Once again, war comes to southern Sudan

War in Sudan’s New South has begun. A clear pattern can be seen in Khartoum’s behaviour.  First in Abyei, then in South Kordofan and finally in Blue Nile, the Sudan Armed Forces, claiming ‘provocation’, assaulted SPLM-administered territories, displacing thousands of civilians in combined ground and air attacks replicating events in Darfur and Sudan’s twenty-two year civil war.

The causes of this new war can be found in the failure of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement to fully address the ‘root causes’ of the conflict, the narrow focus of the international guarantors of the CPA on the referendum process in South Sudan, and a sense of humiliation among elements of the National Congress Party and the army in Khartoum at having lost politically a war that they feel they should have won. South Sudanese independence has ended the six-year compromise with the SPLM during the CPA’s interim period, and the NCP is now reasserting by force the vision of Sudan’s identity it has always professed.

The international mediators who started the peace process in 2002 accepted the stereotyped explanation that the war was between a Muslim Arab North and an Christian and ‘animist’ African South.  Yet since the mid-1980s that characterisation had already proven false when the SPLA moved out of the southern Sudan, began recruiting from other peoples marginalised by Khartoum’s central government, and carried the war into Blue Nile state and the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan.  

Many of these recruits, including men who became senior figures in the SPLA, were Muslim, and their grievances were similar to those of the non-Muslims in the South: political, economic, and cultural domination of the country by a central government captured by an elite from the central Nile valley.

The CPA set out in detail what was characterised as ‘one country, two systems’, with an SPLM-majority government in southern Sudan and an NCP-majority central government in Khartoum.  Provision was made for a referendum in the South either to confirm the unity of the country under this system or independence for the South alone, but the provision for addressing the grievances and aspirations of the peoples in the Three Areas of Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile along the North-South border were vague and ill-defined.  

The Ngok Dinka people of Abyei were to be allowed a referendum first promised them in the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement to decide whether they would be administratively joined to the southern Sudan, but the peoples of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile state were offered nothing more than a ‘popular consultation’ to express how their relations with the central government in Khartoum might be improved.

The CPA in effect established a new South in Sudan, which would have disastrous consequences for the peoples of the borderland.  As the six-year interim period drew to a close the focus of the international guarantors, the US and UK government in particular, was on a successful conclusion to the southern referendum at the expense of the Three Areas.

In Abyei the compromise embodied in the Abyei Protocol of the CPA was further compromised by the 2009 territorial re-definition of the area by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. This was further undermined by the interventions of US and African Union mediators proposing further territorial and electoral compromises which the SPLM refused; the US walked away but did not repudiate its own proposals, leaving Khartoum with an excuse for blocking the implementation of both the Hague ruling and the Abyei referendum.

John Kerry, the chairman of the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, justified this by claiming that the fate of millions in the South should not be sacrificed for the sake of a few hundred square miles.  The SPLM did not see it this way.

While the international mediators effectively sabotaged the Abyei Protocol, they also ignored what was happening in South Kordofan and Blue Nile.  The Satellite Sentinel Project, prepared by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and sponsored by the American actor George Clooney, documented the build up of the Sudan Armed Forces around Abyei and within South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Malik Agar, the elected SPLM governor of Blue Nile warned of the transfer of armed units from Darfur to his state.  He saw any compromise over Abyei as setting a precedent for sabotaging the popular consultation he was overseeing in his own state.  In October 2010 he advised South Sudan’s president Salva Kiir Mayardit against rejoining the AU-mediated negotiations over Abyei in Addis Ababa unless he was sure that he would get what he wanted.

As southern Sudanese began to vote in their referendum in January 2011, armed militias backed by the Sudanese Armed Forces attacked police posts within Abyei.  These attacks were repeated in February, and a further build-up of Sudanese army units in the area was documented throughout March and April.  In May, the army alleged that one of their convoys had been deliberately ambushed by the SPLA and launched an invasion of the territory, expelling, and the dismissing the local administration.  

At the time, the US special envoy on Sudan, Ambassador Princeton Lyman, excused Khartoum’s actions by saying they were ‘provoked’, a line echoed by the FCO, and which gave Khartoum some diplomatic cover.  No compelling evidence for this ambush has been presented and UN officials in Juba have disputed the claim.

The delayed local elections in South Kordofan were finally conducted in May 2011, the same time that the Sudanese army occupied neighbouring Abyei.  By now South Sudan had voted for independence.  During the election campaign, Sudanese President Bashir threatened that Khartoum would go ‘all out for war should SPLM win’.  

Ahmad Haroun, the NCP candidate for governor of the state, who is also indicted by the ICC for war crimes in Darfur, was declared the winner by only 6,000 votes over his SPLM rival.  International observers rushed to proclaim the election fair; there are good grounds for disputing this. Khartoum then declared that the SPLA units in South Kordofan, who were there under the terms of the CPA, should either be removed to South Sudan or be disarmed.

These soldiers were local Nuba, not South Sudanese, and no provision had been made in the CPA for what should happen to them following the outcome of the southern referendum and the popular consultations.  In June the Sudan Armed Forces, again claiming they had been provoked, launched an attack on SPLA units and targeted SPLM officials.  The UN Mission in Sudan documented numerous violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws by government forces during the fighting.

Malik Agar, with the help of Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, tried to negotiate an agreement with Khartoum which would enable the northern SPLM to operated as a recognised legal party and set out a procedure for the absorption of the SPLA’s northern forces into the Sudanese national army.  This agreement was signed in Addis Ababa by the NCP hardliner, Nafie Ali Nafie, only to be immediately repudiated by Bashir.  A meeting in Khartoum between Bashir and Malik Agar, brokered by Meles Zenawi, also failed.  

In September the Sudanese army, again claiming provocation launched its long-anticipated attack on Blue Nile state and declared Malik Agar, the most accommodating of the SPLM’s northern leaders, a rebel. Thousands of refugees have fled into neighbouring Ethiopia and South Sudan, and the Sudanese air force has bombed refugee camps inside South Sudan’s borders.

Washington’s reaction to these events can only be described as confused, reflecting deep divisions within the State Department, the White House’s National Security Council, and the intelligence agencies, who still seem to see some value in keeping on good terms with Khartoum.  

President Obama, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have all issued statements condemning the outbreak of fighting, but Obama has addressed the Sudanese and South Sudanese leaders as if they are equally culpable for this renewal of violence.  

Thousands of Nuba SPLA soldiers based in the South have returned home with their weapons and equipment, and there is some evidence of a continued movement of supplies across the border from South Sudan into both South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Washington now appears to view South Sudan as the real obstacle to peace and has publicly condemned this unconfirmed support, while remaining silent about Khartoum’s documented support to the small dissident groups now operating in the South with the declared intention of overthrowing the SPLM government.

The FCO has long given up any pretence of playing Athens to America’s Rome and as far as Sudan policy is concerned has been content to follow where Washington leads.  But neither government has yet to articulate a clear policy towards the two Sudans, nor do they have a coherent strategy for achieving peace and stability in the region.

Douglas H. Johnson is the author of The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Peace or Truce, revised edition, James Currey, 2011.