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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Fri Jul 08 2011 - 07:26:13 EDT
http://www.cfr.org/sudan/south-sudans-challenge-africas-colonial-borders/p25439
South Sudan's Challenge to Africa's Colonial Borders Author:
*John Campbell*<http://www.cfr.org/experts/africa-nigeria/john-campbell/b15596>,
Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies
July 7, 2011
It is too early to tell if south Sudan independence, which becomes official
July 9, will inspire a clamor for sovereignty in other fractious sub-Saharan
African countries. It will, however, create space for reconsidering Africa's
seemingly irrational colonial borders and its opposition to territorial
secession. Over time, that might encourage secession movements, but such
developments are not likely anytime soon. Absent ethnic and religious
pogroms (as in Nigeria's Biafra) or state collapse (the risk in Congo), the
elites that benefit from the current state structure will likely keep most
African states together for now.
The cardinal principle governing relations among African states has been
that boundaries inherited from colonial administrations should remain
unchanged. While African elites demanded de-colonization on the basis of the
self-determination of peoples, the desire to avoid delay in achieving
independence restricted it to within then-existing colonial boundaries. The
international community's legal recognition of the sovereignty of the new
states within their former colonial boundaries conveyed their legitimacy,
especially to the indigenous elites -- heirs of the colonial administrators.
The creation of* *sovereign, independent countries within existing borders
also provided new African leaders with reciprocal insurance against
territorial aggression.
Accordingly, while there have been boundary disputes and adjustments, no
African state has ever formally declared war on another. Instead, African
warfare has largely been over control of the state. Examples include the
civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Congo. No significant territory has
seceded successfully from a post-colonial state, either. The most serious
attempts -- Katanga's efforts to leave the former Belgian Congo, and
Biafra's secession from Nigeria -- both failed and enjoyed little or no
support from other African states. The pre-south Sudan exception is Eritrea,
which separated from Ethiopia in 1991. But Italians had administered Eritrea
apart from Ethiopia when both had been part of their east African empire.
Ethiopia absorbed Eritrea after World War II, and the Eritreans argued that
their independence from Addis Ababa was itself a form of de-colonization.
African opinion generally has held that the inviolability of national
boundaries promotes peaceful resolution of disputes among sovereign states.
Among intellectuals the principle of inviolability goes hand in hand with
aspirations for a greater sense of common African identity and unity.
Recurring proposals for a "United States of Africa" enjoy popular support,
if not among the elites who actually wield power and benefit from the
current state system. Acknowledging the aspiration for broad African unity,
the African Union is all but alone among international organizations in
declining to recognize the absolute sovereignty of "nation states", though
more in theory than in practice, as its hesitancy to confront Robert Mugabe
in Zimbabwe about human rights violations shows. But the African Union has
been hostile to separatist movements and refuses to recognize the
independence of the Republic of Somaliland, even though that small country
has functioned remarkably well since 1991 in a very rough neighborhood.
An independent south Sudan challenges these assumptions and aspirations.
After a generation of civil war marked by extraordinary levels of violence,
south Sudan has won its independence from Sudan with the recognition of the
other African states, and the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement<http://www.cfr.org/sudan/comprehensive-peace-agreement-sudan/p8477>between
Khartoum and Juba was godmothered by the United States, Britain,
Norway, and Kenya. The colonial Anglo-Egyptian Sudan thus has become two
internationally recognized independent states. Unresolved outstanding issues
between the two -- their boundary, the nationality of persons born in one
half of the country but now living in the other, how to divide petroleum
revenues -- have up to now been essentially domestic issues within one
country, even if they often involved the international community. With south
Sudan's independence, they are issues to be resolved between two sovereign
states. That is a new situation for sub-Saharan Africa, and perhaps
eventually a game-changing one*.*
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