Status Quo Between 2 Sudans Is Not Quite War, Not Quite Peace
By
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_gettle
man/index.html> JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: June 01, 2012
NAIROBI, Kenya - For the first time in months, after killing scores if not
hundreds of each other's men,
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/su
dan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Sudan and
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/so
uth-sudan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> South Sudan are back at the negotiating
table, wrangled into peace talks by an increasingly worried international
coalition, including the United States and China, that was terrified that
the two countries were on the brink of a cataclysmic war.
South Sudanese soldiers in Unity State, near Sudan's border, in May. The
south may soon run out of cash to pay its troops.
It was less than two months ago that Sudan's president, Omar Hassan
al-Bashir, ridiculed South Sudan's government in Juba as a measly "insect"
that needed to be swatted away. Since then, the two sides have announced
that they pulled out of Abyei, a disputed area. On Thursday, Barnaba Marial
Benjamin, South Sudan's information minister, said the negotiations, taking
place in Ethiopia, were "going well."
Guns flashing one day. Smiles the next. Sudan analysts say that is simply
how it is going to be with these two feuding neighbors. Though Sudan and
South Sudan may never descend to a full-fledged war, partly because of all
the international attention, they will probably never achieve full-fledged
peace either.
"I do not see things improving much and basically think that the current
style of destructive but low-level violence will be the order of the day,"
said John O. Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University
and a longtime Sudan specialist.
Mr. Bashir recently offered a similar assessment, saying, "If they want to
change the regime in Khartoum, we will work to change the regime in Juba."
He added, "And if they want to support our rebels, we will support theirs."
The tensions run deep. Guerrilla fighters in what is now South Sudan, which
is mostly Christian and animist and culturally more akin to sub-Saharan
Africa, fought for decades against the Arab-dominated leaders in Khartoum,
Sudan's capital. Last July,
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/world/africa/10sudan.html> South Sudan
officially broke off from Sudan and became the world's newest country.
People celebrated for days.
But the euphoria did not last. There were too many unresolved issues, and
Sudan and South Sudan soon began squabbling bitterly over how to demarcate
the border and share oil profits. (The conundrum of the two Sudans is that
while most of the oil is in the south, the pipeline runs through the north.)
Complicating things even further was a fierce rebellion in the Nuba
Mountains, which lie just across the border in Sudan. The Nuban fighters had
been close allies of the southern rebels, and there was evidence that South
Sudan's new government was covertly supplying the Nubans with money, tanks
and militia fighters. At the same time, Khartoum seemed to be covertly
arming ethnic militias in the south that had killed thousands in the past
few years, making a mockery of the South Sudanese security forces.
In January, <
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16781592> South Sudan
cut off oil production, a measure aimed at Khartoum that also hurt at home.
The southern government gets 98 percent of its revenue from oil sales and
may soon run out of cash to pay its army, a situation everyone agrees is a
time bomb. In April, vicious north-south fighting broke out along the
border. Despite Mr. Bashir's boast that he had "fertilized the soil with
their dead," South Sudan surprised many by seizing Heglig, one of the last
oil fields Sudan still has. It seemed that all the internal stress and
divisions in the north, including the continuing insurgency in the Darfur
region, were finally catching up with Sudan and that its army was not what
it once was.
Mr. Bashir has many headaches, including soaring inflation, urban protests
and his own status as an international pariah. Sudan has struggled under
tough economic sanctions for years, and Mr. Bashir is
<
http://www.icc-cpi.int/menus/icc/situations%20and%20cases/situations/situat
ion%20icc%200205/related%20cases/icc02050109/icc02050109> wanted by the
International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the massacres in
Darfur. Analysts fear that a war would be just the lifeline he needs, and
that his country would rally behind him. The same may be true for Salva
Kiir, South Sudan's president, who also faces rising discontent and
sharpening ethnic divisions in his new nation.
"Both sides have an interest in war," said Mariam al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, a
leading opposition politician in Khartoum. "It's a way out for them, from
internal problems they can't handle."
The last major conflict between the two sides, from the 1980s until the
early 2000s, was a disaster, with more than two million people killed.
Hundreds of thousands of starving refugees fled the fighting, including the
so-called Lost Boys, orphaned children who trudged hundreds of miles across
jungles and savannas, dodging bombers and lions.
The specter of a relapse into this carnage prompted the United Nations
Security Council to intervene, passing
<
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/sc10632.doc.htm> a resolution on May
2 that threatened the two sides with sanctions if they did not stop
fighting. The south immediately signaled it was ready to talk. Mr. Bashir
kept stalling, part of a strategy to allow the southern economy to become
even more distressed and to bolster his own country's leverage to squeeze
the south to pay higher oil transit fees.
"And it's true," said a
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_
nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org> United Nations official in Juba, speaking
on background to frankly assess the state of affairs. "If a deal isn't
worked out soon and those soldiers don't get paid, things could get ugly.
The lights could literally go out in Juba."
The two sides are now discussing a seven-point security "
<
http://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2012/05/full-text-african-union-peace-and.ht
ml> road map" that requires pulling back from contested border areas,
setting up a joint monitoring mechanism and ending covert support for proxy
militias. The Security Council has given negotiators two more months to
tackle the really delicate issues, like oil, but there is still a Persian
Gulf-size gap between the two, with the north wanting more than $30 a barrel
in transit fees and the south offering about a dollar.
Most analysts predict an oil compromise may be reached, but the more
complicated territorial disputes may have to go to international
arbitration, which could take years. While all this grinds on, analysts
anticipate more breakdowns and attempts to patch things up, more violence
followed by more hastily arranged cease-fires.
"While the tensions still exist and there's a lot of friction, both sides
are saying, 'Look, we're committed to implementing the mandates spelled out
by the African Union and the U.N. Security Council,' " said Princeton N.
Lyman, the American special envoy for Sudan, who has been attending the
talks.
The most obvious problem is the lack of trust.
In the past year, the two sides have signed about five different protocols
promising to demilitarize the border and cooperate on security issues and a
variety of other matters. All have been summarily violated.
"The other side has been destroying South Sudan for 50 years," said Mr.
Benjamin, the south's information minister. "Trust will take some time."
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Received on Fri Jun 01 2012 - 21:25:52 EDT
