Citizen Newspaper: The AU, UN Have Been Too Hasty to Utter Their Positions
4 min readBy Citizen Editorial
The conflict between the two armies of Sudan and its neighbour South Sudan has been a protracted one lasting nearly fifty years (1955-2005).
It began as a civil war fought intermittently for two long rounds with a lapse of relative peace of about ten years punctuated with puff of sporadic mutinies.
The current impasse between South Sudan and Sudan which largely the AU is addressing through the African Union High Implementation Panel headed by former South African President Thabo Mbeki and in which the UN is also having a stake is a continuation of that long conflict whose history although not yet comprehensively researched, written and circulated is at least known to the world.
The war in South Sudan began when the UN itself was barely 10 years old having been formed in 1945 in San Francisco, USA assuming the place of the League of Nations taking its present headquarters in Manhattan, New York.
In 1955 when the first bullet for liberation war of South Sudan was shot at Torit, in Equatoria Province the UN Secretary General was Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden who died in a plane crash in Zambia during the Congo crisis of early 1960s was at its climax.
The war in South Sudan became a full blown guerrilla warfare of hit and run when U Thant the Burmese diplomat was Secretary General of the United Nations with its agency UNHCR and later UNICEF getting involved in the affairs of the South Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia, Uganda, Congo Republic and Central African Republic.
The demand of South Sudanese was very clear from the very beginning, attainment of independence in a secure well demarcated border with its northern neighbour Sudan.
The British who had been the rulers of the Sudan first as mercenaries under the Turco-Egyptian administration when the Turks were the decision makers (1821-1885) and later as senior partners with the Egyptians as their juniors (1898-1956) are fully aware about the international boundaries between the Sudan and South Sudan.
Even as the latter was treated as a loose part of the former, the British were fully aware that the people of South Sudan would in the long run break away from the rest of the country they were holding together for their own interest because there were more characteristics and appeals of the South then known as the three southern provinces of Equatoria, Bahr El Ghazal and Upper Nile of becoming a country than remaining a part of the Sudan.
The borders formed themselves in several ways, the old divides which had naturally created them from which the colonialists beginning from the Turks and their Egyptian allies had formed the modern administrative control lines.
From here the lands of north Sudan end and those of South Sudan begin. These borders can only be modernized by not cutting parts of South Sudan and annexing them to north Sudan as former President Jaafar Mohammed Nimeiri had done in 1980 when oil was discovered in those parts of South Sudan. The Heglig which is hotly contested today plus several other parts of the South were cut and annexed to North Sudan for the sake of economic gains.
Even the state in which the war is on-going and where many of the oil wells are located was renamed from being Western Upper Nile District with capital at Bentiu to Unity province (Unity State) to treat it as a meeting point not for South and not for North so that it loses its real Southern origin.
The flare up of fighting for control of these areas provoked by Sudan which thinks because of being in possession of Cold War era obsolete jet fighters and Russian cargo planes turned bombers it has the upper advantage and can invade and occupy South Sudan.
They have forgotten that the people of this part of Africa had been the longest fighting people and if it were not for their attainment of independence which their forefathers had sacrificed their lives for Khartoum troops who had failed to subdue them for nearly a century cannot be a match for them today.
The South Sudanese could fight their ways right in the heart of Khartoum which used to be a slave market where Africans of Sudan including Southerners were paraded for sale for merchants coming as far away as Turkey and the Arabian peninsula.
The AU whose countries had learned the history of the slave trade in Africa must not be hasty like the South Korean diplomat Ban Ki-moon who lost his credibility by issuing an order to President Kiir as if the UN has become overnight an authoritarian organization to enforce its power on world leaders.
People in both AU and UN must take some time to read the history of South Sudan before rushing condemnation because in this case of taking the South as the wrongdoer they are placing themselves in the wrong side.
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