North and South Sudan: Lobby Group Calls for Shift in US Policy

By Staff Writer

KHARTOUM---A new briefing by Enough Project, the Washington-based anti-genocide lobby group, calls for a new US policy in the wake of South Sudan’s secession from the North. The briefing—titled A new US Policy for Two Sudans----authored by John Prendergast calls says that following the South’s independence,  the jubilation was tinged with real concerns over the challenges of the embryonic state of South Sudan and the threat posed by an angry, isolated, and besieged government of the Republic of Sudan left behind in Khartoum.

“It seems to me there are three overwhelming dangers for the Republic of Sudan posed by partition, accompanied by three related opportunities. First, immediate and extreme human rights crises in parts of Sudan, particularly the Nuba Mountains, provide an urgent imperative to exercise the international responsibility to protect civilian life. Second, growing armed and unarmed internal opposition in Sudan focused on a real alteration of the status quo provides an opportunity to hone in on fundamental reforms in governance and how power is shared in that country. And third, the total failure of existing conflict-resolution processes for the various conflicts in Sudan and between the two countries offers a major opportunity to alter the mediation paradigm to focus on a national solution in the North”, says John Prendergast, the author of the briefing.

According to the briefing, South Sudan also has enormous warning signs accompanied by huge opportunities. The resource curse could become a blessing if transparently managed, and threats from within and without focusing on ethnic and regional fault lines could be defused with enlightened power sharing and fundamental democratic reforms.

“A new U.S. policy—rooted in the international responsibility to protect civilian life and democracy promotion—is desperately needed for these two new Sudans.”, says the briefing.

A number of factors create an enabling environment for a bold change in U.S. and broader international policy: South Sudan’s independence offers an opportunity to press restart in how the

United States and the broader international community deal with Khartoum. Ivory Coast and Libya demonstrate that the international community is willing to act to protect civilians at extreme risk. The support for democratic aspirations in Egypt shows that previously unthinkable change is possible in that region. The Obama administration’s policy shift on Syria shows there is a point where internal repression and human rights abuses require the United States to back away from previous policy.

“This is a dynamic time in international relations and should allow for a re-examination of what is possible in Sudan. The international responsibility to protect civilian life is making a comeback and aggressive measures must be deployed in response to the crimes against humanity in the Nuba Mountains. The Arab Spring has opened the door to sweeping reform that should not leave Sudan untouched. And the stove-piped policy of mediating individual Sudanese conflicts—marked by continuous accommodation of the Bashir regime’s international neutrality—has failed the people of Sudan. It’s time to try something else”, the briefing states.

It notes that U.S. efforts to promote peace in Sudan have been undermined by a fatally flawed premise: that separate peace deals could be secured for each of Sudan’s multiple conflicts without finally dealing with the divisive, autocratic regime in Khartoum. The legacy of this policy—a failed peace process in Darfur, a militarily occupied and ethnically cleansed Abyei, a conflagration in the Nuba Mountains, an expected conflict in Blue Nile, a fraying peace deal in the East, and Khartoum-backed militias undermining stability in parts of the newly independent South Sudan—demands a radical change in policy and approach.

 

According to the briefing, the core problem of bad governance in Khartoum has never been the object of international leverage. A dictatorship has festered for 22 years, pursuing a divide-and-destroy approach to remaining in power. A series of unimplemented agreements have failed to address the root causes of conflict and left the international community spending billions of dollars in cleanup humanitarian aid and feckless peacekeeping deployments that protect very few civilians. The only deal that worked was the referendum for the South, part of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, (CPA), mostly because the South had the firepower to create a hurting military stalemate and had the strong political backing of the United States and other key countries. But the CPA was supposed to be accompanied by a number of other commitments with which the Khartoum government has refused to comply, thus leading directly to the latest rounds of ethnic cleansing in Abyei and the Nuba Mountains

Now that the South has seceded, marginalized groups in the East, South, and West of what remains of Sudan are even more vulnerable to the same war tactics and human rights abuses that killed more than 2 million southerners. The underlying rifts have already been exacerbated with the reemphasis of the Bashir regime on its project to Arabize and Islamize the country, despite the majority of its inhabitants still being non- Arab and a significant minority non-Muslim.

The ruling National Congress Party, (NCP), however, is facing huge challenges. Economic hardships are increasing, fuelled by higher food prices, escalating debts, and the prospect of a loss of a substantial amount of state revenue in the form of lost South Sudanese oil. The regime faces a number of armed opposition groups, a veritable ocean of revolution throughout the country, with hot wars in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, the potential for escalation in Blue Nile, a frozen conflict in Abyei, and cold wars in the East and far North. The loss of the South is a major stigma for the ruling NCP. Splits in the ruling party, rumoured for years, are finally becoming a reality. And elements of the army are increasingly concerned that there will be no end to multi-front war as long as Bashir remains in power.

The briefing says that unrest within the Sudanese Armed Forces  may be the most dynamic element in this cocktail of trouble for the NCP. The ruling party’s plan after the signing of the 2005 CPA was to undermine the South’s quest for independent statehood by fuelling intra-South divisions through support to ethnic-based militias, as the NCP had done with great success during the North-South and Darfur wars. The strategy was delayed in the face of unprecedented unity in advance of the referendum both inside South Sudan and in the broader international community. As governor of South Kordofan, Ahmed Haroun, indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes committed in Darfur, has engineered the militia policy, supplying and providing rear bases for a number of southern militias as well as Arab militias that have been a principal element of operations in Abyei, the Nuba Mountains, and vulnerable areas of the South.

The plan was to increase operations in the South in advance of the July 9 date for the independence of the South. Instead, Bashir instigated conflict in South Kordofan with the Nuba branch of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, or SPLM-North, diverting capacities from the effort to undermine the South and leading to numerous casualties for the Sudanese army. The terrain is very unfavourable for conventional forces and the rainy season makes the military confrontation even more puzzling.