Questioning South Sudan’s independence
TENS of thousands of civilians dead, countless children on the verge of starvation, millions of dollars stolen by officials, oil wells blown up, food aid hijacked and as many as 70 percent of women sheltering in camps raped – mostly by the nation’s soldiers and police officers.
Just a few years ago, South Sudan accomplished what seemed impossible: independence. Of all the quixotic rebel armies fighting for freedom in Africa, the South Sudanese actually won. Global powers, including the United States, rallied to their side, helping to create the world’s newest country in 2011, a supposed solution to decades of conflict and suffering.
Now, with millions of its people hungry or displaced by civil war, a radical question has emerged: Should South Sudan lose its independence?
As international frustrations and worries grow, some momentum is growing for a proposal for outside powers to take over South Sudan and run it as a trusteeship until things calm down.
Several academics and prominent opposition figures support the idea, citing East Timor, Kosovo and Bosnia as places where they say it has worked, though of course there are plenty of cautionary tales where outside intervention failed, like Somalia and Iraq.
Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani recently floated a plan in which the African Union would take the lead in setting up a transitional government for South Sudan. Ideally, Mamdani said, none of the South Sudanese politicians who have helped drag their nation into civil war would be able to participate, and the trusteeship would last around six years, requiring UN support.
“The response to the crisis will need to be as extraordinary as the crisis,” Mamdani said.
However, there is one not-so-little problem. Many South Sudanese might not go for it.
According to James Solomon Padiet, a lecturer at Juba University, most members of the nation’s largest ethnic group – the Dinka, who include South Sudan’s embattled president, Salva Kiir – are set against an international takeover.While smaller ethnic groups would welcome it, he said, the powerful Dinka see it as an affront to their sovereignty.
For that matter, so does Padiet, a softspoken scholar who is not a Dinka. He called trusteeship “offensive” because South Sudan has a potential crop of good leaders waiting in the wings who have not had a chance to rule.
Still, Padiet conceded, the country desperately needs help.
“As we speak now,” he said, “South Sudan is at crossroads of disintegration or total fragility.”
Clashes have spread to new areas of the country, and ethnic-based militias are mobilising in the bush. It is all a staggering plunge from the country’s birth.
I, along with hundreds of other journalists, was standing in a crowd that felt like 1 million people on July 9, 2011, the insanely hot day when South Sudan broke off from Sudan. The sense of pride, sacrifice, hope and jubilation will be hard to forget.
For decades, South Sudanese rebels had battled the better-armed, Arabdominated central government of Sudan. They fought in malarial swamps and on sweltering savannas, incredibly hostile environments where it is hard to survive, let alone wage a guerrilla war on a shoestring.
The South Sudanese had absorbed bombings and massacres. The Arabs stole their children and turned them into slaves. As a result, many South Sudanese were scattered across the four corners of the earth – the famous Lost Boys, but also many Lost Girls, ripped from their families and forced to flee to cold foreign places that they had never envisioned.
On independence day, South Sudan’s capital, Juba, partied until dawn. Lost Boys swigged White Bull (the local beer) next to hardened guerrillas bobbing their heads to reggae rap. All around us, there seemed to be a real appreciation of what had been achieved and what lay ahead. Most important, there was unity. That crumbled quickly, undermined by old political rivalries, ethnic tension and a greed for South Sudan’s one main export: oil. The fault line was the most predictable one, the Dinka versus the Nuer. The two biggest ethnic groups had alternated between allies and enemies throughout South Sudan’s liberation wars.
UN officials in Juba have been excoriated for failing to spring into action and effectively step between Kiir and Riek Machar, the former vice president and the most influential Nuer, as their rivalry intensified and grew into nationwide bloodshed. This is a big reason some people think an international trusteeship will never work.
“Having completely failed in the international state-building project, now we’re going to move to an international takeover?With what army?” asked John Prendergast, who has been working on South Sudan for 30 years and co-founded the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group.
“Would the same international bureaucrats that undertook massive state-building experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan come to Juba to lead another failed political intervention?” he added. “It all seems fantastical, doomed and extremely unlikely.”
Other scholars take a middle view. Amir Idris, chairman of Fordham’s African and African-American Studies department and a frequent writer on South Sudan, said that an international trusteeship should be considered – but only as a last resort.
He says the most important issue is that a new government be built with new people, including academics and technocrats.
“South Sudan has no chance of transitioning itself to a functioning state unless the edifice of the current leadership is brought down,” Idris said.