South Sudan, still in infancy, already a global problem child
Published: June 17, 2012
By ALAN BOSWELL - McClatchy Newspapers
NAIROBI, Kenya - Along a road littered with bodies, South Sudan marched
north in mid-April to capture a Sudanese oil field that both countries
claim.
By the time South Sudan withdrew from Heglig 10 days later, it had damaged
more than just the looted oil installations; also badly frayed was the
country's claim to the moral high ground in its decades-long conflict with
Sudan, a war that's long been portrayed in terms of Sudanese atrocities and
war crimes.
The first anniversary of South Sudan's independence from Sudan is fast
approaching, but the hoped-for peace that was the promise of South Sudan's
creation last July 9 hasn't materialized. Instead, war seems closer than at
any other time since the 2005 peace agreement that U.S. diplomats brokered,
and South Sudan's reputation is in tatters. Many who'd long championed South
Sudan are shaking their heads in dismay.
South Sudan's military aggression against Sudan was just the most glaring
sign that the nation-building project that's taking place in central Africa
isn't going as planned. In recent months, South Sudan's government has been
accused of deep corruption and its military has been accused of widespread
abuses against its own people.
One need look no further than the U.S. government's own reckoning to see how
South Sudan's image is eroding: The State Department's human rights report
for last year documents vote-rigging by South Sudan's ruling party,
pervasive official corruption, a state-led crackdown on liberties and
widespread abuses of civilians by security forces.
Still, the Obama administration, many of whose members and high-profile
supporters are considered South Sudan "hawks," has taken few steps to
pressure South Sudan to reform - perhaps no surprise, given the role that
influential insiders have had in promoting South Sudan.
That group includes John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration
official who regularly testifies on Capitol Hill; Susan Rice, Obama's
ambassador to the United Nations; and actor George Clooney, who visits South
Sudan with Prendergast, meets with South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and
lobbies President Barack Obama personally when he returns. Clooney held a
fundraiser for Obama's re-election campaign last month at his home in
California, raising $15 million for the president's re-election, the largest
single-event haul in U.S. history.
In an email, Prendergast defended the administration's approach, which he
called "evenhanded."
"The sizable aid package goes primarily to addressing the massive challenges
faced by the population of a newly independent country emerging from decades
of war," he said. "If the U.S. was backing South Sudan in the conflict (with
Sudan), Washington would be providing a much different kind of aid package
to Juba (South Sudan's capital). I think the premise that Washington is
excessively pro-South is incorrect."
Last month, cash-starved South Sudan admitted that government officials have
stolen $4 billion - roughly twice the government's annual budget up to last
year - since the peace deal established the regional administration in 2005.
"We fought for freedom, justice and equality. Many of our friends died to
achieve these objectives. Yet, once we got to power, we forgot what we
fought for and began to enrich ourselves at the expense of our people,"
President Kiir wrote in a letter to more than 75 current and former South
Sudanese officials. The letter asked them to return stolen money to a Kenyan
bank account in exchange for amnesty.
The South Sudanese government made public a copy of the letter, dated May 3,
earlier this month.
Aid workers say the South Sudanese military often behaves more as predator
than protector. Its 200,000-strong force does nothing to stop tribal
militias from razing villages and slaughtering civilians; but when it tries
to disarm those militias, mayhem follows.
In a confidential letter sent to Western embassies in Juba in the first week
of May and obtained by McClatchy Newspapers, an international aid
organization accused the army of "severe and systematic" rights abuses in
its campaign to disarm an ethnic minority, the Murle. The abuses included
killings and widespread torture, beatings, rape and looting, the letter
said. The agency, contacted by McClatchy, asked that its name not be
divulged, saying it feared for the safety of its staff in the area.
South Sudanese forces in late April torched two Murle villages that
constituted hundreds of homes, according to aid organizations that operate
in the area, forcing hundreds of villagers to flee. Officials there confirm
the general outlines of the reports.
"I don't know why they started to shoot the people," said Joshua Konyi, the
county commissioner of Pibor, where the violence took place. "They'd already
collected the guns."
Such abuses are all the more awkward because the outside world is largely
responsible for keeping South Sudan running.
Western donors have paid to staff the South Sudanese government with
consultants from major international firms, including employees of KPMG,
Deloitte, PKF and Crown Agents, who supplement government departments that
often are staffed with former rebel fighters sitting at computer-less desks.
In Juba, the foreign consultants are snidely referred to as "baby sitters"
and they often have strict instructions not to interact with journalists.
That's in addition to a massive United Nations peacekeeping mission -
mandated to support and mentor the government - that's openly backed the
government's abuse-ridden disarmament campaign. The U.S. has given nearly
$300 million to the South Sudanese military and it embeds advisers to try to
keep the army functional.
For up-close observers, the warning signs were there well in advance, like
the horn of a freight train barreling down icy rails.
Gerard Prunier, a French scholar on Africa, is a harsh critic of the
Sudanese government in Khartoum and was a strategic adviser to the South
Sudanese government in the run-up to the January 2011 referendum in which
South Sudanese overwhelmingly supported independence.
But he resigned before independence, and he explained his reasons in a phone
interview with McClatchy earlier this month.
"What they are going to do is going to be so bad that I don't want to be
guilty by association," he said. "The government in Juba is rotten to the
core."
South Sudan denies that its incursion into Sudan in April was a long-planned
military offensive. But diplomats and others report decisive evidence that
the country regularly harbors, coordinates with and even fights side by side
with rebel groups whose goal is toppling the Sudanese government.
In addition, South Sudan's government released a new map in May that
extended its claims to territory well north of its recognized border with
Sudan. The map included areas that previously were considered undisputedly
within Sudan.
U.S. officials in Juba, while acknowledging many of the government's
shortcomings, defend South Sudan. They point to its painful history of war
and say it's constantly being provoked by the Sudanese government, led by
President Omar al-Bashir, himself wanted by the International Criminal Court
for alleged war crimes. They point out that Sudan backs dissident South
Sudanese militias, has bombed South Sudanese territory, has invaded the
disputed territory of Abyei and has blocked all trade with landlocked South
Sudan.
"We knew the newest country in the world would face many challenges, given
that South Sudan ranks at the bottom of almost all development indicators
worldwide. But our commitment to help the South Sudanese people realize
their aspirations remains strong," said Princeton Lyman, the U.S. special
envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, who's based in Washington.
Former Bush administration officials also remain firmly in South Sudan's
corner. Two - Andrew Natsios, President George W. Bush's special envoy to
Sudan, and Jendayi Frazer, Bush's assistant secretary of state for Africa -
have called for the Obama administration to provide South Sudan with
anti-aircraft weapons to ward off Sudanese warplanes. South Sudan has no air
force.
Frazer and Natsios back that stance by arguing that Sudan, not South Sudan,
was most to blame for the April fighting.
"They (Sudan) were using Heglig to attack border areas in the south. They
were using it in their bombing campaigns. When you bomb another country,
that's an act of war," Natsios said.
However, mounting evidence that South Sudan's foray into Sudan had been
planned for weeks, if not months, is undermining that argument.
In a series of interviews over the last three months, diplomats and other
knowledgeable officials have made clear that the South Sudanese carefully
coordinated the capture of Heglig with members of the Sudanese rebel group
Justice and Equality Movement, whose cause has long been the liberation of
Sudan's conflicted Darfur region.
Officials on the ground say that Justice and Equality Movement rebels began
arriving en masse on the South Sudan side of the border near Heglig in
February, basing themselves in the state capital of Bentiu, clearly under
agreement with South Sudanese authorities.
During the fighting in April, Justice and Equality Movement forces manned
checkpoints in South Sudan side by side with South Sudanese soldiers, and,
once, when members of a rebel convoy forcibly stole two cameras from a
photojournalist, the South Sudanese authorities were able to return the
equipment by the next day.
South Sudan's attack northward with the rebels "was definitely planned,"
said one Western security official, who spoke only on the condition of
anonymity since he wasn't authorized to talk on the record.
"They are both the bad guys now," he said, referring to Sudan and South
Sudan.
A senior African diplomat characterized the Heglig offensive as "part of the
large, grandiose plan to bring the north down." He said South Sudanese
officials "aren't thinking as a nation-state, but as a liberation movement."
The diplomat, who agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that he not
be identified because he didn't want to damage his relationship with South
Sudanese officials, said the plan began with South Sudan's decision to shut
down oil production in January rather than agree to an export deal that
would heavily compensate Sudan. When the two nations split, South Sudan
received most of the oil-producing areas, but it had to ship the oil through
Sudan because South Sudan has no ports.
The diplomat said he suspected South Sudanese officials hoped that the
cutoff of financial resources, coupled with the Heglig incursion, would be
enough to spark a more generalized uprising in the north.
Izzat Kuku, a senior rebel commander in Sudan's Nuba Mountains, told
McClatchy before the Heglig capture that the Justice and Equality Movement
was preparing to move north through Heglig and link up with other rebels to
march north. Other sources confirmed that plan. The Justice and Equality
Movement rebels were in Heglig to begin that mission, they say, and meetings
to plan an offensive among senior Nuba, Darfuri and South Sudanese military
officials began in January.
Such cavalier behavior wouldn't be new, according to Alex de Waal, a leading
Sudan scholar and an adviser to the African Union mediation team. John
Garang, the South Sudan rebel leader who signed the 2005 peace deal and died
months later, was pursuing an uprising in Khartoum and an insurgency in
Darfur even as he was negotiating the final peace deal with al-Bashir, de
Waal said.
Garang's followers "similarly keep several horses running at the same time,
and their hope is that a configuration of events one day will allow them to
gamble on winning the big prize," de Waal said.
(Boswell is a McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent. His work is
underwritten in part by a grant from Humanity United, a California-based
foundation that focuses on human rights issues.)
Read more here:
http://www.bradenton.com/2012/06/17/4080842/south-sudan-still-in-infancy-alr
eady.html#storylink=cpy
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