Sudan: Looming Crises, Strategic Opportunities

While international attention remains riveted on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the western Darfur region – it has been less than two weeks since an Antonov transport belonging to the Sudanese military bombed a school, waterworks, and a busy marketplace in the villages of Um Sidir, Ein Bassar and Shegeg Karo, respectively, leaving at least fourteen civilians dead and scores wounded, many of them women and children – an even larger conflict is on the verge of breaking out in South Sudan, even as a bold attack on Khartoum last weekend put the fragility of the Sudanese state in dramatic relief.

In another blow to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which was supposed to end the decades of civil war between the Arab-dominated Muslim north of the country and the largely Christian and animist South Sudan that had taken the lives more than 2.5 million people and displaced another 5 million – almost all of the casualties were South Sudanese civilians – the national census mandated by the accord ended last week less than a fortnight after it got underway amid reports of failure and acrimonious accusations of blatant manipulation. This puts into doubt elections scheduled for next year and, ultimately, the potential of Sudan to be transformed into a democratic federal state, an eventuality whose chances were already fairly slim, even before the fighting at the edge of Khartoum last Saturday.

The population and housing census, which had already been delayed several times because of still-unresolved disputes over religion and ethnicity as well as how those displaced by conflict (largely South Sudanese) were to be counted, was supposed to be one of the key components of the CPA process since the results were to be used to delineate political constituencies in the lead-up to the general elections in 2009. The census results were to also to be used to determine distribution of the wealth flowing in from the approximately 500,000 barrels of oil – most of which originate in the South – exported daily out of the Marsa al-Bashair terminal near Port Sudan. Instead, even before final tallies are announced, significant evidence of manipulation has emerged, including credible reports that some Southern Sudanese villages near the border between the two regions being counted in the North, while others were left off the maps used for the exercise and thus went uncounted altogether. Even before the process concluded, Gabriel Changson Chang, minister of information in the Government of South Sudan (GOSS), had already dismissed its results, telling reporters that the figures “should not be used to determine the borders, the referendum or to determine the wealth or power sharing, or to determine the cultural identity of the country.”

Not surprisingly, last week at the same meeting in Oslo, Norway, of the Sudan Consortium, the broad-based international donors' group of some forty-five countries and organizations, which pledged $4.8 billion in aid over four years to help consolidate the peace, one of South Sudan's ministers warned diplomats that overall one-quarter of the CPA had not been implemented while in some areas, such as Abyei, “just 35 percent of the CPA has been implemented” (see my January 24 report on the stakes in this critical region). Among the disputed points which highlight the bad faith of the Khartoum regime is its blatant cheating of the GOSS of its share of oil revenues, despite the fact that almost all of Sudan's known oilfields (with an estimated proven reserve of 6.4 billion barrels) except for the unproven offshore blocks on the Red Sea are in South Sudan. Under the peace accord, the money is supposed to be split evenly between National Congress Party (NCP) regime in Khartoum and the GOSS in Juba. Despite record oil prices – last Friday, petroleum hit a record $126.27 a barrel at the Mercantile Exchange in New York – Khartoum has transferred just barely $3 billion to the GOSS since 2005.

All of this highlights the risks about which I warned in this column last year: the heightening tension have the potential to ignite “a new conflict that will be far deadlier and geopolitically more destabilizing than the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur.” However, as worrisome as the threatening crisis is, it does present the international community in general and the United States in particular with three significant strategic opportunities.

First, a North-South bloodbath can be averted – or at least greatly mitigated – if the effective elements of the South Sudanese government are empowered to defend themselves and their people. Having served as midwife to the CPA, the United States made a political commitment to the former rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) that it would help them transform their units into a professional military force for the GOSS. The commitment extended to the militiamen of the South Sudan Defense Forces (SSDF) who were not parties to the CPA but who were subsequently integrated into the GOSS. Thus far this assistance, worth about $40 million in the current fiscal year, has translated into a new interim general headquarters building inaugurated in January by Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer and a modest amount to support some military advisors to help the South Sudanese draft a “white paper” outlining defense needs and concepts. Meanwhile, as I reported here earlier this year, the People's Republic of China (PRC), which buys some 75 percent of Sudan's oil exports, has become Khartoum's largest arms supplier, selling or trading for oil a full array of goods from ammunition for 122 mm howitzers to armored trucks to T-59 tanks to Shenyang J-8 single-seat fighters and F-7 supersonic fighter jets. At the very minimum, South Sudan needs an air defense system to protect itself against raids like the NCP regime continues to direct at civilians in Darfur.

Second, given not only the tragic history of the sufferings they have endured at the hands of successive governments in Khartoum, but also the more recent and repeated violations of the CPA and the failure of the international community to hold President Umar al-Bashir and his regime accountable for them, it is not only certain that South Sudanese would opt for secession in the 2011 referendum promised to them in the peace accord, but it is increasingly likely that they may just precipitate matters and declare independence sooner, especially if they take the botched census as an indication that, even now, the 2009 election results are being manipulated. While this could lead to conflict, the violence can be lessened if the South Sudanese can resist efforts to obstruct their progress to freedom and sovereignty.

Furthermore, if the South Sudanese succeed in striking it out on their own, they will deprive Khartoum of the very resources which it has up to now used to fuel it violent oppression of other parts of the country, including Darfur. The windfall profits of its petroleum resources and the consistent support of its Chinese partners notwithstanding, the NCP regime's grasp on power is incredibly tenuous, as last weekend's foray into Omdurman, the largest city in Sudan just across the Nile River from the capital of Khartoum, by hundreds – some reports even said thousands – of fighters belonging to the largest faction of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), underscored. JEM, one of the main Darfuri resistance groups, is partly back by the Chadian government which is still smarting from a Khartoum-supported offensive against it earlier this year (see my February 14 report in this column space); it has also been linked to Bashir's estranged former mentor, the Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi. While the attack was repulsed amid heavy fighting, JEM has served notice to the world that if the government of Umar al-Bashir is so vulnerable that a large band of rebels can cross more than 600 miles of hostile territory to reach the gates of the capital while the despot's coffers are flush with cash, then the viability of any eventual Khartoum-based successor regime drawn from the hitherto governing elite of Nile Valley Arabs (less than five percent of the population), once they are reduced to penury by the secession of South Sudan, is questionable at best.

Third, the United States stands to gain in this process, if policymakers will look at the broader picture, rather than continuing to pursuing endless dialogues aimed at preserving an artificial state that is not only congenitally illegitimate for the harm it has wrought on its own people, but has been a source of regional and global insecurity. Calls like the one made in the current issue of Foreign Affairs by Andrew Natsios, former U.S. special presidential envoy for Sudan, to “slow down the forces of dissolution before it is too late” may be par for the course in the international diplomatic circles within which and the former U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator traveled alongside the UN secretary-general's special envoy for Darfur, out-of-office Swedish Social Democratic politician Jan Eliasson, and the African Union's special envoy, Tanzanian diplomat Salim Ahmed Salim. However, as a policy the “save united Sudan” approach which Natsios advocates as “the U.S. government's overarching strategic objective in Sudan” neither contributes to long-term stability nor serves America's national interests.

A break-up of the Sudanese state would not only weaken an Islamist regime that once hosted both Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but it would also represent a major setback to mainland China's strategy of penetrating Africa and, through alliances with despotic regimes, acquiring privileged access to natural resources to fuel its rise to great power status. And, in the process, America stands to acquire a valuable partner in the heart of a continent which is of immense strategic significance to it in the 21st century.

In order to effectively seize this unique opportunity, however, the United States needs to at least appreciate, if not master, the internal dynamics within South Sudan. While the South Sudanese are united in their resistance to aggression by Northern forces and their desire to break the colonial era bonds that have chained them to the Arab and, in recent decades, Islamist despots in Khartoum, among themselves there are significant divisions along ethnic and political lines. Up to now, to the extent that U.S. policymakers have engaged with South Sudan, they have down so through the SPLA/M, which is understandable given the charismatic figure cut by the group's longtime leader, John Garang de Mabior, an ethnic Bor Dinka and former Sudanese military officer with a doctorate in agricultural economics from Iowa State University. However, since Dr. Garang's death in a helicopter accident in July 2005, just months after the signing of the CPA, the mantle of leadership has fallen Salva Kiir Mayardit, another Dinka (albeit from the Rek) who currently serves contemporaneously as first vice president of Sudan and president of the GOSS. Lacking his predecessor's authority, Kiir has proven unable to rein in the excesses of corruption, nepotism, and tribalism which characterize of some of his colleagues. This, in turn, has raised tensions with non-Dinka groups, especially the Nuer, in whose traditional lands many of the critical resource-rich areas of the South are to be found. Thus the formal SPLA/M hierarchy as it exists on paper does not necessarily conform to the current realities of power and influence in the South.

Prominent Nuer leaders reportedly at odds with Kiir include GOSS Vice President Riek Machar, a Dok Nuer with a Ph.D. in robotic engineering from the University of Bradford who was one of the SPLA's original members before moving on to the SSDF and eventually the South Sudan Independence Movement/Army (SSIM/SSIA), and General Paulino Matip Nhial, a Bul Nuer who is deputy commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the South whose former militia (the SSDF) is probably the most powerful armed component within the SPLA. The death in a plane crash just two weeks ago of Dominic Dim Deng, the defense minister in the GOSS, and two dozen others, including nineteen ranking officers aligned with Kiir, further complicates the political landscape and raises a number of questions about the South Sudanese president's political future. In fact, a number of observers have noted that Kiir has increasingly identified himself more with his role as first vice president in the interim “government of national unity” created by the CPA than with his other position as head of the GOSS.

The great British military historian, Sir Basil Liddell Hart wrote in his classic treatise Strategy that “for whoever habitually suppresses the truth in the interests of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.” The scholar's dictum succinctly sums up the conventional approach to dealing with the multiple challenges in Sudan in that they consistently to fail to look beyond the current crises to a more desirable long-term end state which, he argued, should be the proper object of strategic planning: “The higher level of grand strategy [is] that of conducting war with a far-sighted regard to the state of the peace that will follow.” If the United States is serious about seeking not only an end to the current conflicts in Sudan, but also a sustainable security balance in the strategically vital Horn of Africa subregion, policymakers and analysts would do well to begin thinking outside their habitual boxes and broaden their horizons to encompass the unprecedented opportunities presently opening before them to support the building of a future that not provides only freedom and prosperity for the long-oppressed peoples of Sudan, but also secures a geopolitical advantage for America and her interests.

J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior 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.