The U.S-South Sudan’s Relations: Friendship or Patronage?
9 min readBy Adut Naar, Melbourne, Australia
Introduction
July 24, 2016 (SSB) — My name is Adut Naar. I am a statecraft geopolitical strategist, political scientist, diplomacy, international politics, and international trade and regional/international policy and international law practitioner. In the latter part of my profession, I specialize in the Soviet/ Russian, and the Chinese geopolitical strategies; Political Violence; Civil Radicalism, and the Decolonization Theory-more especially their 20th century relationships with the U.S. I have also written more especially on the “south-south” or the developing world relations with the U.S.; the third world sub-regions and Blaming the Victims.
Why am I Writing this? I am writing this because I am outraged by the U. S’s stance on the South Sudan’s domestic issues. My point is that both the U.S and the UN are participants in the conflict and should be expelled. But I start my discussion with the following question; that we, the South Sudanese people: Are we friends with the U.S. Or are we its Patroness? I will also offer suggestions on the way forward.
The background:
A fortnight has passed since South Sudan marked its fifth anniversary as a state this month. The sovereign African nation did not, however, mark its extraordinary achievement from the rest of the Sudan with celebrations but with rival armed factions shooting at each other in the streets of the capital, Juba. The Friday’s spasm was not only the latest in a series of foreign-backed policies—aimed bolstering state’s adversaries and weakened elected governments; it was the second in its kind and in a series of foreign sabotage to the nation’s domestic peace. For the U.S. in particular, such a policy is couched in the country’s policy of “regimes change”. The policy bodes well with the humanitarian intervention that the U.S now suggests for South Sudan and in conjunction with the United Nations, or UN’s peacekeeping troops; or threats of sanctions.
This suggests that South Sudan is not alone in this. It has not only developed a strategy on how best to respond to situations like this, the best, as it will be argued here, being that which frames the south Sudan’s case as a people’s case rather than a mounted coup. We have seen the same in the Ivory Coast in 2011, where a combination of the UN, the current Obama’s administration, French troops, and those loyal the opposition, Ouattara, not only stole votes, but also mounted a coup and deposed the legitimately people’s elected president, Gbagbo (See the U.S.’s senate committee’s report). However, the South Sudan’s situation is different from the Ivorian case. The south Sudan’s case, now has the people’s support; and moreover, this is not an election. Rather, the south Sudanese government should see this as a conspiracy to deny it its sovereign authority through local ethnicity.
Solutions to a problem cannot be dictated or prescribed. Neither does the UN nor the U.S is, or holds any expertise on the south Sudan’s ethnic relations with themselves or should prescribed a solution(s) to the territory’s government. Such as are indeed not acts of a friend.
Others in the region and who follows this line towards South Sudan should also face the same or similar way, or frames its relations in the best interest of its existence. but it should have used its “undivided” sovereign rights to defend the territory and its people. The Friday’s spasm was also the second political violence to the December 2013’S violence, in which several hundred people were killed in less than a week, tens of thousands others have been displaced—Lodging in the United Nations Mission in South Sudan(UNMISS).
The ongoing south Sudanese protest is not without any grievances. At the mission has been accused of being an active participant in the conflict. In the region and around the world, conflicts such as the south Sudan’s involve participants, including active combats and those who sponsor its process of continuity or ending. My point is simply this: The U. S’s involvement in the SPLA/SPLM’s factions—the way it manipulated one group against the other is a huge intellectual deficit to the South Sudan’s ruling class.
Already the UNMISS has over 17, 000 (the UK’s BBC reports about 12,000) troops or peacekeepers in the country. The question is what if a member state accuses the peacekeeping mission of having motives or out rightly caught red-handed in the act of the mission’s contradictory missions, where, for justice, would this member-state go?
Both the U.S and the UN have equally been accused of double dealing standards in the conflict. Unless the Obama’s administration withdraws or otherwise see itself failed in its pursuit to have installed an ethnic armed regime with a history that tie both the U.S and the Machar-led rebellion the 1991 SPLA’s split.
With such figures in the country, UN does not want to accept the narrative that its peace keeping efforts are defective in the face of ethnic conflicts like the December 15, 2013; the mission does not also want to admit or accept that: both the UN troops and the SPLA have both failed on December 2013 and on 8th July, 2016 to avert both violence. Rather than pushing for the locals boosting police numbers and to provide local protection. Instead, both the U.S., the UN and those in the region have intervene only on the sides of their friends.
What made Mr. Obama to suggest his “plan B”: for a problem whose solution, as he knows lies outside the country is, in my view, both antagonistic and patronal in all its intentions and purposes. Friends can disagree and still remain friends. However, states or countries do not walk, for example, South Sudan never visited the U.S or vice-versa.
Thus, Obama’s statement on an internal conflict cannot, in any circumstances a friendlier state’s disapproval to a particular course; for sovereign nation’s rights to choose or not to choose the kind of reforms—of which it has fought for that long, cannot be confused with diplomacy here. It is a declaration of war as I have shown here. It is comparable in parts with what Mr. Machar has now labelled a “third force” even after the peace accord made him the country’s First Vice-president.
This should be more than a reform that the south Sudanese people have envisaged. Any peace should not have made two separate armies and through an agreement that seems to a total replacement of the nation’s constitution. Indeed, I do see the people’s protest are the way forward: A reform through people and not a regime. Any rate, a “meaningful reform would need to begin with the rebel coalition’s demands, starting with a two-term limit to the presidency, voting by secret ballot, an end to presidential powers to appoint members to the legislative organ and the constitution of an independent electoral commission, as the first step in a much-needed but protracted reform process”.
This puts the U.S-South Sudan’s relations into question: is it a Friendship or Patronage? The South Sudanese people, feeling cheated out this, they—both Nuers and Dinka—and also others in between: are opposed to the increasing UN’s peacekeepers in their country. In line with our sovereign rights and political destiny, we should have opposed foreign intervention by any means.
I argue that: if the country’s leadership genuinely believes in any meaningful reforms in the post-CPA’s South Sudan, it should come to the aid of this collective voice of the people; through its “executive powers” invested upon the country’s president; and the powers implied by the nation’s territorial jurisdiction; the sovereign rights—of the south Sudanese people to govern themselves, the president of South Sudan should issue an executive order: Terminating or expelling all the diplomatic missions with Troika’s connections, and in particular, the U.S.’s embassy in Juba should be ordered closed; the president’s executive order, or another: should also suspends the country’s membership in the regional body, IGAD, and if possible, the same executive or another should also do the same with the AU . This is justice as it should be; and as it should be at the owner’s demand.
Parallel measures should also apply to the country’s diplomatic arrangements with other friendlier nations. A case in point is the Egypt versus Ethiopia.
Should military solution become imperative—or in case of a buffer against, as I have maintained, the country also reserves the rights to hosting Egyptian in its territory provided that it suspends its membership in the region’s body whose existence threatens the former’s existence.
If the West has no solutions, then Analysts are even divided. They are divided particularly on the role of the UN’s troops, on the one hand, and how to align such roles with the needed political reforms in the country, on the other hand. Critics have, however, been quick to identify the post- post-CPA’s South Sudan with the social and economic conditions of the old Sudan.
The issue is up to Salva Kiir, and the country’s friends in the region are getting fewer. As things seem, only the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, has so far proven himself to be the country’s friend and its people. However, Museveni has problems of his own too. “Having long snubbed the demand for a two-term limit on the presidency at home, it is unlikely that the Ugandan president will be sympathetic to demands for internal reform in South Sudan”.
The Friday’s event, the latest of the post-independence violence in South Sudan coincided with the country’s fifth anniversary on independence. But it is a continuation of the decades-old split within the ruling party, SPLM. I have argued that both the region, the UN, and the U.S. have so far been participants in the ethnic rivalry that brought the recent shift in the geopolitical dynamics; I have offered my view on this historic shift in the international/region’s internal relations. And my belief is that the UN and its associates be expelled using South Sudan’s sovereign rights to govern itself.
#Call it: The Withdraw Theory (WT). Mr. Naar is currently Diplomacy and International/Regional Trade Master Student, Monash University, Australia. Mr. Naar is a South Sudanese Native and expatriate. He’s not politically affiliated with the either factions of the SPLM. For any questions/comments on this or others, please do rich me on: adutmayor@yahoo.com. My recent essays have been on the U.S-African relations, including, but not limited to: Capital Warfare, The Minerals trade, & political violence: How to defeat the United States; How Do countries become Rich? politics of state survival &Warfare; The African people& the Wealth of Nations: their relations with the UN; Politics of Humanitarian Intervention; Ethnic armed conflicts and the Regimes-change; Profits on Death, No Success: The Withdrawal Theory(WT) and The U.S. as an ethnicity in Africa.
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