INTERVIEW-World's newest nation South Sudan battles to open embassies
Sun Jun 10, 2012 4:32pm GMT
* South Sudan eyes stronger presence in Asian nations
* Country mired in ongoing row with Sudan
* Juba was "surprised" by reaction to border fight
By Aaron Maasho
ADDIS ABABA, June 10 (Reuters) - South Sudan has set up only about a dozen
embassies in the year since the world's newest nation declared independence
and an oil output shutdown is slowing efforts to expand its diplomatic
presence abroad, the foreign minister said.
South Sudan entered the world stage when it broke away from Sudan in July
last year under a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war.
The country is now eager to boost its presence in Asian countries including
China, India and Malaysia - all potential sources of capital for
infrastructure projects and development aid, Foreign Minister Nhial Deng
told Reuters in an interview.
So far Juba has managed to establish only about half of the 22 embassies it
set as its initial goal, and might be further hampered since shutting down
oil production in January amid a row with Khartoum over transit fees, said
Deng.
"We already have a mental picture for where we want to go, an idea of which
are the countries that are important for us to establish embassies in. The
only hurdle is resource constraints," he said.
Some embassies are not fully functioning and in Western Europe, South Sudan
has embassies only in London, Paris and Brussels, diplomats have said.
Strengthening diplomacy is particularly important for the new nation as it
tries to make its side of the story heard in a long-running dispute with
Khartoum over issues left unresolved after the partition.
Those include the exact position of the new border, the status of citizens
on each other's territory, the division of debt and, vitally, how much the
landlocked South should pay to export oil through pipelines running through
Sudan.
South Sudan took about three-quarters of Sudan's crude output when it split
away, but the two failed to agree on transit fees. Juba shut down output in
January after Khartoum started taking some oil it said was to make up for
unpaid fees.
That instantly erased 98 percent of government revenues in South Sudan,
which has almost no industry outside oil and is struggling to build a
functioning state almost from scratch.
Tensions boiled over in April when South Sudan and Sudan clashed in an
oil-producing border region, pushing the two closer to an all-out war than
at any time since independence.
South Sudan seized the Heglig oilfield near the disputed border from
Khartoum's control, sparking widespread international criticism and pressure
for it to pull out.
"We were surprised by the ferocity of the reaction but I think we managed to
blunt this criticism and this attitude by availing the facts about the
situation," said Deng.
He said the South had managed to present "factual historical information"
showing Heglig had not always been part of "what is now the republic of
Sudan".
"For the first time now you find that the international community is no
longer 100 percent sure that Heglig belongs to the north," he said. (Writing
by Alexander Dziadosz; Editing by Ralph Gowling)
C Thomson Reuters 2012 All rights reserved
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Received on Sun Jun 10 2012 - 15:56:17 EDT
