South Sudan: Simmering Below the Surface

Last Friday, seven Nigerian soldiers were laid to rest with full military honors in Abuja. The seven peacekeepers – along with one comrade each from Botswana, Mali, and Senegal – were killed when rebels, presumably from a splinter group trying to sabotage upcoming peace talks in Libya, attacked the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) base camp at Haskanita, in the southern part of the conflicted Darfur region. The attack prompted a presidential statement on behalf of the United Nations Security Council, not only condemning the aggression and demanding that “no effort be spared so that the perpetrators be identified and brought to justice,” but also a reiteration of support for AMIS and a strong declaration that “the Council underlines that any attempt to undermine the peace process is unacceptable.”

But on the very day that Ghanaian Ambassador Leslie Christian, whose country holds the rotating Security Council presidency this month, was in New York recommitting the world body to making peace in Sudan's west, the secretary-general of the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), Pagan Amum Okiech, was in Washington warning that the Islamist regime of President Umar al-Bashir was violating the terms of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended decades of civil war between the Arab-dominated Muslim north of the country and South Sudan, where the population is largely Christian or adherents of traditional African religions, which left more than two million people, mostly South Sudanese, dead – ten times as many victims as in Darfur. In an interview with the Voice of America's James Butty, Amum noted a number of violations of the CPA by the Khartoum regime:

Our [main] points where there is no implementation are, the Abyei Protocol is not implemented. There is no peace in Abyei. The people of Abyei up till now, two years after the signing of the peace agreement have not experienced any peace, and this is precisely because the [ruling Islamist] National Congress Party is violating the agreement, is reneging from their commitment, particularly the security arrangement whereby they are maintaining huge forces in Southern Sudan contrary to the agreement.

The South Sudanese leader's reference to Abyei was not lost on those familiar with the history of modern Sudan. Between 1955 and 1972, the First Sudanese Civil War was fought between the northern-dominated central government and South Sudanese who had been involuntarily merged by the British colonial authorities into a single administrative unit only in 1946. In fact, the outbreak of the hostilities, which ultimately claimed half a million lives, actually predated Sudan's 1956 independence. The fighting ended in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Agreement which gave the South Sudanese a single southern administrative region with broad autonomy.

After oil was discovered in 1979, however, the dictator Jaafar al-Nimeiri began tampering with the boundaries to shift potentially petroleum-rich border districts in South Sudan into northern provinces. This maneuver – along with the concomitant pocketing of fees from exploratory licenses in these areas whose proceeds properly belonged to the South Sudan regional government under the terms of the peace deal – was a major contributor to the outbreak of the Second Sudanese Civil War, which started in 1983 and continued until 2005.

Under the terms of the CPA, Abyei was defined as the traditional territory of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms, a finding upheld by the Abyei Boundary Commission established under the agreement to adjudicate the actual lines and which gave most of the district to the Ngok Dinka, who are mostly sedentary farmers. The CPA provides a mechanism for resolving any remaining issues through a referendum whereby the inhabitants can choose between joining the north or the south, but since Ngok Dinka tribesmen formed the backbone of the SPLA/M – and many assumed senior positions in the movement, including its late leader, Dr. John Garang – the results of any vote seem foregone. In fact, earlier this year a National Democratic Institute for International Affairs study involving extensive focus groups in Abyei found that the district would overwhelming opt to cut its ties with the North and join South Sudan, either as the latter's eleventh state or as a part of one of its existing states. President Bashir, not surprisingly, has publicly stated that he disagrees with the commission's interpretation and, in any case, is unwilling to lose to the south the oil regions within the district's boundaries. More ominously, there are reports that the Khartoum government is arming the other major ethnic group in Abyei, nomadic “Arab” Misseriya pastoralists. Sound like Darfur, anyone?

Linked to the boundary issue is the missed July 9 deadline for the Sudanese army to withdraw from South Sudan. According to documents from the UN-led Ceasefire Monitoring Committee, confirmed in writing by Major General Hussein Ali Kambal, the ranking northern liaison officer with the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), only 30,837 Sudanese troops have been verified as redeployed north of the CPA-mandated lines, leaving more than 15,000 still in South Sudan. In addition, the SPLA contests the status of nearly 9,000 northern soldiers not factored into its numbers by the Khartoum regime which alleges that they had been “voluntarily demobilized.”

At the root of these disputes – or rather, of Khartoum's foot-dragging – is Sudan's oil wealth, most of which is located in South Sudan. Thanks to the 480,000 barrels a day being pumped from a proven reserve of 1.6 billion barrels, as well as a bullish oil market (the NYMEX price for light sweet crude closed at $81.22 last Friday), General Bashir has done well with the valuable low-sulfur crude his regime markets as “Nile Blend.” From near bankruptcy in the 1990s, Sudan's overall GDP has increased threefold since 2000, making it one of Africa's fastest growing economies. Moreover, the black gold has bought the regime important political cover and military: with mainland China the consumer of nearly four-fifths of Sudan's oil production and the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) the owner of a 40 percent share in Sudan's Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, Beijing has not only run diplomatic interference for Khartoum at the UN and other international organizations whenever discussion of the Darfur crisis comes up, but, as I reported earlier this year, sold Sudan the weapons to carry out the grisly campaign in the western region.

The problem is that there is a foreseeable end point to this state of affairs. CPA provides that “the people of South Sudan have the right to self-determination, inter alia, through a referendum to determine their future status” and that “at the end of the six year Interim Period there shall be an internationally monitored referendum, organised jointly by the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army, for the people of South Sudan to: confirm the unity of the Sudan by voting to adopt the system of government established under the Peace Agreement; or to vote for secession.” Last year I noted that:

Given that southerners have experienced from Khartoum-based authorities little more than a worsening succession of neglect, abuse, and ethnic cleansing since long before Sudan's independence in 1956, when things only get worse, there is little chance that southerners will “confirm the unity of Sudan” in any free poll. Rather, the referendum will likely result in an overwhelming majority voting to establish what it has fought for several generations to achieve: an independent sovereign state.

Under the terms of the CPA, there should be elections across Sudan in 2009, including voting for an elected Government of South Sudan (GOSS), the current one being the SPLA/M leadership installed in Juba after the peace accord two years ago. These polls are to be followed by a referendum in 2011 which, if it takes place, will, according to almost every observer, confirm South Sudan as a sovereign state. Many, however, doubt that President Bashir and the Arab-dominated Islamist regime in Khartoum will ever let it get this far. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington three weeks ago, special presidential envoy for Sudan Andrew Natsios noted that the CPA “is a key requirement for any lasting peace in Sudan” and expressed concern that “implementation of the CPA is significantly behind schedule, and its failure risks a return to war between the north and the south.” This past weekend, as he wrapped up a ten-day visit to Sudan, Dr. Natsios described the political atmosphere he found there as “poisonous.”

In the recent months, the United States has finally gotten around to implementing the promise made during the final stages of negotiations for CPA that America would help transform the heroic, but ragtag SPLA into a professional military. This State Department-funded program, using private contractors, needs to be accelerated and expanded – and, possibly, even made a priority of the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which was achieved its “initial operating capacity” last week. With the tensions simmering just below the surface and the collapse of the peace agreement looming at the edge the horizon, only a credible armed force can provide the long-suffering South Sudanese with the security they yearn for and deter the Khartoum regime from igniting a new conflict that will be far deadlier and geopolitically more destabilizing than the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.