January 2005 was the effective date of a historical redress. Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed as a compromise between the good and evil. Although seen in the west as a moment of hope drawing the curtain on the longest and bloodiest civil war in African history, the people living there saw it as ”war interrupted”. More than fifty years and milions of dead, were claimed by this war, between Sudan’s dictatorial Khartoum government, made up of the strict islamic Arab speaking center North, against the peoples and the tribes of the south, made up of traditional African animists and newly converted Christians. Some of this conflict was the result of ”Divide and conquer” and ”divide and rule” diplomacy from Brittania’s colonial past. Some of it went further into ancient regime conflicts. But it all rests on the divisions within this vast Churchillian cartographer’s error of a country. It is evident by the great thousand miles straight lines drawn in the map of human lives. Remember Sudan was created by the empire as a fictional map paper country, conquered and ruled by Brittania. Administered by few gallant men and permanent residents of the Khartoum colonial club, more keen on cricket and whiskey than enlightening the ”savages”. That’s how Khartoum came to rule this immense and diverse land of two hundred tribes and more than fifty languages. The conflict was always there, but a more localized tribal version than whatever we’ve seen in the last fifty-five years. More recently, the South Sudanese liberation army had bitterly contested Khartoum’s rule, revealing how Khartoum’s attitudes had changed little since the days of slavery, when southerners were seen as animals or at best heathens, fit only for serfdom, and often they were harvested to be sold into slavery. Many of today’s slaves in the oil rich Arab world still hail from Sudan. This conflict was largely economic from the outset but now is oil resource driven. A bit of the American civil war history is replayed here only the roles are a bit reversed and confused on occasion.
Darfur is bloody enough, but the ethnic, economic and religious war of the South, inflicted suffering on a scale that almost defies comprehension. The savagery claimed between two and three million lives during the conflict that began a few weeks before Sudan won independence from Britain in 1956. The modern round of this war between north and sou from 1983 until 2005, started when an earlier attempt at a peace deal collapsed. Mirroring conflicts in India, Ireland, Palestine, Kashmir, Cuprys, Kongo and Rwanda, the seeds of hate were sown in the earth long before the colonial misrule ended.
Here oil is a curse just as much as it s anywhere else. Natural gas, copper and diamonds are also bad for an African country’s health, but oil is king. Namely, for southern Sudan oil is the resident evil. How bad oil is for this country or any country for that matter, can be best understood by the fate that befalls those resource driven economies and mostly failed or strong man-puppet states. Oil is evil and not just for environmental reasons is what Patrice Lumumba said. He had this insight before he was assassinated plunging his beloved country into another of those nasty fifty year civil bloody wars. An insight that is as powerful as it is counter intuitive: poor but resource-rich countries tend to be underdeveloped not despite their hydrocarbon and mineral riches but because of their resource wealth. One way or another, oil makes you poor. This fact is hard to believe, but very few exceptions exist. Sudan’s south isn’t one of them. And the war here has started again. Only nobody is paying any attention. Except China that is. Europe is as always asleep at the switch. America is busy elsewhere and the UN…. well…. forget about it.
Today, people in southern Sudan fear that history is repeating itself. The repatriation of refugees and IDPs that the relative calm that has prevailed since 2005 has allowed, is rapidly breaking down, while the “comprehensive peace agreement” is steadily unravelling. Abiya’s bloody destruction and erasure from the map as a Southern city has been but a blip in the radar of an escalating war.
This year, more people have been forced from their homes in the south, and more have died violently, and became refugees in the Southern conflict, than in the whole of Darfur and Chad and the rest of Sudan. A half million people are the new refugees, who have fled their villages across the southern states, while the death toll probably runs into the many thousands of errant souls who live in the divided country’s hinterland frontiers. These were not all recently resettled refugees and IDPs but were mostly the traditional settled villagers from the South that are being affected in the renewed conflict.
More than two hundred people were shot and children speared to death in the southern Jonglei state in a single morning, a few days ago in a repeat of the Darfur tactics of genocidaire Bashir’s Khartoum government.
The central question is why all this fighting has suddenly begun. The south has always suffered tribal skirmishing, generally over cattle and grazing. But this time, even the UN observers detect the hand of Khartoum, stirring tribal enmity with much bigger stakes in mind. The renewed war and tribal new frontier hostilities are squarely aimed at causing havoc before a referendum set for January 2011 over independence for the south. The region’s future has wider importance, because large oil reserves lie beneath the lush agricultural plains.
But the oil has been spoken for…
Not only those oil reserves are coveted by the north as a resource to sell to China, whose appetite for Sudan’s oil has given Khartoum a financial and diplomatic windfall, fuelling an economic boom in Khartoum filling the streets with Mercedeses, BMWs and Jaguars and a vibrant night life for the sons and daughters of the regime’s wealthy patrons.
During the civil war, when rebels from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) fought Khartoum dictator Bashir’s regime, the north deliberately ignited ethnic conflict in the south, arming some tribes to fight others. Ministers in the Government of Southern Sudan, which has enjoyed autonomy since the 2005 peace agreement, believe Khartoum is back arming and causing the tribes to fight a war of attrition.
Oyay Ajak, a general and a former SPLA chief of staff who now serves as the south’s regional cooperation minister wrote to the international community for assistance: ”We have evidence that our ”partners” in the north are training, arming and sending to southern Sudan the former militia groups who fought alongside them during the war. There is a stream of weapons and war supplies coming into southern Sudan from the north to . Somebody in Khartoum is coordinating this operation and we very much suspect it is the Bashir government.”
Both north and south know the clock is ticking. If the referendum goes ahead in January 2011, as laid down in the peace agreement, few doubt the people of the south will choose Autonomy and reaffirm their wish to break away. After the nasty fifty year war they will create their own destiny in a Democracy. And it is a good story as a new country will emerge in the heart of Africa and a Democratic constitutional one to boot.
But it might also just become another failed state in Africa as it is right now.
The oil is the main cause of it. Right now, the south has about 75 per cent of Sudan’s 6.3 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. But the North controls the income and signs the contracts with China and the other Oil companies, thus having a vital interest in preventing the South from seceding the central Khartoum government. One way is to rule the South directly via a quick war. This is a major military exercise and will result in unpleasant blood at the doorstep of Khartoum, having missed the Blair-Bush era opportunity to go through the window of evil. The other way would be to stir violence across the south, to the point where the situation is too unstable for the referendum to be held or to be considered a fair and unfettered outcome. They could even terrorize people to bring about the north’s desired outcome. The Khartoum generals around Bashir want to make southern Sudan ungovernable. They want to discredit the nascent government and tell the international community that the Southerners cannot govern themselves and they couldn’t become independent, for they will be another failed state. This idea has actually been floated within the UN with some success by the friends of Bashir. Remember Sudan was created by the empire as a fictional map paper country, conquered and ruled by Brittania but without the civil institutions of other more ”civilized”, prosperous and populous nations. The civil servants and officers saw it as a Kichener’s, kitchen of evil and avoided leaving their compounds or country clubs at any cost. No real institutional country building took place during the long colonial rule. Especially i the much neglected South thathas a lot more in common with Northern Uganda than Khartoum and it’s central north Sudan. Sudanese are only in name nationals but in reality a vast tribal amalgam. Darfur is just a small mirror of this.
China’s interests are closely aligned with Khartoum central government and genocidaire Bashir. Beijing has invested heavily in developing Sudan’s reserves, which provide beween more than ten per cent of China’s imported oil. The China National Petroleum Corporation, a state energy giant, is exploiting the most productive fields, including those in the south, and Beijing has also built a 900-mile pipeline linking these reserves with Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Just remember the pipeline goes through Khartoum and ends up in the North’s main Red sea port.
To guarantee these supplies, China needs Sudan to stay united under Khartoum and Bashir. President Hu Jintao has obligingly traded heavy aid in the form of sophisticated weapons systems, airforce implements and the latest jet fighters, to Sudan’s armed forces and has given Mr Bashir consistent diplomatic cover and support. The human rights record of China over Sudan and it’s support of the genocide regime, is just as bad as that of the Bush-Blair oil slick regimes.
Either way, the 2011 referendum carries huge risks. For those of us who understand Africa and visit Sudan’s desperate areas in Darfur and Juba’s proposed middle borders in Abiya, it is a clear sign. If the poll is delayed or cancelled, people in the south would flee and another war of domination would start.
However, if the referendum goes ahead and the south chooses independence, the north may launch a war of attrition to grab the oil fields and hold onto the oil contracts and resulting wealth stream.
Some believe the recent violence amounts to the opening shots of this new conflict. The claim of Bashir’s “hidden hand” behind the killing is supported by independent evidence. A ship recently arrived in Malakal having travelled up the Nile from Khartoum and it contained Kalashnikov assault rifles and ammunition, beneath a cargo of food.
The Khartoum national army recruits people as fighters of the South against the South, for a hugely impressive monthly salary of £200. These wealthy recruits, once in Khartoum’s pay, will be used to destabilise their own homeland.
The bitter mistrust between the SPLA and their old enemies in Khartoum has already cost many lives in Malakal. The town’s muddy streets were pounded by heavy artillery and tanks in February when a day of fighting between the two sides left at least 60 dead. A school was bombarded, killing about a dozen children. The United Nations is now digging shelters for its staff in Malakal.
However, there is no conclusive proof of a high-level decision in Khartoum to cause turmoil in the south. The region, which covers an area three times the size of Britain, possesses less than 13 miles of tarred road and is one of the poorest places on earth.
Yet the Government of Southern Sudan chooses to spend 60% of its budget on the military, while health, education and development get less than 30%.
These priorities suggest the south is also arming for war, leaving foreign aid agencies to conduct any development work. But the recent violence has disrupted even the aid workers’ efforts. We’re looking to do longer term, more sustainable interventions, said a policy adviser for Oxfam. “But when this insecurity takes place and people are displaced as a result, we’re pulled back into doing emergency programming.”
In the South, many fear that another war is inevitable. The tribals, the IDPs and returned refugees fleeing again the new violence were caught between the SPLA and Khartoum. “Every community is being divided by the two governments, so people who are on one side are encouraged to attack the other side,” he said.
The tribal village communities that were raided recently, are an incident that can be blamed directly on Khartoum’s allies. The people are bribed with money and guns to attack their own people. Oil nurtures bad politics and not just fratricide. They are our own relatives who attack us, the refugees said. Violence begets violence. The oil, not only is a curse for southern Sudan but is also a deterrent to Democracy. Recently the border’s vast oil field dispute and the allocation of the income from it was resolved in favor of the North. Perhaps that is a positive thing for the South’s Democratic chances. Especially, if it becomes an independent state. The south has to The smart people know that the south has to fashion democratic institutions and a strong representative government of all the tribes and peoples, before it rebuilds it’s army. A deeply representative government is what the South needs now. That is where the North cannot compete against them. Although the North has weapons and a formidable army, it hasn’t got Democracy. This is where the North is a failed state. And it is increasingly clear that Democracy building and not war armaments should be the South’s choice. Because if they have a strong Democracy, that is worth defending, whereas any other of the available choices are far grimmer.
So it remains up to the people of South Sudan to fight and strive to create a Democracy out of the ashes of Abiya and many other towns and villages destroyed, before the war’s looming clouds start on them.
Perhaps only then, the EU and others will see fit to rescue a Democracy in South Sudan, not because it has oil but because it has that rare commodity called Democratic governance.
Something rare and worth saving in Africa as well as at home.
