What’s at Stake in Sudan’s Abyei

In this column space three months ago, I warned that the tensions were so heightened that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended the 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, that had taken the lives more than two million people, mostly South Sudanese, was in danger of total collapse, potentially “igniting a new conflict that will be far deadlier and geopolitically more destabilizing than the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur.” In fact, the day after the column appeared, the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) suspended its participation in the coalition national government, citing the failure of President Umar al-Bashir's National Congress Party (NCP, formerly the National Islamic Front) regime to live up to its obligations under the CPA. While the boycott was ended after a little more than two months following some concessions by the Khartoum regime, a lingering dispute over the Abyei district which has received relatively little coverage in the Western media threatens not only the North-South peace deal, but also bodes ill for the resolution of Sudan's other conflicts, not the least of all the one in Darfur which continues unabated notwithstanding the recent stand-up of a hybrid African Union/United Nations peacekeeping mission (UNAMID).

Abyei is a veritable bridge between the lands and peoples of Sudan's north and south. Since the early 18th century, the area has been inhabited by members of the Ngok subdivision of the African Dinka people who has migrated westward and found the waterways of Abyei ideal for their agro-pastoral lives. Not long after the Ngok Dinka settled into Abyei, members of the Humr (“red”) section of the Misseriya tribe of the nomadic Baggara (“cattlemen”) Arabs migrating out of Darfur entered the area and took their abode in its northern part. While the two groups generally coexisted, there were also numerous clashes, especially during the late 19th century when the Humr were aligned with General Charles Gordon's slave-trading nemesis al-Zubayr Pasha (Al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur) and regularly stole cattle from as well as enslaved their Ngok neighbors.

Ironically for the Ngok Dinka, it was these past tensions with the Misseriya that leads directly to the current conflict. In 1905, during the period of Anglo-Egyptian rule in the Sudan, the colonial administrators transferred nine Ngok chiefdoms from the southern province of Bahr el-Ghazal and to the northern province of Kordofan, ostensibly for the sake of more efficient governance by placing the Dinka, as one contemporary report noted, “under the same governor as the Arabs of whose conduct they complain.” As a result, when Sudan became independent on January 1, 1956, Abyei found itself incorporated into a northern state, rather than a part of the South where it historically belonged. As a result, the district was caught up in the fighting of the First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972), with massacres of both Ngok leaders and civilians. The cessation of hostilities with the Addis Ababa Agreement carried with it the promise – never honored – that Abyei would be able to vote in referendum as to whether or not to become part of the new autonomous Southern Region.

When the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) broke out following the dictator Jaafar al-Nimeiry's scuttling of the accord brokered at Addis Ababa, it was not surprising that the Dinka formed the backbone of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the SPLM's military wing. In response, the then Khartoum regime armed the Misseriya, organizing them into Murahalin (literally, “people on the move”) militia units and turning them loose to clear the Ngok Dinka from their traditional homelands – a tactic which the NCP authorities have copied in Darfur, deploying “Arab” Janjaweed irregulars against “black” Darfuri tribesmen. (Incidentally, just this week, the NCP regime announced that a Janjaweed leader who is under a UN travel ban for his role in organizing atrocities in Darfur, Musa Hilal, has been elevated to a senior position in the central government.)

In 2004, during the U.S.-mediated negotiations leading to the CPA, recognizing that the failure to implement the referendum provision was one of the major causes for the failure of the peace agreement signed in Addis Ababa three decades earlier, American envoy Jack Danforth, a former U.S. senator and later ambassador to the United Nations, convinced both parties to sign a distinct Protocol on the Resolution of the Abyei Conflict which defined Abyei as “the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905,” while acknowledging that “the Misseriya and other nomadic peoples retain their traditional rights to graze cattle and move across the territory of Abyei.” For the interim, the Protocol made the residents of Abyei citizens of both Western Kordofan state in Sudan's north and Bahr el-Ghazal state in the territory of South Sudan which the CPA brought into being; thus they would have representation in the legislatures of both states simultaneously. At the end of the interim period, when the CPA stipulated that the South Sudanese would vote whether or not to secede and establish their own independent sovereign state, the residents of Abyei would separately vote to choose whether they wish to remain as a special administrative area of northern Sudan or become part of Bahr el-Ghazal in South Sudan (and presumably secede with the rest of the South).

Significantly, the Abyei Protocol did not spell out what specific geographic areas constituted the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms, leaving that determination was left to the Abyei Boundaries Commission (ABC), an international panel of experts charged with defining and demarcating the area of the chiefdoms, whose ruling would be “final and binding.” After extensive historical research and public hearings, the ABC's definitive Report, presented to President al-Bashir and First Vice President John Garang, leader of the SPLM, on July 14, 2005, drew a line roughly at latitudes 10°22'30″ N. The Sudanese president quickly rejected the decision and, with the attention of both nation and world distracted by the death of Dr. Garang barely two weeks later, has subsequently made no moves to implement it. Quite to the contrary, Khartoum has gone out of its way to obstruct the monitoring activities of the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) while attempting to create new facts on the ground by settling Arabs in Abyei and displacing Dinka. In fact, at a November 18, 2007, mass rally at Wad Medani, in northern Sudan, to commemorate the 18th anniversary of his Islamist militia, the National Popular Defense Forces, Umar al-Bashir openly declared that the regime would “not give an inch, not so much as an ant's body,” of the Abyei district and threatened “holy war” against any who would rearrange the colonial boundaries of 1905.

The reason for Khartoum's recalcitrance is all too obvious. The ABC's ruling places some of Sudan's most productive oilfields – including Heglig, Diffra, and Bamboo Complex, as well as part of Toma South, which collectively have at least 200 million barrels of recoverable reserves left – inside Abyei. According to a study last year by the International Crisis Group, the annual revenue from Abyei's oilfields is roughly $500 million. Since the NCP regime has refused to accept the ABC decision, it goes without saying that neither has it implemented the Abyei Protocol's requirement to share the districts oil revenue with the Government of South Sudan (GOSS), the two state governments, and the local populace, Ngok and Misseriya alike. The 42 percent share that is owed to the SPLM authorities alone would have amounted, just for the period since the ABC's final report was submitted, to more than $750 million – a sum that Juba-based government could use not only to rebuild the war-torn region, but also to create the professional military and security force it will need in the months and years ahead to, as I warned in this column more than a year ago, “defend itself and its people against what will likely be an escalation in economic, environmental, and military violence from the genocidal Khartoum regime.” Conversely, bereft of the income it derives from its monopolization of Abyei's petroleum production, the NCP would not only have fewer resources with which to prosecute its current campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, but less largesse with which to assure itself of the loyalty of the various component factions within its Arab-Islamist core constituency. And if the Ngok Dinka of Abyei opt to align the district with their southern kin and South Sudan votes for independence – both courses of action which most observers deem likely – then the parasitic ruling elites in Khartoum face financial catastrophe.

Abyei also has a geopolitical and strategic significance well beyond the hydrocarbon wealth under its soil. The head of the GOSS, Salva Kiir, like his deceased predecessor, is a Dinka. Add to this the fact that many of the prominent leaders of the SPLM are Ngok Dinka and the injustices they suffered in Abyei was a major factor precipitating the Second Civil War and, quite simply, the ongoing dispute will be a major irritant in North-South relations. No wonder that in a September 11, 2007, speech opening the second session of the Southern Sudan Legislative Assembly, Salva Kiir warned that “it is likely that Sudan will reverse again to war” and listed at the top of the list of grievances the NCP regime's reneging on the Abyei Protocol and its repudiation of the ABC decision, which he described as “a clear violation of the CPA and a direct threat to peace.”

Furthermore, as the distinguished historian of Sudan Douglas Johnson, who served on the ABC, noted in an interview some time back with the news service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Khartoum's failure to live up to its commitments on Abyei has broader implications for conflicts throughout Sudan:

    If one side is refusing to implement an agreement that it has signed – it throws into doubt their commitment to the whole of the CPA. If one side is allowed to choose what part of the CPA they implement, then the other side may wish to choose what part of the CPA they implement, and then the CPA becomes full of holes and is a worthless document. It is either implemented in full, or it is discarded.

    The other issue is that there are a number of things that have happened in Abyei that have since happened in Darfur: the mobilization along alleged tribal lines, the use of militia to fight a war over land use, over the retention of resources. If the Abyei Protocol cannot be implemented, what possibility is there for a Darfur agreement that must address the same types of problems? What hope is there for that to be implemented?

    A third thing is that when the [entire] north-south boundary is defined, and if the referendum takes place, and if the south votes to become independent, there are a number of places along that boundary that will be similarly contested…If there is going to be this amount of trouble over the Abyei boundary, what hope is there for the [rest of the] north-south boundary being demarcated and agreed?

In short, if Khartoum is already more than two years behind schedule on adherence to its commitments on Abyei and giving no indication of being inclined to ever do so, how reasonable is it to anticipate that it will allow elections to take place in 2009 and the referendum on South Sudan to be held in 2011 as it supposed to under the CPA? Or whether, even if the polls take place, that it will honor the results? Consequently, should the GOSS feel itself legally or politically bound by the admittedly arbitrary timetables set by the CPA if it is clear that the northern Islamist regime has no intention of honoring the substance of the peace accord?

Alternatively, if the international guarantors who signed the CPA, including the Abyei Protocol – the U.S., which drove the negotiation of the accords, as well as Britain, Egypt, Italy, Kenya, the Netherlands, Norway, and Uganda, in addition to the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the IGAD Partners Forum, the African Union, the European Union, the Arab League, and the UN – have failed to hold Umar al-Bashir and his regime accountable for flouting the its treaty obligations, how can they credibly mediate the other conflicts they are currently trying to resolve in Darfur, East Sudan, and other regions of the fragile country, to say nothing of those in points beyond? And if these external partners are unable to act vigorously enough ensure the Bashir regime's compliance with a clear international agreements which they themselves guaranteed, what moral right do they have to persist in their diplomatic resistance to the centrifugal indigenous forces seek to break free of Khartoum's yoke?

Thus one can hardly exaggerate the stakes which hinge on the ultimate fate of Abyei.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs 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., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.