Sudan’s widening arc of instability
US efforts to prevent South Sudan becoming a failed state at birth risk being undermined by escalating border violence
Barack Obama meets with the South Sudan president, Salva Kiir Mayardit. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
American attention is focusing on developing South Sudan’s oil wealth and infrastructure two months after the world’s newest state declared its independence from Khartoum. But escalating fighting, including numerous reported attacks on civilians, along the length of the much-disputed, 1,250-mile north-south border is threatening a security emergency that could wreck nation-building plans.
Princeton Lyman, the US special representative for Sudan, said this month Washington was drawing up guidelines allowing US oil companies to circumvent existing sanctions and operate in South Sudan, which now controls about 75% of Sudan’s daily production of 500,000 barrels of oil.
“I’m sure we’re going to open that door but the rules of the game are still being worked out and that is very frustrating to the South because they want American oil companies there,” Lyman said. “There is a task force working on it and they will, God willing, have something soon.”
Boosting oil revenue is seen as vital if the impoverished South is to become a viable state. Oil-hungry America would also welcome a new supplier. But, although most of Sudan’s oil is now located in the South, its transportation, refining and export is controlled by the Khartoum government, with which Washington has poor relations.
Chinese, Indian and Malaysian oil companies currently dominate Sudan’s oil industry. Unlike American firms such as Chevron, they can and do ignore US-decreed sanctions imposed over the conflict in Darfur. US efforts to prevent South Sudan becoming a failed state at birth further risk being undermined by the border violence. Meeting at the UN in New York this week with South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, Barack Obama stressed the need for a resolution of long-standing disputes including border demarcation and oil revenue-sharing.
Deputy US national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama urged the completion of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the North-South war. Obama also condemned continuing violence in theSouth Kordofan and Blue Nile border states, and called on Kiir to investigate Khartoum’s claims that South Sudan’s military is providing support to rebel fighters there.
Reports from border areas this week paint a picture of a widening arc of instability since fighting flared in June. Clashes in South Kordofan on Thursday are said to have killed dozens of people and followed fierce fighting earlier in the week. Other reports said Sudan government forces have seized control of a strategic city in the Dindiro area of Blue Nilestate after fighting with rebels allied with South Sudan.
The instability is catching. Renewed clashes have broken out in Darfur in the west, where government opponents have returned home after having been forced out of their safe havens in Libya following the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. East Sudan, including the country’s main oil export terminal, is also witnessing unrest.
Khartoum has moved to reassert its authority in areas north of the new border following the South’s secession in July. But South Kordofan, the main oil-producing state, and other areas are home to militias and other groups that allied themselves with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement during the South’s war for independence. They are now in effect caught on the “wrong” side of the border and still view Khartoum as their enemy.
According to images collected on 21 September by the American-basedSatellite Sentinel Project (SSP) and analysed by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the violence is about to get worse. Khartoum “appears ready to launch a massive military drive aimed at the rebel stronghold of Kurmuk in the Blue Nile border area [involving] heavily camouflaged, mechanised units of Sudan Armed Forces comprising at least a brigade – 3,000 troops or more,” the SSP report said.
“The satellite images reveal a wall of armour, including what appear to be main battle tanks, towed artillery, infantry fighting vehicles, armoured personnel carriers and troop transports, apparently accompanied by half a dozen Hind attack helicopters near Dindiro town.”
John Bradshaw, executive director of the Enough project pressure group, accused the Khartoum government of using random violence against civilians. “Since May, the government of Sudan has used indiscriminate and disproportionate force, including campaigns to bombard civilians, in the three border areas of Abyei, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile state…
“The US and the larger international community should invoke the [UN’s] ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine to exert greater pressure on the government of Sudan to spare the lives of non-combatants,” he said.
Charlie Clements of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy said Khartoum was engaged in routine violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by targeting civilians using air strikes and artillery.
But both sides are at fault. The SSP also noted there were “credible reports that Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North forces have conducted indiscriminate shelling and other alleged abuses”.
In a bid to stem the upsurge in violence, Sudan and South Sudan officials signed a border security agreement at the weekend, to be overseen in part by Ethiopian peacekeepers. “This agreement will strengthen the exchange between the two peoples … We don’t see any conflicts,” the Sudanese defence minister, Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein, said. But such bland, blinkered assurances have been offered before. In Sudan’s border badlands, the evolving reality on the ground seems very different – and very dangerous.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/23/south-sudan-oil?newsfeed=true
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