South Sudan: What Analysts Are Saying About South Sudan Crisis
16 January 2014
NAIROBI, 16 January 2014 (IRIN) - Since violence first broke out on 15
December, the conflict in South Sudan has left thousands dead and displaced
hundreds of thousands more. Representatives of President Salva Kiir and his
rival, former vice president Riek Machar, are meeting in Addis Ababa to
attempt to negotiate a settlement and a cease-fire. Meanwhile, think tanks,
academics and experts have been scrambling to explain the causes of the
bitter acrimony and bloodshed that has engulfed the country.
What is the role of the armed forces?
"The current conflict has three main dimensions - a political dispute within
the ruling party, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM); a regional
and ethnic war; and a crisis within the army itself," Alex de Waal and Abdul
Mohammed wrote in Foreign Affairs.
International Crisis Group notes: "What has for some time been a political
crisis within the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) has now
spilled over into an army that has long been riven by internal problems,
including ethnic divisions and tensions. The blurred lines between these
institutions, senior political figures and ethnic communities - as well as
wide-scale arms proliferation - make the current situation particularly
volatile."
The dysfunctional army, de Waal and Mohammed argue, traces back to the
signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005: "When the CPA
was signed, the SPLA [Sudan People's Liberation Army] was, in fact, just one
of many military forces in South Sudan. Arguably as strong as the SPLA was
the rival South Sudan Defense Forces, which is organized and funded by
Khartoum and has a strong ethnic-regional base. Many feared a southern civil
war following the peace with the north. But Kiir, newly installed in 2005,
reached out to the SSDF leadership and other militia commanders to offer
them membership in both the army and government."
The government spent 55 percent of their budget on defence, and more than 80
percent of that went to the salaries of the more than 200,000 people
employed by the SPLA. "Over time, the payout created insurmountable
obstacles to army reform and professionalization. The army was little more
than a coalition of ethnic units tied together by cash handouts," they said.
Jok Madut Jok, executive director of the Sudd Institute, a think tank in
Juba, also points to the fissures built up during previous conflicts.
"Intense competition for political power within the ruling SPLM was bound to
spark violence, as it was likely to touch the wounds of the last three
decades of liberation wars, during which South Sudanese had turned guns
against one another over leadership of the movement."
These conflicts "were often patched up or swept under the rug in the
interest of keeping the eyes on the common goal, but they were never
sufficiently resolved, and far too many communities were left wanting for
justice."
He mainly blames the outbreak in violence on "the failure of the post-war
development programs to meet the dividends that the citizens highly expected
going into independence". Most people in the country have not seen the
development, wealth, reconciliation and security that they expected when
South Sudan became an independent state.
What about ethnicity?
Hannah Bryce, an international security expert at Chatham House, argues that
this has been primarily an ethnic conflict: "The dynamics of the leadership
struggle between President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, and former vice president
Riek Macher, a Nuer, colours politics throughout the country, illustrating
the prevalence of political tribalism at the highest office." She also
argues that there is a strong perception by other ethnic groups that the
SPLM and SPLA are dominated by the Dinka.
But Amir Idris, a professor and chair of the Department of African and
African American Studies at Fordham University, strongly disagrees. "Much of
the colonial writing on the social and political cultures of South Sudan
have focused on two groups: the Dinka and the Nuer. Very few have focused on
other ethnic groups. Politics, therefore, came to be seen and defined
through the lenses of these two groups.
"It is inaccurate to interpret the recent political crisis as an ethnic
conflict between President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, and his former vice
president, Riek Machar, a Nuer, for it assumes that the political stability
can be restored if the two ethnic groups agree to share political power," he
said.
He notes that the participation of all groups in peace agreements is crucial
to the success of peace talks. "The ongoing conflict is neither ethnic nor
cultural; it's a political one. Second, these conflicting ethnic identities,
such as the Nuer and the Dinka, are not static. They could become peaceful
identities if the state was redefined and restructured in a way that makes
the managing of and coexistence between overlapping identities possible in
postcolonial South Sudan," he said. This, he thinks, requires a political
solution.
Are administration failures to blame?
Steve McDonald, director of the Africa Program at the Wilson Center, says
top leaders failed to do their jobs. "Since independence, the government of
South Sudan has been wracked with incompetence, malfeasance and corruption,"
he said. "Elites were lining their pockets, while the vast majority went
hungry. Warlords were making deals with international entrepreneurs in their
sectors, but the central government seemed totally ineffective."
Alex Vines of Chatham House, in an opinion piece in The Guardian, wrote,
"This current conflict is about poor political leadership within a country
that is still in need of a massive state-building exercise."
He added: "An elite power struggle within the tiny leadership looks to be
drawing the whole country into a full civil war that is rapidly developing
ethnic dimensions."
John Campbell, senior fellow for African Policy Studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations, argues that poor leadership has resulted from structural
problems. "The SPLA was a liberation movement, not a political party. Beyond
independence and 'development', it has no coherent political program."
"It is apparent that South Sudan, two years after independence, is yet to
establish legitimacy as a state with a functioning government that can keep
its people safe and provide services to them," said Josephine Kibe and
Mwangi S. Kimenyi of the Brookings Institution's Africa Growth Initiative.
They accuse the top leaders of corruption. "The legitimacy of the state can
only be achieved if it provides essential services such as education, health
and security to the citizens," they wrote.
What was the international community's role?
"While commentators can argue about who or what is most at fault in this
terrible turn of events, one fact is clear: the international community -
the many regional and international players who have been supporting the
transition in South Sudan - shoulders some of the responsibility," said Sara
Pantuliano, head of the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas
Development Institute.
She notes that the international community had "high expectations for peace"
after the CPA was signed, and looked at the north-south conflict as the main
obstacle to peace, failing to focus on divisions within the south.
"Concerns and warnings about the role that patronage and ethnicity play in
South Sudan's politics, as well as calls to better understand the causes of
vulnerability, power relations and drivers of instability, were largely
ignored." The international community focused on development-based
"technical" fixes, according to Pantuliano.
"Many in the aid sector in South Sudan have been operating on the assumption
that greater development - improved services, infrastructure, access to food
- would lead to stability and lasting peace," she said. "Technical fixes
have failed South Sudan: it's time to put politics at the heart of the
nation-building project at last."
How to get justice and accountability?
An article for the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), by Princeton
Lyman, Jon Temin and Susan Stigant, called the Intergovernmental Authority
on Development (IGAD)-hosted talks in Addis Ababa between the Kiir and
Machar camps a "positive first step to bring an immediate end to the
killing, destruction and displacement."
However, they noted that "this is only the first of many steps. Horrific as
the violence since mid-December has been, the crisis also presents an
opportunity to address unresolved issues and put South Sudan back on the
path of democratization, good governance and peace - a path from which it
deviated well before the current crisis."
"Peace processes in South Sudan have a long track record of prioritizing
reconciliation at all costs and failing to secure remedies for people
affected by conflict," note David Deng, research director for the South
Sudan Law Society (SSLS), and Elizabeth Deng, a human rights lawyer based in
Nairobi. "To avoid repeating past mistakes, an integrated process of
truth-telling, justice and reconciliation should be included in any mediated
agreement between Kiir and Machar."
The authors suggest establishing a hybrid court, administered by both
national and international staff, similar to those employed in Sierra Leone,
East Timor, Kosovo and Cambodia. "Given the lack of capacity, credibility
and independence of the justice system, it is clear that without
international support, impartial investigations and prosecutions cannot take
place," they said.
"Whatever solutions [are] arrived at, they must include some form of justice
mechanism built into the final deal so as to ensure that the victims of
these atrocities are not just swept aside as collateral damage, as they were
under the CPA," said Jok, of the Sudd Institute.
Beyond the current crisis, USIP recommends restarting the
constitution-writing process. "The process of developing a permanent
constitution has the potential to be a vehicle for nation building and
reform in South Sudan."
But for the process to be meaningful, "there must be sufficient resources
and support," they argue. "There must be an understanding that
constitution-making is not strictly a technical exercise. Rather,
constitution-making should be a vehicle to define a national vision, forge a
national identity, and rebuild trust between citizens and leaders, among
citizens and between communities."
"Ultimately, any solution that fails to change the fundamental way politics
is done in South Sudan is no solution at all," said Peter Greste, a
journalist for Al Jazeera. "If we wind up with a 'power sharing' deal that
papers over the structural cracks without tackling the political culture,
the country will settle back into an uneasy calm but it will, inevitably,
explode once again."
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Received on Thu Jan 16 2014 - 15:43:43 EST