---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Reeves <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 9:07 AM
Subject: Sudan/South Sudan on the Brink of Catastrophic War: The Price
of International Expediency and Disingenuous Moral Equivalence
To: Eric Reeves <[email protected]>
Sudan/South Sudan on the Brink of Catastrophic War:
The Price of International Expediency and Disingenuous Moral Equivalence
Eric Reeves
April 12, 2012
Overview
The price of a year's worth of international diplomatic failure and
facile moral and diplomatic equivocation will soon be paid in blood
and suffering by many hundreds of thousands of civilians in Sudan and
South Sudan. Hundreds of thousands have already been brought to the
brink of starvation because there is no will to confront the Khartoum
regime over its intransigent refusal to allow humanitarian access to
Blue Nile and South Kordofan. Additionally, more than 100,000 Dinka
Ngok civilians---forced militarily from Abyei by Khartoum's Sudan
Armed Forces (SAF) in May 2011---remain displaced and in poor
conditions as refugees in South Sudan. Refugees from Blue Nile have
found only tenuous relief in the camps of Upper Nile (South Sudan),
and the impending rainy season threatens to increase a population of
almost 100,000, even as the transport of relief supplies and
equipment, especially that needed for provision of clean water, will
rapidly become impossible.
Hundreds of thousands in the Nuba Mountains face starvation because of
Khartoum's humanitarian blockade. And in a highly revealing military
action, those Nuba who escaped to Yida refugee camp in Unity State
(South Sudan) were deliberately targeted by Khartoum's military
aircraft on November 10, 2011---with international journalists present
as witnesses. Further, hundreds of thousands of other civilians have,
as of April 8, been stripped of their northern Sudanese nationality
for no reason other than their "Southern" ethnicity.
And yet Khartoum's responsibility---for the seizure of Abyei, for the
current military aggression on three fronts in northern Sudan, for the
obstruction of humanitarian relief (including to Darfur), and for
ethnic culling of the northern population---the regime's direct
responsibility for all this stands without consequential rebuke.
Instead, international actors have with consistent and shameless
expediency apportioned blame in equal allotments to both Khartoum and
Juba, no matter what the actual political, diplomatic, or moral
equities. This has over time done much to generate the present crises
throughout greater Sudan; but given present military developments,
such expediency also seems guaranteed to accelerate the move toward a
war of unfathomable destructiveness.
Military realities: what renewed war will look like
Traveling to a range of locations in South Sudan and the Nuba
Mountains in January 2003 (after the October 2002 cease-fire agreement
but before Khartoum began to observe the cease-fire with any
regularity), I found a grim but constant perception, a relentless
certainty---expressed to me by every military and civil society
official I spoke with, including John Garang: "If war comes again, it
will be the most destructive of all our wars." This is an
extraordinary observation, coming from people who had just begun to
emerge from a civil war that claimed well over 2 million lives and
displaced between 4 and 5 million civilians; the prediction was made
not in a bellicose spirit, but as a factual matter, one that should be
clear to anyone who looked with any understanding at the nature of the
military forces in the North and the South. As of today, those
terrible premonitions from 2003 seem on the verge of becoming a vast
and uncontrollable reality.
For what has also been clear to me in my conversations with
Southerners and other Sudanese, now over many years, is that the Sudan
People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) leadership understood full
well that there would be no international guarantors of the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), completed in 2004 and signed on
January 9, 2005. This was the reason the SPLM/A was adamant about
maintaining its own army: in the event of military violations of the
peace by Khartoum, the leadership knew that no other country would
offer anything meaningful by way of help or protection to the South.
The reasoning of the Southern leadership was all too astute, as we're
seeing with a grim clarity today.
Thus to understand the painfully high military expenditures by Juba,
it's necessary not only to keep in mind the deeply felt need to
prevent excessively rapid and destabilizing demobilization of SPLA
forces, which have certainly not been needed in present numbers for
military purposes. It must also understood that from the viewpoint of
military deterrence, expensive weapons acquisitions such as more
advanced tanks, helicopters, and significant anti-aircraft defenses
were judged necessary to provide a sufficiently credible deterrent to
military aggression by an opponent known not only for aggressiveness,
but for duplicity, ruthlessness, and indifference to human
destruction, especially when those killed are ethnically African.
These relatively advanced weapons, as well as the extraordinarily
lethal and advanced weapons acquired by Khartoum over the past decade,
ensure that future military violence will be extremely destructive.
In short, this will not be a war between a guerilla force and a
national army substantially assisted by proxy militias. It will be a
conflict between two very powerful military forces, with a number of
advantages accruing to the South: they will have much better logistics
and transport than during the 1983 - 2005 civil war, and the SAF will
again be fighting far away from Khartoum. The SAF will also not have
nearly as easy a time forcibly conscripting recruits into military
service from regions it formerly counted on, including Blue Nile,
South Kordofan, Darfur, and South Sudan itself. Perhaps most
importantly, the people of the South generally feel that if war comes,
they will be fighting for their survival, given Khartoum's
unconstrained military ambitions; SPLA morale is correspondingly high.
Khartoum's SAF, by contrast, is poorly motivated in the main and
spread very thin, presently waging war in Blue Nile, South Kordofan,
Darfur, as well as in the border regions. Moreover, all evidence
suggests that the SAF is being badly mauled by the SPLA-North in
brutal fighting within the Nuba Mountains, now over many months;
Khartoum's response has been an increasing reliance on bombing,
long-range artillery, advanced rocket launchers---"stand-off
weaponry"--and the ruthless determination to starve the people of the
Nuba Mountains as a way of ending the insurgency. But crushing
defeats of the SAF in military encounters with the SPLA-North are
increasingly in evidence, and this is taking a significant toll on the
larger military force.
Military realities: where is military conflict occurring?
What the SPLM/A did not anticipate in its negotiations for peace was
that it would be abandoned diplomatically in ways that have emboldened
Khartoum to pick and choose which elements of the CPA Protocols it
would observe and which it would ignore. Nor did Juba anticipate that
the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime would fully
renege on key provisions of the CPA without meaningful consequence,
Abyei most notably. Indeed, to understand the current extraordinarily
precarious military situation, one must see just how poorly the
international community performed in securing from Khartoum good faith
participation in negotiations over delineation and demarcation of the
North/South border per the terms of the CPA.
It not surprising that there is a good deal of confused news reporting
on the situation in the Tishwin (Unity State)/Heglig area, where the
most serious fighting is concentrated; for this is part of the
North/South border that has not been delineated, even as many
Southerners believe---with good reason---that Heglig is actually in
the South as defined by the 1956 border (at independence). This makes
Khartoum's use of Heglig as the launching point for two major
offensives against the Tishwin area all the more galling to Juba.
President Salva Kiir had the strong support of most Southerners when
he declared in a Presidential Statement today that, "the Republic of
South Sudan is prepared to withdraw its forces from Heglig if a clear
mechanism and guarantee can be provided that Heglig will not be used
to launch another attack against South Sudan."
Kiir has rightly placed the diplomatic ball in the international
court; unfortunately, he has already and preemptively been denied the
very assistance he needs to help produce a military de-escalation in
the Tishwin/Heglig area. Indeed, Kiir and the Southern Sudanese
leadership stand accused by the UN, the AU, the EU, the UK, and the
U.S. of military aggression against northern Sudanese territory (see
below). This is so even as all evidence---including that of UN
observers from UNMISS, journalists on the ground, and oil
workers---points to the fact that in both assaults on Tishwin,
Khartoum was the clear aggressor, and that the SPLA's military
response was defensive, and retaliatory only to the extent consistent
with further self-defense. Following the most recent assault, Juba
understandably decided that it would not allow Heglig to be used yet
again by the SAF as a staging ground for military assaults on the
South, hence President Kiir's statement.
Some of the confusion in international responses seems to come from a
failure to follow the course of the dispute over Abyei, which is key
here. Six months following the CPA signing (and thus also formal
ratification of the Abyei Protocol) the Abyei Boundaries Commission
(ABC) presented its findings to Khartoum (July 2005), as mandated by
the Protocol. The regime immediately and categorically rejected the
boundary findings, even as the ABC membership was selected equally by
Khartoum and Juba. In May 2008 Khartoum's regular and militia forces
brutally assaulted Abyei town and the surrounding area, killing many
civilians and forcing many tens of thousands to flee to the South. UN
forces in what was then UNMIS (UN Mission in Sudan) stood by
passively. For its part, the Southern leadership---convinced that the
matter should not be resolved militarily---concluded that "final and
binding" arbitration of the border issues was essential, and was
successful in having the case concerning delineation of Abyei's
boundaries heard before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (The
Hague). The July 22, 2009 ruling by the PCA was dismaying to the
South, which saw much of what was traditional Dinka Ngok Abyei
disappear, but Juba nonetheless accepted the finding.
What must be understood is just how narrowly the Court's "final and
binding" ruling actually was:
[from GOS-SPLM/A Final Award July 22, 2009 Page 267-68 Eastern
Boundary (of Abyei)]
"1. In respect of the ABC Experts' decision that "the eastern
boundary shall extend the line of the Kordofan - Upper Nile boundary
at approximately longitude 29°32'15" E northwards until it meets
latitude10°22'30" N, the ABC Experts exceeded their mandate.
"2. The eastern boundary of the area of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms
transferred to Kordofan in 1905 runs in a straight line along
longitude 29°00'00'' E, from latitude 10°10'00'' N south to the
Kordofan - Upper Nile boundary as it was defined on 1 January 1956."
The central implication for purposes of understanding the present
military conflict in the Heglig region, lying east of Abyei as defined
by the PCA, is that this ruling did nothing to settle where the "1
January 1956 border" actually lies. It had no mandate to make such a
determination, and did not attempt to do so. This was to have been
determined by post-CPA negotiations between Juba and Khartoum. But
feeling no real international pressure, Khartoum has never engaged in
good faith negotiations on either delineation or demarcation of the
North/South border; indeed, Khartoum militarily prevented demarcation
of areas that had actually been delineated in the Abyei region.
The importance of negotiations to settle the location of the "1
January 1956 border" has been made repeatedly clear, most
authoritatively by historian of Sudan Douglas Johnson, a member of the
Abyei Boundaries Commission. His analysis from January 2011 ("The
Road Back from Abyei") and other work gives us a detailed sense of how
for decades the Khartoum regime has been moving the North/South
boundary southward, often by proxy:
"Violence spilling over from Bahr el-Ghazal during the civil war in
the 1960s brought the first armed conflict between the Ngok and
Misseriya since the 19th century, and it was at this time that the
Misseriya began claiming and occupying the northern-most Ngok
settlements. The violent displacement of Ngok from their villages by
armed Misseriya, sometimes with the backing of members of the local
police, was accelerated after the end of the first civil war in the
1970s when the Ngok were offered a referendum on whether they wanted
to be incorporated into the newly-established Southern Region, or
remain as part of Kordofan. Following the discovery of oil flowing
beneath Abyei Khartoum blocked the referendum, in a move that preceded
and led to the abrogation of the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1983. The
Abyei referendum, therefore, is unfinished business."
Long-time and highly informed Sudan observer John Ashworth notes just
today that:
"[I] t is widely acknowledged that the current border is NOT the 1956
border. Successive Khartoum governments have pushed the border
southwards, particularly since the discovery of oil in the 1970s.
South Sudanese have waited patiently while Khartoum procrastinated on
border negotiation while continuing to attack locations which are
known to be well within South Sudan according to the 1956 border."
(email received April 12, 2012)
These historically informed assessments make clear that statements
such as we are hearing today from various international actors are in
fact judging a matter---the location of the North/South
border---presumptively; they are determining an issue that should
still be very much on the negotiating table. But Khartoum has refused
to negotiate boundary issues, and this is the fundamental problem that
has yet to be frankly acknowledged. Peremptory judgments like those
that have come today from the UN, the U.S., the AU, the EU and the UK
are all unwittingly but effectively encouraging Khartoum to remain
intransigent in any future negotiations on the location of the border.
In a ghastly way, this represents a reprise of the international
failure in responding to Khartoum's intransigence on Abyei, including
the denial of a self-determination referendum. And just as a weak and
compromising response ensured the military take-over of the region, so
present international responses work to ensure that this part of the
disputed border becomes a cartographic fait accompli. Such an outcome
will in turn ensure that conflict continues, and it is here that we
should bear in mind the time-line of serial failures leading up to the
seizure of Abyei. It's important to remember that judgments in both
Juba and Khartoum have been shaped by the consequent abject failure to
bring meaningful pressure to bear on the regime to withdraw its forces
and thereby create a security environment necessary for the return of
the Dinka Ngok. Instead, these displaced people continue to struggle
to survive, often in extremely challenging circumstances---and this
because the international community cannot escape its expedient habit
of equivocation:
"'The AU notes with alarm, the occupation of the Heglig by the forces
of (South Sudan) and calls for their immediate and unconditional
withdrawal,' a statement from the AU Commission said on Wednesday,
amid continued fighting in the region."
"State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters when
asked about the surge in border fighting between Sudan and the newly
independent state of South Sudan [that] the State Department would
issue a 'statement which strongly condemns the military offensive,
incursion to Southern Kordofan state, Sudan, by the SPLA today.'"
(Agence France-Presse [Washington, DC], April 11, 2012)
"'The move by the South Sudanese armed forces to occupy Heglig in
Sudan is completely unacceptable, as are the continuing bombings of
South Sudanese territory by Sudan, [UK Minster for Africa Henry
Bellingham] said in a statement."
""The move by the South Sudanese armed forces to occupy Heglig is
completely unacceptable. So is continued aerial bombardment of South
Sudanese territory by the Sudan Armed Forces,' EU foreign policy chief
Catherine Ashton said through a spokesman. 'Both parties must also
stop supporting armed groups in the territory of the other state' and
should 'cease hostilities, withdraw forces immediately back within
their own borders and respect each other's territorial integrity,'
Ashton insisted."
"[Salva Kiir, speaking in Juba today] 'He gave me an order, the U.N.
secretary-general, that I'm ordering you to immediately withdraw from
Heglig. I said, "I'm not under your command." If I'm head of a state,
an independent state, nobody will tell me that---do this, under
duress.'"
"The UN Security Council is demanding demands 'a complete, immediate,
and unconditional: end to all fighting; withdrawal of (South Sudan's
Army) from Heglig; end to (Sudanese Armed Forces) aerial bombardments;
end to repeated incidents of cross-border violence between Sudan and
South Sudan; and an end to support by both sides to proxies in the
other country.'"
Moral equivalence is fully preserved here, along with a border defined
so that Heglig is in North Sudan. Only Norway managed anything
reasonably appropriate to the situation, and even this statement
represents the conflict as the equal responsibility of the two
parties:
"'We urge both parties to pull back their troops to where they were
positioned before the recent escalation. We also urge them to
immediately remove the last obstacles that are preventing the Joint
Border Verification and Monitoring Mission from coming into operation,
as they have previously agreed,' said Mr Støre."
But of course the obstacles to this Joint Border Verification and
Monitoring Mission are virtually all a function of Khartoum's
obduracy. Juba could wish for nothing so much as an active and robust
JBVM Mission. Only Khartoum benefits from ambiguous borders, and an
ability to project military power without a clearly defined trip-wire.
It is also the ambiguity of the border delineation that permits what
has now been photographed and witnessed first-hand: a secret "tie-in"
oil pipeline, originating in Heglig and making its way toward Southern
oil fields where it apparently would have had the capacity to siphon
off as much as 25,000 barrels of Southern crude per day (Reuters
[Juba], April 5, 2012). Such subterfuge is possible only because of
the ambiguous borders that Khartoum is working so hard to maintain,
knowing that it has already seized a great deal of what is Southern
territory and would only lose territory, and military cover, if
reasonable border delineation and actual demarcation actually
occurred.
The large Kafia Kingi enclave in far western Western Bahr el-Ghazal,
for example, has been seized by the regime on the basis of Khartoum's
1960 redrawing of the "1 January 1956 boundary"; per the terms of the
CPA, Kafia Kingi should revert to South Sudan, since the entire
enclave was created by the southward swoop of the factitious 1960
border. So far Khartoum has been unyielding, no doubt in part because
there is copper to be mined and evidence of other minerals and ores as
well. By cleaving to an untenable claim on Kafia Kingi, Khartoum has
also made the enclave---as an authoritative Rift Valley Institute
study suggests---a potentially useful bargaining chip in other border
negotiations, if these ever occur. Of course there have been no
international voices calling for a halt to Khartoum's violation of
this remote part of sovereign Southern territory.
Restraint and forbearance
What becomes clear in the pronouncements by the U.S., the UK, the UN,
the EU, the AU and others over the past day is that Juba is in effect
being punished for its forbearance in the face of relentless military
provocations by Khartoum. These include aerial military attacks on
civilian and military targets in South Sudan going back to November
2010---two months before the Southern self-determination referendum.
Altogether, even before the recent onslaught of bombing attacks, there
have been more than 40 confirmed incidents of aerial assault on
Southern territory (www.sudanbombing.org). Painfully little has been
heard from the international community about this indiscriminate
barbarism, and what we do hear has taken on the form of boilerplate
condemnation that barely registers in Khartoum. This is one reason
the regime's military leaders felt free to escalate dramatically its
aerial offensive by attacking Bentiu today, the capital of Unity
State. Bentiu is a major city, not a town or a village, and an attack
on such a large civilian population certainly demands more than the
familiar perfunctory demands that the bombing stop. There has been
none.
Juba also made the excruciatingly difficult decision not to resist
militarily Khartoum's May 20-21 (2011) seizure of Abyei: coming less
than two months before Southern independence, the regime's seizure
took advantage of the desperate desire by the South not to allow any
event, however unjustified or provocative, to derail the achievement
of independence. But there was a great deal of bitterness throughout
the South, and particularly those from the Abyei area, that the
international response was so flaccid---the more so since Khartoum's
military ambitions had long been clear and yet provoked no decisive
objections from the UN, the U.S., the EU, the AU, or others. And even
now the AU is calling for "both sides to remove their illegal military
presence in Abyei": given the truculent refusal of Khartoum to remove
any of its SAF forces that were instrumental in the seizure, or its
Misseriya militia allies, the suggestion that the SPLA has a
comparable military presence is preposterously disingenuous. It
should also be noted that Khartoum agreed to withdraw its forces as
part of the June 20, 2011 settlement that created the terms of
deployment for an Ethiopian brigade under UN peacekeeping auspices.
It never did so. The regime has yet again reneged on a signed
agreement, and has yet again been emboldened by the failure of the
international community to do more than huff and puff.
Just as difficult for Juba has been the decision to limit severely the
assistance it provides to the Sudan People's Liberation
Movement/Army-North, former comrades-in-arms. A recent report from
the authoritative Small Arms Survey (Number 19, April 2012
Reaching for the Gun: Arms Flows and Holdings in South Sudan) presents
evidence that Juba is in fact assisting the SPLA-N. It finds precious
little, however, and even less in the nature of physical evidence,
such as the sort by which SAS has clearly established that Khartoum is
the source of weapons for the vicious South Sudan Liberation Army
(SSLA), a proxy force that mainly kills civilians. And many of the
weapons in possession of George Athor's former militia group in
Jonglei also originated in Khartoum; in many cases they have ended up
fueling terrible ethnic conflict in Jonglei. The entirety of the SAS
account of Juba's support for the SPLA-N fits in a small box insert
(about one-third of page 4); and as to sources for the only
generalizations of significance, only one is named: Military
Intelligence Officer General Sa'ad Omer of the Sudan Armed Forces.
What is certainly clear is that there is a gross asymmetry between
Khartoum's supplying of militias bent on creating havoc, and Juba's
assistance, probably mainly food and fuel, to the SPLA-N. SAS
specifies nothing in the way of quantity or the particular nature of
any putative military assistance because there is no evidence extant
that would allow for the possibility of quantification and
specification. Certainly if Khartoum had any such evidence it would
broadcast the fact and the evidence widely. Even so, this hasn't
prevented the U.S. and other consequential international actors from
speaking of "assistance to proxy forces by both Khartoum and Juba" as
if they were in any way truly comparable. Such disingenuousness sends
a clear signal to Khartoum: there will be no real consequences for its
immensely destructive and disruptive military assistance to renegade
militia groups that have no meaningful political agenda, and which
trade only speciously on local agendas.
Looking forward
The outlook is extremely bleak. There are in no evidence of
countervailing forces that can bring Khartoum back from its present
commitment to characterize the fighting as "South Sudan's blatant
invasion of Heglig," with a corresponding need for the SAF to engage
in massive military retaliation. The obscene international indulgence
in "moral equivalence" is the only reason Khartoum has pushed as far
as it has; and to see today the judgments of Juba by various
international actors is to see precisely what has emboldened these
brutal thugs. That the diplomatic world cleaves to its shameless
expediency about conflict in Sudan justifies the grimmest pessimism
about near-term military developments. The likelihood of all-out war
is extremely great, and yet those diplomatically in charge refuse to
recognize where the center of power lies in an increasingly brutal and
unconstrained National Islamic Front/National Congress Party.
Princeton Lyman's assessment evidently stands as that of virtually all
diplomatic actors; speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat, Lyman was blunt:
"Frankly, we do not want to see the ouster of the [Sudanese] regime,
nor regime change. We want to see the regime carrying out reform via
constitutional democratic measures."
We might chalk this up to foolish credulity had not Lyman given us
ample reason to believe that in fact it represents the grossest
expediency, an unwillingness to confront Khartoum---even when the
issue is emergency humanitarian relief access. We might well wonder
how Lyman squares his optimistic assessment of the regime with the
fact that more than two months after the UN, the AU, and the Arab
League prepared an agreement guaranteeing humanitarian relief to
Sudanese civilians in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile, Khartoum still
refuses to sign on (the SPLM-N signed on February 9). Indeed, two
months later, with people already seen starving in the Nuba, the
regime claims to be "still studying the proposal," and has conducted
factitious food assessments that reveal "no problems in South
Kordofan." This is of course transparent mendacity: the regime is
attempting (among other things) to wait until the rains begin, in a
matter of weeks, ensuring that delivery of international relief
assistance will be immeasurably more difficult, and that in the
interim the destruction of civilian lives and agricultural livelihoods
can proceed apace with only a few intrepid journalists as witnesses
(see al-Jazeera's recent video dispatch from the Nuba by Peter
Greste).
Moreover, in allowing Khartoum to commandeer the diplomatic agenda by
means of military aggression, the international community becomes
complicit in a range of collateral damage that follows directly from
what is now total absorption with a crisis that the regime has
orchestrated. The agony of the people of Darfur will continue, even
more silently, without any meaningful news profile, excepting only a
bizarrely distorting upbeat dispatch from the New York Times.
Refugees from Blue Nile and South Kordofan are being doubly victimized
by current violence; for virtually all of them fled initially because
of Khartoum's violence against civilians or the consequences of
comprehensive destruction of crops and plantings. Now, because of
violence around Heglig, they receive precious little attention, even
as those refugees in Upper Nile especially are poised to endure an
extremely dangerous rainy season. The same wretched conditions
confronting the refugees from Abyei will also likely become less
visible, and thus more acceptable.
And in another source of potentially explosive conflict, tensions
between the Dinka Ngok displaced from Abyei and the Misseriya herders
who are moving north again from Southern grazing areas are such that
violence could easily flare. Very little attention is being paid to
this potential crisis.
What should happen
•The international community must put Khartoum on notice that it will
be held responsible for its actions, and that there will no longer be
some factitious parceling out of blame to Juba as well with every
serious condemnation of the regime's military violence or support of
proxy forces. To be sure, the odds for changing this decades-long
pattern seem exceedingly small, and the likelihood of war
commensurately greater.
•Every single bombing attack on sovereign Southern territory should be
investigated, detailed, and highlighted publicly for meaningful
condemnation. (Juba, of course, has no offensive military aircraft.)
Having escaped meaningful censure following more than a decade of
indiscriminate aerial assaults, Khartoum must face condemnations
marked by both discipline and conviction, and a specified set of
punitive sanctions. For in virtually all instances, given the
inherently indiscriminate nature of Antonov "bombers" and inexpertly
piloted jet aircraft, these attacks are war crimes, and
collectively---given their massive destruction of civilian lives and
livelihoods---crimes against humanity.
•The UNMISS force should be capable of re-deploying much more rapidly,
have much better transport, and most importantly should confirm
reported military events more expeditiously and fully. Currently, UN
political officials are continuing to conceal most of these findings.
This is so despite the fact that many of the incidents and
observations make perfectly clear, to all who would simply look, that
despite Khartoum's vehement denials, the military actions reported by
Southerners and the SPLA have in fact occurred. UN political
suppression of observations and investigations that have direct
bearing in assigning responsibility for the current military situation
is deeply irresponsible, finally immoral. In many cases the world
learns more from intrepid journalists than from the UN; witness the
recent Agence France-Presse dispatch with a Tishwin dateline, and a
BBC interview of an oil industry worker in the Heglig area who
declared to the BBC: "The Sudanese attacked first but they didn't have
as many soldiers, so they were forced to fell back" (in The Guardian,
April 11, 2012).
•The Border Verification and Monitoring Mission should deploy wherever
security permits, with a robust response force continually at the
ready to provide additional security. The Mission should report
frequently and publicly on its findings. Khartoum will resist, and may
make deployment impossible in many areas; this fact should then be
made widely known.
•Border delineation should begin in earnest, with substantial
diplomatic commitment to securing meaningful participation from
Khartoum. In the absence of sharply delineated borders, clearly
demarcated, Khartoum will continue to test, to probe, to move in
militarily threatening fashion, and in general keep the border regions
unstable. The primary motive is to de-stabilize Juba, as it is with
the regime's support for militia proxies.
•The UN should be prepared to authorize non-consensual cross-border
relief efforts in the event that Khartoum persists in denying all
access to South Kordofan and Blue Nile. We cannot allow hundreds of
thousands of civilians to starve because some feel obliged to respect
the territorial integrity of a genocidal regime.
•The UN should immediately reconfigure and augment UNMISS, both in
light of the Jonglei crisis and as a means of creating a credible,
effective "trip-wire" along the North/South border to prevent, if
possible, future aggressive military actions against the South by
Khartoum.
The painful truth is that none of these measures is likely to be
taken. Khartoum's obduracy will be used to justify any diplomatic
fecklessness---the regime's claim of "national sovereignty" long ago
having trumped the "responsibility to protect."
This new war will be born out of international expediency,
disingenuousness, and cowardice. Few seem to care that this is so.
[Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College, has published extensively
on Sudan, nationally and internationally, for more than a decade. He
is author of A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur
Genocide.]
--
Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
413-585-3326
[email protected]
Website: www.sudanreeves.org
Skype: ReevesSudan
Twitter: @SudanReeves
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