Is political solution of North-South Sudan impasse possible?
Monday, 22 October 2007
David Morse
PAGAN Amum, the Secretary General of the SPLM, claims to think so. More sedate than I remembered him from an interview in 2005, he was nonetheless clearly determined to remain publicly optimistic. A heavyset man with a thin goatee who has charge of the SPLM's daily workings, he spoke softly about the prospects of achieving peace throughout the whole of Sudan via the political process enabled under the CPA.
Just as the old Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is "transforming itself into a modern conventional force," he insisted, so the SPLM is "transforming itself from a rebel movement into a political party that can organise on a national scale -- not just in the South, but in the north, the east, the west," it will be able to compete with the National Congress Party for control of the central government, he said, even in time for the national elections (officially scheduled for 2008, but almost certain not to happen until 2009, after a necessary census is conducted).
In preparation for elections, he claims that an SPLM organising campaign has already registered 600,000 members, with a goal of two million. "SPLM is the political party that can actually achieve a united Sudan, on a new basis -- a Sudan that can be for all Sudanese."
Back in 2005, I had heard Amum spin out a similar vision of a secular Sudan, committed to gender equity and religious freedom -- over beers at a table in the outdoor Afex Café, a hangout for SPLM bigwigs and NGO workers in the heady days of the then-new peace when a young almost-country was drafting its new constitution. The tables were in a mango grove overlooking a bullet-riddled, rusting barge half sunk in the White Nile. In those days -- even given the mysterious death of the movement's charismatic if autocratic leader, John Garang, in a helicopter crash three weeks after his installation as vice president of Sudan -- and before this grinding poverty-in-peace had taken its toll, it was easier to dream of, and sound convincing about, a Sudan that might help democratise and unify the whole of Africa.
Now, for all his talk of grassroots organising, Amun seemed to lack either a real plan or deep conviction when it came to a unified Sudan. (My traveling companion Deng later pointed out to me that Amum had tellingly staffed his office only with members of his own Shilluk tribe.) When I asked the secretary general whether his optimism was now somewhat "manufactured," he denied it and pointed to recent, (exceedingly modest) "achievements": The National Oil Commission, charged under the CPA with overseeing oil contracts and revenues, had, after two long years, finally met; Khartoum had formally agreed to withdraw all 14,000 of its troops from the South by July 9, 2007, then only a few days away.
I didn't know which to find more astonishing, Khartoum's announcement that it would withdraw its troops from the oilfields (which I had not gotten wind of), or the idea that Pagan Amum believed it would actually happen.
The jointly constituted Boundary Commission that was to settle the division of the oil lands was, he also pointed out, finally going to meet. "They have given us a firm date that, by February of 2008, the boundaries will be demarcated." Could he believe that, either -- when Khartoum's promises have so famously been written in disappearing ink? And where was his outrage, given that five years had passed without boundaries being demarcated in a region where Khartoum was assumedly pumping the oilfields dry?
Over two months later, back in the U.S., Deng expressed his growing impatience as the situation deteriorated. He found himself incensed at the gap between the lofty rhetoric that officials like Amum continue to spout and their inability, or unwillingness, to deliver services to the villages of the South, to the people. "During the war, the SPLA were stealing their cows or eating off the same plate with them. Now they need to give something back!"
Even if the organisers of SPLM's political campaign actually succeeded in challenging Khartoum's dominant National Congress Party, it seems unlikely indeed that its hardliners would ever voluntarily relinquish power at the ballot box. It's worth recalling that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup in 1989, the fifth coup since Sudan achieved independence in 1956. Historically ungovernable, Sudan has little experience with democracy.
The vote Sudanese are eyeing most warily is a plebiscite in 2011, also authorised by the 2004 peace agreement, in which southerners supposedly will be allowed to vote on secession. Originally intended as a safety-valve for those southerners who came to the negotiating table doubting that any sort of agreement for a unified Sudan would work, the 2011 deadline is raising ever more apprehension as it grows closer.
Will the North allow the South, with its oil reserves, to pull out of the federation?
Virtually everyone in the region considers such an outcome inconceivable. Not peacefully, anyway. But if some of the benefits of "peace" don't arrive soon, most think the South will vote overwhelmingly to secede -- and if the crisis in Sudan hasn't already hit a full boiling point, it will then.
That North and South are on a collision course is clear to all. On a bus-ride to Nairobi, I sat next to a woman who killed the boredom of the 14-hour trip by confiding to me her black-market scheme to smuggle cigarettes from Kenya into South Sudan. She expected to make lots of money and then hoped to eventually move up to smuggling gold. She described the border crossing-points, gave me phone numbers, "They wouldn't check you," she said, clearly dreaming that my white skin would make me a perfect mule. "But," she cautioned, "you've only got three years. You make your money and get out. That's when they vote. And then they will go to war." She mimed an explosive poof! with her hands.
A word about corruption in the new government. We encountered evidence of petty corruption firsthand. When it came time to leave Kuajok and settle our account at the Warrap State Safari Guest House, for example, we found that the SPLA colonel with the two-year-old who held me a gunpoint had disappeared and stuck us with his $56 bar tab. "That's corruption," said Chris Koor Garang, but he paid the bill, not wanting to cause trouble.
Political patronage is rampant in the SPLM. Jobs are handed out to relatives, former rebel commanders, and party loyalists, undercutting efforts to create a professional bureaucracy based on merit. Larger scale corruption came to light last March, when South Sudan's minister of finance and economic planning, Arthur Akuien Chol, was charged with skimming public funds by vastly overcharging the government for Toyota Land Cruisers. President Kiir placed Chol under house arrest, reiterated a "zero tolerance for corruption" policy, and in July reshuffled his cabinet. Efforts are said to be underway to eliminate "ghost" civil servants from government payrolls.
Deng is a big fan of President Kiir -- who is not only Dinka but grew up near his childhood village, Ariang. Deng likes his humility, his rough-hewn quality; but Kiir, he says, is in "a hard place. If he tries to get rid of the people who are corrupt, they will turn against his leadership. He's in a hot-seat, and it's up to him to take bold steps."
In short, it seemed that, yes, corruption in the new state exists, but no, it is not yet rampant; not, for example, as in neighbouring Kenya where bribery is commonplace at every level of government and society. At the moment in South Sudan, nepotism, tribalism, and cronyism are the most persistent impediments to professional efficiency -- and, of course, lack of funds. A further impediment to the smooth functioning of government is its very newness: Virtually every agency is working with draft laws, while the various state constitutions go through the process of approval, and this, for instance, hinders the writing of contracts for activities like uranium prospecting that might actually produce funds for the fledgling quasi-state.
While we were flying home from Nairobi, the July 9 deadline for Khartoum's pullout from the southern oil fields came and went without action. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon waited six weeks to express his disappointment to the Security Council, calling on Khartoum to live up to its obligation under the CPA. Months later, however, the northern troops still have not budged, nor are they likely to without vigorous international pressure.
Thus far, the "war" between South and North is only a war of words, though it is escalating. Asked about his northern colleagues, President Kiir upped the ante in speaking to the New York Times. "They are cheating us," he said bluntly.
The three Dinka men, those former "Lost Boys" we traveled with -- so intimately familiar with the costs of war -- have returned to lives in Syracuse, Tucson, and Chicago. They remain intent on completing their educations here and doing what they can to nurture the peace there. Deng, who later confessed to me that he had secretly hoped to break ground on the school he plans to build at Ariang, now realises it is going to be a much longer process than he ever imagined. It will have to include such obvious, but major, educational tasks as training teachers -- and other projects that, in many societies, would have nothing to do with starting a school, such as bringing clean water to Ariang. "A school is not just a building," Deng comments. At the end of December, when his own semester is over, he plans to return to Ariang.
Chris Koor Garang has learned the same lesson when it comes to bringing a functioning clinic to the town of Akon. It's one thing to build a structure, quite another to staff and equip it. Right now, the clinic building in Akon is locked up and unused for lack of funds. So Garang is spending time raising money. Next spring, he expects to help train nurses, though in conjunction with what organisation he has not yet decided.
Samuel Garang Mayuol -- the only one of the three who had no clear plan of his own as we began -- came away with a clear sense of mission, once he saw the circumstances in which his people subsisted. As soon as he can afford to, he expects to return to drill wells so that his village, Lang, will have clean water. For now, he sits on the board of a non-profit called Lost Boys Rebuilding Southern Sudan.
The irony of their personal situations is far from lost on these men. For all the wrenching upheavals and suffering they endured, they have obtained educations and material advantages of which they would never have dreamed, had they not been torn from their lives. In fact, it's that very awareness which drives these three extraordinary young men, but it's worth remembering that they are among the fortunate ones. Not all their peers who accompanied them to the U.S. have fared so well. Some have never recovered from the endless traumas involved in their flights and escapes, from the loss of family, of society, of everything that matters deeply to a child. Some are simply ordinary people, who have been terribly damaged; some are descending into alcohol and drug abuse.
And what of that two-year-old, playing with the pistol in the bar in Kuajok? In 2011, he will be six -- exactly between the ages of Garang and Mayuol when they fled into the night. Will that child have a school to attend? Access to medicine? A childhood? Or will he end up traumatised, at one end or the other of a gun, the victim of another resource war? Unless the international community can widen its spotlight from Darfur and take an active role in monitoring implementation of the peace agreement in South Sudan, the answer already seems painfully clear. Concluded.
(David Morse is an independent journalist and human rights activist whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel, The Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum wars in the first two decades of the 21st century.)
--TomDispatch
PAGAN Amum, the Secretary General of the SPLM, claims to think so. More sedate than I remembered him from an interview in 2005, he was nonetheless clearly determined to remain publicly optimistic. A heavyset man with a thin goatee who has charge of the SPLM's daily workings, he spoke softly about the prospects of achieving peace throughout the whole of Sudan via the political process enabled under the CPA.
Just as the old Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is "transforming itself into a modern conventional force," he insisted, so the SPLM is "transforming itself from a rebel movement into a political party that can organise on a national scale -- not just in the South, but in the north, the east, the west," it will be able to compete with the National Congress Party for control of the central government, he said, even in time for the national elections (officially scheduled for 2008, but almost certain not to happen until 2009, after a necessary census is conducted).
In preparation for elections, he claims that an SPLM organising campaign has already registered 600,000 members, with a goal of two million. "SPLM is the political party that can actually achieve a united Sudan, on a new basis -- a Sudan that can be for all Sudanese."
Back in 2005, I had heard Amum spin out a similar vision of a secular Sudan, committed to gender equity and religious freedom -- over beers at a table in the outdoor Afex Café, a hangout for SPLM bigwigs and NGO workers in the heady days of the then-new peace when a young almost-country was drafting its new constitution. The tables were in a mango grove overlooking a bullet-riddled, rusting barge half sunk in the White Nile. In those days -- even given the mysterious death of the movement's charismatic if autocratic leader, John Garang, in a helicopter crash three weeks after his installation as vice president of Sudan -- and before this grinding poverty-in-peace had taken its toll, it was easier to dream of, and sound convincing about, a Sudan that might help democratise and unify the whole of Africa.
Now, for all his talk of grassroots organising, Amun seemed to lack either a real plan or deep conviction when it came to a unified Sudan. (My traveling companion Deng later pointed out to me that Amum had tellingly staffed his office only with members of his own Shilluk tribe.) When I asked the secretary general whether his optimism was now somewhat "manufactured," he denied it and pointed to recent, (exceedingly modest) "achievements": The National Oil Commission, charged under the CPA with overseeing oil contracts and revenues, had, after two long years, finally met; Khartoum had formally agreed to withdraw all 14,000 of its troops from the South by July 9, 2007, then only a few days away.
I didn't know which to find more astonishing, Khartoum's announcement that it would withdraw its troops from the oilfields (which I had not gotten wind of), or the idea that Pagan Amum believed it would actually happen.
The jointly constituted Boundary Commission that was to settle the division of the oil lands was, he also pointed out, finally going to meet. "They have given us a firm date that, by February of 2008, the boundaries will be demarcated." Could he believe that, either -- when Khartoum's promises have so famously been written in disappearing ink? And where was his outrage, given that five years had passed without boundaries being demarcated in a region where Khartoum was assumedly pumping the oilfields dry?
Over two months later, back in the U.S., Deng expressed his growing impatience as the situation deteriorated. He found himself incensed at the gap between the lofty rhetoric that officials like Amum continue to spout and their inability, or unwillingness, to deliver services to the villages of the South, to the people. "During the war, the SPLA were stealing their cows or eating off the same plate with them. Now they need to give something back!"
Even if the organisers of SPLM's political campaign actually succeeded in challenging Khartoum's dominant National Congress Party, it seems unlikely indeed that its hardliners would ever voluntarily relinquish power at the ballot box. It's worth recalling that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup in 1989, the fifth coup since Sudan achieved independence in 1956. Historically ungovernable, Sudan has little experience with democracy.
The vote Sudanese are eyeing most warily is a plebiscite in 2011, also authorised by the 2004 peace agreement, in which southerners supposedly will be allowed to vote on secession. Originally intended as a safety-valve for those southerners who came to the negotiating table doubting that any sort of agreement for a unified Sudan would work, the 2011 deadline is raising ever more apprehension as it grows closer.
Will the North allow the South, with its oil reserves, to pull out of the federation?
Virtually everyone in the region considers such an outcome inconceivable. Not peacefully, anyway. But if some of the benefits of "peace" don't arrive soon, most think the South will vote overwhelmingly to secede -- and if the crisis in Sudan hasn't already hit a full boiling point, it will then.
That North and South are on a collision course is clear to all. On a bus-ride to Nairobi, I sat next to a woman who killed the boredom of the 14-hour trip by confiding to me her black-market scheme to smuggle cigarettes from Kenya into South Sudan. She expected to make lots of money and then hoped to eventually move up to smuggling gold. She described the border crossing-points, gave me phone numbers, "They wouldn't check you," she said, clearly dreaming that my white skin would make me a perfect mule. "But," she cautioned, "you've only got three years. You make your money and get out. That's when they vote. And then they will go to war." She mimed an explosive poof! with her hands.
A word about corruption in the new government. We encountered evidence of petty corruption firsthand. When it came time to leave Kuajok and settle our account at the Warrap State Safari Guest House, for example, we found that the SPLA colonel with the two-year-old who held me a gunpoint had disappeared and stuck us with his $56 bar tab. "That's corruption," said Chris Koor Garang, but he paid the bill, not wanting to cause trouble.
Political patronage is rampant in the SPLM. Jobs are handed out to relatives, former rebel commanders, and party loyalists, undercutting efforts to create a professional bureaucracy based on merit. Larger scale corruption came to light last March, when South Sudan's minister of finance and economic planning, Arthur Akuien Chol, was charged with skimming public funds by vastly overcharging the government for Toyota Land Cruisers. President Kiir placed Chol under house arrest, reiterated a "zero tolerance for corruption" policy, and in July reshuffled his cabinet. Efforts are said to be underway to eliminate "ghost" civil servants from government payrolls.
Deng is a big fan of President Kiir -- who is not only Dinka but grew up near his childhood village, Ariang. Deng likes his humility, his rough-hewn quality; but Kiir, he says, is in "a hard place. If he tries to get rid of the people who are corrupt, they will turn against his leadership. He's in a hot-seat, and it's up to him to take bold steps."
In short, it seemed that, yes, corruption in the new state exists, but no, it is not yet rampant; not, for example, as in neighbouring Kenya where bribery is commonplace at every level of government and society. At the moment in South Sudan, nepotism, tribalism, and cronyism are the most persistent impediments to professional efficiency -- and, of course, lack of funds. A further impediment to the smooth functioning of government is its very newness: Virtually every agency is working with draft laws, while the various state constitutions go through the process of approval, and this, for instance, hinders the writing of contracts for activities like uranium prospecting that might actually produce funds for the fledgling quasi-state.
While we were flying home from Nairobi, the July 9 deadline for Khartoum's pullout from the southern oil fields came and went without action. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon waited six weeks to express his disappointment to the Security Council, calling on Khartoum to live up to its obligation under the CPA. Months later, however, the northern troops still have not budged, nor are they likely to without vigorous international pressure.
Thus far, the "war" between South and North is only a war of words, though it is escalating. Asked about his northern colleagues, President Kiir upped the ante in speaking to the New York Times. "They are cheating us," he said bluntly.
The three Dinka men, those former "Lost Boys" we traveled with -- so intimately familiar with the costs of war -- have returned to lives in Syracuse, Tucson, and Chicago. They remain intent on completing their educations here and doing what they can to nurture the peace there. Deng, who later confessed to me that he had secretly hoped to break ground on the school he plans to build at Ariang, now realises it is going to be a much longer process than he ever imagined. It will have to include such obvious, but major, educational tasks as training teachers -- and other projects that, in many societies, would have nothing to do with starting a school, such as bringing clean water to Ariang. "A school is not just a building," Deng comments. At the end of December, when his own semester is over, he plans to return to Ariang.
Chris Koor Garang has learned the same lesson when it comes to bringing a functioning clinic to the town of Akon. It's one thing to build a structure, quite another to staff and equip it. Right now, the clinic building in Akon is locked up and unused for lack of funds. So Garang is spending time raising money. Next spring, he expects to help train nurses, though in conjunction with what organisation he has not yet decided.
Samuel Garang Mayuol -- the only one of the three who had no clear plan of his own as we began -- came away with a clear sense of mission, once he saw the circumstances in which his people subsisted. As soon as he can afford to, he expects to return to drill wells so that his village, Lang, will have clean water. For now, he sits on the board of a non-profit called Lost Boys Rebuilding Southern Sudan.
The irony of their personal situations is far from lost on these men. For all the wrenching upheavals and suffering they endured, they have obtained educations and material advantages of which they would never have dreamed, had they not been torn from their lives. In fact, it's that very awareness which drives these three extraordinary young men, but it's worth remembering that they are among the fortunate ones. Not all their peers who accompanied them to the U.S. have fared so well. Some have never recovered from the endless traumas involved in their flights and escapes, from the loss of family, of society, of everything that matters deeply to a child. Some are simply ordinary people, who have been terribly damaged; some are descending into alcohol and drug abuse.
And what of that two-year-old, playing with the pistol in the bar in Kuajok? In 2011, he will be six -- exactly between the ages of Garang and Mayuol when they fled into the night. Will that child have a school to attend? Access to medicine? A childhood? Or will he end up traumatised, at one end or the other of a gun, the victim of another resource war? Unless the international community can widen its spotlight from Darfur and take an active role in monitoring implementation of the peace agreement in South Sudan, the answer already seems painfully clear. Concluded.
(David Morse is an independent journalist and human rights activist whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel, The Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum wars in the first two decades of the 21st century.)
--TomDispatch