Tag Archives: Southern Sudan

jkia has free internet!

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The last time I had free wireless at an airport was in Hartford, Connecticut. I am therefore absolutely delighted to be able to blog as I wait for my flight to London tonight. I am not looking forward to the long hours in pressurized steel tubes – as one of my pals calls them – and the long layover in the infamous Heathrow. Although there is no chance of missing my connecting flight to San Francisco, I am bracing myself for the possibility of not having my luggage when I arrive there.

Already missing home. It has been a fun one month, most of which I spent in rural Kenya. Being in Nairobi has been fun too. I am glad I got to be here for the referendum, the promulgation of the new constitution and the release of the 2009 national census results. Kenya is a lot of things, but lately it has been trying tooth and nail to put its best foot forward, the al-Bashir fiasco notwithstanding (I am one of those optimists who are hoping that Kenya was playing smart diplomacy by allowing the genocidaire president to come here in exchange of his honoring the January 9th secession referendum for Southern Sudan).

southern sudan

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As the January 9th, 2011 referendum draws closer the international community is getting concerned about the consequences of Southern Sudanese independence. Many fear that the north, led by the strongman Omar al-Bashir, will not honor the CPA and let the Southerners go. Southern stability is also a concern. Once in the early 1990s the SPLA/M split along ethnic lines (Machar, the leader of the splinter SPLA-Nasir, eventually came back to the fold). Recent skirmishes in the South are testament to the fact that ethnicized civil war may yet visit an independent Southern Sudan.

Check out this post on FP.

In other news, the Continental club of ineffectual autocrats African Union is meeting in Uganda. More on this soon.

foreshadowing post-independence southern Sudan

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It is an open secret that Southern Sudan will likely descend into civil war once it secedes from Khartoum. Reports of a mutiny against Southern Sudanese government troops after last week’s election may foreshadow what is to come after Juba achieves full autonomy. Divisions within the South are not new. In 1991 Riek Machar led a rebellion of Nuer officers against the Dinka-dominated SPLM/A. In the end John Garang’ and SPLM/A prevailed after SPLM-Nasir (Machar’s faction) was accused of being stooges of the regime in Khartoum. The same divisions may plague post-independence Southern Sudan – there are already widespread grumbling about Dinka domination of state affairs in Juba. Khartoum is almost likely to play a role in destabilizing the South. The Southern referendum on secession will be held on January 9th 2011.

al-bashir wins sudan vote

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As expected, incumbent Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir won in the just concluded general election. More here

the lra menace

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That Joseph Kony and his top lieutenants are still alive and well is testament to the ineptitude of the Ugandan and Congolese armies. The Ugandan rebel leader continues to roam the forests in the border regions of Chad, the DRC, Uganda and Southern Sudan, killing villagers with abandon. The BBC reports that late last year the Lord’s Resistance Army massacred more than 300 people.

The LRA has morphed into a thuggish movement with loads of ideological deficit. They stand no chance of reaching Kampala and so roam in the forests of the great lakes region killing villagers and abducting children. This is yet another textbook case on the Continent of a rebellion that festers on for no other reason than because of state incapacity.

africa’s endless conflicts

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The New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman has a thought-provoking piece in Foreign Policy. I don’t particularly buy his doomsday analysis (most of the Continent will definitely not head the Somalia way) but his characterization of the modern day African rebel movement is spot on. The typical rebel leader on the Continent is nothing but a roving bandit with huge amounts of ideology deficit.

a pre-election truce in darfur? fingers crossed

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Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president,  might be having information that we don’t in relation to the upcoming general election in April. His government just signed a peace accord with the JEM, Darfur’s biggest rebel movement. Mr. al-Bashir is desperately trying to stay in power. He also dreads the inevitable secession of Southern Sudan come 2011. Perhaps this is why he wants to make peace with the Darfuris so that he won’t have to deal with two war fronts if he chooses to maintain the territorial integrity of Sudan by force post-2011.

The conflict in Darfur has killed at least 200,000 people and displaced almost 2 million. Like Southern Sudan, the former independent Sultanate of Darfur has never really integrated into the Sudanese state – dominated since independence by the north central valley. The Southerners fought a protracted civil war between 1983 and 2005 before Khartoum agreed to a peace agreement that provided secession as an option. Southern Sudanese will most surely vote to secede in 2011. It will be interesting to see how the Darfuris will react to this. Khartoum is obviously loathe of any further dismembering of the Sudanese state.

Sudanese elections

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Southern Sudan continues to be an extremely dangerous place as it prepares for elections in April. “Ethnic clashes” have so far killed at least 2500 this year alone. The SPLM has nominated Yasir Arman, a northerner, as its presidential candidate in their attempt to dislodge the genocidal al-Bashir from power. The fact that President Kir of Southern Sudan is not running at the national level is a clear signal that the South has its eyes on secession come 2011. President al-Bashir is likely to win the presidential election in April. What matters the most is whether he will let the Southerners go if they so choose in the 2011 referendum.

In the meantime, one of the things that should be done ASAP is to professionalize the Southern Sudanese army and mop up the excess weapons floating around. There are 2.7 million small arms in circulation in Sudan. Quite the definition of a tinderbox if you ask me.

only in Kenya: milk oversupply, even as some Kenyans starve

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So the government and dairy farmers are not too happy with the current milk oversupply. Prices have gone down dramatically due to the milk glut, causing farmers to want tighter regulation of the dairy industry to protect local dairy farmers.

First of all, advocating for a contraction of the industry in order to boost prices is a silly move. Why don’t we export that milk to Uganda and Southern Sudan instead, or even down south to Tanzania? And there is also the minor detail about starving Kenyans in the Northern arid areas (why doesn’t the Kenyan government treat food insecurity in these parts of the country with the seriousness it deserves???). Why not increase output in order to provide enough even for these people at a lower price? Falling prices can be mitigated through higher output. Scale might be the answer.

so what exactly do they do at the AU? seriously

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If the African Union has a PR section then they should all be fired. I am beginning to think that all they do at the AU is convene every year to elect the worst dictator among them as president – Gaddafi is the current president. Well, on top of issuing statements defending the actions of slightly lesser or worse dictators like Zim’s Mugabe and Sudan’s Bashir.

The BBC has this story about the tenuous peace deal between the two Sudans. The whole story has pictures of dusty, out-of-the-past southern Sudan and a clip of some UK foreign office official. No one from either the northern or southern governments appears. The AU is obviously not mentioned. The salvaging of the peace deal is squarely put on the shoulders of the international community. Do the Sudanese care that they may go back to war? Does the AU care? Who knows? From the BBC report it appears that they don’t. Foreigners care more. As always. May be this is merely a matter of the BBC choosing to ignore the key players involved here. Or it could be that the key players don’t care. Or both.

internally displaced people in Africa

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“There are other questions too. Should IDPs stay in rural areas or be resettled in towns? Providing the right amount of assistance is tricky as well. Too much, and an African government risks turning camps into subsidised slums. Too little, and people die.”

The above quote is from this weeks Economist Newspaper. As I have argued before, I think that the move to come up with a framework to protect IDPs on the Continent is a charade. I don’t get how the likes of Mugabe (one of the chief displacers of people on the Continent) are supposed to be entrusted with protecting the same people. Having UNHCR do the job sounds good but is riddled with huge moral hazard problems – as illustrated by the above quote.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of life that many an African autocrat (and soon the effects of climate change) forces his fellow citizens to live.

links that I liked

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The East African, my favorited regional weekly, this week has a few interesting pieces. Of course there are the regulars – Wanyeki and Charles Onyango-Obbo.  There was also this one that mentioned in passing Kenya’s insouciant approach to threats to its territorial integrity.

Wronging rights has a thing on some crazy Chechen and a tiger.

And please read AfricanLoft, if you haven’t yet today.

how hard can it be?

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The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) continues to run amok in the great lakes region, killing, maiming and abducting civilians at will. The governments of Uganda, The DRC, Central African Republic and Southern Sudan have proven unable to provide a solution to the LRA problem once and for all. A joint military operation by the governments of Uganda and the DRC early this year only served to fuel further attacks from the rebel movement – leading to 500 deaths, according to a UN report.

All this makes one wonder: How hard can it be to conclusively deal with the LRA? They need not be completely routed. The huge UN peacekeeping force in the DRC and the very active Ugandan military must be capable of reducing the human toll from the operations of LRA. And more importantly, isn’t it time that Uganda made up its mind on whether it wants to negotiate or pursue a military solution to the conflict with Kony and his murderous gang? Kampala’s indecision continues to cause hundreds of deaths in the wider great lakes region. Museveni should either agree to talk with Kony or take the fight to him (conclusively – and this can be done, with proper planning and commitment. The LRA is not al-Qaeda or al-Shabab). Fighting a war of attrition with a rebel movement whose MO is to maim and abduct young children is simply not an option.

bullying kenya, Southern Sudan in the mix

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A few months ago it was Uganda. Kenya’s western neighbor sent troops and hoisted their flag on a Kenyan island on lake Victoria. The Kenyan government at first wavered, unable to provide a coherent response before it formed a joint task force with the invading Ugandans to determine the ownership of the island. It turned out the island is indeed Kenyan, only for the Ugandan president to claim that even if the island is Kenyan the waters and fish around it are Ugandan.

Now Southern Sudan is also in the mix. The Kenyan immigration minister, the man charged with the running of Kenya’s border posts was stopped from accessing one such post by Southern Sudanese security people – on Kenyan soil!! How ridiculous.

This insouciant approach to territorial matters is evident of the lack of a sense of nationhood in most African countries. These states only meaningfully exist withing a few hundred kilometres radii of the capitals. Since no one had to fight for the borders, no one really cares. But Kenya’s case is even more absurd. This is not Somalia or the Gambia. We should have better control of our people and our borders.

Nimeiri bites the dust

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It is un-African to be irreverent to the dead. I don’t intend to break this particular ancestral tradition. OK may be I will, just a little bit.

Jaafar Nimeiri, the man directly responsible for the start of the second Sudanese civil war, died last Saturday (May, 30). He was 79.

Nimeiri took over power in Khartoum in 1969 through a military coup. His authoritarian rule lasted until he was himself overthrown in 1985. The late Nimeiri will be remembered as the man who brokered and then broke the Addis Ababa Peace Agreement. After years of pretending to govern as per the 1972 agreement, Mr. Nimeiri (under pressure from Islamist extremists in the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood movement) finally decided, in 1983, to impose Sharia law on all Sudanese, including the non-Muslim South. In addition, he sought to redraw the borders of Southern Sudan and created new administrative structures in the region in an attempt to sap some of the newly acquired power of Southern Sudanese leaders. His actions led to rebellions in the South and the formation of the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) led by the late Col. John Garang de Mabior.

The almost certain secession of Southern Sudan in the upcoming 2011 referendum will be one of Nimeiri’s lasting legacies. His autocratic style of government and lack of spine in the face of extremist Islamism gave the South no option but to rebel against Khartoum, and win, more than two decades later. To put a positive spin on this, may be we should all be grateful that Khartoum’s extremism during his tenure exposed the non-viability of Sudan as one nation-state. The South and the North were never part of a single polity. It is probably a good thing that the South will secede from Northern Sudan and occupy its rightful place as an East African state.

May Jaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiri rest in peace.