGOs in Sudan. Christine can understand how easy it would be to present all these victims who have faced such grave injustice with an easy villain. And frankly speaking, again, if I were a southern Sudanese and I had suffered from a war and somebody tells me, well, it's because of the oil company. Well, I'll say okay, it's because of the oil company, you know, because I am a victim. Except how would they even know the oil company unless somebody tells them? The Defence lawyer, Togne, makes a similar point. They are a group of people and they talk and they convince themselves about things and they hear and they suddenly, there can be many of these people who tell stories that they actually think is okay. I wanted to ask Togne why he thought someone would lie about their experience. I think it's very important to understand that when I have a case like this, it's not a question if are they lying or are they not. The Defence's point here is that the burden is on the prosecution to provide clear and conclusive evidence. Putting up plaintiffs whose testimonies haven't always been consistent, the Defence says, undermines the entire prosecution case. The first thing is that they have gone a very long time and that makes it normal that you don't remember everything. But that's a problem for the prosecutor because if you tell one story the first day and the second day, another story, it's a problem. Their main line of attack in this case is the testimony of the plaintiffs, how time takes its toll they remind the court. Many of these plaintiffs, like Gatua, were children when they witnessed these events. How could their memories be trusted now? 25 years later. The Defence points out that details in the plaintiff stories have changed over time. They have said 97 and then the prosecutor must have had a 99 instead. Not 97 and then there were some also coming and saying, well, it didn't happen 97, it happened 2000 or so. After two days of delivering their closing statements, the Defence had done. How do you perceive the way the trial has been playing out? There has been playing out just exactly as we thought it would. And if you looked at the evidence before we started, it has proven to be exactly the same. Perhaps one thing we couldn't anticipate that almost all the plaintiffs would come up when new stories. Unanticipated perhaps, but certainly something that they've turned to their advantage. From the beginning of the trial, I think many people believe that the testimonies for the plaintiffs would be kind of the bulk of the case. Here's Martin again, the journalist who's been covering the trial since day one. Early on, as I guess the Defence lawyers have pointed out the defence kind of tried to, or I mean, started to show that there are discrepancies between different versions and in the police interrogation, you said this and now you're saying that. And kind of at times the plaintiff's stories has kind of been a burden for the prosecution almost. A burden, what might have felt like the lightning rod of the prosecution's case, the stories of people like Gatkoir have become the backbone of the Defence's case. I think if the filmers would win this case, I definitely think it would have a cooling effect because it has taken so much time and resources from the police and the prosecution. It in a sense, it's a huge investment if I may put it that way from the Swedish state in terms of money and resources. So I think if the Defence, I don't think we'll see any of these kind of similar cases against corporations or corporate executives in Sweden for one or two decades. This is Mark Klamberg. [BLANK_AUDIO] professor and international law at the University of Stockholm. And then I suppose, you know, if we're playing the game like which side, I mean, what about the reverse? What are some of the potential ramifications if the prosecution do? It would create an important international president. Also, I think already now Swedish corporations and potentially corporations outside, they're asking themselves, could we be targeted in the same way? We're also talking about individual criminal responsibility for corporate executives. So I think if we have a conviction, I think that message will really be brought home to these executives. Sweden is one of the few countries in the world that tries cases like this. And that's partly to do with itself image as a moral superpower. If we look at the kind of wider context. I mean, Sweden was neutral during World War II. And I mean, for Sweden, it was good in the sense that we were kind of outside of the war and we weren't hurt in the same way as other countries. But it caused kind of that consciousness in Sweden. So that kind of kind of consequences for many parts of Swedish foreign policy and how we look at ourselves. But that's not to say that public opinion of the trial is wholly positive. For a start, it's the most expensive and longest running trial in Swedish history. And then there's a public's relationship with Lundin. In terms of Lundin and the Lundin family and the Lundin companies, I'd say that Swedish people are other divided. I think most people have made up their minds long time ago if they're guilty or not guilty. But if you look at the Lundin stock at the Swedish stock market, it's very popular. You know, stock and a lot of people have gotten a feel-through-rich from buying Lundin shares. Martin is quick to point out that while the Swedish state is responsible for bringing the case against Lundin, it has also been one of its biggest supporters in the past. Our huge pension fund since Sweden, they have heavily invested in Lundin companies. So you could say that you can't just blame Lundin because we all knew how money was made during these years. And according to the prosecutor, the income they got from selling the block was what really gave them rocket fuel to buy more concessions and grow to the global company that they are today. It struck me while sitting in court how Swedish it all was. This feels like an incredibly obvious thing to say, but this is supposed to be universal justice at work. Apart from my producer and I, there were no foreign journalists in the gallery. Nearly every single person in the courtroom on the day I was there was white. It's been hard to shape the sense that this trial is a reckoning that Sweden is having with itself. But something Martin has been thinking about a lot. He recounts one day of a trial in particular that stuck with him. You could also see kind of basic things when the plaintiffs came. I mean, some of them they couldn't read or write. You come to Stockholm. They don't have a credit card. You can't buy coffee here in the cafe. And I could feel that many of the plaintiffs were kind of the court didn't really take care of them. It's a fitting example of how the Sudanese plaintiffs have over the course of this long, drawn out process become something of an afterthought. And that reveals a fundamental tension in this idea of universal jurisdiction. Is there such a thing as a universal idea of justice? What happens when there's incompatibility between the system and the victims it hopes to deliver justice to? And it's been really a clash of cultures also. And you have a court where people are used to dates and times and who did what exactly what time, what did he say? And then you have 25, 30-year-old memories from people and more of a kind of totally different culture in the way stories are told. And when these two meet, it's not really sure who. I mean at the end of the court, the court is a court and things have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. There's been some criticism levelled by the defence that the plaintiffs only came for compensation. It's something Christine mentioned as well as an explanation for why the case was brought in the first place and how Eggbert Besselink managed to get so many testimonies. And I know Eggbert Besselink went to Sudan, to South Sudan. I think it was in 2007 and was telling people you should do London because they have a lot of money. The irony is that so much of this is about money. That's why Lundin went to Sudan in the first place. Nowadays of course, that money has moved. Somewhere much less fraught. Of course the company has been emptied, you know, all the assets. Before the trial began, Lundin merged with a Norwegian energy company in a multi-billion-dollar deal. The bulk of Lundin assets moving out of Sweden in the process. Eggbert Besselink thinks compensation is more than a fair ask. But a family still has billions? And they're enjoying their billions every day. In the week? So I think the Lundin family has something to show for, towards the communities. So yeah, I will not be satisfied until these businessmen or families or corporations, one way or another, go down there and make up. And they can. It's much cheaper than paying your legal counsels here, really much cheaper. The prosecution has asked for a 10-year prison sentence for Ian Lundin if he has found guilty, and six years for his co-defendant, Alexander Schneider. The company would also be fined 3 million Swedish Kroner, the equivalent of 250,000 pounds. On top of that, Lundin would have to forfeit the profits that it's estimated to have made in Sudan during that period, about 200 million pounds. Then again, the combined value of all the publicly traded resource companies that make up the Lundin group stands at $55 billion. So really, that's just a drop in the ocean. Oh, and if that money is collected from Lundin, it would go directly to the Swedish state treasury. Yakuá for his part thinks it's better than nothing. At the very least, it makes a point. In South Sudan, if you are a commander, if you are army commander, you think that maybe you are above the low. Here, people, people appear, appear, are afraid of the, for the lows of the lows. It's certainly a reputation that people like Gorin, Magnus, and the prosecutors are trying to uphold. But even if they do win, it won't make a difference on the ground in South Sudan. This case will end in Sudan, but it will not end in South Sudan. Because some of these, some of the generals are, is still active now. Right up until the end of his life, Gatguar's father was still fighting in the latest permutation of the Civil War. He frequently encouraged his son to return and become a soldier again. Since his death in 2020, the conflict started up again in 2023. It's considered one of the worst humanitarian situations in the world. What happens in a Swedish courtroom won't change that. It's near impossible to get an accurate death toll. Reporting is severely restricted. But experts have estimated that over the past two decades, the number would stand in the hundreds of thousands. So what we just wanted, whether it was just praying for is that, if it ends here in Sudan, whether we win or lose, let it also end there in South Sudan. These days, Gatguar lives in Finland. Now I'm over working. I have a permanent job. Everything is okay. Always with me. And his trauma lives on too. But sometimes I'm just afraid that maybe someone may stop me, someone may stop me with knife or anything. Even some of my bosses, they don't know. They don't know. I don't tell them anything about this, about this court. Because I don't trust them. I ask Gatguar what he wants in this trial, why he was so eager to take part. What I just wanted is the justice. For my mum, the justice for our people that. Hattongan ni, 'Tai' ala, 'Tai' ala, 'Tai' ala. Uwagakak, 'Tai' ala, 'Tai' ala. Kaya ni, 'Tai' ala, 'Tai' ala. Kaya ni, 'Tai' ala. Ipah ong, 'Tai' ala, 'Tai' ala. Kaya ni, 'Tai' ala. Kaya ni, 'Tai' ala. Kaya ni, 'Tai' ala. Kaya ni, 'Tai' ala. Kaya ni, 'Tai' ala.