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Since civil war broke out there in December , as many as 50, people have been killed. More than 2. Around 6 million people are currently at risk of going hungry, and 70 percent of schools have been closed due to the fighting.
So what is the conflict actually about? Who is fighting whom, and why? And does the US — which did more than any other country to help South Sudan win its independence — have any realistic way of stopping the carnage?
For 22 years, a brutal civil war raged in Sudan between the government in the predominantly Muslim, Arabic-speaking north and rebels from the south, where people are mostly Christian or follow more traditional religions. Christian groups in the US had also long championed the cause of the South Sudanese, seeing their struggle against the Muslim government in the north as a fundamental struggle against the Muslim oppression of Christians.
When George W. Bush, himself an evangelical Christian, came into the White House in , he made Sudan a top policy priority — and it was during his second term that the peace agreement was finally signed. The agreement laid out a timetable for a referendum on whether Sudan should be split in two, with South Sudan becoming a separate country.
That vote was held in January and passed overwhelmingly, with nearly 99 percent of South Sudanese voting in favor of independence. On July 9 of that year, the Republic of South Sudan formally came into existence.
Political leaders around the world hailed it as a triumph for peace. People in the south more or less agreed to overlook or ignore or downplay these lesser conflicts in order to achieve what was seen as a far more important goal: independence from the north. But, of course, those underlying ethnic tensions never actually went away. And once the bigger fight for independence was essentially over, and it came time to actually get down to the business of building a brand new country, they came bubbling right back up.
Let our cultural and ethnic diversity be a source of pride and strength, not parochialism and conflict… We are all South Sudanese. And it seemed — at least at first — that Kiir really was committed to preventing ethnic tensions from splitting apart the fledging country.
Kiir, a cowboy hat-wearing member of the ethnic Dinka tribe, appointed Riek Machar to be his vice president. Sudanese human rights monitors reported government-aligned militia attacks on civilians in Blue Nile in April. In January and February, security forces violently broke up anti-austerity protests in Khartoum, Omdurman and other towns, arresting hundreds, beating protesters with sticks and hoses, and using tear gas, according to rights monitors.
Security officials dispersed several university student protests across the country, detaining and injuring many throughout the year. In January, security forces shot at student protesters in El Geneina, West Darfur, killing one , and at displaced persons at a camp in Zalingei, in Central Darfur, killing five. During the wave of protests in January and February, security agents detained hundreds of rights activists, protesters and opposition party members and held dozens for weeks without charge.
Rudwan Daoud, a Sudanese-American activist, was detained for six weeks without charge after security agents arrested him during a protest against government land expropriations. Activist and vocal critic Husham Ali has been detained without charge by security officials following his deportation in May from Saudi Arabia, where he had been detained since November In July, security agents arrested social media activist and sports commentator, Ahmed al-Dai Bushara, at his home in Omdurman and held him incommunicado, without charge, for over two months, releasing him in mid-September.
Detainees were subjected to torture and ill-treatment. A Darfuri student leader, released in late January after five months of solitary confinement, was repeatedly beaten, subjected to electric shocks, threatened with death and rape, and held in harsh conditions. In October, student activist Asim Omer Hassan, who faces charges of killing a policeman during protests in May , was hospitalized after being beaten in Kober prison.
Sudan has failed to investigate allegations of torture by national security officials and has yet to ratify the Convention Against Torture, which it signed in It retains the death penalty and corporal punishment for numerous crimes. In February, a group of nine police in plainclothes raided an apartment where activist Wini Omer — a vocal critic of the public order regime — was meeting three friends, arrested the group, detained them for five days, and accused them of prostitution.
On July 24, a prosecutor brought eight additional charges against Omer, including crimes against the state, punishable by death.
A religious teacher in Central Darfur, Matar Younis, arrested in April for criticizing human rights violations by government forces in Darfur, was accused of crimes against the state and espionage.
In July, authorities dropped charges and released him. In November, security officials charged activist Mohamed Boshi with espionage and crimes against the state after he was forcibly disappeared and then extrajudicially returned from Egypt to Sudan in October.
Authorities also barred opposition politicians and activists from traveling out of Sudan and confiscated passports, including of a Darfur Bar Association lawyer returning from an award ceremony in the United States in August. John Garang, the leader of the South who had negotiated the CPA and wanted to give unity a second chance, was killed in a helicopter crash six months after the agreement was signed.
He was the last major southern leader to truly believe that unity might be both possible and desirable for both countries.
The failure of the conflict resolution effort represented by the CPA leads to many questions about the past. For one, why did the attempt fail? Was it because eager negotiators essentially managed to convince the two sides to sign a set of agreements that they neither believed in nor intended to respect, or was it because the international community did not exert sufficient pressure to ensure that the agreement would be implemented?
Key questions, to be sure, but the most important unresolved issues concern the future rather than the past. Past experience could either act as a facilitator or a hindrance to a new agreement, and it is not clear whether international intervention, without the parties to the conflict committed to a peaceful settlement, is an indispensible instrument of peace or just a temporary respite from fighting that the two sides will unescapably resume with renewed vigor.
Is war simply inevitable because it represents for both countries an escape from internal political and economic problems that appear to have no solution? Since the days of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, Sudan had been officially divided into two areas: the North and the South. Under the condominium, an official internal boundary existed that put the South out of northern reach. Unfortunately for the present conflicts, this internal boundary was never clearly delineated, let alone demarcated—it crossed, after all, territory considered to have no value.
Not surprisingly, when Sudan became independent in and the barrier between the two areas was lifted, the South found itself in an extremely disadvantaged position. It was not long before it started agitating for a new status. Conflict in Sudan was never a simple bilateral affair between North and South. The split between the two regions intersected fundamental problems that existed within both.
The North, which ruled the entire country, was extremely unstable politically. Power switched back and forth between military and civilian governments, ranging from those dominated by the left to those with an Islamist orientation. Important to understanding the present predicament is that active fighting between North and South took place mostly in the center of the country, around the old North-South internal boundary. Complicating matters, the area crossed by this poorly defined border turned out to be rich in oil, making it a vital resource for both sides.
Oil in commercial quantity was discovered in by Chevron near the towns of Bentiu and Heglig, close to the North-South boundary. The discovery made it all the more important for the North to maintain control, while providing added incentives to the southern rebels to fight for control of the territory.
The Heglig find created an especially dangerous situation, because it was located in an area where the boundary was particularly ill-defined and was thus claimed, then and now, by both North and South.
At the time of the oil discovery, Sudan had been enjoying the most peaceful period in its troubled post-independence history. An agreement signed in Addis Ababa in had put an end to the southern uprising, transforming Sudan into an asymmetrical federation where southerners held positions in the central government but also enjoyed a degree of autonomy.
But in the early s, the North underwent another upheaval that put an end to peace. By , the country was slipping back into war and old patterns. North-South conflict was bubbling to the surface. Instability in the North increased after Nimeiri was overthrown in And war raged in the center of the country, with the northern government fomenting divisions and tribal clashes in the South. The signing of the CPA in put an end to open North-South warfare, but all other problems continued to simmer. These conflicts are now again coming to a head with the failure of the separation process.
Four types of conflict afflict the two Sudans today. First is the North-South conflict over oil. Although the North has officially accepted the secession, it does not take a visitor to the country long to discover that in practice most people have not internalized the new reality and feel deeply resentful.
The South is also resentful of the general disdain with which the North has historically treated it. Reciprocal anger manifests itself most clearly in the dispute over the transit fees that the landlocked South should pay the North in order to ship its oil through a pipeline running to the northern Port Sudan terminal. In this dispute, both sides appear willing to undermine themselves economically in order to score points against each other—by April , no oil was being shipped, thus the South received no revenue from sales and the North received no transit fees.
The second set of conflicts, which quickly led to violence, involves attempts to control territories along the border between the North and South. Conflict in these areas is shaped by the presence of various armed rebel groups, making it quite different from the economic warfare between the two nations that has focused mostly on pipelines and resource allocation.
The border areas are beginning to look worse than they did before the CPA was signed in ; fighting is widespread and the leadership is more fragmented.
The third set of conflicts, which also involves violence, is taking place within South Sudan, where the authority of the Juba government is contested, and inexperienced and powerless government officials are unable to impose bureaucratic order on the new country.
The concept of a political opposition appears to be missing in the new state, with politicians breaking from the ruling SPLM and routinely forming armed militias rather than political parties. Across much of the South, furthermore, tribal authorities still dominate. Many southern states are witnessing significant levels of violence and continued instability, much of it caused by competition to control natural resources—land, grazing rights, water, and even oil.
While such conflicts are inevitable in a new country where a weak government is attempting to superimpose the structures of a modern state on a society that must still rely on existing social organizations and tribal structures, this does not make them less destructive. The fourth set of conflicts is internal to the North, which is also attempting to build a new state on its truncated territory. While the North is ahead of the South in terms of its administrative and physical infrastructure, poor as they are, it also has a worn-out political system where old men dominate the government, the opposition, and the military alike.
Discredited by having lost the South and by being involved in what seems to be an endless conflict, both civilian and military authorities command little respect and loyalty. Indeed, what so far has kept the Khartoum government from being ousted as a consequence of the secession is the fact that the opposition is also discredited. The example of the Arab Spring in other countries has so far failed to catalyze the palpable discontent on the ground into a new and popular movement and failed to lead to the rise of a new and organized opposition.
Furthermore, the population in the North continues to be displaced and suffer instability as a result of the conflict in Darfur, bears the subjugation of the eastern tribes, and deals with a rising sense of dissatisfaction everywhere as economic conditions continue to deteriorate.
Ultimately, Sudan finds itself mired in an intricate web of complex problems. Sudan began exporting crude oil in , and oil flow reached a level of , barrels per day by , making oil the greatest resource for the unified country. It remains a significant economic driver for both North and South Sudan today. While dependence on oil has proven to be a serious long-term impediment to both economic development and democratization in most countries, in the short run it represents salvation for poor nations.
Sudan is no exception, making oil the most immediate source of conflict. At the time of the referendum on January 9, , oil accounted for 60 to70 percent of government revenue in the North and 98 percent in the South. Oil created a small zone of prosperity in a country otherwise in dire condition, graphically illustrated by the gleaming oil-company headquarters that dot dilapidated Khartoum.
Together with the ephemeral prosperity engendered by the sudden revenue increase, oil brought serious distortions to the Sudanese economy. The country caught the so-called Dutch disease with a vengeance.
Between and , the average annual growth rate of the agriculture sector in Sudan was only 3. Agriculture still employs 80 percent of the workforce, but it accounts for only one-third of the gross domestic product in the North. In the South, where land is abundant and mostly fertile, agriculture remains equally underdeveloped.
The alternative for the South of trucking oil southward to the Kenyan coast is impractical, and a new pipeline to that destination remains prohibitively expensive and in any case, years away. Before the Republic of South Sudan became independent, the sharing of oil revenue had been regulated by the CPA: 2 percent of it went directly to the producing states both North and South had a federal structure , with the remainder split evenly between Khartoum and Juba.
The South was never happy with the formula, and after it gained independence, it inevitably stopped sharing its oil revenue with the North. Negotiations facilitated by Thabo Mbeki, chairman of the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel, which was established in October to assist with the implementation of the CPA, have restarted and broken down multiple times.
Numerous solutions were proposed by various mediators and rejected by one side or the other: a compromise on oil transit fees; the forgiveness of arrears; and even cash transfers from the South to the North in exchange for southern control of Abyei have all been suggested, but to no avail. With Khartoum seeking to salvage its national pride and make up some of its expected revenue loss and Juba insistent on asserting its newly gained national sovereignty, tensions have only flared further.
Although Sudan has asked China, a prominent investor in Sudanese oil, to intervene and facilitate negotiations, there has been no measurable success to date. The January referendum that overwhelmingly approved the secession of the South did not address several important territorial issues: unclear and undemarcated border tracts; the question of whether Abyei should stay within the North or become a part of the South; and the status of South Kordofan and Blue Nile States, regions that were clearly recognized as part of the North, but expected to be given some form of special status under the provisions of the CPA because of their ties to the South.
These territorial problems involve complex issues of nationalism in both North and South, deep-seated local grievances, and competition for water and grazing land among local tribes. The unresolved issues concerning the border areas led to the outbreak of violence almost immediately after the split. Clashes initially began as separate, isolated incidents north of the border, with fighting between movements supposedly rooted in the contested areas and the Sudanese Armed Forces SAF.
Since the split, attempts at mediation have been undertaken by the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel, Ethiopia, China, and other international powers; and the status of Abyei and removal of troops from the border regions have come to dominate negotiation meetings. Despite the considerable effort, mediation has not been successful.
The potential for conflict created by the uncertainties surrounding the exact demarcation of the North-South border was recognized early on in the negotiations leading to the CPA. As a result, the CPA included a stipulation that a North-South Technical Border Commission should complete the demarcation of the boundary within six months of the signing of the agreement, but this did not happen.
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