Tag Archives: omar al-bashir

Who would win a South Sudanese civil war? Khartoum.

Kiir-and-Bashir-after-vote

Even as the government is allegedly calling for a ceasefire, the capital of South Sudan, the world’s newest country continues to teeter on the brink of civil war.southsudansudan

The political differences between South Sudanese president Salva Kiir and former South Sudanese vice president Riek Machar, which far outdate South Sudan’s independence, now threaten to destroy South Sudan’s fragile institutions, including its armed forces and the independence movement-turned-political party Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) into dueling factions.  Last week, fighting broke out in the streets of Juba after Kiir announced that Machar tried to mount a coup against him — Kiir dismissed an increasingly critical Machar as vice president in July 2013.

The key for South Sudanese leaders is to keep what remains mostly a fight between dueling elites from crossing the political equivalent of the blood-brain barrier — transforming into a wider conflict based on ethnicity.  With reports of mass graves of Nuer victims and fighting that’s spread from Juba to the majority of South Sudan’s ten states, crossing that barrier will become increasingly easier. 

I wrote last week that South Sudan isn’t destined for civil war between Kiir’s Dinka ethnic group and Machar’s Nuer ethnic group, and I outlined steps that could ameliorate the situation — regional moves like South Sudan’s admission to the East African Community or an African or United Nations peacekeeping force, as well as national steps that would include Kiir’s reinstating Machar to the vice presidency, creating stronger checks and balances to the presidency and establishing a firm timetable for 2015 elections.

But the best incentive that the South Sudanese have in avoiding a civil war is the most obvious impetus of all — the winner of a South Sudanese civil war would be neither Kiir nor Machar, but Sudan, the country from which South Sudan split after a half-century independence struggle.  If South Sudan’s leaders continue to turn on one another, you can be sure that Khartoum will take advantage of it.

That’s all the more devastating for South Sudan because so many issues remain unresolved following South Sudan’s 2011 independence.  Those issues include financial matters like how to allocate Sudan’s pre-2011 national debt as between Sudan and South Sudan, but it also includes trickier aspects like territorial disputes and difficulties over sharing oil wealth that comes largely from wells in Unity state in the north-center of South Sudan and Upper Nile state in the northeast.  There are reports that rebels loyal to Machar now control Unity state, oil production of around 45,000 barrels per day has now ceased in Unity state, and Machar loyalists also says they control Malakal, the capital of Upper Nile state.  South Sudan’s government, as well as its economy, overwhelmingly depends on oil sales, so if the turmoil is starting to affect output, the conflict is reaching yet another critically damaging stage.

57197723_sudan_states01_464map

Meanwhile, the status of Abyei, a region immediately west of Unity state, remains disputed by both Sudan and South Sudan.  It’s not difficult to imagine that Omar al-Bashir (pictured above, right, with Kiir) could take advantage of a drawn-out civil war in South Sudan by moving to take control of Abyei, despite the latest indication that the vast majority of Abyei’s residents preferred in an October 2013 non-binding referendum to become part of South Sudan.  Abyei’s fate is connected to a revolt in South Kordofan, a state that lies just north of the Sudan-South Sudan border — while both countries agreed that it would remain under Khartoum’s administration, many of its inhabitants identify with South Sudan, and Bashir has been engaged in a two-year local rebellion to retain control of South Kordofan. Continue reading Who would win a South Sudanese civil war? Khartoum.

How to prevent South Sudan’s impending civil war

kiir

Around 48 hours ago, South Sudanese president Salva Kiir announced that his government had halted a hazy coup attempt against Kiir’s government, which took power in July 2011 after the country emerged as an independent nation from Sudan.southsudan

But Kiir’s announcement seemed less like the end of the matter than the start of the worst ethno-political rupture since South Sudanese independence, pitting Kiir’s Dinka ethnic group against the Nuer ethnic group of his fiercest rival, former South Sudanese vice president Riek Machar.  Instead of stability in the capital city of Juba, the past two days have brought sporadic rounds of gunfire as armed forces allied with either Kiir (pictured above) or Machar clash in the streets, and there are reports of at least 500 people dead in Juba.

Kiir reshuffled his cabinet in July 2013, which led to Machar’s dismissal from the South Sudanese government.  For his part, Machar has criticized Kiir as increasingly ‘dictatorial.’

sudan-mapHopes ran high in the aftermath of the January 2011 referendum, in which 98.83% of the South Sudanese voted in favor of separating from Khartoum.  But since July 9, 2011, the country’s first 29 months have not been good ones for the world’s youngest country.  Aside from oil, the revenues of which South Sudan shares untidily with Sudan (which controls access to the oil pipelines that pump petroleum from South Sudan to the Red Sea coast), the country has been described as the world’s most underdeveloped.

It’s difficult to understand just how difficult the challenge is for South Sudan.

When it separated from Sudan, it was a country with virtually no institutions — don’t think of it like the pushes for Scottish or Catalan independence, where the sub-national units have experience with regional governance.  To the contrary, southern Sudan had essentially been engaged in a resistance struggle against its northern rulers in Khartoum for all but 10 years of the 55 years between Sudanese independence from the British and South Sudanese independence from Sudan.  It’s a landlocked country with no access to ports.  Oil wealth has proved a source of wealth, but also nearly unbelievable corruption.  Its GDP in 2012 was just $9.4 billion, and its GDP per capita is around $860.  Its literacy rate is around 27%.  Though its past is linked to Sudan in the north, and its leaders largely agree that its future lies with east African neighbors, such as Uganda and Kenya, its present is marked by rupture with the former and a lack of durable links with the latter.  It faces a long slog in terms of simply building roads and delivering fresh water to its citizens.  Infant mortality is 105 per 1,000 live births and the maternal mortality rate is 2,054 per 100,000 live births — these are some of the worst mortality statistics in the world.

Facts remain relatively dodgy, and it’s not certain if the ‘coup’ attempt on Sunday and Monday was a genuine plot or Kiir’s response an oversensitive reaction — Machar, speaking to the Sudan Tribune Wednesday, argued that the ‘coup’ itself was a misunderstanding between South Sudanese soldiers before calling Kiir an ‘illegal president.’

But with the US embassy in Juba evacuating all of its non-essential personnel and with thousands of South Sudanese seeking refuge at UN compounds in Juba, the situation seems to be worsening.  As South Sudan appears to move closer to the point of civil war, it’s important to remember that its chief ethnic groups have much more in common with each other than with the Khartoum elite that once ruled Juba from afar — and who would love to take advantage of internal South Sudanese strike in order to gain firm control of the Abyei region and, potentially, launch incursions to other oil-rich areas.  Though the Dinka (about 15% of the South Sudanese population) and the Nuer (about 10%) represent the two largest and politically strongest ethnic groups in the country, around three-fourths of South Sudan’s 11 million people belong to one of over five dozen other ethnic groups.

Speaking of its past, you can lay many of South Sudan’s woes at the feet of Khartoum, which for so long simply ignored what used to be southern Sudan, or even the British colonialists who so curiously fashioned the failed state that would later become Sudan.   Continue reading How to prevent South Sudan’s impending civil war

Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics?

DSC04307

Though you might think of the Nile as a primarily Egyptian river in Africa, its roots go much deeper.  The White Nile originates far within sub-Saharan Africa at Lake Victoria, winding up through Juba, the capital of the newly-minted country of South Sudan, and the Blue Nile originates at Lake Tana in northeastern Ethiopia, and it joins the While Nile near Khartoum, the capital of (north) Sudan. egypt_flag_newethiopia_640

But the rights to the water originating from the Blue Nile have become the subject of an increasingly tense showdown between Egypt and Ethiopia, with Ethiopia moving forward to bring its long-planned Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam into operating, sparking a diplomatic showdown between the two countries and a crisis between two relatively new leaders, both of whom took office in summer 2012 — Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

The Renaissance Dam and the politics of the Nile were no less fraught between former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the late Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi.  But with the project moving forward, Hailemariam and Morsi are locked in a diplomatic tussle that could escalate into something much worse.  Morsi has recently warned Ethiopia that ‘all options are open,’ which conceivably includes an Egyptian air attack to bomb the Renaissance Dam, which would initiate military confrontation between the second-most and third-most populous countries on the continent of Africa.

The Renaissance Dam is Meles’s legacy project and, with a price tag of between $4 billion and $5 billion, it’s embedded with an atypical amount of Ethiopian national pride.  When it is completed, the dam will make Ethiopia a huge hydroelectric producer, perhaps Africa’s largest energy producer, with an estimated generation of 6,000 megawatts of electricity.  To put that in perspective, the Hoover Dam in the southwestern United States has a maximum generation of around 2,100 megawatts and Egypt’s own Aswan High Dam has a maximum of around 2,500 megawatta, while China’s Three Gorges Dam has a maximum capacity of 22,500 megawatts.

Egypt’s chief concern is that the dam will reduce the amount of water that currently flows from the Blue Nile to the Nile Delta, and Ethiopia has already started to divert the course of the Blue Nile to start filling the Renaissance Dam’s reservoir (see below a map of the Nile and its tributaries).  While that process is expected to temporarily reduce the amount of water that flows to Sudan and to Egypt for up to three years, Egyptian officials have voiced concerns that the Renaissance Dam might permanently reduce the flow of the Nile through Egypt, despite technical reassurances to the contrary.  Moreover, Egyptian officials point to colonial-era treaties with the United Kingdom from 1929 and 1959 that purported to divide the Nile’s riparian rights solely as between Egypt and the Sudan, without regard for Ethiopian, Ugandan, Tanzanian or other upriver national claims.  Ethiopian anger at exclusion from the 1959 Nile basin negotiations led, in part, to the decision by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I to claim the independence of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from the Coptic Orthodox Church based in Alexandria, Egypt.

Unknown

It’s clear however, where Ethiopia’s Nile neighbors stand on the issue — the leaders of South Sudan and Uganda have voiced their approval for the project, and even Sudan, which will also mark some reduction in Nile water while the dam is constructed, is inclined to support it, which will result in a wider source of crucial electricity throughout the Horn of Africa, east Africa and beyond.  Ironically, it could even be Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for atrocities stemming from the Darfur humanitarian crisis in the mid-2000s, who has the regional credibility with both Cairo and Addis Ababa to diffuse the crisis.  Continue reading Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics?