Status Quo Between 2 Sudans Is Not Quite War, Not Quite Peace
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — For the first time in months, after killing scores if
not hundreds of each other’s men, Sudan and 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.
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, 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, 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
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 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 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 “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 - 13:03:28 EDT
