webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2010
All rights reserved
From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Sep 28 2010 - 02:43:31 EDT
South Sudan
Are they heading for a crash?
Next year Africa could get its first new country, to be called South Sudan,
for almost 20 years. But the fledgling state looks perilously weak
Sep 23rd 2010 | Juba and Khartoum
ON OR about January 9th, the people of southern Sudan should have an
opportunity to vote in a referendum on whether to break away from the
Republic of Sudan and create their own country. If, as seems likely, they
vote overwhelmingly for independence rather than to stay with the north,
Africa will get a freshly minted country by the middle of next year.
The government-in-waiting of the new country calls the referendum “the
final walk to freedom”. For the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement
(SPLM), the southerners’ main party, led by Salva Kiir, it is the
culmination of half a century of often bloody struggle for recognition
against successive Islamist regimes in Khartoum. These tried to impose an
Arab and Muslim culture on the largely black African, Christian and animist
south. By the time the fighting stopped in 2005, Africa’s longest civil
war had cost 2.5m lives and displaced many millions more. Much of the
region was devastated.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the war set up the
semi-autonomous region of South Sudan, to be ruled by the SPLM, as well as
a government of national unity in Khartoum led by President Omar al-Bashir,
to include the SPLM. The two sides were to work for the country’s unity
in a new federal arrangement, but the south also won the right to a
referendum on outright secession.
Despite the odd rhetorical nod towards unity, as demanded by the CPA, it is
rare to find anyone among the 8m southerners who is not going to vote for
independence. Indeed, Juba, the south’s biggest town and capital, exudes
a mood of expectation. After a five-year makeover of the government
quarter, it gives every appearance of being ready to take its place among
the capitals of Africa.
Smart paved roads (and even streetlamps) now lead to brand-new
air-conditioned ministerial offices. Workers are putting the finishing
touches to a new presidential compound that occupies an entire block in the
middle of town. The president’s own palace is a colonial-era building,
but it has been completely revamped with a splash of contemporary
mock-Pharaonic styling and buttresses tapering towards the upper floors.
Behind it is a helipad.
The shiny new presidential buildings include an office suite and large
conference and dining halls. The South Korean interior designer
enthusiastically invites your correspondent to admire the chandeliers and
carpets from his own country. The door frames are from China and the floor
marble has been imported from Uganda. But it is not all for work. Adjoining
the palace is a sizeable swimming pool and a presidential gym, though the
exercise bikes are still in their containers. There is even a pinewood
sauna, though you can work up just as much sweat by standing outside.
But beyond the SPLM leaders’ rosy poolside view is a more worrying
picture. For a start, it is not certain that the Sudanese government in
Khartoum will let the referendum proceed as planned. Even if it does, the
outcome will be extremely messy. Moreover, outside Juba the condition of
southern Sudan is still dire.
Most southerners think they are marching relentlessly towards independence.
But the view from Khartoum is, as ever, utterly different. There, most
Sudanese are in a state of denial about the referendum, let alone about
independence. When it is mentioned, which is rare, it is only in terms of
“maintaining the country’s unity”. Although Mr Bashir has stated
publicly that the north will not stop the south if it wants to break off,
almost nobody in the north can bring himself to contemplate the probability
that, in less than a year, the country will be dismembered and broken into
two. Some fear that this attitude could even lead to a new war.
.This state of denial stems partly from the fact that the north’s
politicians never wanted the south to have a referendum in the first place.
It was forced on the north, as part of the CPA, only under extreme pressure
from the West. And as only people of southern ethnic origin will be voting
in the referendum, the rest of the Sudanese have had little reason to think
about it at all. Many politicians from Mr Bashir’s ruling National
Congress Party (NCP) genuinely seem to believe that keeping Sudan as one
big country is so obviously better for everyone than breaking it up that
they have only to do a little bit of campaigning and spend a little bit of
money, and the southerners will come to their senses and forget the whole
idea.
Denial is a river in northern Sudan
This delusion shows how little northern Sudan’s ruling Arab politicians
understand southern sensibilities. In practice, it means that since June,
virtually for the first time since the peace deal was signed in 2005, the
north has been releasing money for road-building and other development
projects in the south. This is an extremely belated attempt to show the
benefits of sticking with the Khartoum government. The northerners’
belief that this may suddenly compensate for decades of oppression,
aggression and neglect illustrates how lightly many take southern feelings.
It is also indicative of the north’s attitude to the referendum that the
man appointed to oversee it for Khartoum is Salah Gosh, well known to the
CIA and to Britain’s MI6 as a long-serving former head of Sudan’s
intelligence services.
Northern efforts to drag out, delay or sabotage the referendum are
increasingly blatant. A commission to oversee the referendum has only just
been settled upon, with four months to organise the vote. Even with
everyone working at full speed it will be barely possible to meet the
January 9th deadline. If it is missed, southerners will suspect that the
north is trying to deny them their vote, increasing pressure for a
unilateral declaration of independence, a doomsday option for the south, to
be voted on by its own parliament. This could well provoke another war with
the north, as Mr Bashir would refuse to recognise the new country—and
many countries, especially in Africa, would side with him.
Just mess it up
The other way in which the north might disrupt the referendum is by stoking
dissent and rebellion in the south to reduce the chance of what it calls a
“credible” referendum. Northern leaders have been doing this for
decades, using rogue groups, such as the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army
that originated in neighbouring Uganda, as proxy militias to weaken the
south and keep its SPLM off balance.
The SPLM says the north is already up to its old tricks again. One rogue
SPLM politician, General George Athor, who alleges that an election for
governor in Jonglei state was rigged against him in April, when he stood as
an independent, has taken to the bush in the north of the state with
hundreds of armed followers. In a recent battle, the SPLM claims to have
captured a helicopter and loads of ammunition supplied to the general by
the Sudanese (ie, northern) army.
In northern minds, destabilising the south and mucking up the referendum
would undermine the legitimacy of any putative new country. Perhaps a new
bout of trouble will persuade errant and ignorant southerners to drop their
flirtation with secession and come back to the fold.
Can Salva Kiir save the south?.Meanwhile, the south’s own politicians are
playing into northern hands by misruling and enfeebling the region on their
own. Most of the huge number of willing and devoted outsiders working for
international charities or the UN despair over the chronically slow pace of
reconstruction over the past five years. The disbursement of foreign money
to rebuild the south has been lamentably slow. But many also blame the SPLM
leaders in Juba. Even among the SPLM’s usually loyal cadres frustration
and criticism are growing.
The UN has produced a list entitled “Scary Statistics” to show how
things are going wrong. “It’s as bad as bad can be,” says a senior UN
official. The south still has one of the world’s highest maternal
mortality and infant mortality rates. Some 85% of adults cannot read or
write.
In the fields, so slender are the margins between success and failure that
a single bad harvest last year almost tipped the south into famine. More
than half the south’s population is on “emergency assistance”,
meaning that they will need food handouts this year. Some 1.5m will face
“severe food insecurity”. The south has been saved from famine only by
American money pumped into the UN’s World Food Programme. And even as
malnutrition has increased during the past five years of peace, the SPLM
government has spent more than $6 billion of oil revenue, received under a
wealth-sharing agreement with the north, not to mention hundreds of
millions of dollars in aid. Where, people ask, has the money gone?
The answer is to the army—and the Juba government. The SPLM leadership
spends 60% of its income on weapons and army pay, as an insurance, it is
argued, against renewed hostilities with the north. Corruption has also
become a problem.
The southern centre may not hold
The town of Bor, half an hour by plane down the Nile from Juba, was once a
busy trading post but now feels on a different planet. Signs of progress
are few. The Dr John Garang Memorial University, named in honour of the
SPLM’s former leader who died in a helicopter crash in 2005, was set up
in 2008. It has about 100 students and has received $3m from Juba. Some
southerners educated in Kenya, Uganda and the United States during the
civil war have come back to teach. Bor’s population has grown by about
70% in the last few years, as families displaced in the war have returned.
Its central market does a brisk trade.
Yet only in the past year have a handful of brick buildings been built.
There is still no completely paved road in Bor or in the entire state of
Jonglei. In the rainy season, which can last for over half the year,
getting from one side of town to the other, let alone elsewhere in the
state, can become impossible. Security in Bor itself has improved, but the
roads immediately to the north and south are plagued by bandits. This
summer the WFP was feeding 44% of the state’s population of about
500,000. Recent floods may push that figure up.
The state’s governor, Kual Juuk, a former guerrilla who was once close to
Mr Garang, laments that the lavish development of the centre of Juba has
been at the expense of the rest of the region. This galls him since Mr
Garang identified the concentration of development in Khartoum, at the
expense of the neglected regions in the south and west (especially Darfur)
as a prime cause of Sudan’s civil wars. “The SPLM was supposed to be
different, for fiscal and political decentralisation,” he says. “Now we
are falling into the same pit.” He argues with the government in Juba but
it ignores him. “They are inward-looking,” he says. “It is the same
attitude in Khartoum.”
Such disaffection is growing dangerously. The SPLM is not a democratic
outfit and barely tolerates criticism. In April’s election, it sometimes
resorted to bullying and intimidation to see off independent candidates.
But in the south’s incipient state of anarchy, these men, such as General
Athor, may become rebels all over again, and head off into the bush to wage
war, often backed by their own ethnic groups. Besides General Athor,
another losing candidate, David Yau Yau, is at large in Jonglei with
hundreds of armed followers in Pibor, in the state’s east.
Such rebels will cause more instability, shut more roads and hamper
development even more. They may also open up ethnic cleavages between the
various southern groups, especially the Dinka and Nuer, which are the most
prominent at the heart of the SPLM.
There is also a worry that some neighbouring countries do not openly
support the prospect of southern independence, even though they all signed
up for it under the CPA in 2005. In truth, if the south does become
independent, it will need all the regional and international help it can
muster. Its people’s shared detestation of Arab northerners will no
longer be enough to bind them together.
Middle East & Africa
Recommend
(75)E-mailShareFacebookLinkedInTwitterDeliciousDiggmore.....PrintReprints &
permissions.Readers' commentsThe Economist welcomes your views.
View all comments (22)Add your comment.Want more? Subscribe to The
Economist and get the week's most relevant news and analysis.
...Comment (22)Recommend
(75)E-mailShareFacebookLinkedInTwitterDeliciousDiggmore.....PrintReprints &
permissions.Advertisement
Most commentedMost recommendedMost commentedChina's spat with Japan: Out
but not overEurope's economies: Turbocharged GermanyChina and Japan:
Getting their goatTurkey's referendum: Erdogan wins againLexington: The
perils of constitution-worshipObesity rates: Fat of the landsChina's spat
with Japan: Deng's heirs ignore his adviceBarack Obama and business: The
wages of negligenceSweden's general election: Stalemate in SwedenThe
Republican agenda: "Party of no" no moreOver the past five days
Most recommendedChina's spat with Japan: Out but not overNationalist
protest in China: Doth we protest too much?China and Japan: Getting their
goatBarack Obama and business: The wages of negligenceSchumpeter: Down with
funKAL's cartoonCensorship of The Economist: Blacked outLexington: The
perils of constitution-worshipObesity rates: Fat of the landsPolitics,
regulation, financial markets and inequality: Marxism? Give me a breakOver
the past seven days
Advertisement
Latest blog posts - All times are GMTWhat the right is thinkingFrom Blighty
- September 27th, 23:45 William Hawkins on medical gadgetsFrom Multimedia -
September 27th, 22:53 Is Barack Obama bad for business?From Multimedia -
September 27th, 22:52 Money talks: Monday, September 27thFrom Multimedia -
September 27th, 22:51 Link exchangeFrom Free exchange - September 27th,
21:17 Our neglected moral defectsFrom Democracy in America - September
27th, 21:00 Can you social network your way to revolution?From Free
exchange - September 27th, 20:56 More from our blogs » .Products &
eventsStay informed today and every daySubscribe to The Economist's free
e-mail newsletters and alerts.
Get e-mail newsletters
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe to The Economist's latest article postings on Twitter
Follow The Economist on Twitter
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See a selection of The Economist's articles, events, topical videos and
debates on Facebook.
Follow The Economist on Facebook Advertisement
..
Classified ads.
About The Economist online