<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/09/the_failed_state_lobby>
The Failed State Lobby
Inside the bizarre moral campaign by Washington politicians, NGO do-gooders,
and celebrities to create an independent South Sudan -- whether it's a
disaster or not.
BY ALAN BOSWELL | JULY 10, 2012
Juba, South Sudan, is one of the few places in the world where American
bipartisanship seems to be alive and well. One year ago today, President
Barack Obama's envoy to the United Nations, Susan Rice, sat near former
Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell as Rev. Franklin Graham, a harsh
evangelical critic of the U.S. president, cheered what White House officials
were claiming as a major foreign-policy success -- the birth of an
independent South Sudanese nation. Diplomats and African heads of state took
turns congratulating the new government from a podium overlooking tens of
thousands of sweating South Sudanese gathered under the midday sun for the
occasion.
This was the miracle of South Sudan, a U.S. foreign-policy darling welcomed
onto the world stage in a burst of optimism on July 9, 2011. The new
country's birth was the crowning achievement of one of Washington's most
effective campaigns of the past 20 years. The campaign to support the Sudan
People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) -- a rebel movement founded in 1983 in
Sudan's marginalized southern lands by John Garang, a U.S.-educated officer
who wanted to transform Sudan's minority-ruled northern government into an
inclusive democracy -- began with Rep. Donald Payne, an African-American
Democrat from New Jersey, and Frank Wolf, a conservative evangelical
Republican from Virginia.
Payne described to me on that hopeful day a year ago how he first visited
southern Sudan in 1989 and met South Sudan's now-president (then rebel
commander) Salva Kiir for the first time in the field in 1993. He worked
across party lines ("many of the members I had very little in common with")
to build the SPLM's fan base. Its ranks grew in Washington every year,
expanding beyond the Congressional Black Caucus-evangelical alliance to
three consecutive presidential administrations. "We were able to get a
bipartisan effort. That's really what made this sustainable," said Payne,
who died in March.
Without the United States' heavy-handed engagement, it is doubtful South
Sudan would today be its own country. But Washington's love affair with the
SPLM looks likely to end in heartbreak.
One year on, the jubilation that accompanied South Sudan's independence has
vanished. Its first year as a nation has been a disaster by all but the
lowest of standards. Sure, worst-case scenarios of sustained full-blown war
with Sudan or a complete implosion of the state have not yet materialized.
But good luck finding many other silver linings: South Sudan is already the
target of a <
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=41903> sanctions
threat by the United Nations for military aggression along its border with
Sudan; its
<
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/13/141703/in-south-sudans-violence-us-ba
cked.html> internal strife has already resulted in thousands of civilian
casualties; and the country's oil -- its sole source of revenue --
<
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/20/136485/s-sudan-to-halt-oil-production
.html> stopped pumping in January as part of dangerous brinkmanship in
negotiations with Sudan. The country desperately needs visionary leadership:
It has only one paved highway, three-quarters of its adults are illiterate,
and extreme poverty is widespread.
The SPLM isn't directly to blame for the dire conditions it inherited in
South Sudan, but its dismal governance has stopped most progress before it
even had a chance to begin. South Sudan has been run mostly autonomously --
with its own budget revenue and standing military -- since 2005, and the
SPLM used that time to loot its way to personal riches, leaving development
projects penniless. In May, South Sudan's government
<
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/04/us-southsudan-corruption-idUSBRE8
530QI20120604> acknowledged that South Sudanese officials had "stolen" $4
billion of missing funds that were supposed to go to developing the war-torn
state -- the equivalent of roughly two entire years of official revenue.
Worse, this money was looted directly under the noses of the international
community, which agreed to supervise the peace process and even provided
consultants to do South Sudan's own bookkeeping.
U.S. officials are quick to pay lip service to the problem of corruption,
but there is so far no bite behind the muffled whimpers of protest. Unlike
the tough, targeted U.S. actions against leaders in countries such as Kenya,
Washington has not threatened travel bans or publicly frozen bank accounts
of leading government officials, U.S. officials say. Despite providing
military support -- to the tune of about $300 million in taxpayers' money --
since 2005, the United States does not seem to have a strategy in place to
induce South Sudan's leaders to reform their ways.
That is true despite President Kiir's estrangement from Obama, which one
source close to U.S. policymakers described as "probably irreparable." In
September, Kiir kept Obama waiting for over a half-hour for their
<
http://www.voanews.com/content/south-sudan-president-meets-with-obama-13034
1398/145530.html> first meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General
Assembly session, according to several sources with knowledge of the
meeting. Then, over later phone calls, Kiir personally denied to Obama that
South Sudan was providing support for rebels across the border -- despite
U.S. intelligence that clearly established otherwise. Relations turned even
more sour in early April, when Kiir promised Obama that South Sudanese
forces would not strike north and capture Heglig, a disputed Sudanese oil
field, sources briefed on the conversation said. Several days later, South
Sudanese forces -- working in coordination with the Sudanese rebels Kiir
denied links to --
<
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/04/18/145766/us-envoy-south-sudans-capture.
html> did just that, sparking international outcry.
But even if U.S. policy errors are partly to blame for the country's
mishaps, don't expect the White House to take a tougher stance on South
Sudan anytime soon. Why? Because Obama has little to gain from upsetting the
SPLM's friends.
Amid a sea of foreign-policy realism, Sudan has survived as a foreign-policy
issue grounded not in national security interests, but moral idealism. In
the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Sudan became a rallying cry for
religious activists and human rights proponents enraged by the Sudanese
government's atrocities. But the activists made a critical mistake: They
seemed to think the SPLM rebels represented a virtuous mirror image of
Khartoum's evils.
This conventional wisdom has shielded the SPLM from U.S. wrath, despite its
corruption and increasingly questionable decision-making. It boasts a
bipartisan, election-proof lobby that not even money can buy -- a network of
true believers in Congress, the White House, think tanks, and the media.
This influential network of friends is all the more striking because it has
stayed intact despite the 2005 death of Garang, the SPLM's U.S.-educated
founder, whose personal charisma and political instincts made the SPLM the
best-connected rebel group in Africa.
Two of President Bill Clinton's Africa hands, John Prendergast and Gayle
Smith, who co-founded the Enough Project at the Center for American
Progress, have arguably been the most effective of the SPLM's friends in
Washington. By branding the organization as anti-genocide, the Enough
Project often gets a free pass from the mainstream media, which frequently
cites its version of events in Sudan as objective independent analysis. But
the morally charged and culturally hip do-goodism helps disguise a clear
political agenda: Even while it acknowledges South Sudan's poor record on
human rights and "transparency," Enough's policy papers are filled with
calls for punitive measures toward Khartoum and greater engagement with
Juba. Last year, Prendergast and Enough
<
http://www.enoughproject.org/news/united-states-should-provide-air-defense-
capabilities-protect-civilians-sudan> publicly advocated for arming South
Sudan with air defense weapons. When Enough advertised for a job opening of
"Sudan policy analyst" last year, they hired one of the SPLM's legal
advisors for the position.
Smith moved back into the White House in March 2009 as a special assistant
to the president and a senior director of Obama's National Security Council,
where she joined Rice as the key SPLM advocates in the administration. But
Prendergast has turned into a media phenomenon, an activist-cum-celebrity
whose specialty is recruiting celebrity-cum-activists. Prendergast's biggest
catch of late is George Clooney, who has made Sudanese President Omar Hassan
al-Bashir something of his own personal white whale. Clooney has swooped
through Juba at least three times in the last two years to advocate for
South Sudan's cause, meeting personally with Kiir, and has even invested his
own money in a <
http://satsentinel.org/> satellite service that publicly
spies on Sudan. This sounds a lot like journalism on steroids, and there is
definitely overlap. Clooney's eyes in the sky have visually confirmed
several events on the ground. But, its satellites also have a clear agenda:
Read through the group's reports, and while regularly publishing about
Sudan's troop mobilizations near the border, it does not offer comparably
critical scrutiny of South Sudan's forces, guilty of its own troop buildups,
sometimes in violation of international agreements as well.
Clooney's star power provides multiple benefits: He dominates news coverage
-- his
<
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-january-12-2011/inde-sudan-2011>
visit to South Sudan during the January 2011 referendum headlined news
coverage of the event -- thereby ensuring that Prendergast's narrative of
events carries the day. He is also a powerful lobbying force inside
Washington who can secure personal meetings with the president, and he uses
those meetings to talk about Sudan. In March, Clooney and Prendergast were
arrested protesting outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington. It also
doesn't hurt that Clooney is a major surrogate for Obama in Hollywood: This
year, he hosted the largest single fundraising haul,
<
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304543904577397330920533806.h
tml> $15 million, for the Obama campaign.
The Enough Project isn't the only effective advocate for the SPLM in
Washington. Since the late 1980s, a core group of government officials
worked behind the scenes to implement the policies that led to South Sudan's
independence. Some have left government to advise the government directly.
For instance, Roger Winter, the subject of a
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/magazine/15SUDAN-t.html?pagewanted=all>
2008 New York Times Magazine piece, was an official with the U.S. Agency for
International Development under Clinton and the State Department's special
Sudan representative under George W. Bush, and he still testifies before
Congress on Sudan issues. After retiring in 2006, he stayed behind to serve
as a volunteer advisor to the SPLM. "As one American that has had over 27
years of involvement in Sudan, it is my association with the SPLM and SPLA
that I am most proud of," he said in
<
http://www.gossmission.org/goss/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5
29&Itemid=191> a speech to the SPLM national convention in May 2008. In
another example, Ted Dagne was an Africa specialist at the Congressional
Research Service who forged close ties with Garang. Today, he works as an
advisor to Kiir in Juba, where he labors in his prefab office and sometimes
writes press releases on behalf of the South Sudanese government.
The heavy U.S. backing of the SPLM might be producing as many problems as it
is resolving. "It makes them reckless," said Alex de Waal, a top Sudan
scholar and an advisor to the African Union's mediation efforts between
Sudan and South Sudan. "They think the rules don't apply to them." That
behavior was most evident in April, when U.S. and African diplomatic
officials told me South Sudan seemed genuinely blindsided by the global
condemnation of its military offensive against Sudan.
Meanwhile, South Sudan's partisans in Washington keep egging on the Obama
administration to take a more aggressive stance. "The Obama administration
has not pursued a policy of isolating the regime in Khartoum, as some on
Capitol Hill and in the NGO community have advocated. Neither has the
administration been terribly pro-South Sudan," Prendergast wrote to me in an
email last month. If the United States were really serious about backing
South Sudan, Washington "would perhaps be aiding Sudan's own rebels," he
added. With student-led protests continuing in Khartoum, expect the calls
from SPLM advocates to grow louder for a regime-change policy toward Sudan,
presumably involving arming South Sudan-backed rebels in the process.
No matter who wins the U.S. presidential election in November, the SPLM has
its bases covered -- like it always does. If Obama loses, the SPLM has
reason to hope it will receive even more slack from Mitt Romney's
administration. The Romney campaign website's
<
http://www.mittromney.com/issues/africa> Africa policy page focuses
disproportionately on Sudan and South Sudan, devoting more than twice as
many lines to Sudan and South Sudan than all other countries combined. The
words could have been written by the SPLM itself: "While the initiative
begun by the previous administration to help South Sudan achieve its
independence was completed during President Obama's term," reads the
website, Obama "has failed to strengthen a once promising alliance with
South Sudan."
Romney's backing of South Sudan should come as no surprise, since Rich
Williamson and David Raad, two Bush political appointees to Sudan, are now
advisors to his campaign. Williamson served as Bush's special envoy to
Sudan. Raad worked on the Sudan desk at the State Department, and then --
like some of his Democratic peers -- served as an advisor to the SPLM
government after the peace deal. He then launched a business consulting firm
(created at the request of Kiir himself,
<
http://www.dra-ltd.com/about.html> according to its website) specializing
in facilitating access to SPLM leaders. The website says Raad's clients have
pursued business interests in South Sudan's mining, timber, financial, and
security industries.
With the SPLM's faults becoming more and more difficult to dismiss, its
advocates might begin to face a more skeptical crowd in Washington -- though
there are few signs of that yet. Some of its non-American friends have
already started to turn. Gérard Prunier, a leading French scholar on Africa
and fierce critic of the Sudanese government, resigned as advisor to the
South Sudanese government because, he told me in a phone interview last
month, he didn't want to be "guilty by association," describing the
country's leadership as a "government of idiots" who are "rotten to the
core." Prunier is a respected author on Sudan and a frequent commentator on
the region, and his words have not gone unnoticed in Washington.
By resigning, Prunier has done what U.S. opponents of Bashir have seemed
unable to do -- merge their hatred of Khartoum with any sort of similar
outrage toward South Sudan's leadership.
If Washington hopes to right South Sudan's sinking ship, it would do well to
abandon the feel-good moralizing and consider ways to limit the damage
wrought by its friends, before it is too late.
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Received on Tue Jul 10 2012 - 16:42:17 EDT
